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8 0 0 1 7 3 0 1 8 0 0 19 Poste Italiane S.P.A. spedizione in abbonamento postale. D.L. 353/2003 (CONV. IN LEGGE 27/02/2004 N.46), ARTICOLO 1, COMMA 1, DCB MILAMO

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UPGRADE ISSUE CONTENT

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Editorial Staff Giancarlo Anzisi Andrea Lodetti Lorenzo Ribaudo Collaborators Doc. Katia Maccioni Doc. Alberto Riva Doc. Daniele Madrugo

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EDITORIAL Tesseract is an editorial design project which wants to do scientific communication, while approaching both the designers and scientific community; a meeting point where scientific contents are groundbreaking theories, challenging the near impossible, as well as topics that dispute cultural tradition. We wish both this worlds could benefit from each other, so we have created a magazine where the contents are scientifically significant but nevertheless understandable for everybody.

Hence we designed , we hope, an enjoyable and interesting product in the way it is usable thanks to its print-software interaction structure.

This magazine in fact is the first that use HyperLayers technology, a mobile application that can broaden the experience of the magazine over the printout, linking the core content to multiple virtual layers of expansion and widening content.

The paper magazine is enriched with content designed to explain, simplify and guide the user in clarly understanding the core content.

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summary_00

TESSERACT

04.TIME DOES NOT EXISTS 08.JELLYFISH BARGE

SUMMARY -00 A machine that transforms human waste into clean water and electricity

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12.CLEAN DRINKING WATER

The World Bank predicts that the world population will grow to almost 10 billion in the next four decades

20.Ringwoodite 26.Borexino experiment 32.ELECTRO MAGNETIC DRIVE

A group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has successfully tested an electromagnetic (EM) propulsion drive

42.BIOLOGICAL DARK MATTER 48.LIFE NOT LIFE 54.EINSTEIN TELESCOPE

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Time_Does_Not_Exists TESSERACT

TIME DOES NOT EXISTS

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”QUANTUM

PHYSICS

PREDICTIONS INTERFERENCE Reality does not actually exist until it is measured Researchers working at the Australian National University (ANU) have conducted an experiment that helps bolster the ever-growing evidence surrounding the weird causal properties inherent in quantum theory. In short, they have shown that reality does not actually exist until it is measured – at atomic scales, at least. Associate Professor Andrew Truscott and his PhD student, Roman Khakimov, of ANU's Research School of Physics and Engineering conducted a version of John Archibald Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment – a variation of the classic doubleslit experiment, where light is shown to display characteristics of both waves and particles – where an object moving through open space is

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provided the opportunity (some would say "a choice") to behave like a particle or a wave.

In this instance, however, the ANU team replicated Wheeler's experiment using multiple atoms, which was much more difficult to do than a test using photons. This extra difficulty is due to the fact that, as they have mass, atoms tend to interfere with each other, which can theoretically influence the results.

"An atom is a much more classical particle," Associate Professor Truscott said. "For the theory to hold with a single atom is significant because it proves that it works for particles with mass."

To carry out the experiment, the ANU team initially trapped a collection of helium atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (a medium in which a dilute gas is cooled to temperatures

Double Slit

very close to absolute zero), and then forcibly ejected them from their containment until there was only a single atom left behind.

This remaining atom was then released to pass through a pair of counter-propagating laser beams (that is, beams moving in opposite directions), which created a pattern to act as a crossroads for the atom in the same way that a solid diffusion grating would act to scatter light.

After this, another laser-generated grating was randomly added and used to recombine the routes offered to the atom. This second grating then indiscriminately produced either constructive or destructive interference as if the atom had journeyed on both paths. Conversely, when the second light grating was not randomly added, no interference

would be introduced, and the atom would behave as if it had followed only one path. However, and this is the really weird part, the arbitrary number generated to determine if the grating was added or not was only generated after the atom had passed through the crossroads. But, when the atom was measured at the end of its path – before the random number was generated – it already displayed the wave or particle characteristics applied by the grating after it had completed its journey.

According to Truscott, this means that if one chooses to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths, then one also has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom's past.

"The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their

Observing screen over time

Electron

Individual electron

Accumulated individual electron

Emerging interference pattern

wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence," said Truscott. "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it.”

Even though the findings of the experiment add to the perceived weirdness of quantum theory, the results also validate it. But, even without regard to the weird aspects, quantum physics almost certainly governs the world at the atomic level, and this existence has enabled the development of quantum technologies ranging from cryptography to solar cells.

From an everyday point of view, our minds perceive that an object should behave like a wave or a particle, quite independently of how it is measured.

However, as this experiment supports, quantum physics predicts that it doesn’t seem to matter if a particle or object should show wave-like behavior or particle-like behavior; it all depends on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey.

"Quantum physics' predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness," said Roman Khakimov.

The first time ever that Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment has been conducted using a single atom, the quantum weirdness represented by this experiment much more closely approaches the macro world in which humans perceive reality, which adds to the significance of the findings.

The results of this research were recently published in the journal Nature Physics

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Jellyfish barge

TESSERACT

JELLYFISH BARGE Agriculture with no bearing on existing resources

The World Bank predicts that the world population will grow to almost 10 billion in the next four decades. By 2050, the global demand for food is expected to be 60-70% higher than today. Scarcity of water and cultivable land are the main obstacles to meet the quantitative and qualitative shifts of the world’s demand. Agriculture is the human activity that relies most on the existing water resources. The scarcity of arable land and fresh water for agriculture is being exacerbated by changes in the climate, exposing many areas to increased risks and contribute to make them even more vulnerable to the problem of water and food security.

