The system would allow interplanetary space travel will become a quick and routine.

Furthermore, projecting jets of plasma away from this class would be feasible to expel useless satellites and other space junk in orbit now occupied, without any device install them annoying to those objects. Thus, it could sweep most congested orbits, making it much safer and easier driving on them for space vehicles in use.

This innovative propulsion system called “Mag-beam” and is the result of years of work by the team of Robert Winglee, director of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle.

Oriented in its approach to power interplanetary spacecraft, the Mag-beam involves the installation of a space station around the Earth that generates a stream of magnetized ions, which interact with a magnetic sail spacecraft deployed by the need to travel to Mars. For the method to be practical, must be installed around Mars another plasma unit that allows the ship to stop before reaching its destination. But the vehicles will no longer need to carry large and heavy propulsion systems, so you can spend most of their volume to the payload. It would be feasible to install units of plasma in various parts of the solar system, so that successive missions can take advantage of them and travel to anywhere in the system. Near the Earth, the units generate the plasma ionized by solar energy far beyond, nuclear energy used for the task.

In its mode to drive out of their orbits unusable satellites and other objects annoying, the orbital station equipped with the cannon would be able to use a focused ion flow to push dead satellites and other debris into the atmosphere, where you burn during the reentry.

As interplanetary propulsion method, the Mag-beam interacts with a receptor specialized in spacecraft, perhaps pushing it to speeds of more than 30,000 kilometers per hour (about 18,000 miles per hour). Satellites in Earth orbit have no such specialized receptors, but if the beam is fired directly at the satellite would generate enough force to move it into the atmosphere.

The accumulation of dead satellites in orbit may seem a simple matter of cleanliness and order, but poses a serious problem: As the space around Earth is filled with artificial objects increases, so the chances of a collision between two satellites.

A collision between satellites aggravates the problem since then, instead of two large objects to worry about, it creates a whole cloud of debris, which, moving faster than a speeding bullet, able to threaten the satellites in use All orbital involved, and even if the circumstances contributing to this, could endanger the occupants of the International Space Station and other manned space vehicles.

At present, it is feasible to use a Mag-beam to remove space junk orbiting the fringes of most interest. It is estimated that the mission profile would be comparable to that of a standard satellite, and the cost would be around 300 million dollars.

The technology would not be useful to divert from its collision course with Earth asteroids or comets, because the mass of these bodies is too large for the capacity of the Mag-beam.

On 21 June last year, Mars Express said its high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) to the western part of Acidalia Planitia, a huge basin in the northern lowlands of Mars, near where it meets Tempe Terra, a higher ground and oldest.

Acidalia Planitia is a region so extensive that it can be seen from Earth with an amateur telescope.

The famous astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli named this great dark spot under the name of the mythical Fountain Acidalia in Boeotia, where according to Greek mythology Venus bathed with the three Graces.

These images cover part of the western boundary of the region. They can appreciate subtle drainage patterns ‘dendritic’ based on the numerous valleys that run down the side of Tempe Terra.

The word ‘dendritic’ derived from the Greek (δένδρον), meaning ‘tree’. It is thought that the channels can be seen in these images were formed by runoff from rainwater or water from snowmelt, at some point in past of Mars.

The depth of these valleys, together with the fact that present very few tributaries in its lower, suggesting that the region was transformed through an erosion mechanism known as ‘mining’ or ‘scour’, which is what occurs when water carries the softer materials of the base of a cliff.

The scouring process removes the support of the upper layers, composed of harder rocks, which end in large blocks crumbling away on the slope of the ramp.

Thus, the erosion process is advanced into the upper reaches of the channel, making it deeper, similar to what happens in the Colorado Plateau on Earth.

The lower left corner of the image seems to be in the shade, but this darkening is actually due to the different materials that make up the surface: the left is covered with dark sand, probably of volcanic origin, while the right is covered by a layer of dust, brighter.

These images can also be distinguished several flaws in the Martian crust, extending to Idaeus Fossae region. It is thought that these formations could play a key role when bringing water to the region. When formed, may have laid bare ground water, creating lakes that would flow in the surrounding craters.

Scientists are particularly interested in what appear to be sediment covering the bottom of some of the most ancient and eroded craters, as they may be further evidence of the existence of liquid water on the surface of Mars at some point in their history.

In some cases the valleys tear the rim of a crater, suggesting that at some point the water overflowed and flowed into the adjoining land.

In the center of the image can be distinguished younger craters, which are characterized by less eroded and found on older structures.

