Garden cress is a fast growing and edible herb that will sprout in just a small amount of slightly alkaline water. But there is one exception to that rule, and is has scientists scratching their heads.

A group of 5 girls have carried out a science experiment at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark that saw garden cress seeds placed in 12 tubs and split into two batches. Both batches were placed in different rooms that remained the same temperature, and were given the same amount of water and sunlight over the course of 12 days.

You’d expect both batches of 6 tubs to grow equally well, but one set didn’t even germinate. The reason? They were placed next to two routers. Although it’s unclear exactly why this happened, it is thought that the radiation produced by the routers is what stopped the seeds germinating.

The girls’ experiment was geared towards testing the potential impact of phone radiation on surrounding objects. They didn’t have phones to use though, so decided the routers were a good alternative. The experiment has certainly caught the interest of the international science community and is set to be repeated in a more controlled environment. One of the first controlled experiments will be carried out by Professor Olle Johansson from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Hopefully it will shed more light on why this is happening.

Johansson has said he’s impressed by the girl’s experiment and hopes they will continue into research careers when they are older. For the moment, the girls just find the attention exciting and have all decided not to sleep with a mobile phone anywhere near their beds for fear of it having some negative impact just like with the cress. …

http://www.geek.com/science/school-experiment-discovers-garden-cress-wont-germinate-near-a-router-1555577/

An automated telescope monitoring the moon has captured images of an 88-pound (40 kg) rock slamming into the lunar surface, creating a bright flash of light, NASA scientists said on Friday.

The explosion on March 17 was the biggest seen since NASA began watching the moon for meteoroid impacts about eight years ago. So far, more than 300 strikes have been recorded.

“It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before,” Bill Cooke, with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement.

A NASA satellite orbiting the moon is now on a hunt for the newly formed crater, which scientists estimate could be as wide as 66 feet (20 meters).

The flash was so bright that anyone looking at the moon at the moment of impact could have seen it without a telescope, NASA said.

After reviewing digital recordings made by one of the program’s telescopes, scientists determined the space rock was about 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, and traveling about 56,000 mph (90,123 kph) when it slammed into the moon and exploded with the force of five tons of TNT.

That same night, cameras detected an unusually high number of meteors blasting through Earth’s atmosphere as well. Most meteors burn up well before reaching the ground.

But not always. In February, an asteroid estimated to be about 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging buildings and shattering glass, leaving more than 1,500 injured. It was the largest object to strike Earth since 1908.

“The Russian fireball was many orders of magnitude larger and possessed 100,000 times more energy,” than the lunar impact, Cooke wrote in an email to Reuters.

He believes the lunar impact and the March 17 meteor shower on Earth are related, the result of both bodies traveling together through a region of space sprinkled with small rocks and dust.

“We’ll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-moon system passes through the same region of space,” Cooke said. (Editing by Kevin Gray and Doina Chiacu)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/space-moon

Graphene has dazzled scientists, ever since its discovery more than a decade ago, with its unequalled electronic properties, its strength and its light weight. But one long-sought goal has proved elusive: how to engineer into graphene a property called a band gap, which would be necessary to use the material to make transistors and other electronic devices.

Now, new findings by researchers at MIT are a major step toward making graphene with this coveted property. The work could also lead to revisions in some theoretical predictions in graphene physics.

The new technique involves placing a sheet of graphene — a carbon-based material whose structure is just one atom thick — on top of hexagonal boron nitride, another one-atom-thick material with similar properties. The resulting material shares graphene’s amazing ability to conduct electrons, while adding the band gap necessary to form transistors and other semiconductor devices.

The work is described in a paper in the journal Science co-authored by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT, Professor of Physics Ray Ashoori, and 10 others.

“By combining two materials,” Jarillo-Herrero says, “we created a hybrid material that has different properties than either of the two.”

Graphene is an extremely good conductor of electrons, while boron nitride is a good insulator, blocking the passage of electrons. “We made a high-quality semiconductor by putting them together,” Jarillo-Herrero explains. Semiconductors, which can switch between conducting and insulating states, are the basis for all modern electronics.

To make the hybrid material work, the researchers had to align, with near perfection, the atomic lattices of the two materials, which both consist of a series of hexagons. The size of the hexagons (known as the lattice constant) in the two materials is almost the same, but not quite: Those in boron nitride are 1.8 percent larger. So while it is possible to line the hexagons up almost perfectly in one place, over a larger area the pattern goes in and out of register.

At this point, the researchers say they must rely on chance to get the angular alignment for the desired electronic properties in the resulting stack. However, the alignment turns out to be correct about one time out of 15, they say.

