Physicists Receive $1.85 Million Grant to Reinvent Electronic Computing

by Paul Lilly

Talk about a monumental task. Roland Kawakami, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, is leading a team of physicists on a multicampus research project aimed at replacing conventional silicon electronics with a new way of computing better equipped to process large scale applications. The team’s budget is $1.85 million.

That’s the amount of grant money it received, according to UC Riverside. It was awarded to UC Riverside for winning the national Nanoelectronics for 2020 and Beyond competition.

Kawakami says his team is looking at ways of improving computing that go beyond simply building a better transistor. He believes conventional silicon electronics can only go so far and it won’t be long before the technology hits a wall. Then what?

“Our approach is to utilize the spin degree of freedom to store and process information, which will allow the functions of logic and memory to be fully integrated into a single chip,” Kawakami explains.

It starts with developing a new type of building block device called a magnetologic gate (pictured above). This will serve as the basis for the technology, much in the same way transistors are the backbone of conventional electronics. The magnetic gate is made of graphene with a bunch of magnetic electrodes. These electrodes store data, while electrons move through the graphene to use the spin state to compare the information, according to UC Riverside.

More geeky details on the topic here.

Physicists Receive $1.85 Million Grant to Reinvent Electronic Computing

One-Third of Sun-Like Stars Have Earth-Like Planets In Habitable Zone

Astronomers have calculated the likelihood of finding Earth-like planets around other stars using the latest data from the Kepler mission.

The Kepler orbiting observatory is specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars.

Earlier this year, the Kepler team released the mission’s first 136 days of data and it has turned out to be a veritable jackpot. In that time Kepler looked at some 150,000 target stars and found evidence for 1,235 potential exoplanets. That’s quite a haul.

Since then, most of the work on this database has been to identify the characteristics of all these exoplanets. But such a large dataset also allows for statistical analyses too, from which various projections can be made.

Today, Wesley Traub at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, reveals the results of just such a study. Traub has looked only at the stars that are most similar to the Sun, namely those with the classification F, G or K and worked out often various types of planets occur.

The results are straightforward to state. Traub says that mid-size planets are just as likely to be found around faint stars and bright ones. By contrast, far fewer small planets show up around faint stars. That’s almost certainly because small planets are more difficult for Kepler to see.

It’s also easier for Kepler to see planets that are closer to their stars because it looks for the tiny changes in brightness that these transits cause. That’s why almost a third of all Kepler’s detections orbit their star in less than 42 days. For the most part, these planets orbit too closely to be in the habitable zone.

What interests most astronomers is how many exoplanets orbit at a greater distance, inside the habitable zone. Most of these planets are too far away from their stars to have been picked up by Kepler yet. But Traub says his data analysis provides a way to work out how many their ought to be.

That’s because he’s found a power law that describes how the number of stars with a given orbital period. So all he has to do is assume a longer orbital period equivalent to being in the habitable zone to work out how many planets there ought to be at this distance.

Here’s the answer: “About one-third of FGK stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial, habitable-zone planet,” he says.

So by this measure, there are plenty of other Earths out there.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1109.4682: Terrestrial, Habitable-Zone Exoplanet Frequency from Kepler

One-Third of Sun-Like Stars Have Earth-Like Planets In Habitable Zone

How to Hatch a Dinosaur

Photo: Dan Forbes; model maker: Jason Clay Lewis

By Thomas Hayden

People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. He was hired as a curator but soon told his bosses that he wanted to teach paleontology. “They said it wasn’t going to happen,” Horner recalls. Four years and a MacArthur genius grant later, “they told me to do whatever I wanted to.” Horner, 65, continues to work at the museum, now filled with his discoveries. He still doesn’t have a college degree.

When he was a kid in the 1950s, dinosaurs were thought to have been mostly cold, solitary, reptilian beasts—true monsters. Horner didn’t agree with this picture. He saw in their hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old skeletons hints of sociability, of animals that lived in herds, unlike modern reptiles. Then, in the 1970s, Horner and his friend Bob Makela excavated one of the most spectacular dinosaur finds ever—a massive communal nesting site of duck-billed dinosaurs in northwest Montana complete with fossilized adults, juveniles, and eggs. There they found proof of crazy idea number one: The parents at the site cared for their young. Judging by their skeletons, the baby duckbills would have been too feeble to forage on their own.

