Aurora Dazzles Above Iceland

The Northern Lights are a consequence of activity in the Sun. Occasionally there are large explosions on the Sun, and huge amounts of charged particles are thrown out into space.

These particles sometimes travel towards Earth where they are captured by the magnetic field and pulled towards the polar regions.These charged particles collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere. The energy released in these collisions is given off as light.

The aurora is usually associated with the Arctic Circle and northern countries such as Finland, Sweden and Iceland, but over the best few weeks the likelihood of seeing the Northern Lights increases as two space weather phenomena coincide.

The Sun goes through an 11-year solar cycle between a maximum and minimum phase when it is active or dormant. Currently it is in a decline phase following the maximum which occurred in early 2014.

During the current phase of the solar cycle coronal holes that begin the cycle in the Sun’s ‘polar’ regions have now migrated towards the Sun’s equator, meaning they are aligned with Earth, rather than pointing out into the Solar System.

Cat S60: World's first thermal imaging phone camera

"Everything in the universe either emits thermal energy or reflects thermal energy and the camera senses that and detects that and that's what it replicates on the screen," senior product manager at Bullitt, Pete Cunningham, told Reuters at MWC in Barcelona.

Cunningham envisages multiple uses for the camera, such as firefighters navigating a smoke-filled room to avoid fire or police officers being able to prove when a vehicle was last driven.

Although primarily aimed at tradespeople, Cunningham believes the feature will be incorporated in fifty percent of all smartphones within five years.

"If I want to buy a new house then I can go around and I can check to see whether there is damp patches around or whether the current owners have painted over and tried to hide any issues with leaks or damp patches, so that's another great example," he said. "Also silly things like I'm going into the bakers and getting the freshest bread, you can point the phone up and identify where the freshest bread is. Or I let my dog out in the evening and it's pitch black, so now I can find my dog without having to chase around and rummage in bushes."

Bullitt says the Cat S60 smartphone can withstand a fall onto concrete from a height of1.8 meters high without smashing and survive being five meters underwater for up to for an hour.

"In addition to being the world's first smartphone to integrate thermal imaging it's also the world's most waterproof phone," said Cunningham. "You can take this to depths of five meters waterproof. It's also designed to be dropped from 1.8 meters onto concrete without smashing, so there's lots of other rugged credentials that means we deliver it in this size. I think over time you'll see the ability to reduce the thickness of the device as well."

Cunningham told Reuters the phone enables users to capture the temperature of multiple points within a room at the same time. "You can capture the temperature of a point. We can do that at multiple points as well, so we can capture multiple points on the screen at the same time. The temperature range at the side of the screen gives you the minimum and maximum temperature in that scene at the time".

Revolutionary flexible smartphone allows users to feel the buzz by bending their apps

The world's first full-color, high-resolution and wireless flexible smartphone to combine multitouch with bend input has been developed by researchers.

"This represents a completely new way of physical interaction with flexible smartphones" says Roel Vertegaal (School of Computing), director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University.

"When this smartphone is bent down on the right, pages flip through the fingers from right to left, just like they would in a book. More extreme bends speed up the page flips. Users can feel the sensation of the page moving through their fingertips via a detailed vibration of the phone. This allows eyes-free navigation, making it easier for users to keep track of where they are in a document."

ReFlex is based on a high definition 720p LG Display Flexible OLED touch screen powered by an Android 4.4 "KitKat" board mounted to the side of the display. Bend sensors behind the display sense the force with which a user bends the screen, which is made available to apps for use as input. ReFlex also features a voice coil that allows the phone to simulate forces and friction through highly detailed vibrations of the display. Combined with the passive force feedback felt when bending the display, this allows for a highly realistic simulation of physical forces when interacting with virtual objects.

"This allows for the most accurate physical simulation of interacting with virtual data possible on a smartphone today," says Dr. Vertegaal. "When a user plays the "Angry Birds" game with ReFlex, they bend the screen to stretch the sling shot. As the rubber band expands, users experience vibrations that simulate those of a real stretching rubber band. When released, the band snaps, sending a jolt through the phone and sending the bird flying across the screen."

Dr. Vertegaal thinks bendable, flexible smartphones will be in the hands of consumers within five years. Queen's researchers will unveil the ReFlex prototype at the tenth anniversary Conference on Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands on February 17. The annual forum is the world's premier conference on tangible human-computer interaction.

