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Researchers find coral reefs in a place they shouldn’t exist
While the waters of the North Atlantic and South Pacific tend to have what hard corals need to survive, the North Pacific doesn't, and it has been thought that deep-sea coral reefs were a near impossibility in that part of the ocean. But researchers at Florida State University and Texas A&M University have discovered a few reefs in the North Pacific that don't seem to be following the rules. Their findings were recently published in Scientific Reports.
Deep space travel might play havoc with your heart
Traveling deeper into space may carry some unanticipated health risks. Scientists have published a study noting that Apollo astronauts have died of heart disease at an unusually high rate -- of the 7 that passed away during the study, 43 percent fell to cardiovascular conditions. Only 11 percent of those deceased astronauts who stopped at low Earth orbit succumbed to heart disease, which is about on par with the 9 percent rate on the ground. There's a concern that the increased dose of radiation in deep space, however brief, is intense enough to mess with the functioning of cells that line blood vessels.
Turning sunlight into clean fuel is now cheap and simple
Scientists have already produced artificial photosynthesis, but it has been an exotic process until now. You aren't about to replace the oxygen-giving plants around your home, in other words. However, researchers at Florida State University researcher have found a way to make it practical. They've developed a single-layer manganese oxide material that efficiently traps sunlight and makes it easy to break down that energy into hydrogen and oxygen. Current light-gathering techniques, like solar cells, frequently need multiple layers just to work at all -- this would be far cheaper and simpler to make.
Alt-week 8.4.12: buckyballs, bosons and bodily fluids
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Remember when we told you last week that we live in a strange world? Well, we had no idea what we were talking about. Seriously, things are about to get a whole lot weirder. High school is certainly a head-scratcher, no matter how old you are, but the mathematics of social hierarchies can't hold a candle to the mysteries of the buckyball. And, if the strange behavior of the familiar carbon molecule isn't enough for you, we've got an entirely new molecule to contend with, while the once-elusive Higgs Boson is getting us closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe. It's all pretty heady stuff, which is why we're also gonna take a quick detour to the world of human waste. This is alt-week.
Crystal discovery could pave the way for new generation of computer chips
The discovery is still literally in the building blocks stage, but a team of researchers from Florida State University say that four new so-called "multiferroic" crystals they've identified could eventually lead to a "new generation" of computer chips. Those new chips would apparently not only be able to expand the capacity of storage devices by 1,000 to a million times but, since data would be written both electrically and magnetically, they'd also be far more secure. As if that wasn't enough, the researchers also say any future chips would have "far less environmental impact" than current chips, as they wouldn't rely on lead as chips now do. Of course, the researchers are quick to point out that won't happen overnight, with Sir Harold Kroto saying that this discovery is "where the transistor was when it was first invented," and adding that "it's a long, hard road before we catch up."