The rising sea level, for example, contributes to flooding of extensive areas of fertile land with salt water.

AGRICULTURE

12

INDUSTRY

HOUSEHOLD

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Tackling these challenges in a holistic way can produce considerable improvement in water and food security of coastal communities. Jellyfish Barge is a module for crop cultivation that doesn’t rely on soil, fresh water and chemical energy consumption. It is a floating agricultural greenhouse, able to purify salt, brackish or polluted water using solar energy. It is built with low-cost technologies and simple materials, also appropriate to the self-construction paradigm. It consists of a wooden base of about 70 square meters that floats on recycled plastic drums and supports a glass greenhouse for crop cultivation. Inside the greenhouse, a high-efficiency hydroponic cultivation method provides up to 70% of water savings compared to traditional hydroponic systems. Required water is supplied by 7 solar desalination units arranged around the perimeter that are able to produce up to 150 liters per day of clean fresh water from salt, brackish, or polluted water. Solar distillation is a natural phenomenon: in the seas, the sun’s energy evaporates water, which then falls as rain water.

The floating modular green house

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15

Janicki_s100

TESSERACT

CLEAN_ DRINKING WATER

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JANICKI BIOENERGY_ OMNIPROCESSOR S100 Bill Gates has taken to his blog to discuss the latest project from the philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: a machine that transforms human waste into clean water and electricity.At least 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to adequate sanitation, with human who waste often polluting the water supply and remaining untreated.

The “Omniprocessor” aims to help with this problem. Its development is led by Seattle-based engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy.

The machine extracts water from sewage that’s piped in or delivered to the facility. The dry sewage is then incinerated to generate steam, which powers the entire machine.

Gates publicly demonstrated his commitment to the new technology by drinking a glass of water on camera that entered the machine as feces just minutes before.

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HOW IT WORKS First, the human waste is delivered to the Omniprocessor. The sewage is then boiled and divided into water vapour and dry waste. The dry sludge is burnt at extremely high temperature, driving a steam engine which powers a generator.

The electricity produced by the generator is then delivered to the local community.

Meanwhile, the water boiled off the sewage is carefully filtered, producing clean drinking water. The upshot is that the energy produced is more than enough to power the entire process, so it’s easy for the owner of

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the Omniprocessor to turn a profit — making it an attractive investment for entrepreneurs in the developing world. The only prototype is currently located just north of Seattle, but there’s plans for a pilot project in Dakar, Senegal, later in 2015. From there, they hope to expand. Gates thinks the Omniprocessor could also be a “great fit” in India working with local entrepreneurs to make the machine a reality.

There’s no indication of price (it could be “several years” until it’s ready, Gates says), but at the same size as two double-decker buses, it’s

definitely not a consumer technology.

Instead, it’s hoped that local governments and entrepreneurs will be interested.

“Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year,” Gates writes, “and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically. Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries a few years ago our foundation put out

“Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for a new solution.”

One solution was to reinvent the toilet, but the Omniprocessor approaches the problem differently, by attempting to revolutionise the sewage treatment plant instead.

“The history of philanthropy is littered with well-intentioned inventions that never deliver on their promise,” Gates says, but he’s “excited” about

Janicki’s project. “The processor wouldn’t just keep human waste out of the drinking water; it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace. It’s the ultimate example of that old expression: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

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ACCES TO WATER, AFRICAN Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa even though in one continent, have made different levels of progress towards the Millennium Development Goal on water.

North Africa has 92% coverage and is on track to meet its 94% target before 2015. However, Sub-Saharan Africa experiences a contrasting case with 40% of the 783 million people without access to an improved source of drinking water from the region.

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Sub-Saharan Africa is off track from meeting the MDG on water with just 61% water coverage and with the current pace cannot reach the 75% target set for the region.

An analysis of data from 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (representing 84% of the region’s population) shows significant differences between the poorest and richest fifths of the population in both rural and urban areas. Over 90% of the richest quintile

in urban areas use improved water sources, and over 60% have piped water on premises. In rural areas, piped-in water is non-existent in the poorest 40% of households, and less than half of the population use any form of improved source of water.

Drinking water coverage by wealth quintiles, urban and rural residence, sub-Saharan Africa, based on population-weight averages from 35 countries (percentage).

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OMNI_ PROCESSOR S/200

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JANICKI BIOENERGY, WITH A NEW EVOLVED OP

REMOTE OPERATION

Model S200, will be a stationary combined heat and power plant that converts fecal sludge and other combustible waste streams into electricity, potable water, and ash.

The heat from combustion within a fluidized sand bed is utilized to generate high pressure steam that is expanded in a reciprocating piston steam engine connected to a generator, producing electricity. The exhaust from this engine (process heat) is used to dry the incoming fecal sludge. The water that is evaporated out of the sludge is then treated to meet clean drinking water standards.

The combustion gases are treated as necessary to meet local emission standards.

The OP will be connected to the internet and remotely monitored and operated by a central command center. This will provide technical expertise to each unit without requiring technical expertise physically at each unit. Additionally, this will provide access to software upgrades for the customer continually increasing the performance of their unit.

DAKAR, SENEGAL

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PLACED IN DAKAR

DAKAR, SENEGAL

The Janicki Bioenergy Omni Processor - Model S100 started as a proof-ofconcept project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2013. It was originally designed to take in sewer sludge and primarily output electrical power.

