[VIDEO] Australian researchers unveil world's first 3D printed jet engine

Australian researchers unveiled the world's first 3D-printed jet engine on Thursday, a manufacturing breakthrough that could lead to cheaper, lighter and more fuel-efficient jets.

Engineers at Monash University and its commercial arm are making top-secret prototypes for Boeing Co, Airbus Group NV, Raytheon Co and Safran SA in a development that could be the savior of Australia's struggling manufacturing sector.

"This will allow aerospace companies to compress their development cycles because we are making these prototype engines three or four times faster than normal," said Simon Marriott, chief executive of Amaero Engineering, the private company set up by Monash to commercialize the product.

Marriott said Amaero plans to have printed engine components in flight tests within the next 12 months and certified for commercial use within the next two to three years.

Australia has the potential to corner the market. It has one of only three of the necessary large-format 3D metal printers in the world - France and Germany have the other two - and is the only place that makes the materials for use in the machine.

It is also the world leader in terms of intellectual property (IP) regarding 3D printing for manufacturing.

"We have personnel that have 10 years experience on this equipment and that gives us a huge advantage," Marriott told Reuters by phone from the Avalon Airshow outside Melbourne.

3D printing makes products by layering material until a three-dimensional object is created. Automotive and aerospace companies use it for producing prototypes as well as creating specialized tools, moldings and some end-use parts.

Marriott declined to comment in detail on Amaero's contracts with companies, including Boeing and Airbus, citing commercial confidentiality. Those contracts are expected to pay in part for the building of further large format printers, at a cost of around A$3.5 million ($2.75 million) each, to ramp up production of jet engine components.

3D printing can cut production times for components from three months to just six days.

Ian Smith, Monash University's vice-provost for research, said it was very different to the melting, molding and carving of the past.

"This way we can very quickly get a final product, so the advantages of this technology are, firstly, for rapid prototyping and making a large number of prototypes quickly," Smith said. "Secondly, for being able to make bespoke parts that you wouldn't be able to with classic engineering technologies."

(Editing by Paul Tait)

NASA investigating helmet water leak after spacewalk

Two U.S. astronauts finished a 6-1/2-hour spacewalk on Wednesday to prepare parking spots for new commercial space taxis then discovered water had leaked into a spacesuit helmet, a problem that led to the near-drowning of another astronaut in 2013, officials said.

Unlike the 2013 incident, astronaut Terry Virts was not in any danger, said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias.

Virts discovered a small amount of water was floating in his helmet after he and spacewalk partner Barry "Butch" Wilmore had returned to the station's airlock following a successful outing.

"I really can't see any immediate danger," station flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy radioed to ground control teams at Mission Control in Houston.

In July 2013, NASA hastily aborted a spacewalk when the helmet worn by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano began filling with water. By the time he returned to the airlock, his vision was blocked and communications equipment had stopped working.

NASA suspended spacewalks while engineers searched for the cause of the problem.

Engineers do not yet know why Virts’ helmet leaked, nor if the issue is related to the previous problem, Navias said.

NASA managers plan to meet on Friday to decide whether to proceed with Sunday’s outing, he added,

During Wednesday’s spacewalk, the astronauts removed a cover protecting the space shuttle’s docking port, one of two sites being reconfigured for new spaceships under development by Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The work paves the way for the arrival later this year of two international docking port adapters, which will be installed during four more spacewalks NASA plans in 2015.

The spacewalkers finished routing two power and data cables on Wednesday then greased the grapple fixture at the end of the station’s robot arm.

They also prepared the Tranquility connecting node for the September arrival of an experimental inflatable habitat built by privately owned Bigelow Aerospace. Sunday's spacewalk is devoted to setting up a new communications system for the visiting vehicles.

The station, a partnership of 15 nations, is a collection of laboratories and platforms for materials and life science experiments, Earth studies, physics and other investigations that take advantage of the microgravity environment and unique vantage point of space. The Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday it would remain part of the international outpost until 2024, a four-year extension proposed by the United States.

Source: Reuters

Before decrying the latest cyberbreach, consider your own cyberhygiene

The theft of 80 million customer records from health insurance company Anthem earlier this month would be more shocking if it were not part of a larger trend. In 2013, the Department of Defense and some US states were receiving 10–20 million cyberattacks per day. By 2014, there was a 27% increase in successful attacks, culminating with the infamous hack of Sony Pictures.

