ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

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• Reclaiming rare earths: Improving process to recycle rare-earth materials
• Revealing a mini-supermassive black hole
• Americans use more efficient and renewable energy technologies
• Measuring table-top accelerators' state-of-the-art beams: Slicing through the electron beam
• Brain waves reveal video game aptitude
• Astronomers report that dark matter 'halos' may contain stars, disprove other theories
• Earth's magnetosphere behaves like a sieve
• High-pressure science gets super-sized
• 84 million stars and counting: VISTA creates largest ever catalogue of center of Milky Way galaxy
• Obstinate electrons 'ignore' assumptions and follow another path
• A new take on the Midas touch: Changing the color of gold

Reclaiming rare earths: Improving process to recycle rare-earth materials Posted: 24 Oct 2012 02:55 PM PDT Recycling keeps paper, plastics, and even jeans out of landfills. Could recycling rare-earth magnets do the same? Perhaps, if the recycling process can be improved. Scientists are working to more effectively remove the neodymium, a rare earth element, from the mix of other materials in a magnet. Initial results show recycled materials maintain the properties that make rare-earth magnets useful.

Revealing a mini-supermassive black hole Posted: 24 Oct 2012 12:09 PM PDT One of the lowest mass supermassive black holes ever observed in the middle of a galaxy has now been identified. The host galaxy is of a type not expected to harbor supermassive black holes, suggesting that this black hole, while related to its supermassive cousins, may have a different origin.

Americans use more efficient and renewable energy technologies Posted: 24 Oct 2012 12:08 PM PDT Americans used less energy in 2011 than in the previous year due mainly to a shift to higher-efficiency energy technologies in the transportation and residential sectors. Meanwhile, less coal was used but more natural gas was consumed according to the most recent energy flow charts.

Measuring table-top accelerators' state-of-the-art beams: Slicing through the electron beam Posted: 24 Oct 2012 12:07 PM PDT Accurate tests of the beam quality of laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) assume new importance with the approaching advent of the one-meter-long, 10-billion-electron-volt, bringing the promise of "table-top accelerators" closer to realization. Accelerator scientists have now devised novel techniques for characterizing extraordinarily short beam pulses in the complex environment of LPAs, including the metric known as slice-energy spread.

Brain waves reveal video game aptitude Posted: 24 Oct 2012 10:34 AM PDT Scientists report that they can predict who will improve most on an unfamiliar video game by looking at their brain waves.

Astronomers report that dark matter 'halos' may contain stars, disprove other theories Posted: 24 Oct 2012 10:34 AM PDT Do dark matter "halos" that make up most of the matter in the universe contain a small number of stars? Astronomers now make a case for that.

Earth's magnetosphere behaves like a sieve Posted: 24 Oct 2012 07:16 AM PDT Our protective magnetic bubble lets the solar wind in under a wider range of conditions than previously believed. Earth's magnetic field is our planet's first line of defense against the bombardment of the solar wind. This stream of plasma is launched by the Sun and travels across the Solar System, carrying its own magnetic field with it. Depending on how the solar wind's interplanetary magnetic field – IMF – is aligned with Earth's magnetic field, different phenomena can arise in Earth's immediate environment.

High-pressure science gets super-sized Posted: 24 Oct 2012 06:33 AM PDT The study of materials at extreme conditions took a giant leap forward with the discovery of a way to generate super high pressures without using shock waves whose accompanying heat turns solids to liquid. This discovery will allow scientists for the first time to reach static pressure levels exceeding four million atmospheres, a high-pressure environment where new unique compounds could be formed, materials change their chemical and physical properties, and metals become insulators.

84 million stars and counting: VISTA creates largest ever catalogue of center of Milky Way galaxy Posted: 24 Oct 2012 06:30 AM PDT Astronomers have created a catalog of more than 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 meters long and 7 meters tall.

Obstinate electrons 'ignore' assumptions and follow another path Posted: 24 Oct 2012 02:01 AM PDT The nanowires, which have a cross-sectional area of no more than one square nanometer (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter), are attached to a substrate made of the semiconductor germanium. The virtually defect-free nanowires are spaced at intervals of just 1.6 nanometers. This forces electrons to adopt one-dimensional behavior.

A new take on the Midas touch: Changing the color of gold Posted: 24 Oct 2012 02:01 AM PDT Red gold, green gold - a ground-breaking initiative has found a way of changing the colour of the world's most iconic precious metal. Scientists have discovered that by embossing tiny raised or indented patterns onto the metal's surface, they can change the way it absorbs and reflects light – ensuring our eyes don't see it as 'golden' in colour at all.

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