Harihar Behera, Gautam Mukhopadhyay The invariance of the speed of light in all inertial frames – the second postulate of special theory of relativity (STR) – is shown to be an inevitable consequence of the relativity principle of special theory of relativity taken in conjunction with the homogeneity of space and time in all inertial… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
Helge Kragh By 1930, at a time when the new physics based on relativity and quantum theory had reached a state of consolidation, problems of a foundational kind began to abound. Physicists began to speak of a new “crisis” and envisage a forthcoming “revolution” of a scale similar to the one in the mid-1920s. The… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
by Lisa Grossman - newscientist.com Dark matter is slowly running out of places to hide. Two new looks at the gamma-ray sky suggest that if the mysterious matter is a particle, it is heavier than 40 gigaelectronvolts, about 44 times the mass of a proton. That contradicts hints from three experiments on Earth that pointed to a lightweight dark matter… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
By Ted Greenwald - www.wired.com Eminent physicist Paul Davies has a proposal for you: a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. As it’s typically conceived, a round-trip Mars mission would take about two years and cost at least $80 billion. But you could cut 80 percent of the expense, Davies says, by nixing the return and… [Read more…]
November 30, 2011
BY STEPHEN CLARK SPACEFLIGHT NOW Plagued by an undiagnosed problem that stranded it in Earth orbit, Russia’s Phobos-Grunt Mars mission remained quiet Tuesday after renewed attempts to coax the craft back into contact with ground controllers. European Space Agency officials transmitted signals to raise Phobos-Grunt’s orbit Tuesday in hopes it would allow greater communications opportunities… [Read more…]
November 29, 2011
Light on Mars? Curiosity rover to fire ‘million bulb torch’ at planet’s surface to see if it’s habitable The Mars lander will fire a laser beam with the energy of a million lightbulbs at the surface of the red planet to see whether or not it could have supported life. The international team of space… [Read more…]
November 29, 2011
… and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth Keith B. Wiley It has been widely acknowledged that self-replicating space-probes (SRPs) could explore the galaxy very quickly relative to the age of the galaxy. An obvious implication is that SRPs produced by extraterrestrial civilizations should have arrived in our solar system millions of years ago, and furthermore, that… [Read more…]
November 28, 2011
Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic Abstract Recently, the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum was proposed as alternative to the dark matter paradigm. In the present paper we consider four benchmark measurements: the universality of the central surface density of galaxy dark matter haloes, the cored dark matter haloes in dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the nonexistence of dark… [Read more…]
November 28, 2011
Peter Barthel Happy end-of-the-year evening and night events provide good opportunities to explain the phases of the moon. The need for such moon phase education is once again demonstrated, through an investigation of illustrations on Santa Claus and Christmas gift wrap and in children’s books, in two countries which have been important in shaping the… [Read more…]
November 28, 2011
You wait decades for discoveries that could revolutionise physics, then three come along at once “THE universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose,” as geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once remarked. In recent decades, physicists have done their best to prove Haldane wrong, by supposing some very queer… [Read more…]
November 27, 2011
Liang-Cheng Tu and Jun Luo Abstract Coulomb’s Law is a fundamental principle describing the electric force between isolated charges, and represents the first quantitative law achieved in electromagnetism. The degree of confidence with which the law is experimentally known to hold was investigated after the law was put forth by Coulomb in 1785. The electrodynamics… [Read more…]
November 27, 2011
A video tribute to Carl Sagan — and to Earth, our one and only home … Upon seeing the above image of planet Earth, photographed from 4 billion miles away by Voyager 1, astronomer Carl Sagan was so moved that he wrote out his thoughts about the deeper meaning of this photograph. He later read… [Read more…]
November 26, 2011
NASA began a historic voyage to Mars with the Nov. 26 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, which carries a car-sized rover named Curiosity. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V rocket occurred at 10:02 a.m. EST (7:02 a.m. PST). http://youtu.be/qmJO449R_5g “We are very excited about sending the world’s most advanced… [Read more…]