Much of the media focus is on the losses rather than the process by which such breaches take place. Consequently, instead of talking about how we could stop the next attack, people and policymakers are discussing punitive actions. But not enough attention is given to the actions of individual end users in these cyberattacks.


We are the unintentional insiders

Many of these hacking attacks employ simple phishing schemes, such as an e-card on Valentine’s Day or a notice from the IRS about your tax refund. They look innocuous but when clicked, they open virtual back doors into our organizations.

It is you and I who click on these links and become the “unintentional insiders” giving the hackers access and helping spread the infection. Such attacks are hard to detect using existing anti-virus programs that, like vaccines, are good at protecting systems from known external threats — not threats from within.

Clearly, this virtual battle cannot be won using software alone. In the same way personal hygiene stymies the spread of infectious disease, fixing this cyber quandary will require all of us to develop better cyberhygiene. We need to begin by considering the cyberbehaviors that lead to breaches.

My research on phishing points to three. Firstly, most of us pay limited attention to email content, focusing instead on quick clues that help expedite judgment. A picture of an inexpensive heart-shaped valentine gift gets attention, oftentimes at the cost of looking at the sender’s email address.

This is coupled by our ritualized media habits that our always-on and accessible smartphones and tablets enable. Many of us check emails throughout the day whenever an opportunity or notification arises, even when we know it is dangerous to do so, such as while driving. Such habitual usage significantly increases the likelihood of someone opening an email as matter of routine.

And finally, many of us just aren’t knowledgeable about online risks. We tend to hold what I call “cyber risk beliefs” about the security of an operating system, the safety of a program, or the vulnerability of an online action, most of which are flawed.

Sit on down and get educated.  Matt Grimm, CC BY-NC-SA

Cleaning up our cyberhygiene act

Developing cyberhygiene requires all of us — netizens, educators, local government, and federal policymakers — to actively engage in creating it.

To begin, we must focus on educating everyone about the risks of online actions. Most children don’t learn about cybersafety until they reach high school; many until college. More troublingly, some learn through risky trials or the reports of someone else’s errors.

In an age where online data remain on servers perpetually, the consequences of a privacy breach could haunt a victim forever. Expanding federal programs such as the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, which presently aims to inspire students to pursue cybersecurity careers, could help achieve universal cybersecurity education.

Second, we must train people to become better at detecting online fraud. At the very least, all of us must be made aware of online security protocols, safe browsing practices, secure password creation and storage, and on procedures for sequestering or reporting suspicious activity. Flawed cyber-risk beliefs must be replaced with objective knowledge through training.

Although some training programs address these issues, most target businesses that can pay for training. Left out are households and other vulnerable groups, which, given the recent “bring your own device to work” (BYOD) trend, increases the chances that a compromised personal device brings a virus into the workplace. Initiatives such as the Federal Cybersecurity Training Events that presently offer free workshops to IT professionals are steps in this direction, but the emphasis must move beyond training specialists to training the average netizen.

President Obama calls for beefing up cybersecurity laws on Feb 13, 2015. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Finally, we must centralize the reporting of cyber breaches. The President’s proposed Personal Data Notification and Protection Act would make it mandatory for companies to report data breaches within 30 days. But it still doesn’t address who within the vast network of enforcement agencies is responsible for resolution. Having a single clearing house that centralizes and tracks breaches, just like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks disease outbreaks across the nation, would make remediation and resource allocation easier.

Across the Atlantic, the City of London Police created a system called Action Fraud, which serves as a single site for reporting all types of cyberattacks, along with a specialized team called FALCON to quickly respond to and even address impending cyberattacks. Our city and state police forces could do likewise by channeling some resource away from fighting offline crime. After all, real world crime is at a historically low rate while cybercrimes have grown exponentially.

How the Internet could make us smarter

A few years ago, researchers demonstrated that people had poorer memory for information that they were told had been saved to a computer. Technophobes jumped on the finding. 

"Imagine that in the future people become so used to external access for any form of reference that they have not internalized any facts at all," wrote Susan Greenfield.

