Until not long ago, the best results in attempts to exercise such control came only a split second. But the authors of the new research, including Stephen Lyon and Alexei Tyryshkin of Princeton University have found a way to extend control over the spin of billions of electrons in a silicon chip for 10 seconds, a much longer than that achieved in any previous attempt.

The key of the new results are shown in highly purified silicon. The experiment was based on the use of a small silicon chip made almost entirely of an isotope, silicon-28. The elements are identified by the number of protons within its core; carbon has 6 protons, the silicon is 14. But most of the items we have in different versions (called isotopes) and identified by their number of neutrons. Some isotopes, such as silicon-28, have no magnetism, while others create a strong magnetic effect on the atomic scale. A relatively common isotope of silicon, silicon-29, has a very strong magnetic presence and thus was the first isotope to dismiss.

A normal computer using transistors are turned off to represent zeros and ones that are the bits that form the basis of all computer programs. But instead of this binary language, a quantum computer would incorporate the uncertainty of quantum mechanics in its programming. Instead of bits, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits, a value that is inherently indeterminate.

Mathematicians are still working on ways to take advantage of a machine like that. They believe that quantum computers could be used to crack cryptographic codes to simulate the behavior of molecules and many other things that require immense computing power.

This type of vehicle allows the acquisition of real time information in previously inaccessible areas, such as the gas plume emanating from the volcano, resulting in better modeling of the state of the area by increasing the speed of data acquisition and safety of researchers. These advantages are accompanied by low cost and high frequency in the acquisition of such data.

Researchers at the Computer Vision Group of the UPM, in collaboration with the University of Costa Rica within the International Cooperation program, have evaluated the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) of the quad-rotor type in visual inspection processes, thermal and geo referenced data acquisition (pressure, temperature gases and others) of active volcanoes in the central mountains of Costa Rica.

The objective of this study is to optimize remote sensing techniques of hydrothermal alteration and hot spots of the volcanic mountain range through the acquisition of images with a quad-rotor AscTec Pelican. Tests have been conducted in the craters of volcanoes Poas and Irazu, where UPM researchers have conducted experimental tests.

The quad-rotor employee has operated independently in all phases of its mission, allowing to integrate different types of sensors and cameras for the acquisition and storage of geo referenced. This information is then analyzed by scientists to monitor and study active volcanoes.

The project realized that just ended in January 2012, represents an important milestone in the field of prevention of disasters due to volcanic eruptions.

Atlantic Circulation participates in the Gulf Stream, so often wrongly attributed the name of the current.

This prediction on the future development of the Atlantic Circulation Returns has been conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Meteorological Institute, Germany, and the University of Hamburg, in the same country, using a specific digital model of the circulation. His prognosis was possible because the scientists could compare many of the simulations of the model with actual measurements.

The influence of ocean circulation on climate change is enormous. Temperatures in various parts of the world are regulated in part by currents that carry warm water toward the polar regions of both hemispheres, where they cool in the exchange with the cold air. Because of several factors, these cool waters sink to deeper levels, and then returned to the temperate and tropical regions as undercurrents.

The amount of heat transported in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has a significant direct impact on European climate along the west coast. Climatologists believe the unusually cold winter of 2009 to 2010 was due in part to this ocean current provided a lower supply of hot water to the coast.

The frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and the frequency of droughts in the Sahel region of West Africa depend largely on the temperature of ocean surface waters, determined, in turn, by the strength this Atlantic Circulation.

Due to the importance it presents to the climate, it is extremely important to know as early as possible when the South Atlantic Circulation Return will be weaker and when will be stronger.

The team of Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Meteorological Institute in Germany, and Daniela Matei, an expert from the same institution, predicted fluctuations in the Atlantic circulation for the next four years. His forecast is for no change beyond the usual seasonal variations.

The authors of this study believe that there is no doubt that the weakening in the Atlantic circulation occurred in March 2010 was only a temporary phenomenon. Some experts interpreted this decline as a sign of weakening in the long term. This possibility is often discussed as a potential consequence of climate change as ocean circulation is not only heavily involved in the “cocktail” of climate, but also reacts with remarkable sensitivity to climate change.

A new study conducted by scientists from 13 countries, including experts from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Vienna in Austria, provides clear evidence of a continent-wide effect that global warming has had on plant communities mountain.

The research surveyed the changes in mountain plant communities in Europe, having nearly a decade of separation between work sampling. The researchers analyzed 60 samples and 867 peaks of mountain vegetation of 17 areas across Europe in 2001, and then returned to take samples at the same sites in 2008.

