http://youtu.be/uXfoAYqhGVE A great magnetic bubble surrounds the solar system as it cruises through the galaxy. The sun pumps the inside of the bubble full of solar particles that stream out to the edge until they collide with the material that fills the rest of the galaxy, at a complex boundary called the heliosheath. On the… [Read more…]
January 31, 2012
discrete integrable systems Abstract Chinese ancient sage Laozi said ‘Dao sheng yi, yi sheng er, er sheng san, san sheng wanwu, • • •’ that means something even everything comes from ‘nothing’ via ‘Dao’. In this paper, various discrete integrable models, including the known discrete Schwarzian KdV, KP, BKP, CKP, special Viallet equations and many… [Read more…]
January 31, 2012
John Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard, Dimitri V. Nanopoulos The Higgs boson was postulated in 1964, and phenomenological studies of its possible production and decays started in the early 1970s, followed by studies of its possible production in e+ e-, pbar p and pp collisions, in particular. Until recently, the most sensitive searches for the Higgs… [Read more…]
January 31, 2012
SPEAKER: Eva Halkiadakis We present an update on a number of searches for New Physics, including SUSY and Exotica, based on the recent LHC data, up to the full statistics of ~5/fb recorded by the CMS experiment in 2011. (Video in CDS: Press here) Read more: indico.cern.ch Read also: Lazy photon among the missing in exotic LHC… [Read more…]
January 31, 2012
Alvaro Chavarria I give an overview of the recent developments in the solar neutrino field. I focus on the Borexino detector, which has uncovered the solar neutrino spectrum below 5 MeV, providing new tests and confirmation for solar neutrino oscillations. I report on the updated measurements of the 8B solar neutrino flux by water Cherenkov… [Read more…]
January 30, 2012
…. shows one of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe In a sky filled with bright stars, this image appears to show a massive black hole in its centre. But, rather than being a genuine black hle, the eerily dark ‘hole’ in this photograph is a cloud of matter - known to… [Read more…]
January 30, 2012
Physicists have simulated two universes colliding inside a metamaterial One interesting way in which our cosmos may have formed is in a collision between two other universes with extra spatial dimensions called braneworlds. In this scenario, known as the ekpyrotic model of the universe, our cosmos is just a small four-dimensional corner of a much… [Read more…]
January 30, 2012
Michael Pagano, Robert Brandenberger Cosmic string loops lead to nonlinear baryon overdensities at early times, even before the time which in the standard LCDM model corresponds to the time of reionization. These overdense structures lead to signals in 21cm redshift surveys at large redshifts. In this paper, we calculate the amplitude and shape of the… [Read more…]
January 29, 2012
Opening Plenary talk given at the Israel Physical Society’s Meeting held at Technion on , Dec. 25, 2011. Prof. Robert Kirshner of Harvard University talks about: Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Universe: Einstein’s Blunder Undone. Prof. Kirshner is a professor os science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. He is the author… [Read more…]
January 29, 2012
…. 5,000m above sea level in Chile, will detect a new galaxy every three minutes Alma telescope glimpses space’s mysteries from on top of the world Spend a few days with astronomers at the world’s most sophisticated telescopes in the mountains of Chile, and your skin will begin to feel different. Cheeks become stretched a… [Read more…]
January 28, 2012
The biggest storm on the sun in years erupted on January 22 with a huge solar flare, an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME, and a burst of fast moving, highly energetic protons that, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, caused the strongest solar radiation storm since September 2005. Also, Global Temperatures remain warm,… [Read more…]
January 27, 2012
The question of whether normal matter’s shadowy counterpart anti-matter exerts a kind of “anti-gravity” is set to be answered, according to a new report. Normal matter attracts all other matter in the Universe, but it remains unclear if anti-matter attracts or repels it. A team reporting in Physics Review Letters says it has prepared stable pairs of… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, its host star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there for billions of years, according to the first published models of Vesta’s average global temperatures and illumination by the sun. “Near the… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1′s crew–Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee–was killed when a fire erupted in their capsule during testing. Apollo 1 was originally designated AS-204 but following the fire, the astronauts’ widows requested that the mission be remembered as Apollo 1 and following missions would be… [Read more…]
January 25, 2012