Of course there are many flaws to this logic, not least that the old fashioned act of writing information down can also lead to increased forgetting. A new study has focused on another important point: forgetting information that we know is externally available could be advantageous - allowing us to free up cognitive resources to better learn new information.

Benjamin Storm and Sean Stone tested this possibility across three studies involving dozens of undergrads. The format was similar throughout. The students started by studying a list of ten words in one computer file, which they would be tested on later. Then they moved onto a second file with a new list of words to study. There was a 20-second delay then they were tested on this second list.

The critical finding is that the students performed better at remembering this second list if they were earlier given the chance to save the first list to computer. It's as if knowing the first list was stored on computer prompted them to deliberately forget it, so that they could focus all their mental resources on the second list.

Further details back up this interpretation. When the computer saving process was made unreliable - files kept getting lost - the saving process no longer boosted the students' performance on the second list. Also, when the first list was made up of just two words, meaning it placed little strain on memory, the act of saving it to computer no longer made a difference to memory for the second list.

Why else might saving information to computer help benefit new learning? Another intriguing suggestion made by the researchers is that the act of saving could provide the basis for an "event boundary" in memory, helping avoid confusion between the first and second lists. They further speculate that saving to computer likely doesn't just aid the learning of further information, but could also free up mental resources that underlie thinking and problem solving.

The researchers conclude with a Sherlock Holmes quote that captures the concept of adaptive forgetting: "... a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it."

This article originally appeared at Research Digest. Copyright 2015. Follow Research Digest on Twitter.

India could be the world's most important solar market

Europe, the U.S., Japan, and China have been the stars of the solar industry for the past decade. In the early 2000s, Europe's feed-in tariffs gave birth to the industry as we know it. China brought low-cost manufacturing and billions of dollars in capacity expansions at a rapid rate. Now, the U.S. and Japan are growing demand based on market forces, not subsidies or government mandates.

But the biggest prize in the solar industry could be India. The country has an underserved population that solar energy could help to power, and its population of over 1 billion provides an opportunity for growth that could last for decades.



India's big solar plans

India actually has two distinct potential solar markets, utility scale and small distributed solar on rooftops in rural areas . First, the government is pushing massive 500-plus megawatt solar power plants in a bid to build 100 gigawatts of solar by 2022. SunEdison has been an early mover in this market, saying recently it will build over 15 GW of wind and solar in the next seven years. First Solar is also moving into the market with a plan for 5 GW of solar projects.  

The U.S. has said it is ready to help cover the estimated $160 billion investment needed to build that much solar energy, a potential financial lifeline for India's unstable energy industry.

To put this investment into perspective, China is the world's largest solar energy producer, with 33.4 GW installed, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, while India has just 3.3 GW of solar. To hit 100 GW by 2022, India would have to install on average 13.8 GW of solar every year, more than any country has ever installed and double what the U.S. installed in 2014.  



The smaller, and potentially more important Indian solar market

Mega-solar projects aren't the only kind of solar energy India will build in the next few years. Distributed solar, installed on rooftops or in fields close to demand sources, will play a large role in powering the country's rural populations.

The central grid does a poor job of reaching some of India's most remote locations, and there's little hope they'll be connected anytime soon. The best option is for communities to build their own microgrids, powered by locally produced energy from wind, solar, and other sources and including new technologies such as energy storage and demand response.

Why the industry will grow for decades

India has a couple things going for it that other countries investing in solar don't. The nation is expected to be the world's most populous country by 2030. This rapid population growth will be one of the drivers of India doubling the amount of energy it consumes by that time, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

As you can see above, India also has strong solar resources, particularly in the western part of the country. In the map above, the region that gets 5.0 to 6.0 kW-hrs/m2/day gets a similar amount of sunlight as the southwestern U.S. in terms of intensity. For some perspective, nearly all of the country gets more solar energy than northeastern U.S. states such as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Germany, China, the U.S., and other nations have also done much of the dirty work in proving out solar energy's feasibility and lowering costs to prices competitive with fossil fuels. India can now install large-scale solar plants for $1.60 per watt or less, which is a fraction of what it cost Germany to install most of its solar capacity.

These strong growth factors and a government that is putting its weight behind solar energy make India one of the world's most important solar markets. Companies that can gain market share and win projects there should reap billions of dollars in profits for investors. It's just a race to see who will get there first.