These images of Mars Express brings new evidence of water on the surface of Mars at some point in their past, and will help decipher how the water came, flowed, eroded and retired from the Red Planet’s surface at different times of its history.

Cassava is a plant with many uses. From it we get the tapioca, a staple food for humans in various parts of the world. It is also used to feed livestock and the development of biofuels.

The fact is that the incidence of pests and diseases, new to the area, promoted outbreaks of increasing severity by rising temperatures, could threaten to end disastrous to the cassava industry in Southeast Asia, and bring into play the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of small farmers who rely on their crops for household income. This increased risk is known from research conducted by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the results have been released recently in Bangkok, Thailand.

“Higher temperatures and increased the duration of the short rainy seasons, because of climate change could be the perfect catalyst to uncontrollable outbreaks of pests and diseases, which now already cause enough damage to food crops,” says Pramod K. Aggarwal, regional head of Asia-wide projects in the Technical Scientific Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, under the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

About five million small farmers to supply cassava processing industries within and outside the country, which produce feed for livestock, get pot for energy use, and also extract other products for use in a wide variety of foods and other products. The Thai cassava industry represents over 60 percent of exports. It is one of the largest producers of tapioca, which is made from cassava roots. In 2011, Thai farmers exported 2,800 million tons of tapioca.

In Southeast Asia there are herbivorous insects that are endemic to the region and threaten the cultivation of cassava. But new threats loom over the fields in the area, such as the tiny green mite (Mononychellus mcgregori). “The situation of pests affecting cassava in Asia is quite serious now,” said Tony Bellotti, an entomologist specializing in cassava at International Center for Tropical Agriculture. “But according to our studies, rising temperatures could cause a much worse situation.”

One plagued by invasive species and is a serious and dangerous, but most unfortunately the results obtained by Bellotti and colleagues show that climate change could trigger multiple pests and combined across Southeast Asia, southern China and growing areas of cultivation of cassava in southern India. It is a serious threat to hundreds of thousands of farmers owns a smallholding for which cassava is a fundamental part of their livelihood, and their main source of income.

The report prepared by these experts recommended that a package of measures to minimize the risk of new pests, and to limit the damage level where it is triggered. The strategy includes a renewed scientific effort to obtain cassava varieties resistant to these pests, make minimal use of pesticides to prevent elimination of any possible natural enemy insects invaders may have and to be able to keep them at bay, as well as identification, breeding and introduction of these potential natural agents of biological control, whether predatory or parasitic species that feed on organisms that cause these diseases and pests or annihilate.

“Every indicator of recovery evolves differently. Recover before water flows of biological community, and this before the biogeochemical cycles, but the minimum conditions of viability is reached when the biological community structure, plant, which usually takes about 30 years,” explains the researcher of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology of the CSIC Francisco Comin, who has participated in the work.

The research, published in the journal PLoS Biology, is based on analysis of available data in biology, hydrology and biochemistry of 621 wetlands (which include bogs, swamps, floodplains, salt marshes and lagoons) of world, both restored and newly created, and comparison with other 556 reference wetlands. In many cases, there are existing data dating back over 100 years.

Comin explains: “It is impossible to recover 100% of the features of a wetland as nature does not pass twice by the same state, but a successful repair can be achieved with features that, while not the same as the initials, do meet the same function.”

Among the relevant findings of the article, the team has found that larger wetlands (with an area exceeding one square kilometer) recovered before the little ones. Similarly, those located in warm, tropical climates also experienced faster restoration than in cold environments, the characteristics of reference is not reached before 50 years.

Meanwhile, bodies of water connected to other major hydrological regimes regained their original biological and biochemical levels after 20 years and 30 years respectively. By contrast, isolated wetlands have failed to reach the level of origin in these variables after 50 years. Therefore Comin recommended “investigate new strategies and restoration techniques to accelerate the recovery of functions and services of wetlands.”

Given the enormous loss of wetlands that have hit the planet and services provided by these ecosystems, it is essential to apply appropriate techniques of creation and recovery of such spaces. CSIC researcher claims that “the current restoration plans often do not have a scientific basis.” Comin explains: “Normally, you run a simple work such as revegetation or reconnect water, but does not ensure the functionality of these long-term measures.”

In December 2000, Spain transposed the Water Framework Directive (WFD), a European standard which requires that all bodies of water in the territory are in good condition by 2015. Comin also proposes the creation of a National Wetlands Recovery associated with a strategy for sustainable development of rural areas. According to CSIC researcher, “apart from the environmental services that meet these ecosystems as carbon sequestration and regulation of water cycles, and also has important production values, recreational and cultural.”

