• New Tevatron collider result may help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe

    Updated: 2011-06-30 15:27:00
    About a year ago, the DZero collaboration at Fermilab published  a tantalizing result in which the universe unexpectedly showed a preference for matter over antimatter. Now the collaboration has more data, and the evidence for this effect has grown stronger. The result is extremely exciting: The question of why our universe should exist solely of [...]

  • Baseball superstitions put to the test

    Updated: 2011-06-30 14:15:00
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Self-driving cars get the go-ahead in Nevada News Picks home Baseball superstitions put to the test By Physics Today on June 30, 2011 10:15 AM No Comments No TrackBacks PhysOrg Lloyd Smith , an associate professor at Washington State University's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering , recently investigated three questions of relevance to major league baseball : Can a baseball be hit farther with a corked bat Is there evidence that the baseball is livelier today than in earlier years Can storing baseballs in a temperature- or humidity-controlled environment significantly affect home-run production Smith , working with

  • Self-driving cars get the go-ahead in Nevada

    Updated: 2011-06-30 14:00:00
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Dark matter may explain radio filaments at galaxy's center News Picks home Baseball superstitions put to the test Self-driving cars get the go-ahead in Nevada By Physics Today on June 30, 2011 10:00 AM No Comments No TrackBacks PC Magazine Earlier this month Nevada passed a bill that will require its Department of Motor Vehicles to draw up rules for autonomous vehicles , which the state defines as motor vehicles that use artificial intelligence , sensors , and GPS coordinates to drive themselves without the active intervention of a human operator . Google , which has been test-driving the cars since 2010, lobbied for the legislation ,

  • Strings 2011: Maldacena lost his marbles as well

    Updated: 2011-06-29 22:07:00
    : : Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 29 June 2011 Strings 2011 : Maldacena lost his marbles as well Maldacena's strings 2011 talk is about the wavefunction of the universe You have to be drunk to use the term , but you need to lose your marbles to give a complete talk about . it Seiberg's talk is as wrong and narcissistic as all the talks he gave since the 1990s . He lost his marbles already back then . His missionary zeal , combined with the nonsense he talks about , is . distressing Witten's talk on maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories is not about physics at all , but about knots . Witten shows again that he left physics for .

  • Dark matter may explain radio filaments at galaxy's center

    Updated: 2011-06-29 19:33:27
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar New Okinawa institute launches global recruiting effort News Picks home Dark matter may explain radio filaments at galaxy's center By Physics Today on June 29, 2011 3:33 PM No Comments No TrackBacks BBC Unexplained filaments of radio-wave emission close to our galaxy's center may hold proof of the existence of dark matter , writes Jason Palmer for the BBC . First discovered in the 1980s , the filaments are known to be regions of high magnetic fields , and they emit high-frequency radio waves . Now Dan Hooper at Fermilab and colleagues have posted a paper on the arXiv e-print server suggesting that the filaments' emission arises from

  • New Okinawa institute launches global recruiting effort

    Updated: 2011-06-29 19:26:24
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Working toward a nuclear clock News Picks home Dark matter may explain radio filaments at galaxy's center New Okinawa institute launches global recruiting effort By Physics Today on June 29, 2011 3:26 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Nature In 2001 the Japanese government launched an ambitious plan to build a world-class international research institute and graduate university in science and technology on Okinawa , one of the most southerly and remote islands in Japan . The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology OIST which has no departments and no professorial hierarchy , promises scientists the freedom to pursue their own research .

  • Working toward a nuclear clock

    Updated: 2011-06-29 17:42:07
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar SOFIA successfully observes Pluto occultation News Picks home New Okinawa institute launches global recruiting effort Working toward a nuclear clock By Physics Today on June 29, 2011 1:42 PM No Comments No TrackBacks New Scientist Atomic clocks , the most accurate clocks to date , use the visible light or microwave signals that atoms predictably emit when one of their electrons drops from a high-energy state to a lower-energy state . The signals are so regular that atomic clocks are used to define the length of a second . In principle , the radiation emitted when an atomic nucleus changes from a high-energy state to a lower-energy

  • Fermilab Unravels More About Neutrino Mystery

    Updated: 2011-06-29 16:17:52
    Right when you thought that Fermilab was a thing of the past, new work with neutrinos are exciting us all over again. The scientists associated with the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory just announced their findings of a rare phenomena – the transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. [...]