Credits: BussinessInsider

[VIDEO] Exclusive: Orbital explosion probe said to find debris in engine: sources

Last October's explosion of Orbital ATK Inc's Antares rocket may have been triggered when debris inadvertently left in a fuel tank traveled into the booster's main engine, two people familiar with investigations into the accident told Reuters.

The sources said the preliminary findings suggest that a simple assembly mistake by Orbital ATK could have caused the explosion, which destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.

Orbital initially linked the explosion to a problem with the turbo pump in one of the two Soviet-era NK-33 engines that power the rocket. GenCorp Inc's Aerojet Rocketdyne unit refurbishes the old motors and resells them as AJ-26 motors.

Orbital ATK on Friday acknowledged that so-called "foreign object debris" was one of more than a half dozen credible causes of the explosion, but said it was not "a leading candidate as the most probable cause of the failure."

Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski said the company-led "accident investigation board," which includes officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, had not identified any evidence of mishandling of the flight hardware by Orbital.

He said Orbital continued to compare data from the October explosion with a May 2014 test stand failure of a different AJ-26 engine, and prior failures involving AJ-26 ground tests in 2009, 2011 and 2012.

No details have been released on the May 2014 test stand incident, but sources familiar with the earlier investigation said it was likely linked to faulty "workmanship" on the original motor, and additional inspections had been mandated to prevent mishaps with other engines. Orbital also successfully launched one Antares rocket in July 2014, after the May incident.

NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said NASA was conducting its own internal "lessons learned" review of the accident, but declined to give any details about individual aspects of the investigation.

She agreed with Orbital that foreign object debris was always considered as a possible cause in aerospace accidents.

If the investigations confirm that debris from the fuel tanks caused the Antares explosion, that could have significant financial and legal effects for Orbital ATK, which was formed by the merger of Orbital Sciences Corp and Alliant Techsystems.

The new findings could also open the door for a legal claim against Orbital by GenCorp, which took a $17.5 million loss in October, after Orbital said the accident had prompted it to accelerate plans to switch to a different engine.

One source said the Orbital investigation could end without declaring a single "root cause" for the explosion. Probes of past accidents have had similar results.

Several sources said it may be difficult to determine conclusively whether the debris entered the engine before the explosion, or as a result of it.

Glenn Mahone, spokesman for Aerojet Rocketdyne, declined to comment on the investigations, noting that they were still underway. He also declined to comment on the cause of the May test stand failure, which is part of the investigation.

One of the sources familiar with the probe said investigators found particles of a crystallized desiccant, or drying agent, in the turbo pump and other parts of the AJ-26 engine. The crystals could have caused sparks and triggered a fire when they hit the turbo pump in the oxygen-rich environment, the source said.

Desiccants are often used to control moisture in fuel tanks but need to be removed before takeoff, the sources said.

While the NASA investigation had not finalized the root cause of the accident, there were multiple signs that suggested some "foreign object debris" had been ingested into the engine from the fuel tanks, one source said.

Antares had four previous successful flights. The Oct. 28 explosion was the first accident since NASA began using commercial providers to fly cargo to the space station.

Orbital already faces steep bills for damage to the launch site, and the need to buy a different rocket to launch its next cargo ship to the space station.



In December, the company said it would buy a booster from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, to meet its obligations under a $1.9 billion cargo supply contract with NASA.

Orbital is one of two companies NASA hired to fly 40,000 pounds of cargo each to the station following the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011. Privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, has the other contract, valued at $1.6 billion.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by David Gregorio)

[VIDEO] Spacewalking astronauts rig station for new U.S. space taxis

A pair of U.S. astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Saturday to begin rigging parking spots for two commercial space taxis.

Station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer Terry Virts, 47, left the station’s Quest airlock shortly before 8 a.m. EST/1300 GMT to begin a planned 6-1/2-hour spacewalk, the first of three outings over the next eight days.

The work will prepare docking ports for upcoming flights by Boeing Co and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which are developing capsules to ferry crew to and from the station, which flies about 260 miles (418 km) above the Earth.

The United States has been dependent on Russia for station crew transportation since the space shuttle were retired in 2011.

