Why do we explore? Simply put, it is part of who we are, and it is something we have done throughout our history. In NASA’s new video, “We Are the Explorers,” we take a look at that tradition of reaching for things just beyond our grasp and how it is helping us lay the foundation… [Read more…]
February 29, 2012
A website has been launched that aims to get the public involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Los Angeles, the site will stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array. Participants will be asked to search… [Read more…]
February 28, 2012
curious correlation between the mass of a galaxy’s central black hole and the velocity of stars in a vast, roughly spherical structure known as its bulge has puzzled astronomers for years. An international team led by Francesco Tombesi at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now has identified a new type of black-hole-driven… [Read more…]
February 28, 2012
Nobody knows whether humans can access exotic images based on quantum entanglement. Now one physicist has designed an experiment to find out The strange rules of the quantum world lead to many weird phenomena. One of these is the puzzling process of quantum imaging, which allows images to form in hitherto unimagined ways. Researchers begin… [Read more…]
February 28, 2012
Matt Hartman captured Venus, Jupiter and the Moon on the move in this time-lapse. Recorded on February 25th, 2012. http://youtu.be/aB87RUd_E_E
February 28, 2012
The Orion Nebula is quite “piddly” – but it happens to be in our neck of the galaxy. In this video Meghan Gray (University of Nottingham), Paul Crowther (University of Sheffield) and Nik Szymanek (ccland.net) http://youtu.be/KOXm7W8f6wo
February 27, 2012
Many a time I have stressed on this blog that neutrinos are boring, though I should specify that they are boring from the point of view of a theoretical physicist. For experimentalists, on the other hand, neutrinos are first of all annoying. Indeed, taking part in a neutrino experiment seems the shortest path to trouble,… [Read more…]
February 27, 2012
IBM scientists were able to measure for the first time how charge is distributed within a single molecule. This achievement will enable fundamental scientific insights into single-molecule switching and bond formation between atoms and molecules. Furthermore, it introduces the possibility of imaging the charge distribution within functional molecular structures, which hold great promise for future… [Read more…]
February 27, 2012
What is matter, anyway? What does it have to do with math? And why aren’t you made of Jesus? Delving deeper into the theory of (almost) everything – the Standard Model of particle physics. http://youtu.be/Fxeb3Pc4PA4
February 26, 2012
David Spiegelhalter A report suggests that there should be 91 deaths every year from asteroid strikes, but what are the chances of that actually happening? Buy insurance. Tick. Health check. Tick. Drive sensibly. Tick. As a general rule, we humans like to control our lives. But let’s face it, all of this caution is a… [Read more…]
February 26, 2012
Star Wars fans hoping to build a real Death Star had better get saving – economists have worked out it would cost more than £541,261 trillion just for the raw materials. By Richard Gray - telegraph.co.uk Is seems that while you should never underestimate the power of the Dark Side, you should also pay attention to… [Read more…]
February 26, 2012
Marcelo Gleiser The history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the universe. Since life as we know it relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the universe needs to be old enough for stars to form and evolve. Current cosmological theory… [Read more…]
February 25, 2012
In the middle 1970s a team of scientists announced their discovery of a new fragment of matter and named it “Mandela Particle” (in honor of Nelson Mandela). The “discovery” was later found to be a mistake, due to faulty equipment…. Read also: adsabs.harvard.edu
February 25, 2012
Masahiro Kawasaki, Alexander Kusenko, Tsutomu T. Yanagida Supermassive black holes exist in the centers of galaxies, including Milky Way, but there is no compelling theory of their formation. Furthermore, observations of quasars imply that supermassive black holes have already existed at some very high redshifts, suggesting the possibility of their primordial origin. In a class… [Read more…]
February 24, 2012
NASA’s Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae. This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The field of view is approximately 30 arcseconds across. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star… [Read more…]
February 24, 2012
Despite the success of physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering some of the most basic questions about our existence, such as: why does the universe exist? Why is the universe apparently fine-tuned to be able to support life? Why are the… [Read more…]
February 24, 2012
Stamp Petition Gains Nearly 6,000 Signatures The dwarf planet Pluto may be at the edge of our solar system, but an effort on Earth is seeking to put the icy world in mailboxes across the country — in stamp form. An online petition backed by scientists with NASA’s New Horizons mission is pushing for new postage… [Read more…]
