We all know what a compass is, but ever since it was discovered we don’t know why the magnetic field keeps the needle of the compass to point north. Scientists came up with many ideas, but none of them were satisfying. Now, a geophysicist named Dan Lathrop has build his own planet that will create its own magnetic field.

At the University of Maryland he designed a massive stainless steel sphere which will be filled with molten metal and afterwards the planet will be spun at a top speed of 80 mph.

According to Lathrop it isn’t that hard to create a magnetic field because almost all planets in the solar system have one, although these are created by the naturally.

“Planets have an advantage because of their size and they’re much more rapidly rotating”, he said.

You might wonder why researchers don’t dig up to the core of the Earth. Well, because you just can’t and “the conditions of the core are more hostile than the surface of the sun. It’s as hot as the surface of the sun but under extremely high pressures. So there’s no way to probe it, no imaginable technique to directly probe the core”.

Lahtrop will not be too disheartened if his planet doesn’t create a magnetic field because “it will teach us something about when planets do and don’t make a magnetic field”. If it doesn’t work, the geophysicist said that he might build a bigger one as he is a patient man “”but not infinitely patient”. We can only hope that later this year when he tests it, the little planet will give us the information that we need.

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A cold fusion breakthrough has been announced by a former physics professor at the Osaka University. The professor named Yoshiaki Arata performed a demonstration regarding cold fusion helped by his co-worker Yue-Chang Zhang.

The researchers used the force of pressure to determine the deuterium (D) gas into a cell which contained palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide (ZrO2-Pd). The deuterium was absorbed by the sample of ZrO2-Pd, then produced dense or “pynco” deuterium therefore the deuterium nuclei came so close together that they fused.

“Arata’s demonstration…was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there…Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers…This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata’s lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active”, said Akito Takahashi, a colleague of Arata.

According to Jed Rothwell, editor of the US site LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), the temperature raised to 70 °C after Arata injected the gas, due to the chemical and nuclear reactions. After the gas was stopped, in the center of the cell the temperature remained fairly warmer than the wall of the cell and lasted for about 50 hours and Arata said that this happened thanks to the nuclear fusion. For the moment, we are waiting for more information and hopefully, Arata’s tests will be successful.

Until now, light-emitting diodes have been unable to compete with light bulbs in terms of light output. A one-watt LED delivers about the same optical output as a hundred-watt light bulb, so diodes are unbeatable in terms of energy efficiency.

Dr. Christian Wenzel from the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen stated that his team of researchers increased the efficiency of the LEDs by using special lenses to direct all of the light to the place where it is needed. “The lenses are cast using an injection-molding technique. The two halves of the tool that serve as a mold have to be aligned with extreme precision just once - they have an accuracy of a few microns, or less than a tenth of the diameter of a hair.”

Experts claim that this technology doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe and the lens can be manufactured in large batches with relatively low costs. Researchers at the IPT developed the entire process and carefully planned all the stages, from manufacturing the lens systems to checking their accuracy.

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The new technique called Scan and Solve was developed by the researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Florida International University and allows engineers and sculptors to check whether a building or statue has areas that could crack sooner or later.

The program uses 3D data of the objects to foretell where they are most likely to crease, and how their weak points will be affected by outside forces such as gravity. The David statue of Michelangelo was used as an example, and it predicted the most sensitive areas. The sculpture already suffered damage from several clefts, exactly in the zones Scan and Solve found to be vulnerable.

The method, however, is made for analyzing objects that didn’t crack yet, and researchers are already gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail. Among others, doctors can have a better understanding on how bones are more likely to break, by analyzing them with the new software.

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A team of British researchers have successfully developed a black hole inside a fiber optic cable and to be more specific they created an artificial event horizon. Ulf Leonhardt, physicist at St. Andrews University, says that they actually created pairs of black and white holes which exist as long as they send light pulses through the fiber cable.

This experiment had the purpose of understanding the effects that take place near black holes and the reason why are not all gone is that they created an analogue of the event horizon and you would not be wrong to call it fake black hole. The not-so-real black holes are harmless and they lasted about 10 nanoseconds. Their plans for the future include the study of the similarities of the white holes and the black holes.