Gravity waves detected at last!

Scientists finally discover gravitational waves that were predicted a century ago.

A very special burst of waves from deep space has forever changed the way we look at the universe. These aren’t water waves or waves of light. They are gravity waves, tiny ripples produced by massive objects moving very quickly.

Two black holes produced the newly reported waves when they collided at some point roughly 1.3 billion years ago. Black holes are massive objects that trap light because their gravity is so strong.

Scientists announced the long-awaited discovery of these waves on February 11. That was a century after the famous physicist Albert Einstein first predicted gravity waves would exist. They are also describing their data in a paper published February 11 in Physical Review Letters. 

"It's the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves," LIGO laboratory executive director David Reitze said at a press conference February 11. "As we open a new window on astronomy, we may see things we never saw before."

Their discovery now gives scientists a new tool for studying the universe. Astronomers need these tools because not everything in the universe can be seen through a telescope. Stars, galaxies and other bright objects emit light that travels to Earth. But black holes are truly black. They don’t emit light, so telescopes can’t see them.

“Gravitational waves allow us to look at the universe not just with light but with gravity,” says Shane Larson. He’s an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

The discovery immediately becomes a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize. And that's not just because it ties a neat bow around decades of evidence supporting a major prediction by Einstein. In 1916, he came up with the idea for gravitational waves, also called gravity waves. He had just introduced his famous theory of general relativity. That theory says that objects with mass will curve space, similar to how a person standing on a trampoline will bend the fabric. The bending of space changes the motion of nearby objects. For example, the sun’s mass forces Earth to orbit the star in an ellipse, not just move in a straight line.

Five ways particle accelerators have changed the world (without a Higgs boson in sight)

The Large Hadron Collider is probably the world’s most famous science experiment. The 27km-long ring-shaped particle accelerator beneath the edge of the Alps grabbed the world’s attention in 2013 when it proved the existence of the Higgs boson particle. This helped physicists confirm that one of their key theories about the way the universe worked was correct – a huge step for science. But particle accelerators also have a big impact on our real lives. Even Christmas wouldn’t be the same without them.

Particle accelerators accelerate the tiny building blocks of matter by using electric fields to speed them up to high velocity/energy. These electric fields are the invisible force field created by charged objects, like static electricity or high voltage equipment.

These devices were initially invented to study what happens when particles collide with each other or with targets. These experiments allowed us to understand the particles themselves, the world around us, and nuclear physics (the study of the atomic nucleus). In itself this knowledge has been vital to the development of many technologies such as MRI scanners in hospitals and nuclear power stations.

There are also medium-sized accelerators that produce intense light or neutrons to allow physicists, biologists and pharmacologists to study materials, viruses, proteins and medicines, leading to countless Nobel prizes and new drugs and vaccines. They are even used by chocolate and ice cream makers to study how to make the tastiest products by using X-rays to look at the formation of different crystal structures and how to avoiding icy or chalky parts.

However, the most common type of particle accelerators are not the big 27km giants but the small industrial and medical accelerators that are all around us.

‘Smart’ clothes generate electricity

New fabric harvests energy from its wearer.

You’ll get a charge out of the clothes of the future. Scientists in South Korea have developed a flexible, foldable and wearable fabric that generates electricity as it bends and flexes. A person wearing a shirt tailored from the material only has to move around to power a small screen or other electronic devices.

The advance represents an important step toward making wearable power sources a reality, says Yunlong Zi. He’s a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, who did not work on the new fabric. In his own lab, he studies ways to harvest energy. “Cell phones need batteries, but batteries have limited life,” he notes. With clothing that can generate electricity, he notes, that’s no longer an issue: “You can make power by yourself.”

Sang-Woo Kim led the development of this new material. He works at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea. A shirt made from the new fabric can be worn — even patched — like any other item of clothing. “It feels like an ordinary jacket,” he told Science News for Students.

