Updated: 2011-06-30 10:22:40
Today’s physics news: science in Africa – Lands of promise and one step closer to a nuclear timekeeper Science in Africa: Lands of promise Africa’s nations are achieving some success in building their science capacity, but the foundations remain unsteady. Nature One step closer to a nuclear timekeeper If the tick of a super-precise nuclear [...]
Updated: 2011-06-29 10:44:25
A great video you the perspective on quantum mechanical tunneling. Related posts:Physics video of the week: Could that actually happen? The bus jump from Speed (0)Physics video of the week: Vox pops – what’s it like to work at CERN (0)New video: Funding the frontiers of materials science (0)
Updated: 2011-06-29 10:29:47
Today’s physics news: China and UK strike space deal, Astronauts shelter from space debris and UK research chief defends ‘blacklisting’ of grant applicants China and UK strike space deal Chinese and UK companies have agreed a deal that will result in three high-resolution Earth observation spacecraft being built to map China’s extraordinary growth from orbit. [...]
Updated: 2011-06-28 01:16:20
Strings 2011 started today in Uppsala, with attendance quite a bit lower than in the past (259 registered participants, versus 500 or so at some of the past such conferences). One reason for this may be the high conference cost … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-22 15:30:58
Scientific American is running a Bad Boy of Physics story (also see here) in the July issue, about Lenny Susskind. Here’s the “nut graph”: Physicists seeking to understand the deepest levels of reality now work within a framework largely of … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-21 23:50:37
Updated: 2011-06-20 02:40:00
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Updated: 2011-06-19 15:00:00
When Sada Mire was just 12, her father, a Somali police official, was executed by the country’s brutal Barre regime, which saw him as a political threat. In 1991 she fled Somalia, reuniting with family in Sweden and eventually pursuing graduate studies in England. But while working on her Ph.D. in archaeology from University College London, Mire’s academic interests drew her back to Africa. She returned to her homeland for the first time in 16 years to carry out research in Somaliland—a relatively peaceful, self-declared state in the northwestern part of Somalia—where she discovered several prehistoric rock art sites. In 2007 she was named Somaliland’s Director of Antiquities. Mire hopes to spur interest in the region’s cultural heritage, using the past to foster peace and understanding among her people today...
Photo: Graham Trott; grooming: Claire Hanson
Updated: 2011-06-17 21:22:39
The House committee responsible for the DOE budget has passed a FY2012 appropriations bill, details here. Total funding for DOE Science is down .9% from FY2011 at $4.8 billion. HEP gets a .2 percent increase, Biological and Environmental Research is … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-16 19:25:00
Societies grow through slow, incremental change, but their collapse can be sudden and dramatic. That is one intriguing lesson from a recent study of diverse cultures across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands by University College London anthropologist Tom Currie. The research aims to settle a major anthropological debate over whether political systems develop the same way regardless of culture; the results suggest that some aspects of political development are in fact universal...
It took a sophisticated well-organized society to produce Prambanan, Java's largest temple complex.iStockphoto
Updated: 2011-06-16 01:36:39
Last month’s Quark Matter 2011 conference was a venue for discussion of new results from the first heavy-ion run at LHC energies last fall. I’ve looked a bit at the slides of the talks, but this is an area far … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-15 00:15:00
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Updated: 2011-06-14 22:25:10
In the comments to the previous post, Monty asks a perfectly good question, which can be shortened to: “Is the Higgs boson really necessary?” The answer is a qualified “yes” — we need the Higgs boson, or something like it. That is, we can’t simply take the Standard Model as we know it and extend [...]
Updated: 2011-06-14 08:30:00
The Moment Scientists and engineers inspect a cavern nearly a mile beneath the surface at the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake in Lead, South Dakota. After the mine’s closure was announced in 2000, researchers successfully petitioned to turn it into a lab. The site has contributed to science before: From 1965 until the late 1990s, this cavern housed a Nobel Prize–winning neutrino experiment...
Updated: 2011-06-13 22:00:41
A review that I wrote of David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics is now available at American Scientist. A quick summary is that I think it’s a marvelous book, telling in well-researched and entertaining fashion a story I’ve always … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-13 03:07:40
One of this year’s Spinoza Prizes goes to Erik Verlinde. It comes with 2.5 million euros to fund the prize-winner’s research. Last fall Verlinde received a 2 million euro ERC Advanced Grant to fund his research program, so that’s a … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-10 17:40:18
Alliterative title stolen shamelessly from the lovely and understanding Jennifer Ouellette, who blogs background about the hunt for new particles at Discovery News. So here we have science, marching on. Just last week we heard that CDF, one of the big experiments at the Tevatron at Fermilab, had collected more data relevant to a mysterious [...]
