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You might expect to find our brightest hope for sending astronauts to other planets in Houston, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, inside a high-security multibillion-dollar facility. But it’s actually a few miles down the street, in a large warehouse behind a strip mall. This bland and uninviting building is the private aerospace start-up Ad Astra Rocket Company, and inside, founder Franklin Chang Díaz is building a rocket engine that’s faster and more powerful than anything NASA has ever flown before. Speed, Chang Díaz believes, is the key to getting to Mars alive. In fact, he tells me as we peer into a three-story test chamber, his engine will one day travel not just to the Red Planet, but to Jupiter and beyond.

I look skeptical, and Chang Díaz smiles politely. He’s used to this reaction. He has been developing the concept of a plasma rocket since 1973, when he become a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His idea was this: Rocket fuel is a heavy and inefficient propellant. So instead he imagined building a spaceship engine that uses nuclear reactors to heat plasma to two million degrees. Magnetic fields would eject the hot gas out of the back of the engine. His calculations showed that a spaceship using such an engine could reach 123,000 miles per hour—New York to Los Angeles in about a minute.

Chang Díaz has spent nearly his entire career laboring to convince anyone who would listen that his idea will work, but that career has also taken several turns in the process. One day in 1980, he was pitching the unlimited potential of plasma rockets to yet another MIT professor. The professor listened patiently. “It sounds like borderline science fiction, I know,” Chang Díaz was saying. Then the telephone rang. The professor held up a finger. “Why, yes, he’s right here,” the surprised engineer said into the receiver, then handed it over. “Franklin, it’s for you.” NASA was on the line. The standout student from Costa Rica had been selected to become an astronaut, the first naturalized American ever chosen for NASA’s most elite corps. “I was so excited, I was practically dancing,” Chang Díaz recalls. “I almost accidentally strangled my professor with the telephone cord.”

All astronauts have big dreams, but Franklin Chang Díaz’s dreams are huge. As a college student, as a 25-year astronaut and as an entrepreneur, his single animating intention has always been to build—and fly—a rocketship to Mars. “Of course I wanted to be an astronaut, and of course I want to be able to fly in this,” he says of his plasma-thrust rocket. “I mean, I just can’t imagine not flying in a rocket I would build.” And now he’s close. In four years Chang Díaz will deploy his technology for the first time in space, when his company, aided by up to $100 million in private funding, plans to test a small rocket on the International Space Station. If this rocket, most commonly known by its loose acronym, Vasimr, for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, proves itself worthy, he has an aggressive timetable for constructing increasingly bigger plasma-thrust space vehicles.

Chang Díaz describes his dreams in relatively practical terms. He doesn’t intend to go straight to Mars. First he will develop rockets that perform the more quotidian aspects of space maintenance needed by private companies and by the government: fixing, repositioning, or reboosting wayward satellites; clearing out the ever-growing whirl of “space junk” up there; fetching the stuff that can be salvaged. “Absolutely, fine, I’m not too proud to say it. We’re basically running a trucking business here,” he says. “We’ll be sort of a Triple-A tow truck in space. We’re happy to be a local garbage collector in space. That’s a reliable, sustainable, affordable business, and that’s how you grow.”

Eventually, though, Chang Díaz intends to build more than an extraterrestrial trucking business, and his ambitions happen to coincide with Barack Obama’s call for a privatized space industry that supports exploration well beyond the moon. “We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history,” Obama said in a major NASA-related address earlier this year at Kennedy Space Center. “By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth.”

Such a belief may seem overly ambitious, but the goals of aviation have always seemed that way. In October 1903, for instance, astronomer Simon Newcomb, the founding president of the American Astronomical Society, spelled out a series of reasons why the concept of powered flight was dubious. “May not our mechanicians,” he asked, “be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope, and give up all attempts to grapple with it?” Less than two months later, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. And in the 1920s a young man named Frank Whittle was coming up with drawings for a theoretical engine very different from the propeller-driven kind, one that might scoop in air through turbines and fire it through a series of “jet” nozzles. “Very interesting, Whittle, my boy,” said one of his professors of aeronautical engineering at the University of Cambridge. “But it will never work.”

More on this: PopSci

A few unassuming drops of liquid locked in a very precise game of "follow the leader" could one day be found in mobile phone cameras, medical imaging equipment, implantable drug delivery devices, and even implantable eye lenses.

Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed liquid pistons, in which oscillating droplets of ferrofluid precisely displace a surrounding liquid. The pulsating motion of the ferrofluid droplets, which are saturated with metal nanoparticles, can be used to pump small volumes of liquid. The study also demonstrated how droplets can function as liquid lenses that constantly move, bringing objects into and out of focus.

These liquid pistons are highly tunable, scalable, and -- because they lack any solid moving parts -- suffer no wear and tear. The research team, led by Rensselaer Professor Amir H. Hirsa, is confident this new discovery can be exploited to create a host of new devices ranging from micro displacement pumps and liquid switches, to adaptive lenses and advanced drug delivery systems.