During the development, it became clear that making clean drinking water made the processor more economically viable, and a water treatment system was added.

Model S100 can produce up to 10,800 liters of clean drinking water per day, satisfying all United States FDA and WHO clean water requirements.

Emissions also meet or exceed all applicable United States EPA requirements.

Model S100 is scheduled to ship to Dakar, Senegal in mid-February 2015.

This location is perfect for continuing development and measuring realworld performance.

We are very dedicated to making sure that the Omni Processor works reliably in all locations, and Dakar provides us with an opportunity to establish our support channels, supply chain, and logistics in Africa.

How much water can be produced?

10,800 liters per day How much sewer sludge can be processed?

12.3 cubic meters per day How much power can be produced?

150 kW. When producing maximum power, less water will be produced.

What type of fuel does it use?

Sewer sludge What is the maximum moisture content of the fuel?

84% What standards does the drinking water meet?

The drinking water meets both United States FDA and World Health Organization standards.

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Ringwoodite

TESSERACT

RING WOODITE Tiny diamond impurity reveals water riches of deep Earth

A microscopic crystal of a mineral never before seen in a terrestrial rock holds clues to the presence of vast quantities of water deep in Earth’s mantle, scientists report in a paper published today in Nature1. The discovery came from a diamond weighing less than one-tenth of a gram, found in Brazil. Further studies of the sample could help to answer the long-standing question of the origin of the planet’s water. Most diamonds form at depths of about 150 to 200 kilometres, but ‘ultradeep’ diamonds come from a region of the mantle known as the transition zone, 410 to 660 kilometres below the surface, says Graham Pearson, a mantle geochemist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the

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lead author of the study. Impurities in ultradeep diamonds can be used as probes to study the regions in which the stones formed — and in particular to understand what minerals are present at those depths. Certain minerals have crystal structures that can form only at high pressures or temperatures, or both, and many rearrange themselves into different structures when the pressure is taken off or the temperature goes down. Thus, when the mantle brings rock towards the surface, some of the minerals that formed at great depths can no longer be found. But if the minerals are trapped inside diamonds, they stay compressed in their originalforms.

Ringwoodite is a high-pressure phase of Mg2SiO4 formed at high temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s mantle between 525 and 660 km depth. It is polymorphous with the olivine phase forsterite

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Name: Ringwoodite RRUFF ID: R090003 Ideal Chemistry: Mg2SiO4 Locality: Synthetic Source: Hexiong Yang [view label] Owner: RRUFF Description: Colorless crystals Status: The identification of this mineral has been confirmed by single-crystal X-ray diffraction.

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Crystals of hydrous ringwoodite,synthesized in a high-pressure laboratory experiment

CHONDRITE METEORITES. Polymorph of forsferite and replacesferroan forsterite.

Mineralogical theory and seismic findings had long suggested that ringwoodite is a major component of the transition zone, and the finding backs that up. “It confirms that our ideas of how the mantle is constructed are correct,” says Hans Keppler, a geophysicist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, who wrote about the find in an accompanying News & Views. Unlike better-studied forms of olivine, ringwoodite can hold a substantial amount of water. The sample therefore had the potential to help resolve a long-standing controversy over just how much water the transition zone contains. Using infrared spectroscopy, Pearson’s team found that its tiny fleck of ringwoodite contained about 1% water by weight.

“That may not sound like much,” Pearson says, “but when you realize how much ringwoodite there is, the transition zone could hold as much water as all the Earth’s oceans put together.” But the water content of a single crystal is not necessarily representative of the entire zone, says Norm Sleep, a geophysicist at Stanford University in California. Diamonds are produced by an unusual type of volcanism that is normally associated with water-rich rock, he says. He compares the situation to that of someone panning for gold and finding a large nugget: “It would be unwise to assume that all the gravel in the stream is gold nuggets.” There are two theories as to where the mantle’s water came from. One is that it was

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CRUST (100km) UPPER MANTLE(100_410 km) TRANSITION ZONE(410_660 km) LOWER MANTLE(660 _2925 km) CORE (2925 6371 km)

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ocean water that was carried deep underground when sea-floor rocks were subducted by plate tectonics.

THE OTHER IS THAT DEEPER LAYERS OF THE EARTH STILL CONTAIN WATER THAT WAS PART OF THE MATERIALS THAT FORMED THE EARTH.

An international team of scientists led by Graham Pearson, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic

If the water has been there since Earth formed, its ratio of deuterium to normal hydrogen could be different from that found in sea water today. If so, that ratio could provide clues as to whether the water came from asteroids or from comets, says Humberto Campins, an asteroid researcher at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Pearson sees a value to checking the isotope ratio, but so far his group has been unwilling to do such destructive tests on the only known piece of mantle ringwoodite. “We have to think really carefully on what we do next on this sample because it’s very small: “That means you can only think of doing one or two additional analyses.”

Resources at the U of A, has discovered the first-ever sample of a mineral called ringwoodite.