Fully equipped, it's just a tad on the heavy side, he acknowledges. That added weight comes from the electronic gizmos the researchers wired into the shirt. For tests, these included small screens, lights and even a keyless remote. Press the shirt’s cuff, for instance, and the remote unlocks a car's doors.

How it works

The power-generating material is known as a wearable triboelectric (TRI-bo-ee-LEK-trik) nanogenerator, or WTNG. Here’s what that means: Triboelectricity refers to electricity generated by friction. Friction is the resistance encountered when one material moves over or through another material. People feel friction (in the form of heat) when they rub their hands together. In fact, the prefix tribo comes from the Greek word for rubbing. Meanwhile, nano is a prefix meaning a billionth. The material includes tiny zinc-oxide rods only billionths of a meter long. Those spiky nanoparticles help convert motion into electricity.

This ‘smart’ self-cleaning keyboard is powered by you

The bonus: It works for its owner and no one else.

 

A new keyboard can tell if you’re its owner. It locks out anyone else, even if that person knows your password. What’s more, this device needs no batteries. It harvests all the energy it needs from the action of your typing.

All in all, “This will hugely improve the security of a computer,” predicts Zhong Lin Wang. He’s a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a co-designer of the new keyboard.
“Our fingertips have electrostatic charges,” explains Wang. That means there’s an imbalance of electrons. Your fingertips generally have a slight positive charge. So they have somewhat fewer electrons than the area around them. And that principle makes it possible for typing to induce an electric current in the keyboard, Wang points out.

To understand how this works, consider a magnet. At one end is a positive charge. At the other is a negative charge. Opposite poles attract. So if you put the positive end of one magnet next to the negative one of another, they will latch onto each other. A similar idea applies to electrostatic charges. Positive charges attract negative ones.

Wang’s group put two layers of metal electrodes under the keyboard’s plastic surface. When a finger approaches a key, it attracts free electrons to the top electrode. The bottom electrode supplies them. As soon as the finger lifts off of the key, the electrons flow back to the lower electrode. Any flow of electrons creates an electric current.

And this induced electric current can power the keyboard — but only if the current is strong enough. To achieve that, the Georgia Tech team focused on nanotechnology. (“Nano-“ refers to things measured on the scale of 100 billionths of a meter or less.)

Fast sea level rise is a very recent change

New calculations show how much faster oceans have been rising in the last 20 years than in the many years before that.

 

Sea levels have been rising pretty quickly over the past two decades — on average, about 3 millimeters (0.12 inch) per year. Scientists had known that this rate of rise was speeding up. But new data indicate that, compared to 25 years ago or more, those recent increases are far steeper than previously realized. That could boost how much scientists expect seas will rise in coming decades. Such information is important for people living near coastlines.

Carling Hay was on a team of scientists that released the new estimate. As a physicist, Hay studies the nature and properties of energy and matter (including water). She works at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
Her team developed the new estimate by comparing historical and modern-day rates of sea level rise. They found the seas did not rise as quickly between 1901 and 1990 as scientists had thought. But the rate of rise between 1993 and 2010 does match earlier calculations.

Compared to the data on sea level rise through 1990, the more recent rate of rise is far steeper than earlier research had suggested. Hay and her colleagues did not set out to show this. Instead, they were trying to shed light on a mystery: There are two main ways to estimate sea levels, and their results have not always matched.

Throughout history, people have put out tide gauges to track sea level. These devices are like very big rulers. Placed along coastlines, they record the water’s height. The other way to calculate sea level is to figure out how much water flows into the ocean from the planet’s melting glaciers and ice sheets. This method also takes into account thermal expansion — how much cold water expands as it warms up.

CERN inspires primary-school students to Play with Protons

This spring we highlighted the activities of primary-school teacher Tina Nantsou of Hill Memorial School in Athens, Greece, who, together with CERN, launched the Playing with Protons project to instill in her students the excitement of particle physics research. The documentary above charts the progress of the project, from its inception in Nantsou's classroom to a visit to CERN for 12 lucky students in her class.