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark… [Read more…]
January 25, 2012
(False Color) This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named “Greeley Haven.” Opportunity’s Panoramic Camera (Pancam) took the component images as part of full-circle view being assembled… [Read more…]
January 24, 2012
Rice University physicists have built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Rice’s team and collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could make an electron orbit the atomic nucleus in the same way… [Read more…]
January 24, 2012
The Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), or Orion, being assembled and tested at Lockheed Martin’s Vertical Testing Facility in Colorado. Drawing from more than 50 years of spaceflight research and development, Orion is designed to meet the evolving needs of our nation’s space program for decades to come. As the flagship of our nation’s next-generation space… [Read more…]
January 24, 2012
While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of “intuitive physics.” “In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child’s gaze when presented with… [Read more…]
January 24, 2012
Jean-Nicolas Longchamp, Tatiana Laytychevskaia, Conrad Escher, Hans-Werner Fink The mode of action of proteins is to a large extent given by their ability to adopt different conformations. Τhis is why imaging single biomolecules at atomic resolution is one of the ultimate goals of biophysics and structural biology. The existing protein database has emerged from X-ray… [Read more…]
January 23, 2012
The Millikan oil drop experiment, published in final form in 1913, demonstrated that charge comes in discrete chunks and was a bridge between classical electromagnetism and modern quantum physics. Researchers now routinely isolate single electrons in quantum dots, but a century ago the state-of-the-art charge-trapping device was a droplet of clock oil. Robert Millikan’s oil… [Read more…]
January 23, 2012
Russian scientist claims to have seen ‘scorpion’ in probe photographs Scientist sees shapes in 1982 Soviet probe pictures No previous records of life on the hottest planet in solar system http://youtu.be/RYKbIbqtYTM A Russian scientist claims to have discovered life on Venus after analysing photographs taken by a Soviet probe that landed on the planet’s surface… [Read more…]
January 23, 2012
This image shows the swirling shape of galaxy NGC 2217, in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). In the central region of the galaxy is a distinctive bar of stars within an oval ring. Further out, a set of tightly wound spiral arms almost form a circular ring around the galaxy. NGC 2217… [Read more…]
January 23, 2012
Antonio Barletta There is a huge number of excellent and comprehensive textbooks on quantum mechanics. They mainly differ for the approach, more or less oriented to the formalism rather than to the phenomenology, as well as for the topics covered. These lectures have been based mainly on the classical textbook by Gasiorowicz (1974). I must… [Read more…]
January 22, 2012
Claudio Germana ABSTRACT Recent results from the OPERA experiment reported a neutrino beam traveling faster than light. The experiment measured the neutrino time of flight (TOF) over a baseline from the CERN to the Gran Sasso site. The neutrino beam arrives 60 ns earlier than a light ray would do. Because the result has an… [Read more…]
January 22, 2012
Logical and mathematical aspects of the basic concepts of thermodynamics are considered. G. V. Skornyakov FOREWORD This treatise is in no way meant to serve as a help in gaining acquaintance with the theory of thermal processes. Discussion of the fundamentals of a theory can bear fruit only if led with competent enough people. The… [Read more…]
January 21, 2012
National exams are too easy, a group of high-achieving pupils has told David Willetts in a report which called for a new, tougher science GCSE for those pursuing scientific careers. By Nick Collins The examination would be more rigorous than the rudimentary “citizen science” currently studied in schools and introduce gifted students to advanced disciplines… [Read more…]
January 20, 2012
Meteorite contains evidence of formation of sulfur molecules derived from the ejecta of a supernova explosion Fundamental chemical processes in predecessors of our solar system are now a bit better understood: An international team led by Peter Hoppe, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, has now examined dust inclusions of the… [Read more…]
January 19, 2012
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this video of the M3.2 solar flare on January 19, 2012. The graph at the top indicates corresponding X-ray measurements taken by the GOES-15 satellite. Credit: NASA/SDO/GOES-15 http://youtu.be/ChHv-4IaQN0 A long duration M-class flare began erupting on the sun at 8:42 AM ET on Thursday, January 19. The flare is… [Read more…]
January 19, 2012