Horner went on to find evidence suggesting that, once hatched, the animals were fast-growing (crazy idea number two) and possibly warm-blooded (that would be three), and he continues to be at the forefront of the search for ancient bits of organic matter surviving intact in fossils (number four). Add in his work as a technical consultant on the Jurassic Park movies and Horner has probably done more to shape the way we currently think about dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist.

All of which means that people are more cautious about calling him crazy these days, even when he tells them what he plans to do next: Jack Horner wants to make a dinosaur. Not from scratch—don’t be ridiculous. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.”

Over the past several decades, paleontologists—including Horner—have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor.

But “closely related” means something different to evolutionary biologists than it does to, say, the people who write incest laws. It’s all relative: Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we’re also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.

Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they’re called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Horner’s plan, in essence, is to start off by creating experimental atavisms in the lab. Activate enough ancestral characteristics in a single chicken, he reasons, and you’ll end up with something close enough to the ancestor to be a “saurus.” At least, that’s what he pitched at this year’s TED conference, the annual technology, entertainment, and design gathering held in Long Beach, California. “When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams,” he told the crowd. “I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist—and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur.”

Story Continues -> How to Hatch a Dinosaur

CERN Physicists Observe First Faster-Than-Light Long-Distance Travel

By Jason Mick (Blog)

Neutrinos are first ever observed example of faster-than-light travel in a non-medium, defy laws of physics

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was unequivocal — the fastest objects in the universe could move was the speed of light in a vacuum, which works out to around 299,792,458 meters per second (approximately 7e8 miles an hour).  To travel faster than the speed of light would allow fast travel to other worlds and even the possibility of travelling back in time.  But Einstein’s 1905 theory was firm — objects cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

I. The Erosion of Relativity?

Over the last several decades, exceptions to the Theory of Relativity have cropped up in experiments.  For example physicists have discovered that photons can pass through certain mediums at a faster than light pace via quantum tunneling, and another study revealed pulses of sound can also outpace photons in a medium.

Now, for the first time, subatomic particles have been witnessed as travelling faster than the speed of light.  CERN, the European physics organization known for maintaining the Large Hadron Collider, has been playing with neutrinos in its OPERA experiment.  As they don’t interact with normal particles it’s been sending them through the Earth, hurtling from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy.  The journey is 454-miles (730-kilometers) long.

But the CERN researchers noticed something intriguing.  The neutrino traversed the distance 60±10 nanoseconds faster than light would have according to advanced analysis using GPS systems and atomic clocks to measure the time it took the roughly 15,000 neutrinos produced to complete their journey.  Those results indicate that the neutrinos were travelling two-parts-per-million faster than the speed of light.

CERN has published the results [press release] and presented a live webcast late last week on the discovery.

Robert Plunkett of the Fermilab laboratory in Batavia, Ill. in an interview with LiveScience states, “The consequences [of faster than light travel] would be absolutely revolutionary and very profound. That’s why such a claim should be treated very carefully and validated as many ways as you can.”

“According to relativity, it takes an infinite amount of energy to make anything go faster than light. If these things are going faster than light, then these rules would have to be rewritten.”

Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., concurs, adding, “It’s really thought to be an absolute speed limit. Quantum field theory, the mathematical theory on which basically all results in particle physics are based, has the property that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light through a vacuum. It’s really an absolute prohibition.”

Story Continues -> CERN Physicists Observe First Faster-Than-Light Long-Distance Travel

How to Learn a Star’s True Age

Artist’s conception of a hypothetical exoplanet. Gyrochronology is a promising new method to learn the ages of isolated stars, including all stars known to have planets. (Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA))

For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. In space, the same is true of the actual stars. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we tell if a star is one billion or 10 billion years old? Astronomers may have found a solution — measuring the star’s spin.

“A star’s rotation slows down steadily with time, like a top spinning on a table, and can be used as a clock to determine its age,” says astronomer Soren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Meibom presented his findings May 24, 2011 in a press conference at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Knowing a star’s age is important for many astronomical studies and in particular for planet hunters. With the bountiful harvest from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft (launched in 2009) adding to previous discoveries, astronomers have found nearly 2,000 planets orbiting distant stars. Now, they want to use this new zoo of planets to understand how planetary systems form and evolve and why they are so different from each other.

“Ultimately, we need to know the ages of the stars and their planets to assess whether alien life might have evolved on these distant worlds,” says Meibom. “The older the planet, the more time life has had to get started. Since stars and planets form together at the same time, if we know a star’s age, we know the age of its planets too.”