In the Greek national curriculum, students are introduced to the basics of physics when they are 11 years old. Hill School helps pupils to begin to understand the natural world from the age of seven through hands-on, creative experimentation. After Nantsou attended the Physics Teacher's Programme at CERN in August 2013, she teamed up with Angelos Alexopoulos of the CERN Education Group to inspire these younger pupils to take an interest in particle physics, and in CERN.

"I was blown away from everything that was happening [at CERN]," she says. "I really have to pass on this experience to my students."

The resulting project – Playing with Protons – started in September 2013 and continued for a full school year. “The project focuses on the process and not the outcome, allowing students to try, experiment and learn from their mistakes,” says Nantsou. “By creating imaginative and unique mockups, the kids, for example, learn to visualize their ideas and at the same time to develop problem-solving skills. And all this in a cooperative, fun atmosphere.”

The 45 students involved in the project drew lots to choose 12 students – 6 boys and 6 girls – who visited CERN. "I did not know what particle physics was until I was in university," Ewan Hill, an ATLAS scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada, told the students on their visit. "You guys have 10-15 years more advanced schooling than I did!"

"It is important to get students interested in science when they are young," says Alexopoulos. "Playing with Protons is one of an increasing number of noteworthy efforts in Greece, such as national-level virtual visits to LHC experiments, that help young learners to appreciate not only the importance of science in their daily lives but also the beauty of how science works."

The project also has the support of Dimitri Nanopoulos of Texas A&M University in the US, Greece's scientific delegate to CERN.

Alexopoulos says that inspiring the next generation of scientists is a key task for his country – Greece – which researchers are leaving to find jobs elsewhere. "The country is currently experiencing a brain drain," he says, "Which makes projects like this all the more important."

At a recent teachers' seminar at SNFCC (link is external) in Athens, Greece as part of CERN's 60th anniversary celebrations, Nantsou presented the Playing with Protons project to other teachers. Incidentally, also presenting at the seminar was Andreas Valadakis of Varvakios Pilot School, who visited CERN along with a winning team from last year's "Beamline for schools" competition.

The aim of Playing with Protons is to be an example of good practice to help spread creative and collaborative approaches to teaching modern physics at primary schools across Greece, and further afield.

Find out more:
Nantsou blogs (in Greek) about her hands-on experiments for children at Science Experiments for Kids (link is external)

 

http://home.web.cern.ch/students-educators/updates/2014/12/cern-inspires-primary-school-students-play-protons 

Teachers launch weather balloons, and a passion for science

A weather-balloon kit helped two teachers inspire their students with custom experiments.

 
Making science, technology, engineering and math into hands-on endeavors can spark interest in these fields and cement concepts learned in the classroom. As science coordinator and a physics teacher at Harrisonburg (Va.) High School, Andy Jackson* was looking for a good, complex hands-on project for sophomores and juniors in the school’s Governor’s STEM Academy. Jackson and the so-director of the STEM academy, Myron Blosser*, came across a hands-on project in May when they visited the National Science Teachers Association STEM Forum and Expo in New Orleans, La.

They ran across a company that offers high altitude weather balloon kits. Made by Stratostar, the kits come with boxes to hold a payload of experiments. Transmitters will send data from the experiments and information about the balloon’s location back to the ground. Jackson and Blosser purchased a package, and two other teachers in the science department, Christina Welsh and Kasey Hovermale headed up the project with their students.

After more than seven weeks of preparation, their students launched their first balloon flight last week. It lofted a 2.7 kilogram (6 pound) payload to 25,908 meters (85,000 feet) and carried it 78 miles west of their launch site. The project gave the students a chance to decide what experiments to send, and to place the cameras and sensors in the payload themselves. The data will be used to design and carry out future flight experiments based on the temperature, sound and humidity data they obtained.

