National Ignition Facility recreates the interior of heavy stars

On a simple level, most stars fuse hydrogen to form helium. But things are obviously more complex than that. Most of the hydrogen in our Sun is the lightest form, with just a single proton as its nucleus. The helium produced in stars has two protons and two neutrons. Obviously, making helium from only protons requires a series of nuclear reactions, each with distinct probabilities of occurring that depend in part on the conditions inside the star. Complicating matters further, there are some other possible reactions that don't lead directly to helium but can still occur inside a star, producing things like heavier isotopes of hydrogen. Read more.

Food profiling: the analytics of authenticity

At every place on the globe the mix of the stable isotopes is different. These isotope patterns can be used to identify the source of products. If the product contains water the geographical isotope pattern of the hydrogen and oxygen will enable the precise identification of the origin of the product. The isotope signatures nitrogen and sulfur reflect the soil where a product was grown. Each region has its own individual isotopic composition — a comparison per database can reveal whether the strawberries in the jam came from Queensland or Korea. Read more.

A Philly scientist thinks an Australian parrot might eat flesh

Since 2012, the rainbow lorikeet, an Aussie parrot with clownish coloration, has undergone two mild bouts of internet virality. The first stemmed from the bird’s obscene tongue: a thin, purplish tube topped with an explosion of beige hairs designed to absorb their sustenance of choice –– nectar. The notoriety of this brushlike appendage makes it all the odder that, three years later, the birds went viral again when an Australian birder reported that the lorikeets in his backyard had, for the better part of a decade, been snacking on meat. Read more.

 

A summer job in sub-zero temperatures

The thermostat may read 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside the sprawling federal research complex in Lakewood, Colorado, but inside, CU Boulder undergraduate student Casey Vanderheyden is donning a bulky winter coat, gloves and boots as though she is headed to the South Pole.

In a sense, she is. Vanderheyden is reaching the end of her six-week summer work stint at the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL), one of the country’s most prominent storage facilities for ice samples collected from around the world. Inside the deep freeze room—which is kept as cold as a crisp minus-36 degrees Celsius—cylindrical tubes of ice cores line the shelves in a vast archive that, cumulatively, represents a sizable amount of U.S. polar research dating back decades. Read more.

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