November 25, 2011
Watch live streaming video from spaceflightnow at livestream.com http://youtu.be/P4boyXQuUIw Mars rover Curiosity poised for Nasa’s ‘most ambitious’ mission to planet The rover, part of the Mars Science Laboratory, will probe the Red Planet’s secrets with a wide array of scientific instruments Richard Luscombe A vehicle the size of a small 4×4,is about to embark on a one-way 350m-mile trip… [Read more…]
November 25, 2011
Satoshi Furukawa plays a little ball on his own when he has free time. http://youtu.be/kmnVrW7vGeQ
November 24, 2011
A Two-Tiered Approach to Assessing the Habitability of Exoplanets EARTH SIMILARITY INDEX Earth – 1.00 Gliese 581g – 0.89 Gliese 581d – 0.74 Gliese 581c – 0.70 Mars – 0.70 Mercury – 0.60 HD 69830 d – 0.60 55 Cnc c – 0.56 Moon – 0.56 Gliese 581e – 0.53 PLANET HABITABILITY INDEX Titan –… [Read more…]
November 23, 2011
Producing time-lapse video onboard the International Space Station while orbiting 250 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour helps people follow along on our missions, not as spectators, but as fellow crewmembers. — Ron Garan, NASA Astronaut, Expedition 27 & 28 For the whole story: fragileoasis.org Photography from the International Space Station: Expedition… [Read more…]
November 23, 2011
Contact has finally been made with Russia’s troubled Mars mission, says the European Space Agency (Esa)……….. Read more: www.bbc.co.uk and www.space.com
November 23, 2011
Sophia Jane Balkoski, Laksh Bhasin, Milly KeQi Wang Near-Earth Asteroids can be hazardous to the Earth, due to their orbital characteristics and proximity to inner Solar System planets. Using three sets of CCD images collected in June and July 2011, the orbital elements of asteroid 1994 PC1 were determined at solar opposition. The body’s specific… [Read more…]
November 22, 2011
Starting from the behavior of small flames in the laboratory, a team of researchers has gained new insights into the titanic forces that drive Type Ia supernova explosions. These stellar explosions are important tools for studying the evolution of the universe, so a better understanding of how they behave would help answer some of the… [Read more…]
November 22, 2011
The landing and post-landing activities in Kazakhstan of the Soyuz spacecraft and its crew of Mike Fossum, Satoshi Furukawa and Sergei Volkov are highlighted. http://youtu.be/fORo5XeK4DU www.bbc.co.uk
November 21, 2011
At sunset, the sky is often painted with an array of oranges, reds and yellows, and even some shades of pink. There are, however, occasions when a green flash appears above the solar disc for a second or so. One such occurrence was captured beautifully in this picture taken from Cerro Paranal, a 2600-metre-high mountain… [Read more…]
November 21, 2011
A controversial new explanation for the powerful magnetic fields inside neutrons stars could solve several outstanding problems in astrophysics Pulsar are among the most exotic things in the Universe. These objects are rotating neutron stars emitting radiation from their magnetic poles. They appear to pulse because the magnetic axis is not aligned with the axis… [Read more…]
November 20, 2011
D. Nanopoulos Abstract Recent developments/efforts to understand aspects of the brain function at the subneural level are discussed. MicroTubules (MTs), protein polymers constructing the cytoskeleton, participate in a wide variety of dynamical processes in the cell. Of special interest to us is the MTs participation in bioinformation processes such as learning and memory, by possessing… [Read more…]
November 20, 2011
THE earliest stars may have been less than half as large as previously thought. The new size limit could resolve one of astronomy’s oldest mysteries: why some elements are more abundant than theory predicts. In the first hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, the earliest stars formed from atomic hydrogen, helium and… [Read more…]
November 20, 2011
The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers. Eugenie Samuel Reich At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on… [Read more…]
November 19, 2011
…. Suggestive Correlations in the ATLAS and CMS High Jet Multiplicity Data Tianjun Li, James A. Maxin, Dimitri V. Nanopoulos, Joel W. Walker We present persistently amassing evidence that the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations may indeed be already registering supersymmetry events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our analysis is performed in the context of… [Read more…]
November 18, 2011
Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
November 18, 2011
Jupiter map realised in 2011, between October 10th and October 15th at the Pic du Midi Observatory Jupiter observed with the 1 meter Telescope at the Pic du Midi observatory, and a Basler Scout Camera. Crédit : S2P / IMCCE / OPM / JL Dauvergne / Elie Rousset / Eric Meza / Philippe Tosi /… [Read more…]
November 18, 2011