Bruce G. Elmegreen Processes that promote the formation of dense cold clouds in the interstellar media of galaxies are reviewed. Those that involve background stellar mass include two-fluid instabilities, spiral density wave shocking, and bar accretion. Young stellar pressures trigger gas accumulation on the periphery of cleared cavities, which often take the form of rings… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
by Lisa Grossman If we could don dark matter glasses and look at the universe around us, we might see thousands of miniature galaxies swarming about the luminous spirals that make up the Milky Way and Andromeda. We can’t – but we have the next best thing. A technique known as gravitational lensing has allowed… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
A Historical Review Helge Kragh Abstract. Since the emergence in the late 1960s of the standard hot big-bang theory, cosmology has been dominated by finite-age models. However, the rival view that the universe has existed for an indefinite time has continued to be defended by a minority of researchers. This view has roots far back in… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
Fotini Markopoulou The idea that the Universe is a program in a giant quantum computer is both fascinating and suffers from various problems. Nonetheless, it can provide a unified picture of physics and this can be very useful for the problem of Quantum Gravity where such a unification is necessary. In previous work we proposed… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
…of microelectromechanical systems using photoelectrowetting: proof-of-concept Microelectromechanical devices could soon be remotely controlled using light thanks to a proof-of-concept experiment demonstrating ‘photoelectrowetting’ Moving water is fairly straightforward on the human scale: a pump or a bucket will usually do the trick. But in the last couple of decades, various teams have begun to study ways of… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
In order to reduce power consumption, mission managers have turned off a heater on part of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, dropping the temperature of its ultraviolet spectrometer instrument more than 23 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit). It is now operating at a temperature below minus 79 degrees Celsius (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit), the coldest temperature… [Read more…]
January 17, 2012
PASADENA, Calif. — Twin NASA spacecraft that achieved orbit around the moon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have new names, thanks to elementary students in Bozeman, Mont. Their winning entry, “Ebb and Flow,” was selected as part of a nationwide school contest that began in October 2011. The names were submitted by fourth… [Read more…]
January 17, 2012
L. Bellagamba, R. Casadio, R. Di Sipio, V. Viventi We investigate possible signatures of black hole events at the LHC in the hypothesis that such objects will not evaporate completely, but leave a stable remnant. For the purpose of defining a reference scenario, we have employed the publicly available Monte Carlo generator CHARYBDIS2, in which… [Read more…]
January 16, 2012
Richard Feynman was a brilliant Nobel Prize winning physicist with a “rock ‘n roll” personality Richard Feynman was a talented mathematician and Nobel-prize winning physicist whose startlingly clear answers to questions earned him the unofficial title, the “Great Explainer”. As a student at Far Rockaway High School in Queens, a borough of New York City,… [Read more…]
January 16, 2012
A new telescope array could allow scientists to photograph a black hole for the first time – teaming up 50 radio telescopes around the world into a global telescope that will capture the ‘shadow’ of a black hole for the first time. Scientists will meet on Wednesday 18th to discuss the project, which will also… [Read more…]
January 15, 2012
Dan Sperber (Social and Cognitive Scientist; Directeur, de Recherche au CNRS Paris; Author, Explaining Culture), say: Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference Eratosthenes (276-195 BCE), the head of the famous Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt, made ground-breaking contributions to mathematics, astronomy, geography, and history. He also argued against dividing humankind into Greeks and ‘Barbarians’. What… [Read more…]
January 15, 2012
(update) Doomed Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe that’s been stuck in Earth orbit for two months has crashed down in the Pacific Ocean on late Sunday. “Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean,” Russia’s Defense Ministry official Alexei Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti, adding that the fragments fell in 1,250 kilometers to the west of… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Mihalis Dafermos It is shown that for small, spherically symmetric perturbations of asymptotically flat two-ended Reissner-Nordstrom data for the Einstein-Maxwell-real scalar field system, the boundary of the dynamic spacetime which evolves is globally represented by a bifurcate null hypersurface across which the metric extends continuously. Under additional assumptions, it is shown that the Hawking mass… [Read more…]