Learning a star’s age is relatively easy when it’s in a cluster of hundreds of stars that all formed at the same time. Astronomers have known for decades that if they plot the colors and brightnesses of the stars in a cluster, the pattern they see can be used to tell the cluster’s age. But this technique only works on clusters. For stars not in clusters (including all stars known to have planets), determining the age is much more difficult.

Using the unique capabilities of the Kepler space telescope, Meibom and his collaborators measured the rotation rates for stars in a 1-billion-year-old cluster called NGC 6811. This new work nearly doubles the age covered by previous studies of younger clusters. It also significantly adds to our knowledge of how a star’s spin rate and age are related.

Story Continues -> How to Learn a Star’s True Age

Invisibility Cloak: Scientists Achieve Optical Invisibility in Visible Light Range of Spectrum

Electron micrograph of an invisibility cloak structure. The polymer-air metamaterial (“logs”) is colored blue, the gold-coated areas are colored yellow. (Credit: CFN)

“Seeing something invisible with your own eyes is an exciting experience,” say Joachim Fischer and Tolga Ergin. For about one year, both physicists and members of the team of Professor Martin Wegener at KIT’s Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) have worked on refining the structure of the Karlsruhe invisibility cloak to such an extent that it is also effective in the visible spectral range.

In invisibility cloaks, light waves are guided by the material such that they leave the invisibility cloak again as if they had never been in contact with the object to be disguised. Consequently, the object is invisible to the observer. The exotic optical properties of the camouflaging material are calculated using complex mathematical tools.

These properties result from a special structuring of the material. It has to be smaller than the wavelength of the light that is to be deflected. For example, the relatively large radio or radar waves require a material “that can be produced using nail scissors,” says Wegener. At wavelengths visible to the human eye, materials have to be structured in the nanometer range.

The minute invisibility cloak produced by Fischer and Ergin is smaller than the diameter of a human hair. It makes the curvature of a metal mirror appear flat, as a result of which an object hidden underneath becomes invisible. The metamaterial placed on top of this curvature looks like a stack of wood, but consists of plastic and air. These “logs” have precisely defined thicknesses in the range of 100 nm. Light waves that are normally deflected by the curvature are influenced and guided by these logs such that the reflected light corresponds to that of a flat mirror.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

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Journal Reference:

1. J. Fischer, T. Ergin, M. Wegener. Three-dimensional polarization-independent visible-frequency carpet invisibility cloak. Optics Letters, 2011; (in press)

Story Continues -> Invisibility Cloak: Scientists Achieve Optical Invisibility in Visible Light Range of Spectrum

Quantum Physics: Flavors of Entanglement

Innsbruck physicists exposed four entangled ions to a noisy environment. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Innsbruck)

The entanglement of quantum objects can take surprising forms. Quantum physicists at the University of Innsbruck have investigated several flavors of entanglement in four trapped ions and report their results in the journal Nature Physics. Their study promotes further developments towards quantum computing and a deeper understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Entanglement is a fascinating property connecting quantum systems. Albert Einstein called it the “spooky action at a distance.” This bizarre coupling can link particles, even if they are located on opposite sides of the galaxy. The strength of their connections is behind the promising quantum computers, the dream machines capable of quick and efficient computations.

The team lead by Rainer Blatt at the Institute of Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck has been working very successfully towards the realization of a quantum computer. In their recent study, these physicists exposed four entangled ions to a noisy environment.

“At the beginning the ions showed very strong connections,” says Julio Barreiro. “When exposed to the disturbing environment, the ions started a journey to the classical world. In this journey, their entanglement showed a variety of flavors or properties.” Their results go far beyond what was previously investigated with two entangled particles since four particles can be connected in many more ways. This investigation forms an important basis for the understanding of entanglement under the presence of the disturbances of the environment and the boundary between the dissimilar quantum and classical worlds. The work has now been published in the journal Nature Physics.

As part of their study, the Innsbruck scientists have developed new theoretical tools for the description of entangled states and novel experimental techniques for the control of the particles and their environment. Their high-impact research is possible thanks to support from the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the European Commission and the Tyrolean industry.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Innsbruck, via AlphaGalileo.