The first test flight of a new U.S. crew craft isn’t expected until late 2016, but the station, a $100 billion laboratory owned by 15 nations, needs to undergo a significant transformation to prepare for the new vehicles, NASA said.

That work began on Saturday with Wilmore and Virts installing six cables to a docking port on the station’s Harmony module, the same site where space shuttles used to berth.

"This will be the most complicated cable-routing task that we have performed (by spacewalkers) to date,” Karina Eversly, lead spacewalk official, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

After two more spacewalks scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 25, and Sunday, March 1, the station will be outfitted with a total of 764 feet (233 m) of new cabling, as well as a communications system to support Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s upgraded Dragon capsules.

The work sets the stage for the launch and installation of two international docking systems, built by Boeing and scheduled for launch aboard SpaceX Dragon cargo ships later this year.



To make room for a second berthing port on Harmony and two docking slips for cargo ships, NASA also plans to relocate another module using the station’s robot arm.

"We're doing a lot of reconfiguration this year," Kenneth Todd, station operations manager, said at the news conference. "We are really trying to take the station into this next phase.”

Credits: Reuters

Google launches fifth annual Science Fair

Google is seeking young inventors, explorers and scientists to help change the world and participate in the fifth annual online Google Science Fair.

Students aged between 13 and 18 are invited to submit ideas around two themes - 'It’s your turn to change the world' and 'What will you try?'. Past entries have included body heat-powered torches, wearable sensors for older people and fruit fly-inspired flying robots.

Projects from all scientific fields, including biology, computer science and anthropology are encouraged to enter the fair, which will run from February 18 to May 18.

Prizes include $100,000 in scholarships and classroom grants from Scientific American and Google, a National Geographic Expedition to the Galapagos, an opportunity to visit LEGO designers at their Denmark headquarters and the chance to tour Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship at their Mojave Air and Spaceport.

The finalist will travel to Google's Mountain View Googleplex Campus on 21 September for the final event.

Google received thousands of entries last year from more than 90 countries, and shortlisted projects from nine boys and nine girls.

The winners of 2014's Grand Prize were three girls; Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow, all aged 16, who investigated the use of diazotroph bacteria as a cereal crop germination and growth aid to combat world hunger.

This year the Fair will be held in partnership with Scientific American, National Geographic, The LEGO group and Virgin Galactic.

Applicants can find more informations here: www.googlesciencefair.com

Five things scientists could learn with their new, improved particle accelerator

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back, and it’s better than ever. The particle accelerator, located at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, shut down in February 2013, and since then scientists have been upgrading and repairing it and its particle detectors. The LHC will be back up to full speed this May. Yesterday, scientists discussed the new prospects for the LHC at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science).

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Protons blast along its 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring at nearly light speed, colliding at the sites of several particle detectors, which sift through the resulting particle debris. In 2012, LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs boson with data from the LHC’s first run, thereby explaining how particles get mass. The revamped LHC will run at a 60% higher energy, with more sensitive detectors, and a higher collision rate. What might we find with the new-and-improved machine? Here are five questions scientists hope to answer:


1. Does the Higgs boson hold any surprises?

Now that we’ve found the Higgs boson, there’s still a lot we can learn from it. Thanks to the LHC’s energy boost, it will produce Higgs bosons at a rate five times higher, and scientists will be using the resulting abundance of Higgs to understand the particle in detail. How does it decay? Does it match the theoretical predictions? Anything out of the ordinary would be a boon to physicists, who are looking for evidence of new phenomena that can explain some of the unsolved mysteries of physics.


2. What is “dark matter”?

Only 15% of the matter in the universe is the kind we are familiar with. The rest is dark matter, which is invisible to us except for subtle hints, like its gravitational effects on the cosmos. Physicists are clamoring to know what it is. One likely dark matter culprit is a WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle, which could show up in the LHC. Dark matter’s fingerprints could even be found on the Higgs boson, which may sometimes decay to dark matter. You can bet that scientists will be sifting through their data for any trace.


3. Will we ever find supersymmetry?

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, is a hugely popular theory of particle physics that would solve many unanswered questions about physics, including why the mass of the Higgs boson is lighter than naively expected if only it were true. This theory proposes a slew of exotic elementary particles that are heavier twins of known ones, but with different spin a type of intrinsic rotational momentum. Higher energies at the new LHC could boost the production of hypothetical supersymmetric particles called gluinos by a factor of 60, increasing the odds of finding it.


