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Zoologger: Shrimp wields strongest club in the world
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NASA/SPL
THE Caribbean it ain’t, but the “tropical” regions of Saturn’s moon Titan seem to harbour lakes of liquid methane. The pools are surprisingly long-lasting, suggesting that they may be replenished by underground wells of hydrocarbons. The Cassini spacecraft confirmed the presence of liquid-hydrocarbon lakes in Titan’s polar regions in 2004, but it was unclear whether similar pools could survive in the moon’s marginally warmer lower latitudes – its “tropics” – without evaporating. Caitlin Griffith and colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson analysed the sunlight reflected from Titan’s tropical regions, recorded by Cassini. They found a highly reflective oval-shaped black feature, 2400 square kilometres in size. They say the combination of shape and colour is consistent with a liquid methane lake (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11165). If it is a lake, it is long-lived, persisting since at least 2004, through both rainy and dry seasons. This means it’s unlikely to be a big rain puddle and could be fed by hydrocarbon wells, say the researchers. Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says such lakes might be good habitats for simple life, but that Titan’s larger polar lakes are better candidates.
Qubits live long, quantum computers prosper LONG live the qubit! The world record for how long the quantum computing equivalent of a bit can be trapped within a sliver of silicon has been smashed. The previous record for one of these delicate quantum states lasting inside a material was a few seconds, making qubits tricky to work with. Now a team has coaxed them into existing for more than 3 minutes. The feat could be a huge step towards silicon-based quantum computers, which would be many orders of magnitude faster than classical ones.
Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and colleagues used a sample of ultra-pure silicon-28 containing some phosphorus atoms. Silicon-28 is not magnetic, so the atoms had almost no effect on the magnetic moment, or nuclear spin, of the phosphorus, and these atoms behaved as if in a vacuum. The team aligned the spins of the phosphorus atoms and deduced the radio-frequency pulse that could flip the spins by 180 degrees. They then applied half this pulse, causing the spins
to enter a superposition of two states: flipped and not flipped – the definition of a qubit (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1217635). They were able to maintain the superposition for 192 seconds by applying a series of pulses that prevented the qubits interacting with the silicon. Although similar times have been achieved in a vacuum, this is a record for qubits in a material. “Not only is it a real material, it’s the same one current computers are made of,” says team member John Morton of the University of Oxford. Ethan Daniels/Getty
Hydrocarbon wells on Titan?
Cells that keep gut bugs in their place THERE is a fine line between help and harm. The trillions of gut bacteria that are important for our health are prevented from escaping to cause havoc in other tissues by special immune cells. A team led by David Artis at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia has demonstrated, using mice, that the immune cells – innate lymphoid cells – confine bacteria to the gut by barricading the lining of the gut and neighbouring tissues. Keeping the microbes in check seems to be important: other research has shown that they are abnormally abundant in the blood of people with Crohn’s disease. When the team eliminated the innate lymphoid cells from mice, the bacteria escaped to other parts of the body. The immune cells work by secreting a chemical called interleukin-22. Treatment with IL-22 provided an effective alternative to the immune cells (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1222551). The discovery opens up new ways to treat diseases aggravated by bugs that escape from the gut, says Lora Hooper at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Mantis shrimp wields Thor’s hammer TO BREAK through a hard thing, you have to be even harder, or you’ll just break yourself. So what is it about the hammer of the peacock mantis shrimp – which delivers one of the fastest blows in the animal kingdom – that makes it so tough? The creature’s front claws have evolved into clubs that can move at up to 23 metres per second, and deliver a force of up to 1500 newtons, equivalent to the weight of a 150-kilogram mass. Clubs are replaced when the animal moults, but not before they have delivered thousands of powerful impacts.
David Kisailus at the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues looked at the clubs’ structure to find out how they tough it out. They found that the head of the club is mostly made of two layers of a tough mineral called hydroxyapatite, which is also found in bone. Beneath that is a layer of chitin, the polymer that crustaceans use to make their shells. The three layers differ in how bendy they are, so it’s hard for a crack that forms in one layer to extend into the next, preventing its spread (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1218764).