“The qualities of the boron nitride bleed over into the graphene,” Ashoori says. But what’s most “spectacular,” he adds, is that the properties of the resulting semiconductor can be “tuned” by just slightly rotating one sheet relative to the other, allowing for a spectrum of materials with varied electronic characteristics.

Others have made graphene into a semiconductor by etching the sheets into narrow ribbons, Ashoori says, but such an approach substantially degrades graphene’s electrical properties. By contrast, the new method appears to produce no such degradation.

via Stacking 2-D materials produces surprising results.

Related:

Researchers from the University of Manchester discovered that sandwiching graphene between boron nitride layers can produce highly-accurate capacitors. Such capacitors could be cheaper and easier to fabricate compared to traditional transistors.

The researchers used quantum capacitance spectroscopy to investigate the exceptional properties of graphene …

via http://www.graphene-info.com/highly-accurate-capacitors-graphene-and-boron-nitride-layers

They look for all the world like a collection of flowers bursting into life.

Yet in fact, these are microscopic crystals grown in a Harvard laboratory.

Measuring just microns across, they were created to assemble themselves a molecule at a time.

The team say the work, carried out on glass slides, is able to control the process of crystal growth so precisely it can create curved and delicate shapes, that don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals.

“Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time,” the team say.

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature.

“This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes,” said Wim L. Noorduin of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of the paper in the journal Science.

By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of flui the team was able to create different “flowers”.

The shape of the crystals depends on a reaction of compounds that are diffusing through a liquid solution.

The crystals grow toward or away from certain chemical gradients as the pH of the reaction shifts back and forth.

The conditions of the reaction dictate whether the structure resembles broad, radiating leaves, a thin stem, or a rosette of petals, the team say.

“It is not unusual for chemical gradients to influence growth in nature; for example, delicately curved marine shells form from calcium carbonate under water, and gradients of signaling molecules in a human embryo help set up the plan for the body,” they say.

“You can really collaborate with the self-assembly process,” says Noorduin.

“The precipitation happens spontaneously, but if you want to change something then you can just manipulate the conditions of the reaction and sculpt the forms while they’re growing.”

Increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, for instance, helps to create “broad-leafed” structures.

Reversing the pH gradient at the right moment can create curved, ruffled structures.

Noorduin and his colleagues have grown the crystals on glass slides and metal blades; they’ve even grown a field of flowers in front of President Lincoln’s seat on a one-cent coin. …

Harvard biologist Howard Berg has shown that bacteria living in colonies can sense and react to plumes of chemicals from one another, which causes them to grow, as a colony, into intricate geometric patterns.

Replicating this type of effect in the laboratory was a matter of identifying a suitable chemical reaction and testing, again and again, how variables like the pH, temperature, and exposure to air might affect the nanoscale structures….

Some see the complexity and beauty of nature and conclude an intelligent designer. Others note that environmental variation and small local chemical interactions which follow the laws of physics result in self-organizing systems forming patterns we recognize as life. The duties of our deities are reduced, year by year.

A man in India sold his grandchild on Facebook for 70,000 rupees (US$1,278). After his daughter Noor gave birth to his grandson, Feroze Khan, with the help of some hospital staff, he took the baby and was able to give him to his buyer, Amir Kumar. After seeing pictures of Feroze’s grandson via Facebook, Kumar agreed to pay for the baby.

Police learned about the incident after Noor filed complaints that her father sold her son. They immediately launched an investigation and were able to trace the baby in Delhi.

Ludhiana’s Commissioner of Police, Ishwar Singh, said, “We acted upon the complaint of the mother, who alleged that her child was stolen from the nursing home in Ludhiana. After investigations, we found the grandfather of the child had struck a deal with a man in Delhi and had roped-in the nursing staff to smuggle the baby out of the nursing home. We have arrested four people including the grandfather. We have also booked the buyer from Delhi.”

The reason for all this was that Mr. Khan was planning on another arranged marriage for his daughter. He had hoped that his daughter would get an abortion, but the hospital staff did not agree.

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2013/05/16/stolen-newborn-sold-facebook

Duke Energy Progress shut down the Shearon Harris nuclear plant in Wake County on Wednesday after the company discovered that the reactor vessel, which contains the plant’s nuclear fuel, showed early indications of corrosion and cracking.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported Thursday morning that the discovery was made this week during a review of ultrasonic data. It showed a 1/4-inch flaw in the reactor vessel head, the name for the lid that is bolted on top of the vessel to maintain superheated water under high pressure.

The defect did not penetrate the vessel wall, which is about 6 inches thick, and there is no indication that radioactive water leaked out of the vessel.

“The reactor is shut down and our repair plans are in progress,” said Progress spokeswoman Kim Crawford. “There is no impact to public health or safety as a result of this issue.”

