Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say

A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. 

The concept was first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

CREDIT: Harold White

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light.

A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said here Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Huge Iceberg, Twice The Size Of Manhattan, Breaks Off Petermann Glacier In Greenland

An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan has reportedly broken free of one of Greenland's largest glaciers.

Scientists are reporting the separation to be an indication of another dramatic change to the warming island.

According to the Associated Press, scientists had been keeping a close eye on a specific "long crack" near the tip of the northerly Petermann Glacier. Concerns were eventually raised to a higher level on Monday, July 16, after the 46 square mile iceberg completely separated from the glacier.

University of Delaware professor Andreas Muenchow was one of the first researchers to notice the break.

"It's dramatic. It's disturbing . . . we have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before," Muenchow told AP. "It's one of the manifestations that Greenland is changing very fast."

In a development that does not seem to come off as a coincidence, AP also notes that the same glacier spawned an iceberg twice that size two years ago.

Those paying close attention to the issue suspect global warming to be the reason for the break, but have yet to be able to come up with conclusive evidence.

And while Glaciers do give way to icebergs naturally, scientists are looking at the rapid rate of break-offs from Petermann as unprecedented.

"This is not part of natural variations anymore," NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, who camped on Petermann 10 years ago, told the AP.

Ohio State University ice scientist Ian Howat has said that "If it continues, and more of the Petermann is lost, the melting would push up sea levels."
The new huge iceberg is likely to follow the path of the one in 2010, which broke apart into smaller icebergs headed north, then west and last year started landing in Newfoundland according to Muenchow.

German team finds a way to link boron atoms with a triple bond

In the chemical world, there are few instances where atoms form triple bonds (where three electrons from an atom are bonded with the electrons from another atom). In fact other than triple bonds between carbon and nitrogen few examples exist at all. 

One instance that theory had predicted should work was with boron, mainly because of where it sits on the Periodic Table of Elements, but also of course because in its stable state it has just three electrons. Because of this, various chemists over the years have tried to figure out a way to form a compound made of triple bonded boron atoms. 

Now, it appears a team in Germany at the University of Würzberg, has succeeded. They have published a paper describing their results in the journal Science.

To get two boron atoms to triple bond with one another, you can’t just shove them together and hope they will stick because they are too stable in their current state. In other words, they’ll just ignore one another. To get them to bond some external force must be introduced.

Prior researchers had tried using a laser as a force, but only succeeded in creating a triple bound that could exist at eight degrees above absolute zero. At room temperature it vaporized.

The German team took another approach, instead of trying to push the atoms into bonding, they coaxed them together by slowly filling the places that the three electrons can exist around the nucleus with something else, essentially leaving them no choice but to bond with the electrons from another boron atom.

To do that, they introduced a molecule that contained carbon and nitrogen atoms, called a N-heterocyclic carbine (NHC) in a sterile vacuum chamber.

The idea is that because main-group elements such as boron are most stable when surrounded by eight electrons, creating an environment where the boron atoms could share two electrons from the NHC would leave three openings for electrons from one boron atom to be shared with those of another.

Thus, the three electrons from each would form bonds with each other naturally to create the full complement of eight electrons. To make it happen they induced a boron-boron double bond as a first step, and then a triple bond in the second.

The result is a green crystal that will exist at room temperature indefinitely in the absence of air or water.

Because the discovered process and resultant material is still so new, scientists don’t really know if it might be useful for anything, but the fact that the team has finally solved the riddle of how to get boron to triple bound, will assure them a place in the history books.

More information: Ambient-Temperature Isolation of a Compound with a Boron-Boron Triple Bond, Science, 15 June 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6087 pp. 1420-1422. DOI: 10.1126/science.1221138