La matière noire pourrait rendre les planètes habitables

Une nouvelle étude suggère que la matière noire puisse rendre habitable des mondes autrement hostiles à la vie. Cette matière agirait comme une source d'énergie pour réchauffer la surface de ces mondes...

Lire sur NewScientist.

Ne contaminons pas la planète Mars !

Un projet d'astrobiologie vise à ensemencer une des lunes de Mars. Ce défi spatial risquerait bien de contaminer la planète rouge ! Inadmissible quant à la protection de cette planète qui abrite peut-être une forme de vie primitive.

Lire sur : http://www.newscientist.com

 

 

Robot féminin japonais

Robot féminin japonais - Koreus

Neutrinos dans la neige

Le nouvel observatoire IceCube, conçu pour détecter les neutrinos, est enfin achevé. Installé en Antarctique, cet instrument de physique des particules est enfermé dans 1 km3 de glace, près de la station américaine Amundsen-Scott.

IceCube est un projet de la Fondation nationale pour les sciences (National Science Foundation) et de l’Université de Wisconsin-Madison, aux États-Unis. Des universités belges, allemandes et suédoises participent au projet. Plus largement, le Canada, le Japon, la Nouvelle-Zélande, la Grande-Bretagne, la Suisse et la Barbade sont associés à l’analyse des données du nouvel observatoire.

Sources : http://www.spectrosciences.com/spip.php?breve867

 

Santa: A Claus-et physicist

Several professors in the school's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering recently asked their students to explore the aerodynamic and thermodynamic challenges of delivering gifts to millions of children worldwide in a single night from an airborne sleigh.

The results, posted at web.ncsu.edu/abstract/tag/science-of-santa, posit that Santa Claus is a brilliant engineer and physicist.

Voir en ligne aussi : http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-santa-claus-et-physic...

Sizes for potentially dangerous asteroids

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes take them close to the earth's orbit. An NEO could therefore someday collide with the earth -- and there are almost 7000 of them known, with several times that many predicted to exist.

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth. This image of the asteroid Gaspra was obtained by the Galileo spacecraft; although not an NEO, Gaspra's surface may resemble that of some NEOs. NEOs are also potential astronaut destinations. SAO astronomers announced the first results of the largest program now underway to determine the sizes and characteristics of NEOs. Credit: NASA

 

Sources : http://www.physorg.com/news202138305.html

L'affaire Bogdanoff

Trouvé ce midi un article sur l'affaire Bogdanoff. C'est à lire ici :

http://www.traqueur-stellaire.net/2010/08/affaire-bogdano...

Avatar's moon Pandora could be real

This artist's conception shows a hypothetical gas giant planet with an Earth-like moon similar to the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar. New research shows that, if we find such an "exomoon" in the habitable zone of a nearby star, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study its atmosphere and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water. The key is to find a planet that transits its star, and then find a moon orbiting that planet more than one stellar radius away, so that the moon can be studied independently of the planet. Moreover, an alien moon orbiting the gas giant planet of a red dwarf star may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths. Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA

http://www.physorg.com/news180288713.html

Possibility of the Space Propulsion System Utilizing the ZPF Field

AIP Conf. Proc. 1103, 194 (2009)
Published online: March 16, 2009
DOI: 10.1063/1.3115495

According to the gravity theory proposed by H. E. Puthoff, gravity is a form of long-range van der Waals force associated with the Zitterbewegung of elementary particles in response to zero-point fluctuations (ZPF) of the vacuum and the inertia mass is arisen from the interaction with the vacuum electromagnetic zero-point field. From the standpoint of the ZPF field theory, the author studied the possibility of the space propulsion system, which is based on interactions between the zero-point field of the quantum vacuum and high potential electric field. By the theoretical analysis, it is considered that impulsive high potential electric field can produce a sufficient momentum for the spacecraft, which would permit interstellar travel instead of conventional chemical rockets.