February 24, 2012
While primitive humans of the Middle Paleolithic hunted prey and sheltered in caves in Africa, a distant star eighteen times more massive than the Sun, located faraway in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) endured a catastrophic collapse as it reached the end of its life. As the star caved in, its outer layers rebounded off… [Read more…]
February 23, 2012
Blame dark matter underdog for mystery missing lithium by David Shiga AN UNDERDOG dark-matter particle could explain why the universe seems strangely low on lithium. If the idea holds up, it will be a boon in the hunt for dark matter, the stuff needed to account for 80 per cent of the universe’s matter. In the… [Read more…]
February 23, 2012
Un voyage au centre de la Terre Les trois satellites européens de la constellation Swarm, fabriqués par l’industriel franco-allemand, Astrium, seront lancés cet été depuis la base russe de Plesetsk par une fusée Rockot. Une fois déployés sur leur orbite définitive, à 530 kilomètres d’altitude pour l’un et à 460 kilomètres pour les deux autres, ces… [Read more…]
February 22, 2012
by Edwin Cartlidge It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame. Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso… [Read more…]
February 22, 2012
For the first time, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected little spheres of carbon, called buckyballs, in a galaxy beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The space balls were detected in a dying star, called a planetary nebula, within the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud. What’s more, huge quantities were found — the equivalent in… [Read more…]
February 22, 2012
Simon J.D. Phoenix, Faisal Shah Khan We present a perspective on quantum games that focuses on the physical aspects of the quantities that are used to implement a game. If a game is to be played, it has to be played with objects and actions that have some physical existence. We call such games playable.… [Read more…]
February 21, 2012
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a new class of planet: a waterworld with a thick, steamy atmosphere. The exoplanet GJ 1214b is a so-called “Super Earth” – bigger than our planet, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter. Observations using the Hubble telescope now seem to confirm that a large fraction of its mass… [Read more…]
February 21, 2012
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have clocked the fastest wind yet discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. This result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole behaves. The record-breaking wind is moving about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This… [Read more…]
February 20, 2012
A plant that last flowered when woolly mammoths roamed the plains is back in bloom. Biologists have resurrected a 30,000-year-old plant, cultivating it from fruit tissue recovered from frozen sediment in Siberia. The plant is by far the oldest to be brought back from the dead: the previous record holder was a sacred lotus, dating… [Read more…]
February 20, 2012
Finding evidence for dark matter – the unknown substance that theoretically makes up 23% of the universe – has been one of the biggest challenges in modern cosmology. Several experiments are underway to detect dark matter candidates known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as they travel through the Earth. And experiments at the Large… [Read more…]
February 20, 2012
New images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft show the moon’s crust is being stretched, forming minute valleys in a few small areas on the lunar surface. Scientists propose this geologic activity occurred less than 50 million years ago, which is considered recent compared to the moon’s age of more than 4.5 billion years.… [Read more…]
February 20, 2012
The light scattered off distant worlds could help reveal details about their atmospheres that no other method could uncover, scientists find. Nearly all the information astronomers have of the atmospheres of alien planets or exoplanets comes from worlds whose orbits happen to be precisely aligned from our vantage point. Once per orbit, these exoplanets go… [Read more…]
February 20, 2012
Universal Newsreel Fifty years ago, on February 20th, 1962 John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. This is a 1962 Universal Newsreel about his historic flight. http://youtu.be/qY87RTXzA04 Read also: A Salute to John Glenn, 50 Years of American Manned Spaceflight
February 20, 2012
Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the Universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics, to test General Relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves… [Read more…]
February 19, 2012
In a remarkable feat of micro-engineering, UNSW physicists have created a working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal. http://youtu.be/ue4z9lB5ZHg Read more here
February 18, 2012