“When we saw this weather balloon idea, we thought ‘This is it,’” Jackson says. “We needed something that would integrate different disciplines. This tied in atmospheric science, chemistry and engineering.”

What they do…

These weather balloons — between 0.7 and 2.4 meters (2.5 to 8 feet) in diameter — work on a fairly simple principle. The balloon is attached to a small payload (less than 5.4 kilograms), filled with helium and released. In short order, it rises into near space, an altitude of between 19,812 and 99,974 meters. As the balloon rises, the atmospheric pressure falls. This causes the helium in the balloon to expand. When the balloon gets high enough, the expanding gas makes it pop. The science payload now falls back to Earth, aided by a small parachute. Meanwhile, the sensors send data on the payload’s location back to the ground, so that teachers can send out search parties to pick it up.

Raindrops break the speed limit

Tiny drops fall faster than expected, and scientists don't know why.

Some of those tiny raindrops that keep falling on your head may be outlaws, of a sort. They have been caught breaking the speed limit.
A falling object reaches what’s known as its terminal velocity when friction — the slowing force of air — cancels the downward pull of gravity. That means the drop stops speeding up and keeps falling at a steady rate. This should be the top speed at which a droplet can move. Yet scientists have observed raindrops plummeting faster than their terminal velocity.

Michael Larsen is an atmospheric physicist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bigger raindrops have a faster maximum speed than smaller ones. That’s why meteorologists often use terminal velocity to estimate the size of raindrops, he says. These estimates help determine how much rain a storm deposits over an area. So the existence of fast-fallers suggests that rainfall estimates could be distorted, Larsen told Science News.

“If you’re going to understand rain, you need to make guesses,” he says. However, he adds, “If our guesses are wrong as to how fast these drops are falling, that could ultimately affect a whole bunch of other work.”

The puzzle

A raindrop's size grows inside a cloud. A drop’s one-way ride begins when it becomes heavy enough that gravity pulls it toward the ground. But air friction slows it down. Eventually, these upward and downward forces cancel out, and the drop should maintain a constant speed: its terminal velocity. (Velocity is a measurement of how fast and in which direction an object moves.) Every object falling through the atmosphere, from skydivers to hailstones, has a terminal velocity.

How science saved the Eiffel Tower

Science eventually won over the critics who had wanted the ‘ugly’ structure dismantled.

 

Close your eyes and picture the city of Paris. Now imagine the city without its most famous landmark: the Eiffel Tower.

The unthinkable almost happened.

When French engineer Gustave Eiffel built this tower for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, it created a sensation. The iron structure contrasted sharply with the historic stone buildings of Paris. What’s more, at 300 meters (984 feet), it became the tallest structure in the world. It dwarfed the previous record holder — the 169.3-meter (555-foot) Washington Monument in the U.S. capital.

Eiffel’s four-legged iron archway was supposed to last only 20 years. That’s when Eiffel’s permit to operate the building would expire and the city could choose to tear it down.

And it initially seemed the building indeed was in peril. Three hundred prominent artists and writers publicly expressed their hatred for Eiffel’s iron giant. In a petition published in the French newspaper Le Temps just as construction was beginning, the group referred to the Tower as a “giddy ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack.”

A French novelist of the time, Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, declared that “it is hard to imagine” that people will allow such a building to stay.

Yet from the beginning, Eiffel had a strategy to save his building. If the Tower was linked to important research, he reasoned, no one would dare take it down. So he would make it a grand laboratory for science.

Areas of research would include weather and the brand-new fields of powered flight and radio communications. “It will be an observatory and a laboratory such as science has never had at its disposal,” Eiffel bragged in 1889.

And his strategy worked. This year marks the iconic structure’s 125th birthday. Over the years, research conducted there has brought dramatic and unexpected payoffs. During World War I, for instance, the French army used the Tower as a giant ear to intercept radio messages. It even led to the arrest of one of the war’s most famous and notorious spies.