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Borexino experiment TESSERACT

Borexino experiment

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ABOUT BOREXINO

Borexino is a solar neutrino experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in Italy, designed to detect low-energy solar neutrinos, in real time, using 300 tons of liquid scintillator in an unsegmented detector. The detector is located in Hall C of the Gran Sasso underground laboratory. Neutrino-electron scattering in the scintillator produces flashes of scintillation light which are observed by 2000 photomultiplier tubes (20 cm diameter). With a fiducial volume of about 100 tons, the expected neutrino count rate is about 30 events per day above 250 keV (Standard Solar Model and Large Mixing Angle neutrino oscillation model, assuming vacuum oscillations), due mostly to 7Be solar neutrinos. The emphasis in Borexino is on the ultimate in radiopurity, for the energies where the 7Be neutrino signals occur are filled with false positives from many different species of radioactive decay. In particular, the uranium and thorium chains are great problems, as well as the radioactive noble gas isotopes 39Ar, 85Kr, and 222Rn, all present in the Earth’s atmosphere. Numerous methods of getting rid of these isotopes have been used, ranging from careful materials selection, through construction of the most delicate parts of the detector in a radon-free clean room, up to a several month sequence of purging the entire detector with special nitrogen free of argon, krypton and radon.

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The Borexino detector started taking data.

2008

2010_ Geo-neutrinos from Earth’s interior have been observed for the first time. These are anti-neutrinos produced in radioactive decays of uranium, thorium, potas2011_ The experiment published a

sium, and rubidium

precision measurement of the beryllium neutrino flux,as well as the first evidence for the pep solar neutrinos.

2012_ They published the results of measurements of the speed of CERN to Gran Sasso. The results were consistent with the speed of light.See measurements of neutrino

2013_ They set a limit on ster-

speed.

ile neutrino parameters.They also extracted a signal of geoneutrinos,which gives insight into radioactive element activity in the earth’s crust.

2014_ They published an analysis of the proton–proton fusion activity in the solar core

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STRUCTURE OF BOREXINO A schematic of the detector is shown at right. The concentric volumes of the detector are based on the principle of graded shielding: the cleanest parts are at the very center. First, of course, the underground location of the detector, under 3500 meters of water equivalent, reduces the cosmic ray flux to a fraction of its value at the surface. Next, a shield of ultra-pure water protects internal parts of the detector from neutrons and gamma rays, emitted by radioactive decays in the rock walls of the laboratory.

Within the ultra-pure water is a stainless steel sphere .

That acts as a support structure for > 2000 PMTs. About 200 of these are located in the volume of water; they act as a muon detector by observing the tracks of Cherenkov light left. The remainder are on the inner surface of the SSS, pointed inward.

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THE SCINTILLATOR

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Two of the main contributions of the Princeton group to the experiment are the majority of the scintillator purification plants, and the scintillator containment vessels. Because the scintillator and its containment vessels are the most sensitive parts of the detector in terms of radiopurity requirements, great care was taken in the design and manufacture of both components.

Inside the SSS are three more concentric spherical volumes, separated by the two thin nylon membranes built in the Princeton University Physics Department clean room, under a radon-purged atmosphere. The outer two volumes are filled with buffer fluid. This acts as a passive buffer to increase the distance between the PMTs (which themselves are quite radioactive by our standards) and the active part of the detector. The outer nylon vessel in addition acts as a barrier to prevent radon atoms emanating from the PMTs and SSS from migrating inward. Both vessels have quite an elaborate architecture to provide for structural support and

intrumentation to monitor the parameters of the detector, including vessel shapes and positions, differential pressures, and fluid temperatures.

A detailed description of the vessels has been published by Nuclear Instrumentation and Methods A, and may also be read at the arXiv. The scintillator itself is pseudocumene (also called 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene), an organic compound similar to benzene, with the addition of 1.5 grams/liter of 2,5-diphenyloxazole, a fluor. It is purified through techniques of nitrogen stripping and distillation.

It is this material in which neutrino interactions with its electrons yield scintillation light. The maximum possible kinetic energy transferred to an electron by an 0.86 MeV 7Be solar neutrino is 0.66 MeV. At this energy, roughly 7000 scintillation photons will be produced, of which only about 330 will be detected.

Composition Elementary particle Statistics Fermionic Generation First, second and third Interactions Weak interaction and gravitation Symbol ν e, ν μ, ν τ, ν e, ν μ, ν τ Antiparticle Antineutrinos are possibly identical to the neutrino (see Majorana fermion).

Theorized ν e (Electron neutrino): Wolfgang Pauli (1930) ν μ (Muon neutrino): Late 1940s ν τ (Tau neutrino): Mid 1970s Discovered ν e: Clyde Cowan, Frederick Reines (1956) ν μ: Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger (1962) ν DONUT collaboration (2000) Types 3 – electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino Mass 0.320 ± 0.081 eV/c2 (sum of 3 flavors)

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EM Drive

TESSERACT

ELECTRO_ MAGNETIC DRIVE

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Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive A group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has successfully tested an electromagnetic (EM) propulsion drive in a vacuum – a major breakthrough for a multi-year international effort comprising several competing research teams. Thrust measurements of the EM Drive defy classical physics’ expectations that such a closed (microwave) cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum.

PARAMETER

UNITS

ATLAS

SKYLON SUS

EM DRIVE

Launch mass

Tonnes

541

345

315

GSO payload mass

Tonnes

3.8

3

49.4

LEO payload mass

Tonnes

20

16

15.9

1

200

500

Number of launches Max vehicle acceleration

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4.9

3

0.05

Max velocity in atmosphere

mph

1.040

3.53

256

Cost per launch

$

110

40

11.2

Cost per kg payload GSO

$

28

13

224

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EM Drive: Last summer, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – made waves throughout the scientific and technical communities when the group presented their test results on July 28-30, 2014, at the 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Those results related to experimental testing of an EM Drive – a concept that originated around 2001 when a small UK company, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR), under Roger J. Shawyer, started a Research and Development (R&D) program.