Read also: Peek into Isaac Newton’s theology papers APOCALYPSE – Isaac Newton a prophétisé la fin du monde pour 2060 La controverse fait rage depuis des décennies : sir Isaac Newton, l’un des plus grands scientifiques de l’histoire, mort en 1727, était-il versé dans la théologie et le mysticisme ? Aux yeux de tous, Newton est… [Read more…]
February 17, 2012
…. a component of strange matter Physicists in Italy have discovered the first evidence of a rare nucleus that doesn’t exist in nature and lives for just 10-10 seconds before decaying. It’s a type of hypernucleus that, like all nuclei, contains an assortment of neutrons and protons. But unlike ordinary nuclei, hypernuclei also contain at… [Read more…]
February 17, 2012
First, build a telescope the size of planet Earth ….. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international project aimed at taking the first picture of a black hole, specifically of Sagittarius A*, the site of the black hole that is believed to be lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy….. ….. Getting there will… [Read more…]
February 16, 2012
Read also: Time crystals could behave almost like perpetual motion machines If crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they ought to exist in the dimension of time too, says Nobel prize-winning physicist One of the most powerful ideas in modern physics is that the Universe is governed by symmetry. This is the idea that certain… [Read more…]
February 16, 2012
John W. Barrett, Harald Garcke, Robert Nürnberg Facetted growth of snow crystals leads to a rich diversity of forms, and exhibits a remarkable sixfold symmetry. Snow crystal structures result from diffusion limited crystal growth in the presence of anisotropic surface energy and anisotropic attachment kinetics. It is by now well understood that the morphological stability… [Read more…]
February 16, 2012
Craters appear well defined on icy Rhea in front of the hazy orb of the much larger moon Titan in this Cassini spacecraft view of these two Saturn moons. Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemispheres of Rhea and Titan. North on the moons is up and rotated 13 degrees to the left.… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
The creation of increasingly large multipartite entangled states is not only a fundamental scientific endeavour in itself, but is also the enabling technology for quantum information. Tremendous experimental effort has been devoted to generating multiparticle entanglement with a growing number of qubits. So far, up to six spatially separated single photons have been entangled based… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
Captured by Envisat’s MERIS instrument on 13 February, this image shows an unusual view of Italy: almost all of the country is covered with snow. Credits: ESA - badastronomy
February 15, 2012
Collisions in space may be behind mysterious diamonds found in meteorites. By Brian Jacobsmeyer, ISNS Contributor Inside Science News Service Space diamonds may now be an astrophysicist’s best friend. For years, scientists have found DNA-sized diamonds in meteorites on Earth. New research suggests that these diamonds spring from violent cosmic collisions, which may help scientists… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
This spectacular edge-on galaxy, called ESO 243-49, is home to an intermediate-mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy. The estimated 20,000-solar-mass black hole lies above the galactic plane. This is an unlikely place for such a massive back hole to exist, unless it belonged to a small galaxy… [Read more…]
February 14, 2012
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will increase the energies of the bunches of subatomic particles called protons that it smashes together. The boost should improve the collider’s chances of discovering “new physics” and definitively confirming or denying the existence of Higgs boson particle. The proton beams’ energies will be increased by 14%, for… [Read more…]
February 13, 2012
All-sky image of molecular gas and three molecular cloud complexes seen by Planck This all-sky image shows the distribution of carbon monoxide (CO), a molecule used by astronomers to trace molecular clouds across the sky, as seen by Planck. Molecular clouds, the dense and compact regions throughout the Milky Way where gas and dust clump… [Read more…]
February 13, 2012
Video: Equations that rule the world Read more: newscientist.com
February 13, 2012
Professor Jon Butterworth, member of the High Energy Physics group on the Atlas experiment, provides an overview of his work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
February 12, 2012
by Jill Tarter - newscientist Earth 2.0 is in our sights. Checking it for signs of life will be the next big issue THE thousands of probable worlds discovered in orbit around other stars are making our corner of the universe appear a lot friendlier to life these days. The Kepler space telescope, which has its… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
