One of the strongest glasses known to man had been discovered by Joanna Aizenberg, physical and material chemist at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J.. This was discovered while Aizenberg was studying how a sponge is formed and found out that individual needle-like glass beams make up the sponge’s basic structure and it uses every structural feature we know in mechanical engineering, but at a scale that is 1,000, 10,000-times smaller. Each strand is half the thickness of the human hair but has the property of being unbreakable.

Engineers hope to use what they’ve learned about the formation of the sponge’s glass beams to help create better, stronger and cheaper materials for the future.Elsa Reichmanis, director of Polymer and Organic Materials Research at the Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J. says, “As scientific research is evolving, we are now starting to explore and understand more of what nature does every day very easily.”

The sponge cannot only show scientists how to produce glass at low temperatures, but the sponge also has optical fibers that glow in the dark.

The “heliosphere”, the region around the sun over which the effect of the solar wind extends is now much more accurately discerned as to the approximate shape of this “bubble” as the Voyagers 1 and 2 approach the boundaries of interstellar space after 28 years from launching at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida which was managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which is a division of the California Institute of Technology: Voyager 2 on August 20, 1977 and Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977 on a faster and shorter route than its counterpart.

Scientists discovered that the heliosphere bulges outward in the northern hemisphere and is pressed inward in the south. At about 34 degrees north of the equator, the Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock and entered the outermost layer of the heliosphere about 9 billion miles from the sun while Voyager 2’s flight path at about 26 degrees south of the equator led to the discovery that the shock may be nearly a billion miles closer to the sun. It is concieved that the differences are due to an interstellar magnetic field pressing inward on the southern hemisphere.

Accurate location of the shock in the south will be determined when Voyager 2 crosses it sometime before the end of next year in which the scientists will then have a better idea of how strong the magnetic field is outside of the heliospheric bubble.

It is also discovered through Voyager 2 that the shock in the south is a source of low energy ions as was discovered by Voyager 1 in the north. Contrary to earlier predictions, however, neither Voyager 1 nor 2 have found the source of higher energy anomalous cosmic rays.

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