This work was led by the Universities of California at Berkeley and Stanford (both USA) and has enjoyed the cooperation of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (France).

The mantle is a layer of rock that extends from the outer planet’s core, about 2,900 kilometers deep, and about 50 kilometers below the surface, just below the crust.

The Marianas Trench is a subduction zone where the Pacific plate, old, cold and dense, it slides under the plate of the Marianas, younger and lighter as the plates converge slowly, the front edge of the Pacific plate plunges deep within the Earth’s mantle.

The team of Doug Wiens and Patrick Shore, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Daniel Lizarralde of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, both institutions in the U.S., was recently working in Western Pacific waters on the Trench the Marianas, aboard research vessels “Thomas G. Thompson” and “Marcus G. Langseth.”

Researchers deployed seismometers and hydrophones (underwater microphones) to keep track of one year from the reverberations created by distant earthquakes, allowing seismologists to create maps of structures up to 96 kilometers (60 miles) deep below the surface.

The tracking will monitor the water chemically bound to the Pacific plate or trapped in deep fissures that open on the plate as it bends.

Only recently, scientists have begun to study the groundwater cycle, which promises to be as important to the state of the planet as the surface water cycle, more familiar to us all.

It is believed that hydration reactions along the subduction plate transport water to the depths of the earth, and that the dehydration reactions that are triggered deep within the mantle releases fluids that promote melting and volcanism.

The water also influences the strong earthquakes that are characteristic of subduction zones. It is believed that the rocks hydrated and lubricated high-pressure water boundaries between the plates and make it possible to trigger sudden landslides.

The scientists studied a giant cloud about 770 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. They used the Herschel Space Observatory, European Space Agency and the GBT radio telescope of the National Science Foundation United States. This allowed them to make detailed observations of a kind of lump or lump that contains about 100 times the mass of the Sun within the cloud.

It is believed that the typical mechanism by which stars form is where one of such clouds of dust and gas gravitationally collapses on itself, first in lumps, and then dense cores, each of which may even begin to pack Moreover, to form a star. The details of how this happen is not yet well understood. One of the difficulties to find out, but also one of the major impediments to any detailed observation of the process is that in most regions where this process is underway already formed nearby stars. These stars affect the subsequent formation of stars in their neighborhood, through their stellar winds during their normal activity, and by shock waves when they explode as supernovae.

Unlike many previous attempts, the team of James Sarah Sadavoy and Di Francesco, University of Victoria in Canada, has captured clearly and for the first time in a cloud of gas and dust to a lump in which they are to about to form multiple cores of stars, and has not yet around with no stars formed and active. The absence of stars allows us to observe without interference this fascinating process by which a star is born.

The far-infrared images captured by the Herschel Space Observatory revealed substructures within the lumps that were not previously seen and which may be precursors of nuclei with the potential to form individual stars. The astronomers used the GBT radio telescope to study the movements and temperatures of molecules, primarily ammonia, within these substructures. These GBT observations indicate that it is likely that a sub-structure is already in the final process of compaction by its own gravity and close and the time to become the core of a star. This will, therefore, where the first born of the stars in the cloud. It is estimated that the entire lump will form a dozen stars.

Tour equipment developed memory chips transparent and flexible, using the silicon oxide as active component.

The new type of memory could be combined with the transparent electrodes developed in that American university and other components designed in recent years by various laboratories in order to have flashy flexible touch-screen devices, and equipped with batteries and integrated circuits transparent.

Transparent memory chips at Rice University are based on the discovery, made in 2010 that by imposing a strong electrical charge through standard silicon oxide, an insulator widely used in electronic channels are formed pure silicon crystals less than 5 nanometers in width.

The initial voltage appears stripping of oxygen atoms to silicon oxide. Minor electrical charges repeatedly cut and reconnected the circuit and make it a non-volatile memory. A small signal can be used to check the status of the memory without causing disturbances.

From the foregoing, those skilled Rice University have developed a functional two-terminal memory which can adopt a configuration by layers or modules stacked vertically, not limited by both the horizontal space, and also can be attached to a flexible substrate.

Using measurements made between 1980 and 2011, oceanographers Gregory C. Johnson of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and Sarah Purkey of the University of Washington in Seattle have found that these deep icy waters have been declining at a rate of an average of about eight million tonnes per second for recent decades, equivalent to about fifty times the average flow of the Mississippi River.

