SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
The Science of Pressure
Chemistry, it seems, is a different beast under high pressure. One team has found a new kind of iron oxide, a compound that somehow had never been seen before, even though it contains two of the most common elements in Earth’s crust. Another group argues that hydrogen’s odd behavior at high pressures means that the cores of giant gas planets, such as Jupiter, are eroding in a slow hydrogen drip.
In other technology news, to make electricity from sunlight you can convert it directly, using a photovoltaic cell. Or you can use the heat of that sunlight to boil water, and then drive a turbine with the resulting steam. These are both established technologies. But there is, in principle, a third way: Use heat directly, without steam or turbines.
Profs Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, from the University of Manchester, two Nobel laureates involved in the creation of graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, have received knighthoods.
In June, scientists, politicians and campaigners of all stripes will flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the fourth Earth summit. NASA's car-sized rover, Curiosity, is set to arrive on Mars in August. And six visionary research proposals will vie for huge grants from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies Flagship scheme. The two winning projects will each receive €1 billion (US$1.3 billion) over the next decade. In the running are projects on graphene; robot companions for the lonely; planetary-scale modeling of human activities and their environmental impact; and autonomous energy-scavenging sensors.
Tsunami-damaged nuclear reactors, Twitter-fueled political uprisings, a possible violation of Einsteinian physics--these and other highlights defined this year in science and technology. Scientific American explores these and other top stories.
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