4. Where did all the antimatter go?

Physicists don’t know why we exist. According to theory, after the big bang the universe was equal parts matter and antimatter, which annihilate one another when they meet. This should have eventually resulted in a lifeless universe devoid of matter. But instead, our universe is full of matter, and antimatter is rare somehow, the balance between matter and antimatter tipped. With the upgraded LHC, experiments will be able to precisely test how matter might differ from antimatter, and how our universe came to be.


5. What was our infant universe like?

Just after the big bang, our universe was so hot and dense that protons and neutrons couldn’t form, and the particles that make them up—quarks and gluons—floated in a soup known as the quark-gluon plasma. To study this type of matter, the LHC produces extra-violent collisions using lead nuclei instead of protons, recreating the fireball of the primordial universe. Aided by the new LHC’s higher rate of collisions, scientists will be able to take more baby photos of our universe than ever before.

Credits: ScienceMAG

Back to Mars One mission: 100 hopefuls shortlisted for chance to leave Earth forever

Amateur astronauts hoping to make history by leaving Earth to live on Mars have been shortlisted for the one-way trip of a lifetime.

The final 100 candidates from the Mars One project have been whittled down from more than 200,000 applicants following an exhaustive selection process, which began in April 2013.

“The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars,” said Dutch billionaire Bas Lansdorp, co-founder & CEO of Mars One.

“These aspiring Martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be.”

The 50 men and 50 women were selected for round three of the process after coming through an online interview with the project’s chief medical officer.

Mars One wants to put humans on the Red Planet by 2024  Photo: Mars One

Those who made it through the interview stage showed they understood the risks involved and demonstrated a strong willingness to work in a team.

The final 100 chosen come from around the world, with 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa, and 7 from Oceania.

Ambitious: Mars One

A total of 40 candidates will eventually be chosen to take part in a training programme and live in a copy of the Mars outpost on Earth.

Mars One wants to put a permanent human settlement on Mars, with the first crew of four to reach the Red Planet by 2024 and the mission set to be turned into a reality TV show.

Over the next few years, communication satellites, two rovers and several cargo missions will be sent to Mars.

However, sceptics have cast serious doubt over whether the Mars mission will ever be achieved.

Drone to scan for ancient Amazonia

Scientists are to scan the Amazon forest in Brazil to look for evidence of occupation by ancient civilisations.

A drone will be sent up with a laser instrument to peer through the canopy for earthworks that were constructed thousands of years ago.

The UK-led project is trying to determine how big these communities were, and to what degree they altered the landscape.

The data is likely to inform policies on sustainable forest use today.

Researchers announced the initiative at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

It has just won a 1.7m-euro (£1.25m; $1.9m) grant from the European Research Council.

The key quest is to try to understand the scale and activities of populations living in the late pre-Columbian period (the last 3,000 years before the Europeans arrived in the 1490s).

'Cultural parkland'
The international team will endeavour to find more geoglyphs, which are large geometric patterns left in the ground.

More than 450 of these are known in places where the forest has been cleared.

No-one is really quite sure what these earthen circles, squares and lines represent. Perhaps, they were ceremonial centres. But what is certain is that they are evidence of collective behaviour.

"It’s a hot debate right now in New World archaeology," said Dr Jose Iriarte from Exeter University, UK.

"While some researchers think that Amazonia was inhabited by small bands of hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators who had a minimal impact on the environment, and that the forest we see today is pristine and untouched for thousands of years - mounting evidence is showing this may not be the case.

"This evidence suggests that Amazonia may have been inhabited by large, numerous, complex and hierarchical societies that had a major impact on the environment; what we call the 'cultural parkland hypothesis'," he told BBC News.

Dr Iriarte's project will fly its robotic plane across sample areas of forest.

This vehicle's lidar instrument should reveal how many more geoglyphs remain hidden beneath still-canopied regions of Amazonia.

While some of the light from the lidar scatters back off the leaves, some is able to penetrate to the ground.

A smart algorithm can then be used to separate the two signals, digitally removing the trees to expose anything unusual beneath.

If candidate geoglyphs are confirmed in follow-up inspections, scientists would then move in to characterise signature changes that have been left in the soils and vegetation by the ancient inhabitants.

