Until recently, crystals with ‘forbidden symmetry’ were thought impossible to naturally occur. Yet, a 4.57 billion-year-old meteorite was found in the far northeastern region of Chukotka, Russia exhibiting crystals with naturally occurring ‘forbidden symmetry‘ for the first time. Dr. Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University led a research team to characterize the nature and occurrence of this enigmatic quasicrystal. [...]
Excerpt from educatinghumanity.com "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."Niels Bohr10 Ways Quantum Physics Will Change the WorldEver want to have a "life do over", teleport, time travel, have your computer wor...
Excerpt from cnet.com Though the seismic waves from earthquakes are best known for their destructive abilities, in the hands of geologists, they can be powerful tools of discovery. A research team at the University of Illinois (UI) has just used th...
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| © Getty Images Strange rock containing 30,000 diamonds baffles scientists |
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| Researchers have achieved 32 different–shaped crystal structures using the DNA–brick self–assembly method. (Photo : Harvard’s Wyss Institute) |
“Therein lies the key distinguishing feature of our design strategy—its modularity,” said co-lead author Yonggang Ke, Ph.D., formerly a Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and now an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. “The ability to simply add or remove pieces from the master canvas makes it easy to create virtually any design.”
“DNA crystals are attractive for nanotechnology applications because they are comprised of repeating structural units that provide an ideal template for scalable design features”, said co-lead author graduate student Luvena Ong.
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| Artist's illustration of what a cool early Earth looked like. (Artwork by Don Dixon, cosmographica.com) |
There are three main Grids that operate through and around Earth; the first we will look at is the Crystalline Grid, which links the Crystals in the Earth.
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Meteorite is ‘hard drive’ from space ~ Researchers decode ancient recordings from asteroid ~ BBC
Like the data recorded on the surface of a computer hard drive, the magnetic signals written in the space rock reveal how Earth's own metallic core and magnetic field may one day die.
The work appears in Nature journal.
Using a giant X-ray microscope, called a synchrotron, the team was able to read the signals that formed more than four-and-a-half billion years ago, soon after the birth of the Solar System.
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Dr James Bryson University of CambridgeThe new picture of metallic core solidification in the asteroid provide clues about the magnetic field and iron-rich core of Earth.
Core values "Ideas about how the Earth's core evolved through [our planet's] history are really changing at the moment," lead researcher Dr Richard Harrison, from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News.
"We believe that Earth's magnetic field is linked to core solidification. Earth's solid inner core may have started to form at very interesting time in terms of the evolution of life on Earth.
"By studying an asteroid we get to see this in fast forward. We can see the start of core solidification in the magnetic records as well as its end, and start to think about how these processes work on Earth."
Tiny particles, smaller than one thousandth the width of a human hair, trapped within the metal have retained the magnetic signature of the parent asteroid from its birth in the early Solar System.
"We're taking ancient magnetic field measurements in nano-scale materials to the highest ever resolution in order to piece together the magnetic history of asteroids - it's like a cosmic archaeological mission," said Dr James Bryson, the paper's lead author.
"Since asteroids are much smaller than Earth, they cooled much more quickly, so these processes occur on a shorter timescales, enabling us to study the whole process of core solidification."
Prof Wyn William, from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, commented: "To be able to get a time stamp on these recordings, to get a cooling rate and the time of solidification, is fantastic. It's a very nice piece of work."
The key to the long-lived stability of the recording is the atomic-scale structure of the iron-nickel particles that grew slowly in the asteroid core and survived in the meteorites.
Making a final comment on the results, Dr Harrison said: "In our meteorites we've been able to capture both the beginning and end of core freezing, which will help us understand how these processes affected the Earth in the past and provide a possible glimpse of what might happen in the future."