  • Physicists seek to quantify macroscopic quantum states

    Updated: 2011-06-29 14:20:01
    Javascript is currently not supported or disabled by this browser . Please enable Javascript for full . functionality Science and technology news Home Nanotechnology Physics Space Earth Electronics Technology Chemistry Biology Medicine Health Other Sciences General Physics Condensed Matter Optics Photonics Superconductivity Plasma Physics Soft Matter Quantum Physics Physicists seek to quantify macroscopic quantum states June 29, 2011 by Lisa Zyga article comments 2 text-to-speech loading Download mp3 iTunes podcast Latest podcasts About share Tweet Share to facebook Reddit Google Delicious Slashdot Yahoo bookmarks Windows Live RSS QR code PhysOrg.com Scientists have been interested in generating and observing macroscopic quantum superpositions in order to test quantum mechanics at the

  • SOFIA successfully observes Pluto occultation

    Updated: 2011-06-28 16:30:54
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Elders offer help at Japan's crippled reactor News Picks home SOFIA successfully observes Pluto occultation By Physics Today on June 28, 2011 12:30 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Astronomy On 23 June NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy SOFIA observed Pluto's passage in front of a distant star . Planetery occultations when a star is hidden by a planet that passes between it and the observer that involve Pluto allow astronomers to study the dwarf planet's atmospheric pressure , density , and temperature profiles . SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft carrying a 100-inch telescope it operates in the stratosphere and

  • Elders offer help at Japan's crippled reactor

    Updated: 2011-06-28 16:00:28
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Computer climate models fall short News Picks home SOFIA successfully observes Pluto occultation Elders offer help at Japan's crippled reactor By Physics Today on June 28, 2011 12:00 PM No Comments No TrackBacks New York Times The Skilled Veteran Corps has been both lionized as a group of self-sacrificing patriots and derided as a would-be suicide corps , writes Ken Belson for the New York Times The man who founded it , however , has neither extreme in mind he simply thinks that it would be a good idea for retired engineers and other specialists with applicable skills to assist with the cleanup efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi power

  • Computer climate models fall short

    Updated: 2011-06-28 15:30:35
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar New reality show promotes innovative stove for developing world News Picks home Elders offer help at Japan's crippled reactor Computer climate models fall short By Physics Today on June 28, 2011 11:30 AM No Comments No TrackBacks BBC Precise prediction of catastrophic climate events remains impossible for even the best computer models , according to Paul Valdes of Bristol University in the UK . Models have not been able to predict at least four major transformations in the past : the rapidly rising temperatures of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum , the drying trend over North Africa , the serial weakening or shutting down of the

  • Eliminating the Higgs - with the Tunnel of Babylon

    Updated: 2011-06-28 08:39:00
    : Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 28 June 2011 Eliminating the Higgs with the Tunnel of Babylon According to this talk by CERN's Fabio Zwirner 1 inverse femtobarn is sufficient to eliminate a Higgs above 120 GeV . Now , the LHC has achieved that value a few days ago . So I am looking forward to the corresponding data analysis Above all , I am looking forward to see the faces of CERN managers when they will admit that there is no Higgs boson . And to the Homeric laughter that will follow across the world . The LHC will then be renamed Tunnel of Babylon The expression is my copyright . Or are the holding back the result already , to avoid

  • Strings 2011

    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 →

  • Fermilab experiment weighs in on neutrino mystery

    Updated: 2011-06-27 19:40:36
    This article first appeared in symmetry breaking June 24. Step by step, physicists are moving closer to understanding the evolution of our universe.  Neutrinos — among the most abundant particles in the universe –  could have played a critical role in the unfolding of the universe right after the big bang. They are strong candidates [...]

  • Gene editing used to treat hemophilia in mice

    Updated: 2011-06-27 19:20:13
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Wildfire triggers evacuation for Los Alamos laboratory News Picks home Gene editing used to treat hemophilia in mice By Physics Today on June 27, 2011 3:20 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Nature Genetic diseases such as hemophilia may one day be treated through a gene-editing process . Katherine High , a hemophilia researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia , teamed up with researchers at Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond , California , who are experts on enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases ZFNs They treated hemophilia in mice that were engineered to carry the faulty human gene the researchers used ZFNs as molecular scissors to

  • Wildfire triggers evacuation for Los Alamos laboratory

    Updated: 2011-06-27 19:00:13
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Flap-running in birds is key to flight evolution News Picks home Gene editing used to treat hemophilia in mice Wildfire triggers evacuation for Los Alamos laboratory By Physics Today on June 27, 2011 3:00 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Chicago Tribune The Las Conchas fire in New Mexico has spread to within one mile of Los Alamos National Laboratory , and voluntary evacuations have been issued for the towns of Los Alamos and nearby White Rock . New Mexico governor Susana Martinez dispatched the National Guard to assist with evacuation efforts . The fire started Sunday afternoon about 12 miles southwest of Los Alamos and spread over