Your phone screen just won the Nobel Prize in Physics

You’ve probably got the fruits of this year’s Nobel laureates’ handiwork in your pocket. In fact, if you’re reading this on your phone or a relatively recent flat-screen monitor, you’re more than likely staring at some of them right now.

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for their pioneering work on blue LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. Blue LEDs are important for two reasons: first, the blue light has specific applications of its own and second, because it’s a vital component of the white light which makes white LEDs, and therefore LED computer and phone screens, possible.

A flash of inspiration

So, what is an LED? Fundamentally, the simplest LEDs are two pieces of a semiconductor material sandwiched together. Semiconductors, as their name suggests, are materials which don’t conduct electricity all that well.

This property might seem to demarcate them as thoroughly unremarkable, but in fact this propensity for unimpressive transmission of electrical currents has a huge advantage to technologists: its flexibility. If you take a semiconductor – silicon, for example – and mix in tiny amounts of impurities during manufacture, you can radically alter its electrical properties.

The two broad types of semiconductor you can make are called n-type and p-type. To make an n-type semiconductor, the impurity you add needs to be something which has lots of electrons. This gives the semiconductor an excess of electrons, and makes it a slightly better conductor of electricity.

Bracing sand sculptures with gravity

Gravity keeps giant sandstone arches and pillars from crumbling.

 

 

Gravity keeps things from flying off the planet. It also helps towering pillars and soaring arches of sand stand up to the weather, scientists now report.
Tiny grains of sand stick together to form a type of rock called sandstone. Over time, wind and rain chip away at the edges, carving large natural sculptures that resemble arches and pillars. Scientists have typically credited sandstone's endurance to a chemical glue. It was supposed to hold the grains together. A study published July 21 in Nature Geoscience now challenges that explanation.

The study began when Jiří Bruthans was visiting a quarry. He's a geologist at the Czech Republic’s Charles University in Prague. Bruthans noticed a funny thing about sandstone at the quarry. Workers had to use explosives to break apart big chunks of the stone. But small rocks quickly crumbled in his hand. Something didn't add up.

Bruthans suspected some other force, not glue, was holding the sand together. So he gathered some scientists and started playing with the sand. They built sand cubes 10 centimeters (4 inches) on a side. Then they added 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) weights on top. Those weights simulated the downward force that would come from rocks stacked on top of sandstone. Then they put the cubes in water, allowing it to pick away at the edges, just as the weather might.

Over time, sides of the blocks eroded. Grains there had gradually fallen away. The process left an hourglass-shaped pillar that still held up the weight. And after a few minutes, the scientists found that the remaining pillars were even stronger than the original cube had been.

They concluded that as gravity pulled on those heavy weights, the downward force actually increased the sculpture's resistance to erosion.

“The weight allows these formations to withstand what would be horrendous weathering processes,” such as rain and wind, Alan Mayo told Science News. A geologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he worked with Bruthans on the project. “These things survive thousands of years in a harsh environment,” he notes.

Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics. Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why

Albert Einstein was not a fan of quantum mechanics. He was annoyed by the uncertain, random nature of the universe it implied (hence the famous quote “God does not play dice with the universe”). So, Einstein tried to develop a unified theory that would circumvent what he saw as quantum mechanics’ flaws.

Astronomers Find Slow-Cooked Diamond the Size of Earth

About 900 light-years away, an ancient white dwarf star has cooled into a crystallized chunk of carbon — a diamond. But this isn’t just any old diamond hiding in space: It’s the size of Earth, and it’s 11 billion years old.

The diamond-star, described in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, is among the coldest white dwarfs astronomers have found. In fact, it’s so cool and dim that it can’t even be seen — its feeble light isn’t nearly powerful enough to pierce the darkness of the cosmos, even from relatively nearby.