January 13, 2012
Since we can’t go to the stars yet, let’s bring the stars to us. In a giant X-ray-producing facility, astronomers and plasma physicists have heated a cigar-sized sample of gas to over 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit in order to replicate the surface of stars called white dwarfs. “As an astronomer, I am used to looking at… [Read more…]
January 13, 2012
…….Using a scanning tunneling microscope, the researchers were able to encode a bit of data in just 12 iron atoms kept at a temperature just a few degrees above absolute zero. Smaller numbers of atoms were too unstable to act as bits – without neighbours to interact with and stabilise them, the atoms behaved like quantum… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
London and New York are in the huge area where Russian spacecraft might land, but it is most likely to ditch in the sea A defunct Russian spacecraft is due to re-enter the atmosphere sometime after midday (GMT) on Sunday, say scientists who are watching its orbit closely. They cannot predict precisely where it will… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
This video simulates the time cloaking device developed by Cornell University researchers. A ball is trying to pass through a green beam of laser light without being detected. Two short pulses of red laser light change the color of the green light, and since different colors travel at different speeds, a gap is opened in… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
A new Hubble Space Telescope image centers on the 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the hub of the neighboring spiral galaxy M31, or the Andromeda galaxy, the only galaxy outside the Milky Way visible to the naked eye and the only other giant galaxy in the local group This is a Hubble image of the 100-million-solar-mass… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
Jeremy Schiff, Bill Poirier We present a self-contained formulation of spin-free nonrelativistic quantum mechanics that makes no use of wavefunctions or complex amplitudes of any kind. Quantum states are represented as ensembles of real-valued quantum trajectories, obtained by extremizing an action and satisfying energy conservation. The theory applies for arbitrary configuration spaces and system dimensionalities.… [Read more…]
January 11, 2012
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the distant universe and detected the feeble glow of a star that exploded more than 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better constraints on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious repulsive… [Read more…]
January 11, 2012
F. J. Ballesteros Planck’s law describes the radiation of black bodies. The study of its properties is of special interest, as black bodies are a good description for the behavior of many phenomena. In this work a new mathematical study of Planck’s law is performed and new properties of this old acquaintance are obtained. As… [Read more…]
January 11, 2012
At national meeting today, Pitt researchers say Milky Way is ‘white as snow’ A team of astronomers in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences announced today the most accurate determination yet of the color of the (aptly named) Milky Way Galaxy: “a very pure white, almost mirroring a fresh spring snowfall.” Jeffrey… [Read more…]
January 10, 2012
Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. http://youtu.be/7ImvlS8PLIo …. and now the new book: “A universe frοm nothing“, Lawrence Krauss Read also: Trying to make the cosmos out of nothing
January 10, 2012
An exceptional galaxy cluster, the largest seen in the distant universe, has been found using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation-funded Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. Officially known as ACT-CL J0102-4915, the galaxy cluster has been nicknamed “El Gordo” (“the big one” or “the fat one” in Spanish) by the researchers… [Read more…]
January 9, 2012
Today’s robotic space missions take careful steps to avoid carrying tiny bacterial life from Earth that could contaminate the surface of Mars or other planets. That may all change if a NASA-funded effort can harness microbes as an almost endless power source for the next generation of robotic explorers. Such microbial fuel cells could power… [Read more…]
January 9, 2012
Eli Visbal, Rennan Barkana, Anastasia Fialkov, Dmitriy Tseliakhovich, Christopher Hirata Understanding the formation and evolution of the very first stars and galaxies represents one of the most exciting and challenging questions facing the scientific community today. Since the universe was filled with neutral hydrogen at early times, the most promising method for observing the epoch… [Read more…]
January 9, 2012
Alyssa Goodman, Jonathan Fay, August Muench, Alberto Pepe, Patricia Udomprasert, Curtis Wong The WorldWide Telescope computer program, released to researchers and the public as a free resource in 2008 by Microsoft Research, has changed the way the ever-growing Universe of online astronomical data is viewed and understood. The WWT program can be thought of as… [Read more…]
