‘radiant’ point in the constellation of Gemini tagged posts

New Method uses Heat Flow to Levitate variety of objects

Vacuum chamber

UChicago researchers achieved levitation of macroscopic objects between warm and cold plates in a vacuum chamber. Credit: Chicago Jean Lachat

UChicago undergraduate physics students helped take the levitation science to a new level. 3rd-year Frankie Fung and 4th-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects – ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds – between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber. “They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Prof. Cheng Chin, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.

In their work, researchers achieved a number of levitation breakthroughs, in terms of du...

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Using Fat to help Wounds Heal Without Scars

This is a comparison of wounds healing with and without hair follicles. Credit: Penn Medicine

This is a comparison of wounds healing with and without hair follicles. Credit: Penn Medicine

Breaking ground on method to transform cells. Doctors have found a way to manipulate wounds to heal as regenerated skin rather than scar tissue. The method involves transforming the most common type of cells found in wounds into fat cells – something that was previously thought to be impossible in humans. Researchers began this work at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, which led to a large-scale, multi-year study in connection with the Plikus Laboratory for Developmental and Regenerative Biology at the University of California, Irvine.

Fat cells, ie adipocytes are normally found in the skin, but they’re lost when wounds heal as scars...

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Geminids set to Light up Winter Sky in Year’s Best Meteor Shower

A diagram showing how the meteors will appear to emanate from a radiant in the constellation of Gemini, located in the east in the evening sky. Credit: Greg Smye-Rumsby / Astronomy Now

A diagram showing how the meteors will appear to emanate from a radiant in the constellation of Gemini, located in the east in the evening sky. Credit: Greg Smye-Rumsby / Astronomy Now

From 13 to 15 Dec, weather permitting, skywatchers across the world will be looking up as the Geminid meteor shower reaches its peak, in potentially one of the best night sky events of the year. Tens of ‘shooting stars’ or meteors may be visible each hour (the theoretical maximum under ideal conditions is about 120/hr). Meteors are the result of small (mm- to cm-sized) particles entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, burning up and superheating the air around them, which then shines as a characteristic short-lived streak of light...

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