Instead, teams inferred the presence of the crystallized dwarf based on the way its gravity perturbs the normally steady radio pulses coming from a spinning companion star.

Yep, the system gets even cooler. The dwarf is orbiting a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star — known by the charismatic moniker PSR J2222-0137. The system is similar to another that was described in 2011, with a crystallized white dwarf orbiting a pulsar — but this new diamond is bigger (there’s also a planet hypothesized to be somewhat diamond-like).

If you were to look in the sky in the direction of the constellation Aquarius, you’d be looking in roughly the right direction to see the system, which is actually a pair of dead stars: The spinning neutron star is the extremely dense remnant of a formerly huge star that ended its life in a supernova. A white dwarf is all that remains of a formerly Sun-like star, contracted into a clump the size of Earth. Left on their own, dwarfs will slowly cool and fade to black over billions of years (but sometimes, with the help of a stellar companion, they can detonate and create dazzling supernovas the outshine entire galaxies).

Monster collision in space

Four clusters of galaxies are smashing into each other.

BOSTON — A galactic pileup is underway 5 billion light-years from Earth. The colossal collision is spewing charged particles. And this fountain is huge. It’s jetting particles at nearly the speed of light some 2.5 million light-years into intergalactic space. One might think of the event as building a powerful particle accelerator — one up to a million times as strong as Earth’s mightiest (the Large Hadron Collider).

Astronomers reported the intergalactic fireworks at the American Astronomical Society meeting, here, on June 3. They observed the smashup in new images compiled by two telescopes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a satellite system, eyed the event from an altitude of 139,000 kilometers (86,500 miles) above Earth’s surface. A radio telescope, the Very Large Array, homed in on the collision from the ground. Its 27 antennas are splayed out across the New Mexico desert.

And the source of all the commotion? Four clusters of galaxies are crashing into each other. Together, they involve a mass equal to 3 million billion suns.
Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe that are linked by gravity, notes Reinout van Weeren. He works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Large clusters can house thousands of galaxies. Astronomers think these built up over billions of years as smaller clusters merged.

Digital lighting goes organic

Research reveals a bright future for a new lighting technology.

 

Flick on a light at home and chances are a glass bulb or tube will start to glow. The two most common types of electric lights — incandescent and fluorescent — have worked pretty well for a long time. Make that too long: Both types are so last century.

Incandescent bulbs waste most of their energy. Regular and compact fluorescent tubes are more efficient. However, they contain toxic mercury. Now lighting engineers want us to imagine electric lighting beyond the bulb.
Picture sheets of electric lights that can bend or twist. Your bedroom could have glowing sculptures instead of lamps. A living room window might be transparent by day, then light up at night. The whole kitchen ceiling might glow. And whole walls could be covered with programmable lighting. A few taps on a control panel might change its brightness, color or pattern.

 

It’s all possible with organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. They are a new type of digital — or solid-state — lighting. Made from solid materials, they don’t require the vacuum now found in an incandescent bulb or the gas that’s encased within fluorescent tubes.

Scientists achieve quantum teleportation breakthrough that could prove Einstein wrong

Scientists in the Netherlands have achieved a breakthrough in quantum teleportation that could quash Albert Einstein’s objection to the notion of quantum entanglement, which he famously labelled “spooky action at a distance”.

Publishing their results in the journal Science this Thursday, physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University say they managed to reliably teleport quantum information between two bits of diamond located three metres apart.

Although this is not the same process as teleportation as imagined in science fiction, one of the lead authors of the paper Professor Ronald Hanson, said that it was possible that Star Trek-style “beaming up” would become a reality in the future.

“What we are teleporting is the state of a particle,'' said Professor Hanson. ''If you believe we are nothing more than a collection of atoms strung together in a particular way, then in principle it should be possible to teleport ourselves from one place to another.”

