GLIESE 581D

By Anastasia Macovei

The scientists have discovered that only the planet GLIESE 581D is habitable from 550 planets around the stars. Gliese 581D has seven times more mass than the Earth and its location is 20 light years. It turns around the GLIESE star, a red star, which is more luminous than the Sun. It was discovered in 2007, but now we know that there are possibilities of life in this planet.

They discovered that the planet is in the habitable zone of the Universe. There, it receives energy from the star to keep liquid water on the surface. They are investigating if the life is possible in this planet, but they don’t know if the suitable conditions exist. With the help of the computing models, the scientists concluded that it is possible that the planet has coal dioxide, and that means, this planet can have water. The only thing they have to check is if the planet can keep the life in its surface and if this life can be microorganisms, because on the Earth the most simple life are the microorganisms.

All these investigations continue in the NASA and in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The car of the future

By Camilo Sánchez

A new prototype of car, the "cibercar", created by the team of Michel Dohme, the research director of Lasmea, the CNRS electronic laboratory, will allow us to move about in cities in the future without driving. It was launched at the second Carrefour PREDIT exhibition in March. By means of a camera and a computer, these vehicles will be able to memorize their routes by choosing significant details and then repeat them. It works in the same way as a GPS.

Radiation in Catalonia

By Joel Suñé

Nowadays people are talking a lot about the radiation in Japan, but other events related to the emission of radiation have occurred here in Catalonia. In November 2007, there was a leak in the Asco nuclear plant. The leak was not dangerous, but it could have caused many deaths. On April 16th 2008 the leak was classified as level 2 on a scale from 0 to 7 and the director of the plant was removed from his job. On 21st October 2010 a leak was discovered when a school party was on a day trip in the nuclear plant, and the plant did not stop functioning because the fine was cheaper than the cost of stopping the nuclear plant. Now, in March and April of this year, the courts are judging the former director and the former head of radiation protection service.

Chernobyl disaster

By Alessandra Iparaguirre

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on April 26th 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It is considered the worst nuclear accident in history, and the only one classified at level 7 on the international nuclear event scale. At the time of the accident, local residents did not know the real level of radiation to which they were exposed, because they were not informed. The explosion created a toxic cloud that arrived everywhere in the world and is still flying above the Earth’s atmosphere. This explosion also caused many deaths from radiation and now a lot of people, especially children, are suffering from cancer and physical deformities as a result.

Synchrotron ALBA

By Àlex Santomà

The synchrotron ALBA is located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near of Barcelona. It opened in 2010 and is managed by the "Consorci CELLS".

The synchrotron is used as a big microscope that allows us to see the mysteries of the atoms and molecules. There are 10 synchrotrons in Europe, but only three or four of them are of the third generation.

A synchotron is a particle accelerator, in which some electrons are used to accelerate the synchrotron until velocities close to the speed of light are achieved. And then electrons circulate for many hours in this synchrotron. The electrons, which move almost at the speed of light, emit light through pulsations, and the scientists use this light to investigate these particles. One of the most important questions is: What is it used for? Well, it is used for:

- The study of biological structures

- Surgical implantation

- Creation of new medicine

- Creation of new materials

- The study of bacteria and viruses

Artificial sperm

By Joana Roig

Scientists from Yokohama University (Japan) have produced sperm in the laboratory. This achievement gives hope to men with infertility, although this research was only performed on mice. According to investigators from Nature magazine, creating sperm is one of the longest and most complicated processes in the human body. In the laboratory, Ogawa and his professional team extirpated small pieces of testicles of young mice and cultured them at 34 ºC. This experiment lasted for a few weeks more, because the investigators wanted to check whether the testicles they had used before worked after producing their first sperm. The results show that the culture system can maintain the sperm for two months or more. Then, they had to prove that this artificial sperm could fertilize an ovule, so they tried to fertilize 58 ovules in vitro with some of the sperm they produced in the laboratory. The embryos were implanted into females. The investigators waited for the sperm to grow, and while it was growing they did not observe any health problems. The twelve mice born as a result of the laboratory sperm were fertile. The young mice conceived with this artificial sperm grew normally, without any health problems, and when they became adult they were fertile. This is a big step in the fight against men's infertility, and it will also be useful for men who have suffered from cancer and want to have children.

The Dark Energy

By Àlex Santomà

Dark Energy, in the context of physical cosmology, astronomy and celestial mechanics, is a theoretical form of energy that allows us to confirm the expansion of the universe at an accelerating rate, but we do not know if it exists or not, it's only a supposition.

According to the law of the Big Bang, the universe exploded a long time ago, and according to this theory the universe is getting bigger more and more slowly, but when we look at the universe we can prove that it is getting bigger faster and faster, and that's the reason for the invention of Dark Energy.

This type of energy was first named by Michael Turner. Dark Energy should not be confused with Dark Matter, because they are different things. Dark Energy was discovered in 1998 when some physicists were watching the explosion of a distant supernova, and then they confirmed it with the study of microwaves, gravitational lenses and nucleosynthesis. Recently, physicists have discovered that in the universe, 73% of the mass is Black Energy, 23% is Dark Matter and 4% is baryon matter (all the stars, the planets, us, the earth...).

There are two types of models of Dark Energy: the cosmological constant and the quintessence.

The Mobile World Congress

By Timotei Savu

Once more the Mobile World Congress (GSMA), the foremost congress of mobile telephones in the world, arrived in BCN and made a big economic impact. According to the City Council, this congress produced an income of 225 million euros.

This year’s congress took place from 14th to 17th of February in Montjuïc, and the prospects were better than in the previous two years.

John Hoffman, the managing director of the GSMA, said that BCN was the mobile telephone capital for a week. Furthermore, this congress created jobs.

The new video games

By Timotei Savu

Probably most of you have heard about a lot of video games and you think that all of them are great, so you want to buy or download these games. Here only I'm going to describe the two new video games in the world because they are one of the biggest industry into the computing world.

- We have “Call of duty: black ops”: It's, for me, the biggest adventure game of all the times. It has very high definition and it is so real that the player comes into the game on a first person perspective. It was developed by the company Treyarch and distributed by Activision. It is a game of shoots and weapons where the player becomes a soldier, of course the war takes place nowadays.

- And “Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood”: It's the third part of the saga Assassin's Creed, which was in the shops on 19th Nobember 2010. It explains the life of the leader of the Assassin's sect. The game continues the history of Ezio Auditore, the main character of this game. He has to go to Rome to kill a lot of bad people in the templar's sect, because the assassins and templars are involved in a war of centuries. The game offers a high definition and resolution that does that the player comes into the game on third person. The game was developed by the Ubisoft Montreal studios to xbox360, Playstation 3 and PC.