Our Universe May Have Emerged from a Black Hole in a Higher Dimensional Universe

The event horizon of a black hole — the point of no return for anything that falls in — is a spherical surface. In a higher-dimensional universe, a black hole could have a three-dimensional event horizon, which could spawn a whole new universe as it forms. 

New research from theoretical physicists at the Perimeter Institute proposes that our universe may have emerged from a black hole in a higher-dimensional universe.

The big bang poses a big question: if it was indeed the cataclysm that blasted our universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago, what sparked it?

Three Perimeter Institute researchers have a new idea about what might have come before the big bang. It’s a bit perplexing, but it is grounded in sound mathematics, testable, and enticing enough to earn the cover story in Scientific American, called “The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time.”

 our known universe could be the three-dimensional “wrapping” around a four-dimensional black hole’s event horizon. In this scenario, our universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole.

In our three-dimensional universe, black holes have two-dimensional event horizons – that is, they are surrounded by a two-dimensional boundary that marks the “point of no return.” In the case of a four-dimensional universe, a black hole would have a three-dimensional event horizon.

Physicists Test the Response Time of Electrons

Attosecond flashes of visible light make it possible to measure the delay with which electrons react to the exciting light because of their inertia. The characteristic form of the light wave arises because the researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics form the pulse from light of different wavelengths.

Researchers from the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics generated for the first time visible flashes of light in attosecond dimensions. They dispatched the light-flashes to electrons in krypton atoms. Through the experiment the researchers have been able to display that the electrons, which are stimulated by the flashes, needed roughly 100 attoseconds to respond to the incident light. Until now it was assumed that particles respond to incident light without delay.

Light could be the driving force which makes electronics even faster in the future. This is how physicists pursue their goal of using short pulses of light to control electric currents in circuits at the same rate as the frequency of light. The attophysics discovery made by an international team working with Eleftherios Goulielmakis, Leader of the Attoelectronics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, may make it possible in future to use light to control electrons much more precisely than ever before. This is because electrons apparently follow the electromagnetic forces of light with a slight delay. The researchers determined the time it takes the electrons to react to light by exciting electrons in krypton atoms with attosecond pulses of visible light. They observed that it takes around 100 attoseconds (one attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second) until the particles’ reaction to the light pulses becomes noticeable. Physicists previously had to assume that the force of light has an immediate effect because they were unable to measure the delay.

An electron weighs almost nothing at all. If you want to express its mass in grams, you have to write 27 zeros after the decimal point before you can write the first number. But even this lightweight is sluggish, a little bit at least. Quantum mechanics predicts that an electron also needs a certain, albeit very short, period of time to react to the forces of light. Since this takes only several tens to hundreds of attoseconds, this process was considered to be unmeasurably fast – until now. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics working with colleagues at Texas A&M University (USA) and Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) are now the first to have stopped this reaction time, as it were.

“Our research thereby puts an end to the decade-long debate about the fundamental dynamics of the light-matter interaction,” says Eleftherios Goulielmakis. In recent decades, researchers were already in a position to track both the rotations as well as the nuclear motions in molecules. “This is the first time that we are able to also track the reaction of the electrons bound in the atoms in real time,” stresses Goulielmakis. “But at the same time we are now standing on the threshold of a new era in which we will investigate and manipulate matter by influencing electrons.” In the current publication, the researchers namely present not only the first measurements of how long an electron takes to respond to a light pulse. They also present the means that made this measurement possible in the first place, and which will enable completely new experiments with electrons to be carried out in the future: a way of tailoring pulses of visible light.

Which path will lead to novel electronics and photonics?

The scientists used this new tool of attosecond pulses of visible light to excite krypton atoms. They varied the two properties of the pulses which characterize them precisely: the intensity and the phase. The latter gives the point on the light wave which the electromagnetic oscillation passes through at a specific point in time. The small changes to the pulses meant that slightly different forces acted on the electrons in the atoms in different experiments. After being excited, the electrons emitted ultraviolet light. It was this radiation which ultimately told the researchers that it takes roughly 100 attoseconds until the electrons respond to the force of the light.

One of the next steps planned by Goulielmakis and his team is to extend the investigations to the electron dynamics in solid bodies. “This will tell us the best way to realize novel, ultrafast electronics and photonics which operate on time scales of a few femtoseconds – a femtosecond is one millionth of a billionth of a second – and with petahertz clock rates,” explains Goulielmakis             .https://youtu.be/atPhPHb_Du4