Comparing the vegetation found in the areas examined in 2001 and 2008, the team of Ottar Michelsen, Michael Gottfried, Harald Pauli and others in these areas could see a clear transition to species that do better in warmer temperatures.

The continental scale transformation of plant communities in less than a decade can be considered as a rapid response of the ecosystem to the advancement of global warming, and has surprised even the authors of the study. “We did not expect to find such a significant change in a short space of time,” says Michael Gottfried.

The project, led by European and U.S. scientists, has included the removal of four ice cores from a glacier on top of Mount Ortler, at 3,905 meters above sea level in northeastern Italy. Three of them measuring 75 meters long and the room were 60 meters. The extracted nuclei are of great importance for two reasons:

First, scientists previously thought that the glacier was at an altitude too low, given the latitude that is, to hold ice cold enough to have retained a climate record in good condition. Although the upper third of the nuclei actually showed that the melting water had seeped into lower layers, mixing bits of history and thus affect a portion of the record, we did find that the rest, about two-thirds, contained undisturbed permafrost that will allow researchers to compile a reliable chronology of the climate history of the region and draw firm conclusions about past climate.

Secondly, as it has been impossible to make any other similar analysis of ice cores from the eastern Alps, this work presumably be crucial to get a better general knowledge about past climate changes in this region of Europe.

This glacier is changing irreversibly, Paolo Gabrielli warns as a member of the research team, and scientific Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University. Before the new study, and found that there was a steady increase in the top of this mountain region. This increase has come down to 2 degrees Celsius over the past three decades.

Although the effects of melting in the upper portion of the extracted cores, scientists hope to use to start a record intact in the 1980′s and back several centuries or longer. Researchers also hope that these nuclei contain traces of the initial presence of humans in the area, such as by air from the metal setting.

The investigation was also worked by Victor Zagorodnov and Lonnie Thompson, of that university, as well as specialists of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and Venice, Padua and Pavia, and three in Italy.

These jets of water at temperatures that can exceed 450 degrees Celsius at a depth that exceeds approximately 800 meters to the deepest undersea volcanic vents of earlier views. Caribbean vents shoot a stream of mineral-laden water, which rises to more than a mile above the ocean floor.

Despite these extreme conditions, the vents are populated by thousands of members of a new species of crustacean that has a light sensitive organ on its back. And since there are more black smokers in a nearby seamount, the team of Doug Connelly marine geochemist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, and marine biologist Jon Copley of the University of Southampton, UK, believes that the vents of the deep shipping may be more abundant in the world than previously thought.

The results of the study culminate the work of analysis by researchers from the expedition made in 2010 so singular place. Using a vehicle for deep-diving submarine that is governed by remote control, and belongs to the research vessel James Cook, scientists discovered thin needles consist of iron ore and copper on the ocean floor, from which flowed water hot enough to melt lead.

In this issue, they used a submarine robot called Autosub6000, developed by a group of engineers at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, to probe with a level of unprecedented detail the seafloor of the Cayman Trench. The crew also deployed other deep ocean underwater vehicle called HyBIS developed by Bramley Murton and Hydro-Lek Ltd, to film for the first time of the world’s deepest vents.

The pressure to 5 kilometers deep in the bottom of the Cayman Trench (500 times normal atmospheric pressure) equals the weight of a large car by pressing on every square inch of the creatures that live there.

The deep-sea vents are underwater jets where superheated water flows from the ocean floor. They were first seen in the Pacific for three decades. Most are between 1.5 and 3 kilometers deep. Experts are fascinated by these deep sea vents because the boiling water out of them fed colonies unusual creatures of the deep, which has forced scientists to rewrite the laws of biology. To study the life forms that flourish in such shelters provides new insights into patterns of marine life in the world, about the possibility of life on other planets, and even how life could begin on Earth.

Connelly and his colleagues have found a new species of crustacean that congregate in groups of up to 2,000 members per square meter, around the needles minerals six meters of the vents. Their analyzing indicates that, instead of having normal eyes, the crustacean has a light sensitive organ on its back, which can help you navigate in the environment illuminated by the faint glow of the vents. Researchers have given this animal the scientific name Rimicaris hybisae for the vehicle used to collect the specimens examined.

The team plans to return in 2013 in the Cayman Trench, with Isis, a vehicle for deep dives governed by remote control, it can work at depths of up to six kilometers.

Most of the time, the jets show a continuous flow of material, but occasionally disappear and the jets are ejected “bullets” ultrafast ionized gas, apparently from a region located just outside the outer edge of the event horizon black hole, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape. One of these bursts can produce as much energy in one hour as the sun emits in five years. Until recently, it was not possible to determine the exact moment of “switching” from one of these “bullets”.