“In practice it's extremely unlikely, but to say it can never work is very dangerous," Professor Hanson added. "I would not rule it out because there's no fundamental law of physics preventing it. If it ever does happen it will be far in the future.”

“White Holes” Could Exist—But That Doesn't Mean They Do

A black hole is a one-way door to oblivion. According to general relativity, once anything crosses its boundary—the event horizon—it cannot return to the outside. For that particle, the black hole is the entire future.

We’ll never actually get a chance to see the particle live out that destiny: Any light the particle emits (which would be the only way for us to observe its death plunge) will be stretched to longer and longer wavelengths with correspondingly less energy, until it fades beyond detectability. In fact, the story is even more strange. If we observe the particle falling in, we could never live long enough to see it reach the event horizon. The extreme gravity of the black hole makes time appear, to an outside observer, to go more slowly there; in fact, the particle would seem to us to take infinite time to reach the event horizon. That’s true even though from the particle’s reference frame, it crosses the event horizon unremarkably, with no unusual effects on time and space.

If a black hole is a one-way door to oblivion, you might wonder if there is any way to go the other way through the door—and it’s a good question. General relativity, which has been our standard theory of gravity for nearly 100 years, makes no distinction between past and future, time running forward and time running backward. (See physicist Sean Carroll discuss the time-symmetry of physics in his interview with Nautilus.) Newtonian physics also is time-symmetric in the same way. So the idea of “white holes”—black holes reversed in time—does make theoretical sense.

Number of students studying Stem courses in UK at record high

New figures show a 12% increase in those studying computer science – the highest total in a decade.

 

 

More students than ever have been accepted on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) courses, according to new figures published by the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce).

In 2013-14, 98,000 students were accepted on to Stem undergraduate courses, the highest level ever recorded.

This is an 8% rise on last academic year, and an 18% rise since 2002-03.

Acceptances on to engineering and technology courses "bounced back" by 6% after a decline, returning to the peak levels of 2010-11. Acceptances to computer science courses increased by 12% compared with the previous year, and are now at their highest point since 2003-04.

In addition to the numbers of students accepted on to courses, Hefce also looks at the figures for those applying. It finds applications for Stem courses are similarly buoyant. The biggest increase in applications has been in computer sciences, at 13%, but applications in engineering and technology also rose by 11% compared to the previous cycle.

Yvonne Baker, director of the National Science Learning Centre, which is run by a consortium of universities and provides continuing professional development (CPD) for science teachers, welcomes the news: "This shows that students are taking seriously the messages about high-value qualifications and also that the emphasis put on supporting Stem by employers, charities and government through initiatives like Project Enthuse, which supports teacher CPD, is having real impact."

Playing with protons in primary

Soon after her return to Athens, Greece, from the Greek Teachers Programme at CERN last summer, primary-school-physics teacher Tina Nantsou started working on a science education project, Playing with Protons, for her students at Hill Primary School, the oldest operating primary school in Greece. "The aim was to inspire my students about the magic of particle physics the same way I was inspired during my time at CERN," says Nantsou.

For years Hill School has introduced pupils from the age of eight to the world of science, technology and mathematics. "Students become familiar with big ideas and the latest discoveries in science through hands-on experimentation with simple materials. The pedagogical approach promotes inquiry, creativity and collaborative learning," says Minnie Karra, member of the board of directors of Hill School. Nantsou blogs about her work at Science Experiments for Kids, which over the last few years has become a point of reference for an ever-increasing number of primary but also secondary science educators in Greece and beyond.

Famous paintings help study the Earth’s past atmosphere

A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere.


In particular, the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.

When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, painters in Europe could see the colours of the sky changing. The volcanic ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere travelled the world and, as these aerosol particles scattered sunlight, they produced bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for up to three years after the eruption. J. M. W. Turner was one of the artists who painted the stunning sunsets during that time. Now, scientists are using his, and other great masters’, paintings to retrieve information on the composition of the past atmosphere.


“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” says lead-author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”