January 8, 2012
(Reuters) – The world’s best known living scientist, Stephen Hawking, was too ill to attend his 70th birthday celebrations Sunday but in a recorded speech urged people to “look up at the stars” and be curious about the universe. Hawking, the author of the international bestseller “A Brief History of Time,” was diagnosed with motor… [Read more…]
January 8, 2012
Before DNA, before RNA: Life in the hodge-podge world Take note, DNA and RNA: it’s not all about you. Life on Earth may have began with a splash of TNA – a different kind of genetic material altogether. Because RNA can do many things at once, those studying the origins of life have long thought… [Read more…]
January 8, 2012
New research lays groundwork for new generation of ultrasensitive gyroscopes to measure gravity, magnetic field, and create quantum circuits A Cambridge team have built a semiconductor chip that converts electrons into a quantum state that emits light but is large enough to see by eye. Because their quantum superfluid is simply set up by shining… [Read more…]
January 8, 2012
Scientist who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 to deliver rare public lecture in Cambridge by Alok Jha The world’s most famous living scientist turns 70 today. ProfessorStephen Hawking has defied medical expectations, since being diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and given only a few years… [Read more…]
January 7, 2012
Nope. ….. Read more: motls.blogspot.com
January 7, 2012
Intel Studios will kindly be streaming the symposium live on the day. Click here to bring up the webcast in a new window, but please note that the stream won’t start until shortly before the 1st talk on Sunday 8 January 2012. Meanwhile, you can watch the webcasts from the currently going Scientific Conference - day 3 Read… [Read more…]
January 7, 2012
B. Weber, S. Mahapatra, H. Ryu, S. Lee, A. Fuhrer, T. C. G. Reusch, D. L. Thompson, W. C. T. Lee, G. Klimeck, L. C. L. Hollenberg, M. Y. Simmons ABSTRACT – sciencemag.org As silicon electronics approaches the atomic scale, interconnects and circuitry become comparable in size to the active device components. Maintaining low electrical… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
Russia launched an ambitious Mars moon probe, the Phobos-Grunt mission, on Nov. 8, 2011 (EST) on a mission to collect the first samples of the Martian moon Phobos, but the spacecraft was soon marooned in Earth orbit. See how the Phobos-Grunt probe will fall to Earth in January 2012 in the SPACE.com infographic …. Source:LiveScience… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
Sudoku fanatics have long claimed that the smallest number of starting clues a puzzle can contain is 17. Now a year-long calculation proves there are no 16-clue puzzles Sudoku is a number puzzle consisting of a 9 x 9 grid in which some cells contain clues in the form of digits from 1 to 9.… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
M. E. Bennett, R. Hirschi, M. Pignatari, S. Diehl, C. Fryer, F. Herwig, A. Hungerford, K. Nomoto, G. Rockefeller, F. X. Timmes, M. Wiescher The 12C + 12C fusion reaction has been the subject of considerable experimental efforts to constrain uncertainties at temperatures relevant for stellar nucleosynthesis. In order to investigate the effect of an… [Read more…]
January 5, 2012
Mikael Granvik, Jeremie Vaubaillonc, Robert Jedickea Abstract We have for the first time calculated the population characteristics of the Earth’s irregular natural satellites (NES) that are temporarily captured from the near-Earth-object (NEO) population. The steady-state NES size-frequency and residence-time distributions were determined under the dynamical influence of all the massive bodies in the solar system… [Read more…]
January 5, 2012
John H. Schwarz This lecture presents a brief overview of the early history of string theory and supersymmetry. It describes how the S-matrix theory program for understanding the strong nuclear force evolved into superstring theory, which is a promising framework for constructing a unified quantum theory of all forces including gravity. The period covered begins… [Read more…]
January 5, 2012
Data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope have revolutionized the search for planets outside the Solar System — and are now doing the same for asteroseismology. Ron Cowen Most astronomers gaze at the heavens and see stars. William Chaplin hears an orchestra — a celestial symphony in which the smallest stars are flutes, the medium-sized ones… [Read more…]
January 5, 2012
A scientist in the US is arguing that the vacuum should behave as a metamaterial at high magnetic fields. Such magnetic fields were probably present in the early universe, and therefore he suggests that it may be possible to test the prediction by observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation – a relic of the… [Read more…]
physicsworld newscientist.com NASA dailygalaxy technologyreview science2.0
January 31, 2012
1