16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 19
NASA/SPL
THE Caribbean it ain’t, but the “tropical” regions of Saturn’s moon Titan seem to harbour lakes of liquid methane. The pools are surprisingly long-lasting, suggesting that they may be replenished by underground wells of hydrocarbons. The Cassini spacecraft confirmed the presence of liquid-hydrocarbon lakes in Titan’s polar regions in 2004, but it was unclear whether similar pools could survive in the moon’s marginally warmer lower latitudes – its “tropics” – without evaporating. Caitlin Griffith and colleagues at the University of Arizona in Tucson analysed the sunlight reflected from Titan’s tropical regions, recorded by Cassini. They found a highly reflective oval-shaped black feature, 2400 square kilometres in size. They say the combination of shape and colour is consistent with a liquid methane lake (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11165). If it is a lake, it is long-lived, persisting since at least 2004, through both rainy and dry seasons. This means it’s unlikely to be a big rain puddle and could be fed by hydrocarbon wells, say the researchers. Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says such lakes might be good habitats for simple life, but that Titan’s larger polar lakes are better candidates.
Qubits live long, quantum computers prosper LONG live the qubit! The world record for how long the quantum computing equivalent of a bit can be trapped within a sliver of silicon has been smashed. The previous record for one of these delicate quantum states lasting inside a material was a few seconds, making qubits tricky to work with. Now a team has coaxed them into existing for more than 3 minutes. The feat could be a huge step towards silicon-based quantum computers, which would be many orders of magnitude faster than classical ones.
Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and colleagues used a sample of ultra-pure silicon-28 containing some phosphorus atoms. Silicon-28 is not magnetic, so the atoms had almost no effect on the magnetic moment, or nuclear spin, of the phosphorus, and these atoms behaved as if in a vacuum. The team aligned the spins of the phosphorus atoms and deduced the radio-frequency pulse that could flip the spins by 180 degrees. They then applied half this pulse, causing the spins
to enter a superposition of two states: flipped and not flipped – the definition of a qubit (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1217635). They were able to maintain the superposition for 192 seconds by applying a series of pulses that prevented the qubits interacting with the silicon. Although similar times have been achieved in a vacuum, this is a record for qubits in a material. “Not only is it a real material, it’s the same one current computers are made of,” says team member John Morton of the University of Oxford. Ethan Daniels/Getty
Hydrocarbon wells on Titan?
Cells that keep gut bugs in their place THERE is a fine line between help and harm. The trillions of gut bacteria that are important for our health are prevented from escaping to cause havoc in other tissues by special immune cells. A team led by David Artis at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia has demonstrated, using mice, that the immune cells – innate lymphoid cells – confine bacteria to the gut by barricading the lining of the gut and neighbouring tissues. Keeping the microbes in check seems to be important: other research has shown that they are abnormally abundant in the blood of people with Crohn’s disease. When the team eliminated the innate lymphoid cells from mice, the bacteria escaped to other parts of the body. The immune cells work by secreting a chemical called interleukin-22. Treatment with IL-22 provided an effective alternative to the immune cells (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1222551). The discovery opens up new ways to treat diseases aggravated by bugs that escape from the gut, says Lora Hooper at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Mantis shrimp wields Thor’s hammer TO BREAK through a hard thing, you have to be even harder, or you’ll just break yourself. So what is it about the hammer of the peacock mantis shrimp – which delivers one of the fastest blows in the animal kingdom – that makes it so tough? The creature’s front claws have evolved into clubs that can move at up to 23 metres per second, and deliver a force of up to 1500 newtons, equivalent to the weight of a 150-kilogram mass. Clubs are replaced when the animal moults, but not before they have delivered thousands of powerful impacts.
David Kisailus at the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues looked at the clubs’ structure to find out how they tough it out. They found that the head of the club is mostly made of two layers of a tough mineral called hydroxyapatite, which is also found in bone. Beneath that is a layer of chitin, the polymer that crustaceans use to make their shells. The three layers differ in how bendy they are, so it’s hard for a crack that forms in one layer to extend into the next, preventing its spread (Science, DOI: 10.1126/ science.1218764).
16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 19