That changed recently when the team of Sivakoff Gregory, University of Alberta in Canada, Diego Altamirano of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and several astronomers in many parts of the world, able to distinguish, in an analysis of data collected in 2009, how the change in the behavior of the jets is accompanied by dramatic changes in the X-ray emission from the vicinity of black hole.

The astronomers studied a black hole system, called H1743-322, about 28,000 light years from Earth. This system has experienced several outbreaks of type “bullet” since its discovery in 1977 by HEAO-1 satellite of NASA. The system consists of a normal star and a black hole. The two objects orbit each other so closely that only takes a few days to make a full turn. They are so close together that the black hole attracts a steady stream of matter from its companion star. The flow of gas forms and accretion disk flattened, millions of miles in diameter, several times larger than our Sun, and has its center in the black hole. As matter swirls toward the innermost zone is compressed and heated to tens of millions of degrees. Such as high temperatures lead to the emission of X-rays.

The data for the new study were obtained mainly through the VLBA network of radio telescopes of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the RXTE astronomical satellite of NASA.

Collisions between galaxies or between clusters of galaxies are not as collisions between planets or other stars. Most of the space of a galaxy is empty, so that when two galaxies or clusters of galaxies merge into one, many of its stars only suffer orbital perturbations. The two clusters of galaxies in the process of collision and merging galaxies have hundreds of each.

The Cluster Perry consists of about 86 percent dark matter, 12 percent of superheated gas and 2 percent of stars. These proportions are similar to the average distribution of mass in the universe at large. It is believed that dark matter interacts very little, if anything, with normal matter, and does not emit light. However, it exerts a gravitational pull on light passing through or near it, distorting the images of distant celestial objects.

William Dawson and colleagues mapped the visible galaxies in the cluster of Perry with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Subaru telescope in Hawaii 8 meters, the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the twin telescopes 10 meters at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Chandra Observatory x-ray Space. And with the Hubble, Subaru and Mayall, the researchers mapped the dark matter by observing distortions in the light passing through the cluster and that comes from more distant objects.

The mapping has revealed that each of the two clusters of galaxies within the cluster of Perry has gone through the other and that most of the dark matter has done so without colliding. That is not the case of gas clouds, which collided and assembled, forming a huge cloud of gas a thousand times hotter than the Sun’s surface.

By comparing the behavior of dark matter in galaxies and the gas in the cluster result, physicists can rule out some theories about the properties of dark matter. The energy involved in this fusion of clusters of galaxies is a trillion (million million) times greater than that of a supernova.

In the first billion years of Earth, the materials were separated into different zones according to their affinity with internal iron. As it was at the core and mantle, some elements such as tungsten, also followed this differentiation.

According to the accepted model in the early stages of formation of the Earth’s mantle was composed of a heterogeneous mixture of materials that were gradually organizing and leading to the current structure. Now a team at the University of Maryland (USA) proposes another theory of a static mantle with large blocks formed shortly after the solar system and that lasted for long periods of time.

Researchers have analyzed the isotopic data of two komatiites deposits; volcanic rocks formed by lava from the deep mantle, and ensure that these materials include tungsten reserve situated in the Earth’s mantle. It concluded that this block was formed 20 million years after the creation of the Solar System and lasted at least 1,700 million years. “The preservation of this book indicates that the mantle may not be well mixed,” the researchers say.

Also present two possible models to explain isotopic variations observed in Kostomuksha (Russia) and Komati (South Africa): the primary reserves of tungsten could be a region that suffered deep mantle compensation of metals and silicates, or product differentiation large-scale magma in the mantle.

The ability of these reptiles is not so easy to emulate as it sounds. What the biological brain of a reptile can be achieved with relative ease is instead a first-order computer challenge for a robot. Robert Full’s team (University of California at Berkeley) and Talia Moore (now at Harvard University) used high speed film to record how an agama lizard managed to achieve good falls in jumps from a platform under different circumstances.

When the researchers saw the lizard used its tail to counter the rotation of your body while in the air, created a mathematical model and manufactured to Tailbot, a robot made from a toy car, which equipped with a tail and a small gyroscope that determines the position of the robot’s body.

In the experiments, Tailbot has proven capable of stabilizing the body in the air. The tail movements generated by the robot accurately redirect the angular momentum of the body, like lizards in the same situation, and allow you to land on its wheels. To achieve this, it is essential that the robot, like reptiles to mimicking, sense the position of his body while in the air.

Build on the tails of lizards probably lead to the creation of search and rescue robots more nimble, and the robots that have a greater ability to detect very rapidly chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.