"It is possible to make mechanical pumps that are small enough for use in lab-on-a-chip applications, but it's a very complex, expensive proposition," said Hirsa, a professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. "Our electromagnetic liquid pistons present a new strategy for tackling the challenge of microscale liquid pumping. Additionally, we have shown how these pistons are well-suited for chip-level, fast-acting adaptive liquid lenses."

Hirsa's team developed a liquid piston that is comprised of two ferrofluid droplets situated on a substrate about the size of a piece of chewing gum. The substrate has two holes in it, each hosting one of the droplets. The entire device is situated in a chamber filled with water.

Pulses from an electromagnet provoke one of the ferrofluid droplets, the driver, to vibrate back and forth. This vibration, in turn, prompts a combination of magnetic, capillary, and inertial forces that cause the second droplet to vibrate in an inverted pattern. The two droplets create a piston, resonating back and forth with great speed and a spring-like force. Researchers can finely control the strength and speed of these vibrations by exposing the driver ferrofluid to different magnetic fields.

In this way, the droplets become a liquid resonator, capable of moving the surrounding liquid back and forth from one chamber to another. Similarly, the liquid piston can also function as a pump. The shift in volume, as a droplet moves, can displace from the chamber an equal volume of the surrounding liquid. Hirsa said he can envision the liquid piston integrated into an implantable device that very accurately releases tiny, timed doses of drugs into the body of a patient.

As the droplets vibrate, their shape is always changing. By passing light through these droplets, the device is transformed into a miniature camera lens. As the droplets move back and forth, the lens automatically changes its focal length, eliminating the usual chore of manually focusing a camera on a specific object. The images are captured electronically, so software can be used to edit out any unfocused frames, leaving the user with a stream of clear, focused video.

The speed and quality of video captured from these liquid lenses has surpassed 30 hertz, which is about the quality of a typical computer web cam. Liquid lenses could mean lighter camera lenses that require only a fraction of the energy demanded by today's digital cameras. Along with handheld and other electronic devices, and homeland security applications, Hirsa said this technology could even hold the key to replacement eye lenses that can be fine-tuned using only high-powered magnets.

"There's really a lot we can do with these liquid pistons. It's an exciting new technology with great potential, and we're looking forward to moving the project even further along," he said.

Source: ScienceDaily

Researchers have created a new aerogel that boasts amazing strength and an incredibly large surface area. Nicknamed ‘frozen smoke’ due to its translucent appearance, aerogels are manufactured materials derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas, resulting in a material renowned as the world’s lightest solid material. The new so-called “multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel” could be used in sensors to detect pollutants and toxic substances, chemical reactors, and electronics components.

Although aerogels have been fabricated from silica, metal oxides, polymers, and carbon-based materials and are already used in thermal insulation in windows and buildings, tennis racquets, sponges to clean up oil spills, and other products, few scientists have succeeded in making aerogels from carbon nanotubes.

The researchers were able to succeed where so many before them had failed using a wet gel of well-dispersed pristine MWCNTs. After removing the liquid component from the MWCNT wet gel, they were able to create the lightest ever free-standing MWCNT aerogel monolith with a density of 4 mg/cm3.

MWCNT aerogels infused with a plastic material are flexible, like a spring that can be stretched thousands of times, and if the nanotubes in a one-ounce cube were unraveled and placed side-to-side and end-to-end, they would carpet three football fields. The MWCNT aerogels are also excellent conductors of electricity, which is what makes them ideal for sensing applications and offers great potential for their use in electronics components.

A report describing the process for making MWCNT aerogels and tests to determine their properties appears in ACS Nano.

Source: zeitnews

La Valle d’Ayas è un’incantevole vallata della Valle d’Aosta, incastonata tra montagne imponenti e ghiacciai, cosparsa di vegetazione color smeraldo e spesso scintillante di neve. Qui sorge una costellazione di borghi sparsi, che insieme formano il comune di Ayas, tra cui spicca il pittoresco paese di Antagnod: il nome significa “prima del bosco”, a testimoniare la vicinanza della foresta nel periodo della sua fondazione, e la sua bellezza gentile ha fatto si che nel 2008 venisse incluso tra i Borghi più Belli d’Italia.

Antagnod fa parte della Comunità Montana Evançon, e come una scultura da ammirare se ne sta appollaiato a 1710 metri di quota, abbarbicato al versante occidentale della valle di Ayas, da cui si gode una vista spettacolare del Monte Rosa. Ad allungare il collo oltre i tetti dell’abitato, tra il fumo dei comignoli, c’è il campanile della chiesetta locale: è lui che saluta il sole, e cattura gli ultimi raggi d’oro, prima che questo cali dietro le montagne disegnando le sagome degli abeti. La chiesa, le stradicciole tortuose e le abitazioni di legno, timide a confronto delle montagne imponenti, basterebbero a far innamorare di questa località, ma ad attirare così tanti turisti ad Antagnod sono gli impianti sciistici all’avanguardia.