The repair will take place in a highly radioactive area and will require the use of robotics, said NRC spokesman Roger Hannah. He said repairs will involve scraping out corroded material and welding the area.

The nuclear plant, which has been generating electricity since 1987, is less than 25 miles from downtown Raleigh.

Duke Energy Progress, formerly known as Progress Energy, is the Raleigh-based subsidiary of Charlotte-based Duke Energy.

Water stress corrosion is a common form of degradation in nuclear plants, said David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The stress comes from expansion of metal as it heats up,” Lochbaum said. “The reactor vessel has carbon steel with a stainless steel overlay. Different metal and curved shapes cause stress as it heats up.

“Impurities in the water can collect in tiny cracks formed in metal by stress,” he added. “These impurities, called corrosion, exacerbate stress factors accelerating the propagation of tiny cracks.”

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/16/2897074/shearon-harris-shut-down-because.html

A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The “ghost imaging” technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.

Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.

Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object – a toy soldier …

Ghost imaging works a bit like taking a flash-lit photo of an object using a normal camera. There the image forms from photons that come out of the flash, bounce off an object and into the lens.

The new technique also uses a light source to illuminate an object. However, the image is not formed from light that hits the object and bounces back. Instead, the camera collects photons that do not hit the object, but are paired through a quantum effect with others that did.

In Shih’s experiments a toy soldier was placed 45 centimetres away from a light source, which was split into two beams. One was pointed at the toy and the other at a digital camera. A photon detector was placed near the soldier, able only to record when a photon bounced off.

Photons from the light source constantly travel down both paths made by the splitter, either towards the soldier and the photon detector, or towards the camera. The detector and camera record a constant stream of those photons, and occasionally record a photon at exactly the same time.

When this happens, there is a direct relationship between where one of the photons hit the soldier, and where the other one hits the camera’s sensor, says Shih, because of a quantum effect called “two-photon interference”.

“If the first photon stops at one point on the object plane, the second photon can only be observed at the corresponding point on the image plane,” he says.

So when the camera records only pixels from photons that hit simultaneously with one reaching the detector, a “ghost image” of the object builds up. The soldier’s image appeared after around 1000 coincidental photons were recorded.

“It is clear that the experimental set-up can be directly applied to sensing applications,” Shih told New Scientist .

The same method could one day be employed to produce satellite images of objects hidden behind clouds or smoke, using the sun’s radiation as the photon source, says Shih. Doing that may require a photon counter beneath the clouds, but could allow a top-down view not possible using conventional methods.

Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons that are not correlated as Shih suggests.

They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar. …

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13825-quantum-camera-snaps-objects-it-cannot-see.html

The label on the bottle said it contained a common antibiotic, but prosecutors say inside was a drug that’s often used to induce abortions.

Remee Jo Lee, 26, was six weeks pregnant when her boyfriend gave her a pill he said was prescribed by his father, a Florida fertility doctor, to treat a bacterial infection, according to court papers.

Lee says she trustingly swallowed the pill, and within hours started bleeding. She went to the hospital, where she had a miscarriage and learned that her boyfriend had tricked her into terminating her pregnancy, her lawyer alleges.

Now the ex-boyfriend, John Andrew Welden, 28, is in county lockup, facing a civil lawsuit and a murder rap.

A federal indictment unsealed Thursday charged Welden with product-tampering and first-degree murder under the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, charges that could carry a life sentence.

The lawyer who represented him at an initial appearance Wednesday did not return a phone call but said in court that the allegations were out of character for his client, according to The Associated Press.

In a civil complaint and statement, Lee’s attorney described how an eight-month romance turned toxic when his client became pregnant in February.

Lee “was anticipating motherhood with great joy and excitement,” but Welden begged her not to go through with it, lawyer Gil Sanchez said in a press release.

“Everyone dreams of becoming a mom. This was my chance,” Lee told told Tampa’s WFTS-TV.

In late March, Welden took Lee to his father’s Lutz, Fla., clinic for a prenatal examination, including a sonogram and blood and urine samples that confirmed a healthy pregnancy, Lee’s lawsuit says.

The next day, Welden told Lee that his father had diagnosed her with an infection and prescribed Amoxicillin, the antibiotic, the suit charges.

In reality, the doctor’s son had forged a prescription for Cytotec, an ulcer drug that can be used for non-surgical abortions because it causes contractions, Lee’s lawyer said.

“He came to my house with the pills, his weapon of choice,” Lee told WFTS.

“He told me to keep taking them. I was supposed to take three a day for days.”

Welden later admitted to Lee that he had fooled her, the suit claims. It describes his actions as “outrageous, beyond the bounds of decency and utterly intolerable.”

