Sentences with word «helium»

PowderMed, based in Oxford, is developing a DNA - based vaccine that works by spraying gold particles coated with avian flu genes directly into human skin with high - pressure helium.

«It's the same as when inhaling helium gas makes your voice higher - pitched.

The large orbit of the loosely bound outer electron of cesium atoms would repel the negative charge of the helium atom — overcoming the van der Waals forces that normally help spread superfluid helium over a surface.

As stars age, they fuse together heavier and heavier elements, forging helium from hydrogen, carbon from helium and so on up the periodic table to iron.

Helium prospectors have uncovered a massive source of the vanishing gas, vital for MRI scanners, the Large Hadron Collider, NASA rocket fuel... and balloons

Satellites first sensed an annual spike in helium as Earth passed through the cone in 1972.

Because they have no internal resistance to flow, ultracold helium - 4 or helium - 3 slips through microscopic holes, flows effortlessly uphill, and flouts efforts to contain for study.

A drop of superfluid helium (left, with its mirror image underneath) won't slide down a cesium surface.

Helium is much lighter than regular air, so it makes the air around your vocal cords vibrate faster.

Their mass is too small for full nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium (with a consequent release of energy) to take place, but they are usually significantly more massive than planets.

Ultrafast lasers have measured how long electrons take to be booted from a helium atom with zeptosecond precision — trillionths of a billionth of a second

The experiments involved are a weirdly diverse bunch, including IceCube, a detector composed of light sensors frozen deep in the ice of Antarctica (SN: 12/27/14, p. 27); Super-Kamiokande, which boasts a tank filled with 50,000 tons of water stationed in a mine in Hida, Japan; and the Helium and Lead Observatory, or HALO — with the motto «astronomically patient» — made of salvaged lead blocks in a mine in Sudbury, Canada.

Over the centuries, astronomers have used eclipses to make fundamental advances, such as discovering helium and confirming Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity (J. M. Pasachoff Nature Astron.

A cooling unit circulates liquid helium around the seven - foot - high, nine - foot - wide cylindrical icebox, chilling the detectors to just 50 thousandths of a degree above -459 degrees Fahrenheit: absolute zero.

Between here and the moon, about a quarter - million miles away, there's virtually nothing — just stray hydrogen, helium and the odd dust particle.

The first nuclei, including most of the helium and all of the deuterium in the universe, were theoretically created during big bang nucleosynthesis, about 3 minutes after the big bang.

• Stars like the sun produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom.

Helium is a non-renewable commodity in demand for superconducting magnets in medical and science applications.

The telescope contains enough liquid helium coolant to keep going at this pace for another three years.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — A newly discovered gas cloud contains hydrogen and helium but virtually nothing else.

Commercial travel to near space in helium - filled balloons (24/31 December 2011, p 46) is to be deplored.

Earth's exosphere consists mainly of hydrogen with traces of helium, carbon dioxide and atomic oxygen.

Gao is making one unit for a Harvard University team that will include it in a large, maneuverable helium - filled balloon.

Within that maelstrom, physicists have now found 18 particles of anti-helium-4: the antimatter twin of helium, and the heaviest piece of antimatter ever made.

Whereas Sagnac shone light into his experiment from an external source, the C - II's ring itself generated laser beams, its cavities filled with a lasing medium of neon and helium gas.

That core, plus a thin shellacking of helium, is called a white dwarf.

Stars with more than about 10 solar masses, after burning their hydrogen become red supergiants during their helium - burning phase.

ELEMENTAL DIVERSITY Explosions of first - generation stars (one simulated here) produced elements heavier than helium and spread them throughout the cosmos.

First - generation stars, forged from pristine hydrogen and helium gas produced just minutes after the Big Bang, burst onto the scene about 13.4 billion years ago.

For 100 million years after the big bang, the Universe was dark and filled with hydrogen and helium.

These plasmas drive fusion reactions, giving off helium and flashes of energetic neutrons.

At the time our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, only about 39 % of the hydrogen and helium in our galaxy had collapsed into clouds that then evolved into stars, they say.

«Rare isotopes will help us to understand how stars processed some of the hydrogen and helium gas from the Big Bang into elements that make up solid planets and life,» Wrede said.

Then, researchers believe that the deuterium and tritium nuclei will fuse together to form a helium nucleus, releasing a burst of energy.

Then, the first stars appeared, and heavier elements (referred to as «metals,» meaning anything heavier than helium) were created by thermonuclear fusion reactions within stars.

Manobianco has talked with Department of Defense officials about equipping similar, helium - filled devices with chemical sensors and minicameras to perform military surveillance.

B's voice — already a happy toddler squeal — sounded as if she'd sucked in some helium.

Like kids playing crack - the - whip, atoms of hydrogen and helium figuratively link arms and spin around the planet in unison, scientists report.

The telescope is built around a 34 - inch - wide beryllium mirror, cooled by liquid helium to — 450 °F to eliminate the infrared noise that every warm object emits.

And even though it's made predominantly of the lightweight elements hydrogen and helium, Jupiter is 318 times as massive as Earth.

At still deeper levels, the liquid hydrogen becomes electrically conductive, or metallic, while the liquid helium remains mixed in.

Although the experimental confirmation of helium rain on Saturn is reassuring, she says, the fact that it may happen on Jupiter creates a thorny problem for theorists.

Demkowicz and his collaborators believe that helium may move through the networks of veins that form in their nanocomposites, eventually exiting the material without causing any further damage.

Rather than making bubbles, the helium in these materials formed long channels, resembling veins in living tissues.

David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and one of the theorists who originally proposed the mechanism of helium rain, said in an email that it's always good to get experimental confirmation of a theory.

One way to account for this is through the behavior of its massive envelope of hydrogen and helium gases.

According to theory, this liquid helium forms droplets of «rain» that fall farther towards Saturn's core, unleashing gravitational potential energy that makes Saturn more luminous.

But they also suggest that a helium rain could also fall on Jupiter, where such behavior was almost completely unexpected.

Working with a team of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Demkowicz investigated how helium behaves in nanocomposite solids, materials made of stacks of thick metal layers.

«Helium is an element that we don't usually think of as being harmful,» said Dr. Michael Demkowicz, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.