Tantalising hints of the Higgs boson will be confirmed or ruled out at the LHC in the coming months, say researchers by Ιan Sample Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva are edging ever closer to answering one of the most profound questions in particle physics: does the Higgs boson exist? Speaking at a… [Read more…]
November 18, 2011
OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso UPDATE 18 November 2011 Following the OPERA collaboration’s presentation at CERN on 23 September, inviting scrutiny of their neutrino time-of-flight measurement from the broader particle physics community, the collaboration has rechecked many aspects of its analysis and taken into account valuable… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
New details about the birth of a famous black hole that took place millions of years ago have been uncovered, thanks to a team of scientists who used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as from radio, optical and other X-ray telescopes. Over three decades ago, Stephen Hawking placed — and eventually lost… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
http://youtu.be/kjxg6MgTH-s By Jonathan Amos A Chinese spacecraft has returned to Earth after completing the nation’s first docking manoeuvres in orbit. The Shenzhou 8 capsule landed in the Gobi desert late on Thursday (Beijing time), the final moments of its descent having being slowed by parachute. While in orbit, the unmanned Shenzhou mission had rendezvoused with… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
Scientists at Chalmers have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results have been published in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum. The experiment is… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
This composition shows a number of diverse astronomical sources where shocks have been detected. Shock waves arise when supersonic flows of plasma are faced with an obstacle, such as a planet or a star with a magnetic field, or when they encounter a slower moving flow. Depicted in the composition are: a bow shock around… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
Nasa says it has found evidence of a vast salt water lake just under the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa – a potential location for alien life http://youtu.be/wt58KiJW2kk Lake of slush hidden under floating ice cap on Jupiter’s moon Europa ‘could harbour life’ By ROB WAUGH Slushy lake may be hidden by a ‘lid’… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
Donald Dukes, Mark R. Krumholz A number of authors have argued that the Sun must have been born in a cluster of no more than about 1000 stars, on the basis that, in a larger cluster, close encounters between the Sun and other stars would have truncated the outer Solar System or excited the outer… [Read more…]
November 16, 2011
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011. http://youtu.be/ls9yJTphLxg
November 16, 2011
Job Title:Astronaut Candidate Department:National Aeronautics & Space Administration Agency:Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center Job Announcement Number:JS12A0001 SALARY RANGE: $64,724.00 to $141,715.00 / Per Year OPEN PERIOD: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 to Friday, January 27, 2012 SERIES & GRADE: GS-0801-11/14 POSITION INFORMATION: Full Time – Permanent PROMOTION POTENTIAL:15 DUTY LOCATIONS: Few vacancy(s) in the following locations: Houston,… [Read more…]
November 16, 2011
The Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and cosmonauts and fellow Expedition 29/30 members Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin hooks up with the International Space Station two days after their liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. http://youtu.be/9oW7noeV0dc Read also: Expedition 29 launched amid snowy conditions from Kazakhstan
November 15, 2011
Lunar researchers have been struggling with the mystery for years, and they may have finally found a solution. But first, what is an ionosphere? Every terrestrial planet with an atmosphere has one. High above the planet’s rocky surface where the atmosphere meets the vacuum of space, ultraviolet rays from the sun break apart atoms of… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