Updated: 2011-06-10 00:51:45
This week in Philadelphia the String-Math 2011 conference is going on, planned as the first of a series, with String-Math 2012 next summer in Bonn. Slides of the talks are appearing here. There’s also supposed to be video, but the … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-09 19:28:56
I’ve updated the blog a bit, to a newer, widgetized theme. Functionality should be the same as before. The only issue I’m aware of now is that the “Archives” widget adds an annoying character below its header which I can’t … Continue reading →
Updated: 2011-06-08 21:00:00
Kahuna’s got it rough. Last August, the 183-pound sea turtle washed up near Hutchinson Island, Florida, after a shark clipped off nearly 60 percent of her front left flipper, resulting in a persistent bone infection. After nine months of various medical treatments, including surgery, antibiotics, and vitamins, she is still struggling to recuperate at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach. Yet all hope is not lost: Veterinarians have begun using hyperbaric oxygen therapy to breathe new life into her ailing limb.
So just what is this new treatment?
In the 1940s, the U.S. military developed hyperbaric oxygen therapy to treat deep-sea divers suffering from decompression sickness, aka the bends...
Updated: 2011-06-06 08:55:00
For Kirk Borne, the information revolution began 11 years ago while he was working at NASA’s National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At a conference, another astronomer asked him if the center could archive a terabyte of data that had been collected from the MACHO sky survey, a project designed to study mysterious cosmic bodies that emit very little light or other radiation. Nowadays, plenty of desktop computers can store a terabyte on a hard drive. But when Borne ran the request up the flagpole, his boss almost choked. “That’s impossible!” he told Borne. “Don’t you realize that the entire data set NASA has collected over the past 45 years is one terabyte?”
“That’s when the lightbulb went off,” says Borne, who is now an associate professor of computational and data sciences at George Mason University. “That single experiment had produced as much data as the previous 15,000 experiments. I realized then that we needed to do something not only to make all that data available to scientists but also to enable scientific discovery from all that information.”
The tools of astronomy have changed drastically over just the past generation, and our picture of the universe has changed with them. Gone are the days of photographic plates that recorded the sky snapshot by painstaking snapshot. Today more than a dozen observatories on Earth and in space let researchers eyeball vast swaths of the universe in multiple wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays. And with the advent of digital detectors, computers have replaced darkrooms. These new capabilities provide a much more meaningful way to understand our place in the cosmos, but they have also unleashed a baffling torrent of data. Amazing discoveries might be in sight, yet hidden within all the information.
Since 2000, the $85 million Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico has imaged more than one-third of the night sky, capturing information on more than 930,000 galaxies and 120,000 quasars. Computational analysis of Sloan’s prodigious data set has uncovered evidence of some of the earliest known astronomical objects, determined that most large galaxies harbor supermassive black holes, and even mapped out the three-dimensional structure of the local universe. “Before Sloan, individual researchers or small groups dominated astronomy,” says Robert Brunner, an astronomy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “You’d go to a telescope, get your data, and analyze it. Then Sloan came along, and suddenly there was this huge data set designed for one thing, but people were using it for all kinds of other interesting things. So you have this sea change in astronomy that allows people who aren’t affiliated with a project to ask entirely new questions.”
A new generation of sky surveys promises to catalog literally billions and billions of astronomical objects. Trouble is, there are not enough graduate students in the known universe to classify all of them. When the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Cerro Pachón, Chile, aims its 3.2-
billion-pixel digital camera (the world’s largest) at the night sky in 2019, it will capture an area 49 times as large as the moon in each 15-second exposure, 2,000 times a night. Those snapshots will be stitched together over a decade to eventually form a motion picture of half the visible sky. The LSST, producing 30 terabytes of data nightly, will become the centerpiece of what some experts have dubbed the age of petascale astronomy—that’s 1015 bits (what Borne jokingly calls “a tonabytes”)...</p
Image: Contrasting views of the Lagoon nebula. Top: Infrared observations from the Paranal Observatory in Chile cut through dust and gas to reveal a crisp view of baby stars within. Bottom: A similar view in visible light appears opaque. Courtesy of ESO and VVV
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Updated: 2011-06-06 08:00:00
The powerful blasts of particles and light energy known as gamma-ray bursts come from violent cosmic events in deep space, such as stellar explosions and black hole collisions. But smaller-scale bursts called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) can occur much closer to home, erupting thousands of times a year in association with lightning strikes during storms in Earth’s atmosphere. Two satellites originally designed to observe gamma rays from space recently caught the atmospheric flares in action, revealing that they emit far more energy than previously thought and release streams of antimatter particles, which bear a charge opposite that of their normal counterparts.
In a study of 130 TGFs recorded by the AGILE satellite, Italian Space Agency physicist Marco Tavani and colleagues report that the most energetic particles released carry four times as much energy as previous measurements detected, and hundreds of times as much as those produced by normal lightning strikes. In fact, Tavani describes a storm hurling photons into AGILE’s detectors as basically a giant particle accelerator in the sky. “It’s the equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider acting in the atmosphere for a fraction of a second,” he says. Next, Tavani plans to evaluate how TGFs might affect aircraft flying nearby...
Some high-powered lightning strikes produce unusual forms of matter.iStockphoto