These "fingerprints" could then be searched for in satellite images, enabling a much broader swathe of Amazonia to be probed than is possible with just a small unmanned aerial vehicle. The arguments over the scale of occupation and its impacts should then be settled.

In normal airborne imagery only the tops of the trees are visible

The lidar makes a map of the canopy in digital form...

...which can then be removed to leave only that signal of the laser that made it through to the ground

The project is a partnership between agencies and institutions in Europe and, of course, in Brazil.

The expectation is that lessons learned will feed into policies for the management and sustainable use of the Amazon and its resources.

Dr Iriarte said it was not possible to gauge properly what future changes would be acceptable unless there was a fuller understanding of how the forest had been altered in the past.

"We want to see what is the human footprint in the forest and then inform policy, because it may be the case that the very biodiversity that we want to preserve is the result of the past historical manipulation of this forest," he explained.

How many more of the geoglyphs is the Amazon forest hiding from view

Credits: BBC Amos

Collider hopes for a 'super' restart

A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson.

The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy.

This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino.

Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to "dark matter".

And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe.

"It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we're really lucky," said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC.

"We hope that we're just now at this threshold that we're finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we'll find now supersymmetric matter."

The University of California at Berkeley researcher made her comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.



In the debris

Supersymmetry is an addition to the Standard Model that describes nature’s fundamental particles and their interactions.

Susy, as it is sometimes known, fills some gaps in the model and provides a basis to unify nature's forces.

It predicts each of the particles to have more massive partners. So the particle that is light – the photon – would have a partner called the photino. The quark, the building block of an atom’s protons and neutrons, would have a partner called the squark.

But when the LHC was colliding matter at its pre-upgrade energies, no sign of these superparticles was seen in the debris, which led to some consternation among theorists.

Now, with the accelerator about to reopen in the coming weeks, there is high hope the first evidence of Susy can be found.

The machine is going to double the collision energy, taking it into a domain where those theorists say the gluino really ought to emerge in sufficient numbers to be noticed. The gluino is the superpartner of the gluon, which "glues" the quarks together inside protons and neutrons.

The LHC’s detectors would not see it directly. What they would track is its decay, which scientists would then have to reconstruct.

But importantly, those decay products should include the lightest and most stable superparticle, known as the neutralino – the particle that researchers have proposed is what makes up dark matter, the missing mass in the cosmos that binds galaxies together on the sky but which cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

"This would rock the world,” said Prof Heinemann. "For me, it’s more exciting than the Higgs."



'The other side'

So, not only would supersymmetry proponents be elated because they would have their first superparticle, but science in general would have a firm foot on the road to understanding dark matter.

Dr Michael Williams, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "We sometimes talk about the dark matter particle, but it’s perfectly plausible that dark matter is just as interesting as [normal] matter, [which] has a lot of particles that we know about.

"There might be just as many dark matter particles, or even more.

"Finding any particle that could be a dark matter candidate is nice because we could start to understand how it affects the galaxy and the evolution of the universe, but it also opens the door to whatever is on the other side, which we have no idea what is there."

Particle physicists have three major conferences in August and September, one of which is the main gathering of the supersymmetry community. All these meetings are bound to draw huge interest.

But Prof Jay Hauser, who works on the CMS detector at the LHC, added a little caution on timings. "Even if we did see something, remember it might be complicated enough that it takes us a while to explain it," he told reporters.

Extremely large telescopes will add more firepower to search the cosmos

As an astronomer, I get a lot of requests for help. “I’d like to buy a telescope,” the conversation usually goes. “Can you give me some tips on what to look for?”

Sadly, there’s little advice I can offer, because the telescopes used by professional astronomers have become unrecognizably different from those you might buy for your backyard. Lens caps, eyepieces and finderscopes are nowhere to be seen. Instead, we are now entering a world where telescopes involve 20-ton mirrors, 250-foot high domes, and billion-dollar budgets.

The power of a telescope is defined by the size of the mirror it uses to collect starlight. Like a bucket collecting raindrops, the bigger the mirror, the more light one can gather, and hence the fainter an object one can see. What’s more, the bigger the mirror, the sharper your vision: if you double the diameter of your mirror, in principle you can now see features twice as small as before.