The concept of an EM Drive as put forth by SPR was that electromagnetic microwave cavities might provide for the direct conversion of electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant.

This lack of expulsion of propellant from the drive was met with initial skepticism within the scientific community because this lack of propellant expulsion would leave nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum if it were able to accelerate.

However, in 2010, Prof. Juan Yang in China began publishing about her research into EM Drive technology, culminating in her 2012 paper reporting higher input power (2.5kW) and

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tested thrust (720mN) levels of an EM Drive.

In 2014, Prof. Yang’s papers reported extensive tests involving internal temperature measurements with embedded thermocouples.

It was reported (in SPR Ltd.’s website) that if the Chinese EM Drive were to be installed in the International Space Station (ISS) and work as reported, it could provide the necessary delta-V (change in velocity needed to perform an on-orbit maneuver) to compensate for the Station’s orbital decay and thus eliminate the requirement of re-boosts from visiting vehicles. Despite these reports, Prof. Yang offered no scientifically-accepted explanation as to how the EM Drive can produce propulsion in space.

Dr. White proposed that the EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for propulsion.

In Dr. White’s model, the propellant ions of the MagnetoHydroDynamics drive are replaced as the fuel source by the virtual particles of the Quantum Vacuum, eliminating the need to carry propellant.

This model was also met with criticism in the scientific community because the Quantum

” V A L I D I M P O S S S D R

N A I P I

A T B A V

S E L C E

A S E E ”

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Vacuum cannot be ionized and is understood to be “frame-less” – meaning you cannot “push” against it, as required for momentum.

The tests reported by Dr. White’s team in July 2014 were not conducted in a vacuum, and none of the tests reported by Prof. Yang in China or Mr. Shawyer in the UK were conducted in a vacuum either.

The scientific community met these NASA tests with skepticism and a number of physicists proposed that the measured thrust force in the US, UK, and China tests was more likely due to (external to the EM Drive cavity) natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating (internal to the EM Drive cavity).

However, Paul March, an engineer at NASA Eagleworks, recently reported in NASASpaceFlight.com’s forum (on a thread now over 500,000 views) that NASA has successfully tested their EM Drive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organization has reported such a successful test.

To this end, NASA Eagleworks has now nullified the hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection.

A community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents joined forces on the NASASpaceflight.com EM Drive forum to thoroughly examine the experiments and discuss theories of operation of the EM Drive.

The quality of forum discussions attracted

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the attention of EagleWorks team member Paul March at NASA, who has shared testing and background information with the group in order to fill in information gaps and further the dialogue.

This synergy between NASASpaceflight.com contributors and NASA has resulted in several contributions to the body of knowledge about the EM Drive.

The NASA Spaceflight.com group has given consideration to whether the experimental measurements of thrust force were the result of an artifact. Despite considerable effort within the NASASpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artifact, the EM Drive results have yet to be falsified.

After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive experiments in the US, UK, and China – at thrust levels several thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum conditions – the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves serious inquiry.

THIS IS AN OLDER VERSION OF THE CONCEPT THAN THE ONE NASA TESTED, THOUGH IT MAY STILL PRODUCE MORE THRUST.

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Application The applications of such a propulsion drive are multi-fold, ranging from low Earth orbit (LEO) operations, to transit missions to the Moon, Mars, and the outer solar system, to multi-generation spaceships for interstellar travel. Under these application considerations, the closest-to-home potential use of EM Drive technology would be for LEO space stations – such as the International Space Station.

In terms of the Station, propellant-less propulsion could amount to significant savings by drastically reducing fuel resupply missions to the Station and eliminate the need for visiting-vehicle re-boost maneuvers.

The elimination of these currently necessary re-boost maneuvers would potentially reduce stress on the Station’s structure and allow for a pro-longed operational period for the ISS and future LEO space stations.

Likewise, EM drive technology could also be applied to geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites around Earth.

For a typical geostationary communications satellite with a 6kW (kilowatt) solar power capacity, replacing the conventional apogee engine, attitude thrusters, and propellant volume with an EM Drive would result in a reduction of the launch mass from 3 tons to 1.3 tons. The satellite would be launched into LEO, where its solar arrays and antennas would be deployed. The EM-drive would then

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Force

Microwaves striking end walls exert force

Microwaves bounce off the inside of tapered copper cavity. They create a larger force on the wide end than the narrowed end.

Microwaves trapped in a cavity exert a force on the end walls.

By making the area in one end greater than the other, force is tailored so that the device generates thrust

propel the satellite in a spiral trajectory up to GEO in 36 days. Moving out from LEO, Mr. March, from NASA EagleWorks, noted that a spacecraft equipped with EM drive technology could surpass the performance expectations of the WarpStar-I concept vehicle.

If such a similar vehicle were equipped with an EM Drive, it could enable travel from the surface of Earth to the surface of the moon within four hours.

Such a vehicle would be capable of carrying two to six passengers and luggage and would be able to return to Earth in the same four-hour interval using one load of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel cell-derived electrical power, assuming a 500 to 1,000 Newton/kW efficiency EM Drive system.

While the current maximum reported efficiency is close to only 1 Newton/kW (Prof.

Yang’s experiments in China), Mr. March noted that such an increase in efficiency is most likely achievable within the next 50 years provided that current EM Drive propulsion conjectures are close to accurate.

