Month: July 2015

WASHINGTON (TIP): Nasa’s New Horizons probe has discovered a stunning mountain range on Pluto with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet above the surface.

The data suggests that the Pluto’s surface was formed no more than 100 million years ago – a mere youngster in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system.

It also means that the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today.

“This is one of the youngest surfaces we have ever seen in the solar system,” said Jeff Moore from Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California.

The probe, now heading deeper into the mysterious Kuiper Belt beyond our solar system, also clicked a new, youthful view of Pluto’s largest moon Charon.

“New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC.

“Today, we get the first sampling of the scientific treasure collected during those critical moments and I can tell you it dramatically surpasses those high expectations,” he added.

Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body.

Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape, Nasa said in a statement.

This may cause scientists to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds.

“New Horizons is returning amazing results already. The data look absolutely gorgeous, and Pluto and Charon are just mind blowing,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator for New Horizons.

The new view of Charon reveals a youthful and varied terrain.

Scientists are surprised by the apparent lack of craters. A swath of cliffs and troughs stretching about 1,000 km suggests widespread fracturing of Charon’s crust, likely the result of internal geological processes.

The image also shows a canyon estimated to be seven-nine km deep.

In Charon’s north polar region, the dark surface markings have a diffuse boundary, suggesting a thin deposit or stain on the surface.

New Horizons also observed the smaller members of the Pluto system, which includes four other moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos.

A new sneak-peak image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 43-33 km.

The observations also indicate Hydra’s surface is probably coated with water ice.

Future images will reveal more clues about the formation of this and the other moon billions of years ago.

New Horizons travelled more than three billion miles over a period of nine years to reach the Pluto system.

NEW YORK (TIP): The US military is developing a next-generation hypersonic jet plane that could fly at up to five times the speed of sound – faster than a bullet.

The jet that could take flight by 2023 builds upon research from a 2013 test flight of an experimental hypersonic vehicle, the X-51A Waverider.

The unmanned Waverider reached a top speed of Mach 5.1, more than five times the speed of sound, in just over six minutes, before it was intentionally crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

The US Air Force officials said at the time the flight was the longest-ever for a hypersonic vehicle of its kind, ‘Live Science’ reported.

However, the military’s new hypersonic vehicle will go even further, Mica Endsley, the Air Force’s chief scientist, told Military.com.

Engineers in the Air Force and the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) will take into account materials that can work well at hypersonic speeds.

They are also working on guidance systems that are smart enough to point the plane in the right direction quickly, Endsley added.

SINGAPORE (TIP): Blue light emitting diodes (LEDs) have strong antibacterial effect on major food borne pathogens and can be used as a chemical-free food preservation method, a new study has found.

The team, led by Yuk Hyun-Gyun from the National University of Singapore Faculty of Science, found that blue LEDs are most effective when in cold temperatures (between 4 degrees Celsius and 15 degrees Celsius) and mildly acidic conditions of around pH 4.5.

This opens up novel possibilities of using blue LEDs as a chemical-free food preservation method, researchers said.

Acidic foods such as fresh-cut fruits and ready-to-eat meat can be preserved under blue LEDs in combination with chilling temperatures without requiring further chemical treatments that are commonly needed for food preservation.

Bacterial cells contain light sensitive compounds that adsorb light in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is mainly blue LED light. Exposure to blue LED light can cause these cells to die.

In this study, the team placed three major foodborne pathogens – Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli and Salmonella Typhimurium – under blue LED illumination, and varied the pH conditions from acidic to alkaline.

The team found that higher bacterial inactivation was achieved at acidic and alkaline pH conditions than when neutral. In particular, acidic conditions were more detrimental than alkaline conditions for L monocytogenes. For E coli and S Typhimurium, alkaline conditions were most detrimental although acidic conditions were also sufficiently effective in deactivating them.

A previous study in 2013 by the same team had also looked at the effect of temperature on blue LED’s ability to deactivate bacterial cells and found the antibacterial effect to be most enhanced in chilling temperatures.

“Taken together, our two studies point to a potential for preserving acidic foods in combination with chilling temperatures without chemical treatments. This could meet the increasing demand for natural or minimally-processed foods without relying on chemicals such as acidulants and artificial preservatives to preserve food products,” Yuk said.

The next step of the research is to investigate whether LED illumination can effectively kill pathogenic bacteria without deterioration of food products, said Yuk.