http://youtu.be/4xGscFj7j6k by DAVID WARMFLASH Editor’s note: With Russian engineers trying to save the Phobos-Grunt mission, Dr. David Warmflash, principal science lead for the US team from the LIFE experiment on board the spacecraft, provides an update of the likelihood of saving the mission, while offering the intriguing prospect that their experiment could possibly be recovered,… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Superconducting metal bars could revolutionise the detection of gravitational waves, says physicists Gravitational waves are vibrations in the fabric of spacetime. They are among the most exciting phenomena in the universe because they are generated by exotic processes such as collisions between black holes and even in the moment of creation itself, the Big Bang.… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Read also: Radioactivity in Europe (update17-11-2011) Selon l’Agence hongroise de l’énergie nucléaire, les très faibles concentrations d’iode 131 mesurées dans l’atmosphère de différents pays d’Europe, dont la France, proviennent d’un Institut spécialisé dans la production de produits radioactifs à usage médical ou industriel. L’AIEA qui vient de publier l’information rappelle que ces rejets ne présentent… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Read also: 1. LHCb uses charm to find asymmetry 2.LHCb has evidence of new physics! Maybe 3. New Physics at LHC? An Anomaly in CP Violation By Jason Palmer Large Hadron Collider researchers have shown off what may be the facility’s first “new physics” outside our current understanding of the Universe. Particles called D-mesons seem… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Constraining ExtremeNeutrino Speeds at TeV-ZeV Energies with the Diffuse Neutrino Background Brian C. Lacki The only invariant speed in special relativity is c; therefore, if some neutrinos travel at even tiny speeds above c, normal special relativity is incomplete and any superluminal speed may be possible. I derive a limit on superluminal neutrino speeds v… [Read more…]
November 14, 2011
….. through the 2011 off the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Earthquake and Subsequent Nuclear Power Plant crisis Tsuneo Kobayashi An earthquake, Tohoku region Pacific Coast earthquake, occurred on the 11th of March, 2011, and subsequent Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents have been stirring natural radiation around the author’s office in Fukushima Medical University (FMU). FMU… [Read more…]
November 14, 2011
Time. We waste it, save it, kill it, make it. The world runs on it. Yet ask physicists what time actually is, and the answer might shock you: They have no idea. Even more surprising, the deep sense we have of time passing from present to past may be nothing more than an illusion. How… [Read more…]
November 14, 2011
MinutePhysics Why is the past different from the future? Caltech physicist Sean Carroll explains how the arrow of time is not an intrinsic property of physics, but rather an emergent feature. http://youtu.be/GdTMuivYF30
November 14, 2011
China completed its second space docking on Monday, state media reported, as it moves closer towards fulfilling its ambition to set up a manned space station The move comes 12 days after the Asian nation successfully completed its first ever “kiss” in space, when the Shenzhou VIII spacecraft joined onto the Tiangong-1 experimental module 343… [Read more…]
November 14, 2011
Timothy C. Ralph, Tony G. Downes Relativistic quantum information combines the informational approach to understanding and using quantum mechanics systems – quantum information – with the relativistic view of the universe. In this introductory review we examine key results to emerge from this new field of research in physics and discuss future directions. A particularly… [Read more…]
November 14, 2011
(update 16-11-2011) Russia Soyuz spacecraft docks with International Space Station Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft has docked successfully at the International Space Station (ISS). The rocket, carrying a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, blasted off from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday. It was the first manned launch since an unmanned cargo rocket crashed shortly… [Read more…]
November 13, 2011
by David Shiga TALK about being over the moon. It seems planets don’t need a big satellite like Earth’s in order to support life, increasing the number on which life could exist. In 1993, Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory in France and colleagues showed that the moon helps stabilise the tilt of Earth’s rotation axis against perturbations by… [Read more…]
November 13, 2011
Alexei M. Frolov The general formula for the interaction potential between two point electric charges is derived. This analytical formula has the correct asymtotic behaviour at large distances between two interacting charges. The derivation of this formula is based on the closed analytical expression for the Uehling potential obtained earlier (A.M. Frolov and D.M. Wardlaw,… [Read more…]
November 13, 2011
http://youtu.be/_l9RDqOxIws Too lazy to learn origami? Now you can sit back and let heat do the work, thanks to a new technique developed by Michael Dickey and his team at North Carolina State University that uses a material that can fold up on its own. The researchers used plastic sheets that shrink when placed under a heat… [Read more…]
November 13, 2011
NASA Hitches a Ride on a Russian Craft, and Begins a New Dependent Phase A Russian Soyuz rocket with three astronauts — two Russians, one American — is set to lift off from Kazakhstan on Monday morning, ferrying the men to the International Space Station. Ordinarily, the launching of a Soyuz, Russia’s workhorse rocket for… [Read more…]