  • Flap-running in birds is key to flight evolution

    Updated: 2011-06-27 18:51:12
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar NASA autonomous lander completes test flight News Picks home Wildfire triggers evacuation for Los Alamos laboratory Flap-running in birds is key to flight evolution By Physics Today on June 27, 2011 2:51 PM No Comments No TrackBacks BBC Adult birds will often flap their wings and run up steep inclines rather than fly over them . Brandon Jackson of the University of Montana wanted to know why birds capable of flight use the flap-run motion , writes Victoria Gill for the BBC . To measure birds' muscle activity , Jackson and his colleagues implanted electrodes into the flight muscles of pigeons . They found that , for birds , running up a

  • NASA autonomous lander completes test flight

    Updated: 2011-06-27 16:48:14
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Glitches delay NIF's ignition tests News Picks home Flap-running in birds is key to flight evolution NASA autonomous lander completes test flight By Physics Today on June 27, 2011 12:48 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Daily Mail Earlier this month a robotic lander successfully flew up to 7 feet for 27 seconds during testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center . The lander , about the size of a golf cart , is powered by a green propellant , hydrogen peroxide . The test proved the lander could execute commands autonomously , such as hover for an extended period , control its position and orientation , and land successfully . Such

  • Strands, data and gender

    Updated: 2011-06-27 07:36:00
    : , Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 27 June 2011 Strands , data and gender Have a look at the comments on the strand model at this . blog A few people say about the strand model that it is sketchy outrageous and speculative This is the modern world : feelings and opinions instead of . facts When I point out that there are hard predictions of Schiller's strand model that match the data , the answer is that these predictions are not new . Wow it is suggested that a model has to make new predictions to be taken seriously . But nature does not work that way nature is as she . is Ervin points out that there are other ideas to keep the standard

  • CERN mug summarizes Standard Model, but is off by a factor of 2

    Updated: 2011-06-26 19:13:44
    Last month had the unique pleasure of making my first trip to CERN (more on that in a later post). I made a point to stop by the CERN gift shop to pick up a snazzy mug to show off to my colleagues back in the US, and am now the proud owner of a [...]

  • Fermilab experiment weighs in on neutrino mystery

    Updated: 2011-06-24 22:55:33
    Scientists of the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today the results from a search for a rare phenomenon, the transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. The result is consistent with and significantly constrains a measurement reported 10 days ago by the Japanese T2K experiment, which announced an indication of this type of transformation.

  • Glitches delay NIF's ignition tests

    Updated: 2011-06-24 20:03:38
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Lunar study casts doubt on why the Moon glows News Picks home Glitches delay NIF's ignition tests By Physics Today on June 24, 2011 4:03 PM No Comments No TrackBacks New York Times The 3.5 billion National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has delayed the next set of experiments for six months to install new safety equipment . At NIF , 192 powerful lasers are trained on a pea-sized pellet of hydrogen isotopes , which is heated to more than 100 million degrees to fuse the atoms together and release nuclear energy . Among the challenges faced is the unanticipated presence of particles that clog filters designed

  • Lunar study casts doubt on why the Moon glows

    Updated: 2011-06-24 19:58:01
    Physics Today News Picks A blog of hand-picked science news from the staff of Physics Today Home Print edition Advertising Buyers Guide Jobs Events calendar Graphite-coated sand could clean up dirty drinking water News Picks home Glitches delay NIF's ignition tests Lunar study casts doubt on why the Moon glows By Physics Today on June 24, 2011 3:58 PM No Comments No TrackBacks Science Many planets with an atmosphere have a faint illumination or glow that can be seen on the horizon . Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell saw something similar when his spacecraft went around the Moon in 1968, but the Moon has no atmosphere to catch the Sun's rays and create such a spectacle . Data collected by the Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites LEAM experiment , placed on the Moon in 1972, suggested that lunar dust

  • No electroweak unification and no electroweak interaction

    Updated: 2011-06-24 16:35:00
    : Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 24 June 2011 No electroweak unification and no electroweak interaction Why do so many people think that the electromagnetic and the weak interaction have been unified They have not . The two interactions mix because the W boson is charged . But they are not unified The two interactions still have two unrelated coupling . constants Yes , the coupling constants are related via the W and Z masses . But the argument remains : the two interactions are not unified in the standard . model It is wrong to say that there is an electroweak interaction . Posted by Clara , alias Nemo at 16:35 Email This BlogThis Share to