The suit seeks unspecified damages in excess of $15,000.

“We may soon be seeking redress for Lee against others who may have some degree of liability for this heinous act,” Sanchez said, without identifying anyone.

Welden, who worked at his father’s clinic but was not a doctor, is the only person charged with a crime. Workers at the clinic declined to comment.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/16/18302019-fla-man-tricked-pregnant-girlfriend-into-taking-abortion-drug-feds-say

Catching a glimpse of even regular neutrinos – low-energy particles generated in the atmosphere – is difficult enough, but spotting a “cosmic neutrino” left over from the Big Bang has been downright impossible. That is until this cubic kilometer buried under Antartica’s frozen wastes started looking.

Known as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, this $279 million telescope is located under the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Since its completion in 2010, IceCube has been searching for evidence of the cosmic neutrino via an array of thousands of sensors hung in cascading lines under the ice.

Just as its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), did, IceCube consists of spherical optical sensors called Digital Optical Modules (DOMs), each with a photomultiplier tube (PMT). In all, 86 strings containing 60 DOMs apiece and a total of 5,160 PMTs have been hung a depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 meters. IceCube researchers leveraged a unique hot water drill to quickly bore through the ice when installing the array.

When a weakly-interacting neutrino does manage to strike the nucleus of an atom in the ice, the resulting energy release creates a brief flash that is picked up by the DOM and transmitted to a data collection station on the surface. The system detects roughly 100,000 neutrino strikes annually but, until last month, all of them were of the atmospheric variety. In April, IceCube detected a pair of strikes – nicknamed Bert and Ernie – with energy signatures in the TeV range, suggesting an extraterrestrial origin. Since then, the system has spotted an additional 26 potential cosmic neutrino strikes.

The data must still be analyzed and verified by the scientific community but if these really are what researchers think they are, we could soon gain new insight into conditions present mere seconds after the Big Bang.

http://gizmodo.com/this-subterranean-telescope-may-have-just-seen-humanit-507516289

Are toys, pacifiers and even shampoo driving the epidemic of childhood obesity?

Researchers from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have found an association between a class of chemical substances known as “phthalates” and obesity in young children.

Phthalates are man-made chemicals that disrupt your endocrine system because they mimic the body’s natural hormones. They are commonly used in building materials like plastic flooring and wall coverings, food processing materials and medical devices. They are also found in many personal-care products such as shampoos, nail polish, deodorants, fragrances, hair gels, mousses, hairsprays, and hand and body lotions. Children’s toys and some pacifiers are known to contain phthalates which help soften the plastics used in the manufacturing.

Phthalates have already been cited as a concern for menopausal women because of their endocrine disrupting properties.

Previous studies have found that use of phthalates among pregnant women can lead to a feminization of boy babies and infertility in men. Animal studies suggest they can lead to breast cancer.

This study was the first to examine the relationship between phthalate exposure and obesity in children. Published in the journal Environmental Research, the study was funded by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, the National Cancer Institute, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Mount Sinai researchers measured phthalate concentrations in the urine of 387 black and Hispanic children in New York City, and recorded body measurements including BMI, height, and waist circumference one year later. The urine tests revealed that greater than 97 percent of study participants had been exposed to phthalates typically found in personal care products such as perfume, lotions, and cosmetics; varnishes; and medication or nutritional supplement coatings.

The team found an association between concentrations of these phthalates with BMI and waist circumference among overweight children. BMI in overweight girls with the highest exposure to phthalates was 10 percent higher than those with the lowest exposure.

Prior research had already shown that exposure to these everyday chemicals may impair childhood neurodevelopment.

A subsequent study found that children with the highest levels of a particular chemical, di-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), in their blood had nearly five times the odds of being obese compared with children with the lowest levels.

The percentage of obese children aged six to 11 in the United States has grown from seven percent in 1980 to more than 40 percent in 2008, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 15 percent of American children between the ages six and 19 are now characterized as obese.

Phthalates are everywhere and it’s impossible to avoid them completely.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce your family’s exposure

1. Look for toys and pacifiers that are advertised as phthalate-free.
2. Read the labels of all personal care products and avoid anything with “phthalate” or any hyphenated version of it on the label. Also avoid anything with abbreviations of chemical names such as DBP, DEP, BzBP or DMP (in insect repellents).
3. Avoid personal care products that list “fragrance” as an ingredient since that often denotes a combination of ingredients that may include phthalates.
4. Only use or buy plastics with a recycling code of 1, 2 or 5. Other codes (3 or 7) are more likely to contain phthalates.

http://banoosh.com/blog/2013/05/16/environmental-toxins-linked-to-childhood-obesity/