November 13, 2011
It started with a few experiments with Scotch tape and a pencil. Then graphene, stronger than steel, one atom thick and a super-conductor, was born, a wonder material that could be as revolutionary as silicon, say its Nobel prize-winning creators. Now with £50m from the UK government, they’re out to prove it. Somehow it seems… [Read more…]
November 12, 2011
The UN atomic agency said Friday “very low levels” of radioactive iodine-131 had been detected in the air in the Czech Republic and in other countries, but presented no risk to human health. The Czech nuclear safety office said the source of the contamination was “most probably” outside the Czech Republic, and that its information… [Read more…]
November 12, 2011
…. “German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science,” Relativity, and the Bad Nauheim Meeting Jeroen van Dongen Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein’s life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a… [Read more…]
November 12, 2011
(update) Russia Mars probe considered lost Efforts to resume contact with a Russian space mission to Mars stuck in Earth orbit after launch have failed and the probe must be considered lost, Interfax news agency reported Saturday. “All attempts to obtain telemetric information from the Phobos-Grunt probe and activate its command system have failed. The… [Read more…]
November 11, 2011
How fast can a star spin? Our sun rotates at a leisurely 2 kilometers per second, but now astronomers have discovered that a star in another galaxy spins 300 times faster—with a record-breaking speed of 600 kilometers per second. At that velocity, an airplane could circle Earth in little more than a minute. The star,… [Read more…]
November 11, 2011
The prediction could help explain some unexpected properties of helium white dwarfs White dwarf stars are glowing embers, the remains of small stars that have run out of fuel to burn Most white dwarfs are hot lumps of charcoal, gradually radiating their heat into space. But a few are made of helium and it is… [Read more…]
November 10, 2011
It is much easier to get to Mars than to get deep inside this planet, so for all our knowledge about things like earthquakes and the magnetic field, Earth’s interior is actually very poorly understood. To study how metals interact at the prodigious pressures within, scientists squeeze small particles in the lab and heat them… [Read more…]
November 10, 2011
Scientists are simulating how the very first stars in our universe were born. This diagram shows a still from one such simulation. The cube on the right is a blown up region at the center of the box on the left. The stars we see today formed out of collapsing clouds of gas and dust.… [Read more…]
November 10, 2011
In the 19th century, Lord Kelvin made the inspired guess that elements are knots in the “ether”. Hydrogen would be one kind of knot, oxygen a different kind of knot—and so forth throughout the periodic table of elements. This idea led Peter Guthrie Tait to prepare meticulous and quite beautiful tables of knots, in an… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass four million times that of the sun. With its immense gravitational pull, Galactic Central is a very dangerous place, with… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
Exploration Flight Test-1 Animation This animation depicts the proposed test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014. During the test, which is called Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), Orion will launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., perform two orbits, reaching an altitude higher than any achieved by a spacecraft intended for human use since 1973, and then… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
THE tiniest car in the world has gone for a drive. Made of a single molecule, the “vehicle” has four wheel-like paddles that rotate in the same direction when zapped with a beam of electrons. “The molecule is autonomous,” says Syuzanna Harutyunyan, a chemist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who worked on… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
Marcus Bleicher, Piero Nicolini, Martin Sprenger, Elizabeth Winstanley The possibility of creating microscopic black holes is one of the most exciting predictions for the LHC, with potentially major consequences for our current understanding of physics. We briefly review the theoretical motivation for micro black hole production, and our understanding of their subsequent evolution. Recent work… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
Rosalind Franklin is a lesser-known hero in the famous story of DNA’s discovery. http://youtu.be/TZUun93_V18
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November 30, 2011
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