  • Repelling atoms reach quantum unison more easily

    Updated: 2011-06-24 02:19:21
    Experiments show that an ultracold gas will condense to a coherent state at a higher temperature when its atoms repel each other. Published Thu Jun 23, 2011

  • Odd topological superconductor

    Updated: 2011-06-24 02:19:20
    The superconducting behavior of a topological insulator changes when copper is inserted between its layers. Published Thu Jun 23, 2011

  • Pairing in nuclei

    Updated: 2011-06-24 02:19:19
    Paired states between neutrons and protons were thought to only occur in nuclei beyond the proton dripline, but calculations suggest they may be seen in stable nuclei, too. Published Thu Jun 23, 2011

  • An Ear for Science: The Particle Physics Wind Chime

    Updated: 2011-06-23 21:12:36
    Like particle physicists the world over, Stanford's Matt Bellis is always looking for ways to share his research with the public. "I had the idea of the BaBar detector as an instrument," Bellis said, but not one played by human hands. It would be played by the particles gusting through it, like wind through a wind chime.

  • Evidence of a QCD critical endpoint at RHIC

    Updated: 2011-06-21 20:47:06
    A critical endpoint in QCD is a kind of holy grail in nuclear physics. It has been theorized as a point where deconfinement occurs and hadronic matter leaves place to some kind of plasma of quarks and gluons. We know that the breaking of chiral symmetry is something that people has proposed several years ago [...]

  • Tribute to Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel medical physicist

    Updated: 2011-06-21 19:05:51
    Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, who passed away last month on May 30, was a mother, wife, educator, and dedicated medical physicist. She received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1977 while working for the Veterans Administration Hospital in New York for her contributions to the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones. Today scientists utilize this technology to further diagnostics in the medical field for cancer research and Type II diabetes.

  • Not your usual NMR

    Updated: 2011-06-21 10:47:02
    Researchers have detected spin flips of a single proton, a first step toward precision measurements of the antiproton’s spin magnetic moment. Published Mon Jun 20, 2011

  • Helicity, Chirality, Mass, and the Higgs

    Updated: 2011-06-20 06:14:40
    We’ve been discussing the Higgs (its interactions, its role in particle mass, and its vacuum expectation value) as part of our ongoing series on understanding the Standard Model with Feynman diagrams. Now I’d like to take a post to discuss a very subtle feature of the Standard Model: its chiral structure and the meaning of [...]

  • "Beyond the standard model" - really?

    Updated: 2011-06-19 06:25:00
    : Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 19 June 2011 Beyond the standard model really The expression beyond the standard model is so common that it even has a wikipedia entry though a badly written one But why is the expression so common Beyond is such a simple word . Most people thing that there must be something beyond what we know . But is that true Are there speed values beyond the speed of light Beyond implies that what we know is incomplete . But is that true So far , the LHC is telling us . otherwise Beyond often implies that what comes after is some extension of the standard model Now this is really a heavy statement . Also for this

  • J-PARC issued a press release on T2K experiment

    Updated: 2011-06-18 09:46:10
    J-PARC announced that the international T2K collaboration have observed, for the first time, an indication of a neutrino oscillation from a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino. Please see J-PARC press release for detail. http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2011/J-PARC_T2Kneutrino.html

  • Japanese neutrino observation a boon for U.S. physics

    Updated: 2011-06-17 20:54:56
    The Japan-based experiment T2K Tuesday gave scores of U.S. particle hunters a license to ready their detectors and take aim at the biggest question in the universe: How everything we see came to exist.

  • Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She's Not Controversial, She's Right | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-06-17 17:55:00
    : ,

  • LHC experiments reach record data milestone

    Updated: 2011-06-17 15:09:59
    As of this week, the Large Hadron Collider has delivered 1 inverse femtobarn of integrated luminosity to ATLAS and CMS, two of the four experimental stations housed along the ring. This means the detectors will have gathered data from about 70 trillion proton-proton collisions. For comparison, the experiments collected just 45 inverse picobarns in all of 2010; 1 inverse femtobarn is equal to one thousand inverse picobarns.

  • The DNA also collapses

    Updated: 2011-06-17 01:37:42
    Large electric fields, alternating at hundreds of hertz, cause DNA molecules to collapse, the opposite of previous observations that they stretch out at higher and lower frequencies. Published Thu Jun 16, 2011

  • Two is good, four is better

    Updated: 2011-06-17 01:37:42
    Connections relating mathematical models of quantum particles in four and two spacetime dimensions could simplify calculations in quantum field theories. Published Thu Jun 16, 2011

  • Single photons obey the speed limits

    Updated: 2011-06-17 01:37:41
    Observations of single photons traveling through cold atomic gases confirm that information can only travel as fast as the speed of light. Published Thu Jun 16, 2011

  • TAUWER aims for cosmic heights

    Updated: 2011-06-16 20:25:03
    The origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is a question that makes it onto many top-unsolved-problems-in-physics lists. Scientists are proposing a new experiment, called TAUWER, that would look to tau neutrinos to remove some of the mystery from these strange, over-stimulated cosmic rays.