Far more ambitious applications for the EM Drive were presented by Dr. White and include crewed missions to Mars as well as to the outer planets. Specifically, these two proposed missions (to Mars and the outer planets) would use a 2 MegaWatt Nuclear Electric Propulsion spacecraft equipped with an EM Drive with

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a thrust/powerInput of 0.4 Newton/kW. Furthermore, this type of mission would have the added benefit of requiring only a “single heavy lift launch vehicle” as compared to “a current conjunction-class Mars mission using chemical propulsion systems, which would require multiple heavy lift launch vehicles.” Presenting at the “Human Outer Solar System Exploration via Q-Thruster Technology” panel at IEEE, 2014, Mr. Joosten and Dr. White explained that “only 12 days would be utilized spiraling up from a 400 km low Earth orbit to achieve escape velocity and only 5 days spiraling down to a 400 km low Mars orbit.While these spiral trajectories around Earth would have to be carefully designed to avoid or minimize time in the most problematic regions of the Van Allen radiation belts that could expose crewmembers to undesirable levels of radiation, Mr. Joosten and Dr. White note that “These relatively rapid transits would argue for mission strategies where the ‘Q-Ship’ (EM Drive ship) operates between the lowest orbits possible to minimize the launch requirements of crew and supplies from Earth and lander complexity at Mars.”

Moreover, this type of EM Drive-enabled mission could negate the need to bring along, for the duration of the mission, a high-speed reentry vehicle to return a Mars crew back to the Earth’s surface because “By quickly spiraling into Earth orbit at the end of the mission, the crew could readily be retrieved

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via a ‘ground-up’ launch.

“While the fast Mars transits that Q-Thruster technology [EM drive] could enable would be revolutionary, the independence from the limitations of departure and arrival windows may ultimately be more so,” added Mr. Joosten and Dr. White.

This means that an EM drive ship mission could be designed without consideration of the every-two-year interplanetary conjunction launch windows that currently govern Earth-Mars transit missions and could help stabilize and provide more routine Mars crew rotation timetables. This same elimination of inter-planetary conjunction-enabled launch windows would be applied to crewed missions to the outer planets as well.

For such a mission, such as a crewed flight to the outer planets – specifically, a Titan/ Enceladus mission at Saturn – an EM Drive would allow for a 9-month transit period from Earth to Saturn, a 6-month in-situ mission at Titan, another 6-month in-situ mission at Enceladus, and a 9-month return trip to Earth. This would result in a total duration of just 32 months.

However, EM drive applications are not limited to Mars or outer solar system targets. Applications of this technology in deep space missions have already received conceptual outlines. In particular, the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to our solar system at just 4.3 lights year’s distance, received specific mention as a potential mission destination.

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Biological_Dark_Matter

TESSERACT

BIOLOGICAL DARK MATTER

Is space really the final frontier, or are the greatest mysteries closer to home?

In cosmology, dark matter is said to account for the majority of mass in the universe, however its presence is inferred by indirect effects rather than detected through telescopes.

The biological equivalent is “microbial dark matter,” that pervasive yet practically invisible infrastructure of life on the planet, which can have profound influences on the most significant environmental processes from plant growth and health, to nutrient cycles in terrestrial and marine environments, the global carbon cycle, and possibly even climate processes. By employing next generation DNA sequencing of genomes isolated from single cells, great strides are being made in the monumental task of systematically bringing to light and filling in uncharted branches in the bacterial and archaeal tree of life.

In an international collaboration led by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), the most recent findings from exploring microbial dark matter were published online July 2013 in the journal Nature.

“Instead of wondering through the starkness of space, this achievement is more like the 21st Century equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s expedition to open the American West,” said Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI Director. “This is a powerful example of how the DOE JGI pioneers discovery, in that we can take a high throughput approach to isolating and characterizing single genomes from complex environmental samples of millions of cells, to provide a profound leap of understanding the microbial evolution on our planet. This is really the next great frontier.”

This microbial dark matter campaign targeted uncultivated microbial cells from nine diverse habitats: Sakinaw Lake in British Columbia; the Etoliko

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PHYLOGENETIC TREE OF

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Lagoon of western Greece; a sludge reactor in Mexico; the Gulf of Maine; off the north coast of Oahu, Hawaii, the Tropical Gyre in the south Atlantic; the East Pacific Rise; the Homestake Mine in South Dakota; and the Great Boiling Spring in Nevada. From these samples, the team laser-sorted 9,000 cells, from which they were able to reassemble and identify 201 distinct genomes, which then could be aligned to 28 major previously uncharted branches of the tree of life.

“Microbes are the most abundant and diverse forms of life on Earth,” said Tanja Woyke, DOE JGI Microbial Program Head and senior author on the Nature publication. “They occupy every conceivable environmental niche from the extreme depths of the oceans to the driest of deserts.

However, our knowledge about their habits and potential benefits has been hindered by the fact that the vast majority of these have not yet been cultivated in the laboratory. So we have only recently become aware of their roles in various ecosystems through cultivation-independent methods, such as metagenomics and single-cell genomics. What we are now discovering are unexpected metabolic features that extend our understanding of biology and challenge established boundaries between the domains of life.”

To get around the difficulty of growing most microbes in the lab, recent efforts have focused on conducting surveys based on sequencing marker or 16S ribosomal RNA genes that are conserved across microbial lineages because of their essential role as “housekeeping” genes— critical for the organism’s survival.