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Journal Reference:

1. Julio T. Barreiro, Philipp Schindler, Otfried G?hne, Thomas Monz, Michael Chwalla, Christian F. Roos, Markus Hennrich, Rainer Blatt. Experimental multiparticle entanglement dynamics induced by decoherence. Nature Physics, 2010; DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1781

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100927083907.htm

NASA prepares for sun dive

NASA””s Solar Probe Plus mission will uncover some of the long-standing questions about the nature of our star””s atmosphere

By Dario Borghino

In an effort to explore what is perhaps the last salient region of our solar system yet to be visited by a spacecraft, NASA has announced Solar Probe Plus, a mission that will launch a probe directly into the sun””s atmosphere. The mission will seek to answer some of the outstanding questions about the nature of our very own star, while helping to understand and forecast the radiation environment in which future space explorers will be living and operating.

Humans have been observing the sun for millions of years, and although much knowledge has been gathered in the past few decades, at least two outstanding questions keep puzzling scientists even today. The first enigma is the discovery, back in the 1940s, that our star””s atmosphere (or corona) appears to be several hundred times hotter than the photosphere, the visible surface. The second is about the origin of the solar winds in the atmosphere, which travel at supersonic speeds and affect our planet as well as the rest of the solar system.

Because a definite answer to these questions can only be provided by direct measurements in the solar atmosphere, we have been forced to wait since 1958, when a mission to provide these answers was first recommended even though we lacked the necessary technology. Since then, a solar mission has remained one of the agency””s top priorities, and several studies of its possible implementations have been conducted.

The spacecraft

As the spacecraft approaches the sun, it will be keeping a distance of “only” 6 million kilometers (3.7 million miles) from its surface. The extreme conditions in this region, where scientists expect to find temperatures in excess of 1400 degrees Celsius (2552F) and intense radiation, requires an ad-hoc structure for adequate protection. This function is performed by the innovative Thermal Protection System (TPS) – a large, flat carbon shield 2.7 meters (8.86 feet) in diameter protecting the spacecraft and instruments within its shadow during the solar encounters.

Power is provided by two separate solar array systems. The first is only intended to function as the probe approaches the star, while the second – consisting of two movable, liquid-cooled panels of high-temperature cells – is specifically designed to withstand the high temperatures of the Sun””s corona. As the spacecraft moves even closer to the Sun, these secondary arrays will be partially retracted behind the TPS in order to maintain constant temperature and power output, while a lithium-ion battery will function as a backup power source.

The craft, which is roughly the size of a small car, will be guided by a system of three star trackers, an inertial measurement unit, as well as a solar horizon sensor. Four reaction wheels for attitude control and a monopropellant system for trajectory correction maneuvers are also part of the system.

The mission

Back in 2009, NASA invited researchers to submit science proposals that would be useful toward its goals of solving the outstanding questions about the solar atmosphere. Now that the project is being finalized, the five chosen projects (whose total cost is estimated at around US$180 million) have been announced.

• Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation: the project will capture particles in the sun””s atmosphere, such as electrons, protons and helium ions, into a specially designed cup and will directly measure their properties.
• Wide-field Imager: a telescope will take 3-D images of the solar corona, including three-dimensional images of clouds and radiation shocks as they approach and travel past the spacecraft.
• Fields Experiment: this experiment involves the direct measurement of electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions and shock waves that course through the sun””s atmospheric plasma. The experiment will also serve as a giant dust detector, registering voltage signatures as space dust hits the spacecraft””s antenna.
• Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun: two instruments will take an inventory of elements in the sun””s atmosphere using a mass spectrometer to weigh and sort ions in the vicinity of the spacecraft.
• Heliospheric Origins with Solar Probe Plus: directed by the mission””s observatory scientist Marco Velli, the aim of this project is to provide an independent assessment of the scientific performance of the overall mission.

NASA stated the probe will be launched in 2018. The Solar Probe Plus mission is part of NASA””s Living with a Star program.

http://www.gizmag.com/nasa-prepares-for-sun-dive/16246/

''Living Dinosaurs'' in Space: Galaxies in Today''s Universe Thought to Have Existed Only in Distant Past

A simulation of a star forming galaxy similar to those observed. Cold gas (red) flowing onto a spiral galaxy feeds star formation. (Credit: Rob Crain, James Geach, the Virgo Consortium, Andy Green & Swinburne Astronomy Productions)

Using Australian telescopes, Swinburne University astronomy student Andy Green has found ”living dinosaurs” in space: galaxies in today”s Universe that were thought to have existed only in the distant past.

The report of his finding — Green”s first scientific paper — appears on the cover of the Oct. 7 issue of Nature.

“We didn”t think these galaxies existed. We”ve found they do, but they are extremely rare,” said Professor Karl Glazebrook, Green”s thesis supervisor and team leader.

