Astronomers have found several rocky worlds in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface, and many more are thought to exist. As telescopes get more sensitive, we should be able to collect light reflected off such planets and look for clues to their surface conditions.

Seen from space, Earth gives off a large amount of near-infrared light, which is reflecting off the chlorophyll in plants. We might see a similar "red edge" on distant exoplanets if they also host green vegetation.

United Way of the Bluegrass partnered with First Bracktown Inc., University of Kentucky, Fayette County Public Schools and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation to create the STEM Academy. Adante and 39 other middle school males attend weekly out-of-school programming with STEM focused activities.

And, it’s working. Seventy percent of STEM Academy students have improved their overall grades. These amazing results prove all children can succeed in school.

“Any program that supports the future of our children is important,” says Brian. “Having a program like this is beneficial to both the kids and society as a whole.”

The robot goes by Rex (short for robotic exoskeleton) or Million-Dollar Man (because that’s how much it cost to build him). Rex looks somewhat lifelike in that he has prosthetic hands, feet and a face modeled after a real man. That man is Swiss social psychologist Bertolt Meyer, who himself has a prosthetic hand. Such technology is now becoming more widely available to the general public.

But where Rex really breaks new ground is his suite of working organs. The team of roboticists, called Shadow, that created Rex incorporated various individual body parts built in labs all over the globe. He acts as a sort of showcase to demonstrate the human organs that are currently being built in the lab and what they can do.

Rex has a heart that beats with the help of a battery, and eyes that actually kind of see: Rex’s glasses send images to a microchip is his retina, which in turn sends electrical pulses to the brain, forming shapes and patterns. But the roboticists didn’t even try to tackle the complexity of the human brain this time.

Rex’s fist-sized dialysis unit works like a real kidney, and his mock spleen can filter infections from his “blood.” This filtering function could eventually be extremely helpful in a human, but Rex’s mock-circulatory system pumps a synthetic blood that is immune to infection.

Rex’s creators say he is the most complete bionic man to date.

In principle, they are simple devices. They consist of a couple of mirrors, a source of energy, usually light, and a lasing cavity in which the light can bounce back and forth.

The trick is to fill the lasing cavity with a material known as a gain medium which amplifies at a specific frequency when stimulated by light of another frequency. When this amplified light is directed out of the cavity, using a half-mirror, it forms a narrow beam of coherent light of a single specific frequency–a laser beam.

For many applications, the shape of this beam– the way the light intensity varies across the beam–is important.

But because these devices are essentially bolted on to the front of a laser, they all require expensive custom optics that have to be calibrated each time they are changed.

Today, however, Sandile Ngcobo at the University of KwaZulu–Natal in South Africa and few buddies, say they’ve worked out a way round this. And they've designed and built a device to test their idea.

The solution is simple. Instead of putting a spatial light modulator in front of the laser, they’ve built one in to the device, where it acts as the mirror at one end of the cavity. In this way, the spatial light modulator shapes the beam as it is being amplified.

The Fabrication Lab (Fab Lab) at the STEM campus is a workshop where students can take their ideas through a complete process from conception to reality. One side of the Fab Lab holds computers with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software where students draft their ideas. CAD software, Google SketchUp and Autodesk Inventor, allow students to create 3D digital prototypes. The other side of the lab houses machinery that brings students' 3D designs to life.

The CAD Software on the computers and the machinery in the Fab Lab work together enabling students to be creative, imaginative, and highly practical. The Fab Lab at LEAP Academy STEM is a place where students can identify needs and create real, working solutions for social problems in the community. For example, students can use the Fab Lab to design and create a home water filtration system to address the issue of clean water in Camden. Simultaneously, the Fab Lab encourages innovation and community engagement while teaching STEM skills and real world application.

More Information Contact
Dr. Alex Nieves, Director, Fabrication Lab
alex.nieves@camden.rutgers.edu | 856. 614.3292 | Extension 7320

Lecture from University of Oregon - "The Beginning of Time"

The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.

Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiverse in which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.

Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.

The experiment is relatively straightforward. Metamaterials are usually hard to engineer because they are based on nanoscale structures. However, Smolyaninov and pals have instead exploited the self-assembling nature of cobalt nanoparticles suspended in kerosene.

Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime.

So light passing through behaves as if this region has one dimension of time, aligned with the nanocolumns, and two dimensions of space, perpendicular to the nanocolumns.

That creates a single Minkowski universe. The trick that Smolyaninov and pals have pulled off is to create a multiverse containing many Minkowski spacetimes.

Established in 1990 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Timbuktu Academy is an award-winning mentoring program for underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. The program's pre-college to graduate curricula includes the Undergraduate Research Program (URP), which provides students with the educational support they need to succeed in graduate school. Bagayoko, a solid-state physicist and native of Mali, named the academy after the medieval Malian city of Timbuktu, which was renowned for its scholarship.

In the beginning, Timbuktu Academy provided mentoring only for physics undergraduates and a handful of pre-college students, but with the help of additional funding from the Department of the Navy and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), in 1993 the academy added chemistry and engineering majors and 100 to 200 pre-college students. To date, the academy's URP has sent 74 students -- 47 in physics -- to science and engineering graduate programs throughout the country, including the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Moreover, 19 have earned M.S. degrees and 8 have earned Ph.D.s with many others nearing completion.