Antarctic Bottom Water is formed in a few places around Antarctica, where sea water is cooled by air is in contact with it, becoming saltier because a part freezes. By becoming more dense, sinks to the seafloor and spreads northward, becoming part of most of the deep waters of other oceans as they slowly mix with warmer waters.

The deep underwater ocean currents play a critical role in transporting heat and carbon on the planet, thus regulating our climate.

It was previously shown that the deep waters have been warming and becoming less salty in recent decades, and these new results suggest that significantly fewer of these waters has been forming over previous decades.

Although the downward trend is significant, Purkey and Johnson cannot venture to say whether this is a definite long-term trend or is part of a natural cycle of low frequency (long periods of return). It is needed; therefore, continue to monitor the sea in all its depth, including this deep ocean, to assess the importance of the role that these observed changes, and the like, have on the Earth’s climate.

In that body of water, changes in temperature and salinity as well as the content of oxygen and carbon dioxide have significant impacts on the global climate, with many potential ramifications, including its contribution to raising the level Sea and changes in the energy balance of the Earth that can contribute to heating.

Although avoiding methane emissions at these sites may be expensive, researchers are certain that a cheap and effective way to treat the problem of emissions can be as easy as applying to a landfill cover, using charcoal as an ingredient principal.

Krishna Reddy, a professor of civil engineering and materials, and Jean Bogner, professor of earth and environmental sciences, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago, saying that the layers of biochar, either alone or mixed with soil, can capture the keep methane and held for a time long enough to allow Methanotrophic bacteria decompose, producing by-product carbon dioxide, which, in numbers equal to the methane, it is less harmful as the greenhouse effect.

Biochar is charcoal produced from biomass such as agricultural and wood waste. It basically consists of carbon with a large surface area where bacteria attach looking to capture and consume any methane molecule to pass near them. Most of the methane escapes from the old dumps before the bacteria can do their work. Biochar help maintain the gas in place.

Another advantage of biochar is that it helps to oxygenate the soil, providing an environment where Methanotrophic bacteria can thrive.

Reddy and Bogner made a series of laboratory analysis of samples obtained from different sources biochar to check their levels of acidity, ash content and its ability to retain moisture. Determine what types of charcoal give better results in the function of retaining methane, how they behave land applied to different classes, and what thickness is needed to achieve reasonably good efficiency.

In the nearly five decades since the first lunar studies were carried out as part of NASA’s Apollo program, scientists have proposed a series of increasingly complex theories to explain the huge amounts of highly magnetic material that were found in parts of the lunar crust.

But now a team of researchers has proposed a surprisingly simple explanation for these unusual findings: Magnetic anomalies are geological traces of the collision of a massive asteroid on the Moon.

The authors of the new study, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, also in the U.S., and the Institute of Physics of the Globe in Paris, believe that an asteroid crashed into the Moon about 4,000 million years, leaving behind a huge crater and rock material rich in iron and very magnetic.

In the past, to explain the existence of such large quantities of highly magnetic material in some parts of the lunar crust, many scientists turned to very complex scenarios. The explanation that has been advocated most often is that an impact concentrated and amplified magnetic field of the Moon.

The theory proposed by the team of Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is more simple and straightforward. Because the anomalous magnetism in those portions of the lunar crust is stronger than this in the normal lunar rocks, the researcher and his colleagues suggest that a significant portion of those portions of the material is not lunar. It is known that asteroid material is more magnetism than the Moon. It therefore raised the possibility that the iron was magnetized by an asteroid impact and deposited on the moon.

When the most recent and detailed findings on lunar geology are combined with data from previous inspections moles, all of which is examined in the light of the new theory, it quickly becomes clear that most of the magnetic anomalies are scattered around the edge of a huge crater of 2,400 kilometers in diameter known as the Aitken Basin, or Basin lunar south pole.

The basin is between 3,900 and 4,500 million years, and is somewhat stretched, suggesting it was formed by an object that struck the Moon at an oblique angle.

The key question to verify the feasibility of this hypothesis was if large enough concentrations of the material of the asteroid impact could survive and remain relatively intact on the moon, and if so, where would settle asteroidal material. The research team worked with models of the impact and the formation of the basin, using software that is commonly used in digital models of the effects of explosives.

Stewart-Mukhopadhyay and her colleagues worked in various collision scenarios, with impacts faster or slower, and angles more horizontal or more vertical. Each time, the model produced results similar to the magnetic anomalies detected on the moon.