Genome sequencing of the rest of the genomes of most of these lineages is however proceeding much more slowly. “Microbial genome representation in the databases is quite skewed,” said Chris Rinke, DOE JGI postdoctoral fellow and first author of the study. “More than

three-quarters of all sequenced genomes fall into three taxonomic groups or phyla but there are over 60 phyla we know of.” For the majority of them, however, there are no cultivated members available.

“Based on 16S surveys we know they’re out there, but we don’t know much about them—that’s why we call them microbial dark matter,” Woyke added. “Using modern single-cell techniques allowed us to access the genetic make-up for some of them, even without growing them in the lab.”

In this effort to “seek out new life,” the team’s findings fell into three main areas. The first was the discovery of unexpected metabolic features. They observed certain traits in Archaea that previously only were seen in Bacteria and vice-versa. One such trait involves an enzyme that bacteria commonly use for creating space within their protective cell wall, which is needed so the cell can, for example, expand during cell division.

As it rather generically cleaves the protective bacterial cell envelope, it needs to be very tightly regulated. For the first time, a group of Archaea was found to encode this potent enzyme and the authors hypothesize that Archaea may deploy it as a defense mechanism against attacking Bacteria.

The second contribution arising from the work was the correct reassignment, or binning, of data of some 340 million DNA fragments from other habitats to the proper lineage. This course correction provides insights into how organisms function in the context of a particular ecosystem as well as a much improved and more accurate understanding of the associations of newly discovered genes with resident life forms.

The third finding was the resolution of relationships within and between microbial phyla—the taxonomic ranking between domain and class—

which led the team to propose two new superphyla, which are highly stable associations between phyla. The 201 genomes provided solid reference points, anchors for phylogeny—the lineage history of organisms as they change over time. “Our single-cell genomes gave us a glimpse into the evolutionary relationships between uncultivated organisms – insights that extend beyond the single locus resolution of the 16S rRNA tree and are essential for studying bacterial and archaeal diversity and evolution,” Woyke said.

“It’s a bit like looking at a family tree to figure out who your sisters and brothers are. Here we did this for groups of organisms for which we solely have fragments of genetic information. We interpreted millions of these bits of genetic information like distant stars in the night sky, trying to align them into recognizable constellations. At first, we didn’t know what they should look like, but we could estimate their relationship to each other, not spatially, but over evolutionary time.” Woyke and her colleagues are pursuing a more accurate characterization of these relationships so that they can better predict metabolic properties and other useful traits that can be expressed by different groups of microbes.

Phil Hugenholtz, Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at The University of Queensland, a former DOE JGI researcher, and another one of the paper’s authors reinforced the motivation for taking on this expedition of sorts. “For almost 20 years now we have been astonished by how little there is known about massive regions of the tree of life. This project is the first systematic effort to address this enormous knowledge gap. One of the most significant contributions is that based on these data, we provided names for many of these lineages which, like most star systems, were just numbered previously. For me,

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taxonomic assignment is important as it welcomes in strangers and makes them part of the family. Yet this is just a start. We are talking about probably millions of microbial species that remain to be described,” Hugenholtz said.

Cosmologists have only mapped half of one percent of the observable universe and the path ahead in environmental genomics is similarly daunting. “There is still a staggering amount of diversity to explore,” Woyke said. “To try to capture 50 percent of just the currently known phylogenetic diversity, we would have to sequence 20,000 more genomes, and these would have to be selected based on being members of underrepresented branches on the tree. And, to be sure, these are only what are known to exist.”

The Nature publication “Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter” builds upon a DOE JGI pilot project, the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA: and closely articulates with other international efforts such as the Microbial Earth Project which aims to generate a comprehensive genome catalog of all archaeal and bacterial type strains (http://www.microbialearth.org), and the Earth Microbiome Project (http://www.earthmicrobiome. org). More information about GEBAMDM is available at http://genome.jgi. doe.gov/MDM/.

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Life_notLife

TESSERACT

LIFE NOT LIFE

Life began How life began is one of the most compelling questions humanity has ever asked. Atoms and molecules, driven by nothing more than unthinking chemical processes, somehow became the complex reproductive organisms that we see roaming the Earth today -- somehow, they became us.

Those tiny baby steps at the start of life, when some unknown molecule somehow became selfreplicating, for example, hold the

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key to understanding how life began and how likely it is to have sprouted throughout the Universe.

Martin Hanczyc, from the University of Southern Denmark has dedicated his professional life to this area of study.

His popular TED Talk from 2011 is a great discussion of the blurred line between life and non-life.

Now, using a new computational approach to mapping how simple

“We don’t know the whole reaction landscape.”

Expectations molecules like hydrogen cyanide become more complex, he’s hoping to find those first chemicals that bridged the divide and became living.

“Hydrogen cyanide is a very simple molecule with only three atoms […] but it can combine with other things to make more complicated molecules,” he explains.

not well-known.

“We don’t know the whole reaction landscape,” says Hanczyc.

“Understanding the larger landscape […] gives us a more intuitive sense about how likely it is that hydrogen cyanide can give rise to something biologically relevant.”

“Some of those molecules have a complexity like the molecules found in biology, so if you need a starting material to build the biochemistry of a cell, that’s a good place to start.”