  • This Week’s Hype

    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 →

  • String theory may hold answers about quark-gluon plasma

    Updated: 2011-06-15 20:36:35
    Recreating the conditions present just after the Big Bang has given experimentalists a glimpse into how the universe formed. Now, scientists have begun to see striking similarities between the properties of the early universe and a theory that aims to unite gravity with quantum mechanics, a long-standing goal for physicists.

  • Japan’s T2K experiment observes candidates for electron neutrino appearance

    Updated: 2011-06-15 16:04:15
    The T2K experiment in Japan has observed six particle events that indicate the oscillation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos, a long-sought signal that allows scientists to better understand a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations. For a long time scientists have suspected that the three known types of neutrinos can morph into each other. Several [...]

  • Evolution of the universe in four *spatial* dimensions

    Updated: 2011-06-15 09:56:10
    TweetWe have shown throughout the Imagineer’s Chronicles there are many theoretical advantages to defining the universe in terms a continuous non-quantized field of energy/mass and four *spatial* dimensions instead of four-dimensional space-time. One is that it would allow one to quantifiably derive the origins of our present universe in terms of a cycle of expansions [...]

  • Vital Signs: Brain Got Your Tongue? | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-06-15 00:15:00
    :

  • Why We Need the Higgs, or Something Like It | Cosmic Variance

    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 [...]

  • A Giant Mine's Glorious Second Life as a Physics lab | DISCOVER Magazine

    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...

  • 20 Things You Didn't Know About...: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About... DNA | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-06-13 16:40:00
    .

  • New place to search for Efimov states

    Updated: 2011-06-10 21:45:52
    Three-body bound states, known to form among spherically symmetric atoms, should also exist for dipole molecules. Published Fri Jun 10, 2011

  • Twist or twirl

    Updated: 2011-06-10 21:45:51
    Depending on their width, certain ribbon-forming biomolecules assume either twisted or spiral shapes. Published Fri Jun 10, 2011

  • Nesting questions

    Updated: 2011-06-10 21:45:50
    Experiments chip away at the assumption that Fermi-surface nesting is key to superconductivity in iron-based superconductors. Published Fri Jun 10, 2011

  • D0 Decides to be Debbie Downers | Cosmic Variance

    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 [...]

  • Math and Physics, Summer 2011

    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 →

  • The Quantum Story

    Updated: 2011-06-09 00:04:53
    Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments is now out here and I’ve been starting to see it in bookstores. I read most of it a year or two ago when he sent me a draft of … Continue reading →

  • Changing repulsion into attraction with the quantum Hippy Hippy Shake

    Updated: 2011-06-06 21:27:08
    A quick-acting ac field may change the repulsive interaction in a system of correlated electrons to an attractive one. Published Mon Jun 06, 2011

  • Lightning Unleashes Antimatter Storms | DISCOVER Magazine

    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

  • The standard model holds up to at least 1 TeV

    Updated: 2011-06-04 07:30:00
    : Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 4 June 2011 The standard model holds The first 2011 results from the LHC are coming in . In June 2011, the LHC collected much more than 10 times the data collected in 2010. The first published results confirm the predictions by the spaghetti model : no deviations were . found The investment in the LHC , over 7 billion Swiss Francs , starts looking like the investments in Maddoff's Ponzi scheme : a total loss . Posted by Clara , alias Nemo at 07:30 Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz 0 comments : Post a Comment Older Post Home Subscribe to : Post Comments Atom Fixed

  • A hierarchy of wrinkles

    Updated: 2011-06-03 13:56:08
    Thin sheets of length scales ranging from graphene to paper are shown to exhibit a universal behavior of self-similar wrinkling patterns. Published Thu Jun 02, 2011

  • Laws of the rings

    Updated: 2011-06-03 13:56:08
    Ring formation in polymerization offers new insight into the formation of giant polymer clusters. Published Thu Jun 02, 2011

  • Relative absurdity

    Updated: 2011-06-03 06:48:00
    Have fun, read arXiv:1106.0313 "Relative locality: A deepening of the relativity principle". It proves that four established physicists are able to write a paper without a single sensible idea.If their teaching is as bad as their research, their students are having a really bad time ...

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