Artist’s concept of Giant Magellan Telescope once completed, with its seven mirrors. Giant Magellan Telescope - GMTO Corporation, CC BY-SA

Frustratingly, a full understanding of our place in the Universe requires us to see things far smaller and fainter than we can currently achieve. Out of this need has emerged a vision of a new generation of mega-facilities: the Extremely Large Telescopes, or ELTs.

Bigger than big

There are three Extremely Large Telescopes now beginning to take shape, all almost unbelievable in their sheer scale, audacious in their engineering challenges and thrilling in the scientific mysteries they aim to solve.

The first of the ELTs expected to come online will be the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), to be built on a mountain peak in northern Chile and aiming for “first light” in 2021. Close behind will be the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), to be built on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and scheduled for completion in 2022. And the biggest of them all, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will also be in the mountains of northern Chile, and will begin operations in 2024.

The size of these telescopes is hard to comprehend: even the smallest, the GMT, will have a mirror 83 feet across, with a total area larger than a tennis court. The TMT will easily top this, with a mirror 100 feet in diameter. And the E-ELT will be even larger, with a mirror spanning 130 feet.

The E-ELT dome (on the left) will be 100 meters in diameter, about the size of the Colosseum in Rome (on the right).  European Southern Observatory, CC BY

The largest single mirror ever made is a mere 27 feet across. How does one go about building something so much bigger?

The answer is: you don’t.

The seven giant mirrors of the GMT (in an artist’s rendering).  Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, CC BY-NC-ND

All three ELTs will use a mosaic of smaller mirrors, segmented together and operating in concert. But even this simplifying technique takes us into uncharted territory.

For the Giant Magellan Telescope, the plan is to build seven of these 27-foot mirrors, to be arranged in a circle like the petals of a giant flower. But to make just one of these mirrors is a herculean effort: 20 tons of ultra-pure glass is cast in a giant rotating oven, takes six months to cool, and then another year to polish into the required curved shape. When the mirror is finally ready, it needs to be delivered from the mirror lab in Arizona to the mountain in Chile. And the whole process must then be repeated another six times.

Artist’s rendering of the TMT’s 492 small mirrors arranged in honeycomb formation.  Thirty Meter Telescope, CC BY-NC-ND

The Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope are taking a different approach, using a much larger number of small mirrors, each 5 feet across and fit together in a honeycomb pattern. But the number of mirrors then required is enormous: 492 for the TMT, and a staggering 798 for the E-ELT. What’s more, to perfectly maintain the shape needed to keep the light in focus and to correct for the blurring effects of the atmosphere, the precise shapes and orientations of the individual mirror segments need to be continually adjusted. This requires thousands of individual motors attached to the back of the mirrors, each making minute adjustments many times per second, all orchestrated by a dedicated supercomputer.

These facilities will be so complex that rarely will scientists steer the telescope themselves; specially trained telescope operators will be at the controls. Instead, we astronomers will never need to leave our offices, the collected data arriving via a link in an email.

Stars orbiting very close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The animation starts with a standard image, then one produced with the most powerful telescopes currently available, then the type of image expected to be produced using an ELT. Credit: Keck / UCLA Galactic Center Group

Stargazers no longer gaze at the stars

Is the romance now gone? No. The stargazers are as entranced as ever with the heavens. But to understand our Universe, we need to gaze more deeply than we’ve ever done before.

The view of the night sky as seen with the naked eye or with a modest-sized telescope is terribly misleading. A typical photograph of the starry sky is about as representative of the Universe as a concert mosh pit might be of all of planet Earth. Or to put things more scientifically, our ordinary view of the sky is overwhelmingly biased by the brightest, nearest, biggest objects.

But the big prizes for modern astronomy – the things we seek to discover and understand – are inevitably extremely faint, distant or small. The new frontiers are stars so old that they’re a fossil record of the beginnings of the Universe, the mysterious Dark Energy that is forcing the cosmos to expand ever faster, and the hunt for tiny Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

These and other related challenges were barely on the radar twenty years ago, but now they dominate worldwide astronomy. So how to make further progress? How do we see what the Universe really looks like? The answer lies with these bigger telescopes, far bigger than anything we’ve dared build before.

Credits: TheConversation