A real view of mercury and venus from earth

SUNSET PLANETS: If you haven't looked at the sunset recently, you're missing a good show. Mercury and Venus are converging there for a bright conjunction:



"This is the first time I have seen Mercury," says Anton, who took the picture in Port Provideniya, Chukotka, Russia. "It was very clear and easy to see."

At closest approach on April 3rd and 4th, the two planets will be only three degrees apart--an eye-catching pair. Look before the sky fades to black. Two bright planets framed by deep twilight blue is a beautiful sight indeed.


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Sugar Power For Charging CellPhones

Drinking sugary soda gives you a burst of energy. Some day, sugar might power electronic equipment as well.

That's because scientists have now found a way to turn sugar into electricity. If they can find a way to make the technology work on a large scale, you may some day share your sweet drinks with your handheld video game player or cell phone.

A new technological advance could lead to cell phones that are powered by sweet drinks.

The new strategy involves fuel cells, which are devices that use chemical reactions to produce electrical currents. Manufacturers already make fuel cells that depend on precious metals, such as platinum, to spark those chemical reactions. Precious metals, however, are expensive and hard to get.

For the new study, researchers from St. Louis University used a type of protein called enzymes in place of the metals. In the cells of living things, including people, enzymes are what spark chemical reactions. To keep up the pace that our bodies demand, our cells constantly produce new enzymes as the old ones break down.

Scientists had tried using enzymes in fuel cells before, but they had trouble keeping the electricity flowing. That's because, unlike the enzymes in our cells, the enzymes in fuel cells break down faster than they can be replaced.

To get around this problem, the St. Louis researchers invented molecules that wrap around an enzyme and protect it. Inside this molecular pocket, an enzyme can last for months instead of days.

In the new fuel cells, electricity-conducting materials are attached to wires. The scientists coat each conductor with a layer of wrapped enzymes. Then, they allow a sugary liquid to ooze inside the enzyme pockets.

When the enzymes interact with the sugar molecules in the liquid, chemical reactions release a flow of electrons into the wire. This process produces both water and an electrical current that could power electronic devices.

So far, the new fuel cells don't produce much power, but the fact that they work at all is exciting, says Paul Kenis, a chemical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Just getting it to work," Kenis says, "is a major accomplishment."

Sugar-eating fuel cells could be an efficient way to make electricity. Sugar is easy to find. And the new fuel cells that run on it are biodegradable, so the technology wouldn't hurt the environment.

The scientists are now trying to use different enzymes that will get more power from sugar molecules. They predict that popular products may be using the new technology in as little as 3 years.—

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Space Umbrellas to shield Earth From Sun

On a hot, clear day, an umbrella can provide cooling relief from the sun's scorching rays. The same concept might one day help protect Earth from the accumulating heat of global warming.

Miniature flyers with circular sunscreens made of clear plastic would deflect sunlight from Earth. Three solar-reflecting tabs on each flyer direct the spacecraft's course. This illustration shows background starlight blurred into doughnut rings by the film.

R. Angel and T. Connors, University of Arizona

Building a single umbrella big enough to shade the entire planet will never be possible. Instead, astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona wants to launch a trillion tiny sunshields into outer space.

Each mini-umbrella would be a small, light spacecraft, weighing about a gram (0.04 ounces) and carrying a sunshade measuring half a meter (1.6 feet) across. Working together, hordes of the devices could act as a sunscreen for the globe.

Such a sunscreen would stretch across about 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) of space. And the pressure of sunlight on attached solar reflectors would keep the little flyers in orbit around Earth at a distance of about 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles).

The sunshade would be mostly transparent, or see-through, but it would cut the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by 1.8 percent. This would be enough to reduce the impact of global warming, Angel says.

In Angel's scheme, people on Earth could make the lightweight sunscreens out of transparent film. Each shade would be full of holes like Swiss cheese.

Angel says his plan is a big improvement over previous ideas for shading Earth from the sun. Those scenarios have typically involved large, heavy spacecraft that would need to be built in outer space out of pieces of asteroids or other space rocks.