Ci sono voluti anni di interventi, manutenzione e progettazione per realizzare degli impianti adeguati, che offrissero ai visitatori un servizio impeccabile senza alterare il paesaggio splendido della Valle d’Aosta. Il risultato è strabiliante: in uno scenario magico si inseriscono ottime strutture alberghiere, piste mozzafiato, spazi di divertimento per i più piccoli e locali accoglienti in cui rilassarsi tra una discesa e l’altra. Le piste non sono estese come in altre località montane, ma riescono a soddisfare anche gli sciatori più esigenti: 18 chilometri adibiti allo sci alpino e 3 chilometri per lo sci nordico sono i tracciati del complesso di Antagnod, incluso nell’ampio comprensorio del Monterosa Ski. Le piste sono spaziose, panoramiche e non eccessivamente ripide, perfette per chi ama scivolare in tutta calma, divertendosi ma anche assaporando la brezza pungente tra i capelli, godendo il profumo degli abeti e lanciando lontano lo sguardo sognante.

I bambini apprezzeranno la pista per lo slittino, e tutta la famiglia potrà avventurarsi lungo i sentieri innevati nei dintorni di Antagnod, con le ciaspole ai piedi. Chi invece non rinuncia alla tintarella neppure in montagna sarà lieto di sapere che l’esposizione al sole di Antagnod è eccellente: fuori dal rifugio, in prossimità delle piste, ci si può rilassare con il volto rivolto al sole, per respirare l’aria pura delle Alpi, assaporare il profumo del vin brulé e, allo stesso tempo, guadagnare un colorito da vacanza.

In effetti il clima locale è a dir poco idilliaco. L’esposizione geografica garantisce tante ore di sole sia in inverno che in estate, gli inverni hanno temperature spesso al di sotto dello zero che regalano nevicate strepitose, e le estati sono fresche quanto basta per godere appieno della bellezza della natura. Le temperature medie di gennaio, il mese più freddo, vanno da una minima di -3°C a una massima di 3°C, mentre in luglio e agosto variano tra i 17°C e i 27°C. Le piogge danno il meglio di sé in giugno, quando si presentano anche per dieci giorni sul totale, mentre in inverno le precipitazioni sono a carattere nevoso, suggestive e cariche di atmosfera festosa.

Se non vi accontentate dello sport e delle vedute panoramiche, preferirete le passeggiate nel centro vero e proprio del borgo: è un dedalo grazioso di viuzze e piazzole, con costruzioni suggestive tipiche della montagna e abitanti ospitali, e non mancano i piccoli tesori culturali. Tra gli edifici da non perdere c’è la Chiesa di Saint Martin de Tours, una chiesetta millenaria più volte rimaneggiata, ristrutturata nel XV secolo e nel XIX. All’interno si può ammirare l’altare barocco, intagliato nel legno con maestria, e altri due altari del Seicento, un reliquario e alcuni dipinti realizzati nel XVI secolo.

Se siete curiosi di conoscere le tradizioni di Antagnod dovete visitare la “Maison Fournier”, una delle abitazioni tipiche più suggestive, che ospita la mostra permanente dedicata ai prodotti dell’artigianato locale, oppure potete assistere a uno degli eventi culturali organizzati in paese dalle AIAT e dal comune di Ayas.

Raggiungere la Valle di Ayas significa immergersi in una costellazione appassionante di borghi e tesori naturali: per farlo basta scegliere il mezzo più indicato e partire, carichi di entusiasmo e curiosità. Chi viaggia in macchina, venendo dall’Italia, dovrà imboccare l’autostrada A5 Torino-Aosta fino al casello di Verres, poi proseguire lungo la regionale 45 della Valle di Ayas. Dopo i primi tornanti, che da Verres salgono verso la cima dei monti, si arriva a Challand-Saint-Victor e a Challand-Saint-Anselme, si raggiunge poi il cuore di Brusson, prima stazione sciistica, e superato l'abitato di Extrepieraz si accede al comune di Ayas. Sin dal bivio di Corbet si può scegliere di deviare sulla strada panoramica che attraversa i villaggi di Lignod e, finalmente, Antagnod.

Chi preferisce il treno dovrà scendere a Verres: da Torino e da Milano bisogna dirigersi a Chivasso per prendere la coincidenza con la linea Chivasso-Aosta. Giunti a Verres si trovano i pullman diretti alla Valle d’Ayas. Gli aeroporti più vicini sono quelli di Torino, Milano Malpensa e Milano Linate, rispettivamente a 107 km, 168 km e 191 km.

Fonte: ilturista.info