Hanczyc holds a sample of reacted hydrogen cyanideBirgitte Svennevig/ SDU In particular, hydrogen cyanide has been previously shown to play a part in the creation of adenine, one of the building blocks of DNA and RNA. An adenine-creation pathway was first demonstrated in the 60s, but the probability that hydrogen cyanide will naturally lead to a biologically important molecule is

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Daniel Merkle That knowledge is important because hydrogen cyanide is found across the Universe. If there are hundreds of different ways for hydrogen cyanide to help produce adenine, then maybe this building block for life is being created on those far off exoplanets discovered by Kepler. To help discover those possible pathways, Hanczyc turned to mathematics. For the past two years he has been working with Daniel Merkle, of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southern Denmark.

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s consisting of oleic benzene. the visual cal droplet that is moflow (left). The same d with direction of well as the convective e bar: 100 μm.

Hydrogen Cyanide Using mathematical models, Merkle is able to map the trillions of different possible molecules and pathways that can arise when hydrogen cyanide is left to react.

By comparing that map with experimental results from Hanczyc’s lab, Merkle can narrow down the field and then begin to identify interesting patterns in the data.

“When hydrogen cyanide reacts [there are] a trillion possible different molecules,” says Merkle.

“We ask if is there a structural [mathematical] property that’s interesting from a chemistry point of view.”

For example, if one of the molecules generated by the model has a mathematical property similar to self-replication, this might be a candidate for further experimentation in the lab.

The approach, detailed by Hanczyc in a keynote speech at the European Conference on Artificial Life in Taormina, Italy on 5 September, helps target the research towards potential precursors to life.

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Chaotic State “Life started from a chaotic state, so how to organise things? Having chemical reactions that reinforce themselves is one way of doing this. But these types of reactions in reality are very difficult to find,” says Hancyzc. “We need new tools to understand the complexity of the [chemical] systems that we need to make in order to answer these scientific questions.”

So-called “generative chemistry”, where mathematicians provide a menu for experimentalists to focus their efforts on could well be one of the new tools that help us better understand the origins of life.

And if Hancyzc and Merkle find a hydrogen cyanide reaction product that self-replicates, it might suggest that somewhere in the masses of hydrogen cyanide across the Universe, a little self-replicating chemical is taking the first steps towards life.

Heterotrophic Protocell Figure | Conceptual model of a heterotrophic protocell. Growth of the protocell membrane results from the incorporation of environmentallysupplied amphiphiles, whereas division may be driven by intrinsic orextrinsic physical forces. Externally supplied activated nucleotides permeateacross the protocell membrane and act as substrates for the non-enzymaticcopying of internal templates. Complete template replication followed byrandom segregation of the replicated genetic material leads to the formationof daughter protocells.

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TED.talk Martin Hanczyc The line between life and not-life

0:11 - So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side.

Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? But it's very simple.

It's very simplistic. It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve.

0:58 - But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of nonliving end of this spectrum mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems.

Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life.

The Laboratory of Artificial Biology was established by Martin Hanczyc in 2014 as part of the Centre for Integrative Biology (CIBIO) at the University of Trento.

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ET_Einstein TESSERACT

ET.EIN_ STEIN TELESCOPE

HUBBLE TELESCOPE_MARS SURFACE

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Hubble and Einstein Telescope theory Stunning visual confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, after astronomers captured the first images of light from an exploding star being distorted by a cluster of galaxies.

The world’s most famous scientist first predicted the effect more than a century ago and now, after 50 years of scanning the skies, it has finally been detected.

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Four points of Light The photograph shows the tell-tale signature of four points of light, originating from a single supernova explosion, arranged in an “Einstein cross” around a distant galaxy cluster.

The four spots are the result of a hidden mass of dark matter inside the galaxy bending the light from the supernova which is many light years away but falls directly behind it when viewed from Hubble.

Each of the four points of light take different paths through space and their travel times are affected by the amount of missing matter – the invisible dark matter that makes up most of the Universe – that they have to pass through on their journey, explained Patrick Kelly, of

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the University of California, Berkeley, who was part of the international team supported by the American and European space agencies, Nasa and ESA. The supernova’s four points of light forming an ‘Einstein cross’ The supernova’s four points of light forming an ‘Einstein cross The effect is analogous to several trains leaving the same station at the same time but following different routes, some slower than others, to the same final destination, said Steve Rodney, of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Science.

Hubble Telescope

Launch date: 24.04.’90 Orbit height: 559 km Speed on orbit: 7.5 km/s Power: 2,800 watts Cost: 2.5 billion USD

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Gravitational Lens Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that dense concentrations of matter in the Universe will exert such a strong gravitational pull on light passing through it that light becomes bent just like a lens in a pair of spectacles.

Although the first gravitational lens was discovered in 1979, and they have subsequently been confirmed in objects such as galaxies and quasars, this is the first time one has been found for the intense light given off by a stellar explosion – in this case a supernova occurring 9.3 billion light years away.

Astronomers working on images collected by Hubble first saw four points of light arranged in a cross

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around a galaxy cluster 5 billion light years away on 11 November last year, and have since analysed the images with other ground-based telescopes on earth.

The four supernova images captured by the Hubble appeared within a few days or weeks of one another.

“It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy – it was a complete surprise,” said Dr Kelly.

“Basically, we get to see the supernova four times and measure the time delays between its arrival in the different images, hopefully learning something about the supernova and the kind of star it exploded from, as well as about the gravitational lenses,” he said.

THIS NEAR-INFRARED COLOR IMAGE SHOWS A SPECULAR REFLECTION, OR SUNGLINT, OFF OF A HYDROCARBON LAKE NAMED KIVU LACUS ON SATURN’S MOON TITAN

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