To reduce the environmental impact of launch, Angel says, astronomers could use magnetic fields instead of rocket fuel for acceleration. He envisions launching 800,000 flyers at a time for a total of 20 million launches over a decade.

Angel thinks that the first launch could happen in just 25 years. And, once the flyers are up there, he says, they would shade the planet for 50 years.

The idea is certainly creative, but critics say there are easier and much cheaper ways to tackle global warming. Covering large areas of ground with white paint, for example, could reflect light back into space and reduce heating. Better yet, by reducing the pollution we create, we can all help keep the planet from heating up.—E. Sohn

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Small but mighty Space Telescope WISE

Anyone on Earth can look up and see the moon or stars, but it takes a telescope to get a glimpse of planets and the other bright and strange things that share our universe. Astronomers are always finding new ways to observe far-off galaxies and study the mysteries of deep space.

							Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer project scientist Peter Eisenhardt stands next to the fully assembled satellite.

That’s why, on December 14, NASA blasted a small but mighty telescope into space. The telescope is called WISE and is about as wide around as a trashcan. Don’t let its small size fool you: WISE has a powerful digital camera, and it will be taking pictures of some the wildest objects in the known universe, including asteroids, faint stars, blazing galaxies and giant clouds of dust where planets and stars are born.

“I’m very excited because we’re going to be seeing parts of the universe that we haven’t seen before,” Ned Wright told Science News. Wright is the scientist who directs the WISE project, which costs about $320 million.

Since arriving in space, the WISE telescope has been circling the Earth, held by gravity in a polar orbit (this means it crosses close to the north and south poles with each lap). Its camera is pointed outward, away from the Earth, and WISE will snap a picture of a different part of the sky every 11 minutes. After six months it will have taken pictures across the entire sky.

The pictures taken by WISE won’t be like everyday digital photographs, however. WISE stands for “Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.” As its name suggests, the WISE camera takes pictures of features that that give off infrared radiation.
Radiation is energy that travels as a wave. Visible light, including the familiar spectrum of light that becomes visible in a rainbow, is an example of radiation. When an ordinary digital camera takes a picture of a tree, for example, it receives the waves of visible light that are reflected off the tree. When these waves enter the camera through the lens, they’re processed by the camera, which then puts the image together. Voilà! We see a tree.
Waves of infrared radiation are longer than waves of visible light, so ordinary digital cameras don’t see them, and neither do the eyes of human beings. But we can feel some types of infrared radiation, in the form of heat.

An artist illustrated WISE in space, along with a depiction of infrared radiation behind it.

JPL/NASA

That’s a key idea to why WISE will be able to see things other telescopes can’t. Not everything in the universe shows up in visible light. Asteroids, for example, are giant rocks that float through space — but they absorb most of the light that reaches them. They don’t reflect light, so they’re difficult to see. But they do give off infrared radiation, so an infrared telescope like WISE will be able to produce images of them. During its mission WISE will take pictures of hundreds of thousands of asteroids.

Brown dwarfs are another kind of deep-space object that will show up in WISE’s pictures. These objects are “failed” stars — which means they are not massive enough to jump start the same kind of reactions that power stars such as the sun. Instead, brown dwarfs simply shrink and cool down. They’re so dim that they’re almost impossible to see with visible light, but in the infrared spectrum they glow.
These are just a few of the wonders that will show up in a gallery of WISE’s greatest photos. During its mission, WISE will take pictures of hundreds of millions of stars, asteroids, galaxies and brown dwarfs. Not bad for a flying trashcan!

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POWER WORDS (adapted from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary)
infrared The range of invisible radiation that extends from the long wavelength, or red, end of the visible-light range to the microwave range. Invisible to the eye, it can be detected as a sensation of warmth on the skin.
radiation Emission and propagation of energy in the form of rays or waves.
asteroids Small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, usually with orbits lying between Mars and Jupiter. They’re usually between a few and several hundred miles in diameter.
galaxy Any of numerous large-scale aggregates of stars, gas and dust that constitute the universe, containing an average of 100 billion (1011) solar masses and ranging in diameter from 1,500 to 300,000 light-years.
telescope An arrangement of lenses or mirrors or both that gathers visible light, permitting direct observation or photographic recording of distant objects.


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