The Swinburne researchers have likened the galaxies to the ”living dinosaurs” or Wollemi Pines of space — galaxies you just wouldn”t expect to find in today”s world.

“Their existence has changed our ideas about how star formation is fuelled and understanding star formation is important. Just look at the Big Bang, which is how we all got here,” Glazebrook said.

The galaxies in question look like disks, reminiscent of our own galaxy, but unlike the Milky Way they are physically turbulent and are forming many young stars.

“Such galaxies were thought to exist only in the distant past, ten billion years ago, when the Universe was less than half its present age,” Glazebrook said.

“Stars form from gas, and astronomers had proposed that the extremely fast star formation in those ancient galaxies was fuelled by a special mechanism that could exist only in the early Universe — cold streams of gas continually falling in.”

But finding the same kind of galaxy in today”s Universe means that that mechanism can”t be the only way such rapid star formation is fuelled. Instead it seems that when young stars form, they create turbulence in their surrounding gas. The more stars are forming in a galaxy, the more turbulence it has.

“Turbulence affects how fast stars form, so we”re seeing stars regulating their own formation,” Green said.

“It”s a bit like a little girl deciding how many siblings she should have.” “We still don”t know where the gas to make these stars comes from though,” he said.

Understanding star formation is one of the most basic, unsolved problems of astronomy. Another significant aspect of the paper is that it was authored by a PhD student.

As Glazebrook pointed out, being first author of a Nature paper as a student is as rare as the galaxies they”ve discovered. This is an achievement not lost on the young scientist.

“Nature is one of the most prestigious journals in science. It was a pleasant surprise for our work to receive this kind of accolade,” Green said.

The study was based on selected galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a kind of census of modern galaxies.

“We studied extreme galaxies to compare them with the ancient Universe,” Green said.

He observed them using the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the Australian National University”s 2.3 metre telescope, both located at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. Professor Matthew Colless, Director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory, which operates the AAT, said that the study highlighted the value of the instruments found at Australia”s telescopes.

“They are ideal for studying in detail the nearby counterparts of galaxies seen in the distant Universe by the eight and 10 metre telescopes,” he said.

For the next stage of his research, Green plans to use one of these 10 metre telescopes — in fact the largest optical telescope in the world at the Keck Observatory — to take an even closer look at the rare galaxies he has discovered.

Green admitted: “Really, we need a bigger telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope, to understand star formation. But, until it”s constructed, Keck is the best tool available.”

Green”s access to the Keck will be possible thanks to Swinburne”s agreement with Caltech, which gives the Swinburne astronomers access to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii for up to 20 nights per year.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Swinburne University of Technology.

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Journal Reference:

1. Andrew W. Green, Karl Glazebrook, Peter J. McGregor, Roberto G. Abraham, Gregory B. Poole, Ivana Damjanov, Patrick J. McCarthy, Matthew Colless, Robert G. Sharp. High star formation rates as the origin of turbulence in early and modern disk galaxies. Nature, 2010; 467 (7316): 684 DOI: 10.1038/nature09452

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007145136.htm

Turning Waste Heat Into Power

A “forest” of molecules holds the promise of turning waste heat into electricity. UA physicists discovered that because of quantum effects, electron waves traveling along the backbone of each molecule interfere with each other, leading to the buildup of a voltage between the hot and cold electrodes (the golden structures on the bottom and top). (Credit: Justin Bergfield, University of Arizona)

What do a car engine, a power plant, a factory and a solar panel have in common? They all generate heat — a lot of which is wasted.

University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power.

Using a theoretical model of a so-called molecular thermoelectric device, the technology holds great promise for making cars, power plants, factories and solar panels more efficient, to name a few possible applications. In addition, more efficient thermoelectric materials would make ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, obsolete.

The research group led by Charles Stafford, associate professor of physics, published its findings in the September issue of the scientific journal, ACS Nano.

“Thermoelectricity makes it possible to cleanly convert heat directly into electrical energy in a device with no moving parts,” said lead author Justin Bergfield, a doctoral candidate in the UA College of Optical Sciences.

“Our colleagues in the field tell us they are pretty confident that the devices we have designed on the computer can be built with the characteristics that we see in our simulations.”

“We anticipate the thermoelectric voltage using our design to be about 100 times larger than what others have achieved in the lab,” Stafford added.

Catching the energy lost through waste heat has been on the wish list of engineers for a long time but, so far, a concept for replacing existing devices that is both more efficient and economically competitive has been lacking.

Article Continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100930154610.htm