Many of the Universe’s galaxies are like our own, displaying beautiful spiral arms wrapping around a bright nucleus. Examples in this stunning image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, include the tilted galaxy at the bottom of the frame, shining behind a Milky Way star, and the small… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
A new interactive NASA art exhibit opens February 9 at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore that will showcase stunning images of the sun. Called “Sun As Art,” the collection consists of 20 full-color, high-resolution images of the star with which we live. Some of the pieces stand alone, beautiful images that hold true to… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
… A Possibility A group of scientists at NASA is strongly considering the possibility of constructing what they refer to as a waypoint tended by humans on the far side of the Moon. This structure would serve as a relay and resupply base for space missions probing deeper within the solar system. Top NASA officials… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
(updated 13/2/2012 – Vega First Launch) http://youtu.be/GF8aVCFJb2M Europe’s Vega rocket is finally set to make its maiden flight on Monday. The 30m tall vehicle, first conceived in the 1990s, will launch on what is termed a qualification flight from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. It will carry nine satellites into orbit but the object… [Read more…]
February 9, 2012
In December 2011, the elusive Higgs boson was back in the limelight when hints of the particle emerged in the wreckage of proton collisions at the world’s most powerful particle smasher – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. There have been no new collisions since, but researchers from the LHC’s two main detectors… [Read more…]
February 8, 2012
ESO’s Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery taken so far. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged. This is one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT. Deep in the heart… [Read more…]
February 7, 2012
Salt Lake City photographer captures spectacular images of our own Milky Way arched over the pillars and canyons of Utah Royce Bair Read more: dailymail.co.uk
February 7, 2012
Helge Kragh Modern atomic and nuclear physics took its start in the early part of the twentieth century, to a large extent based upon experimental investigations of radioactive phenomena. Foremost among the pioneers of the new kind of physics was Ernest Rutherford, who made fundamental contributions to the structure of matter for more than three… [Read more…]
February 7, 2012
On Jan. 27, 2012, a large X-class flare erupted from an active region near the solar west limb. X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events. Seen here is an image of the flare captured by the X-ray telescope on Hinode. This image shows an emission from plasma heated to greater than eight… [Read more…]
February 6, 2012
Ram Brustein, Judy Kupferman How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism… and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to scientific measurement, it has led scientists to come up with fascinating ideas… [Read more…]
February 6, 2012
Brian C. Thomas & Matthew Quick Sports are a popular and effective way to illustrate physics principles. Baseball in particular presents a number of opportunities to motivate student interest and teach concepts. Several articles have appeared in this journal on this topic, illustrating a wide variety of areas of physics. In addition, several websites and… [Read more…]
February 5, 2012
… but it could be lurking in the depths Scientists have virtually ruled out the possibility of life on Mars having revealed the planet experienced a 600 year water drought. Samples of soil found that the surface had been starved of any moisture that might enhance the view that there are living organisms on the… [Read more…]
February 5, 2012
Sebastian Sachse, Christian Roeder We derive the amino acid assignment to one codon representation (typical 64-dimensional irreducible representation) of the basic classical Lie superalgebra osp(5|2) from biochemical arguments. We motivate the approach of mathematical symmetries to the classification of the building constituents of the biosphere by analogy of its success in particle physics and chemistry.… [Read more…]
February 4, 2012
Brant Widgeon is an Astronomical Image Enhancement Engineer. Many people are surprised to hear everything that goes into making the beautiful celestial images that have brought us so much awe and wonder. One of the most technically difficult parts of Brant’s job however is dealing with space cats. http://youtu.be/_P-yAkBbIV0
February 4, 2012
http://youtu.be/9R1OX4fZqKY Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk
February 3, 2012
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy. The team, led by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), used the database they created and… [Read more…]
February 3, 2012
Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is en route to intercept a comet– and to make history. In 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkoand land a probe on it, two firsts. Rosetta’s goal is to learn the primordial story a comet tells as it gloriously falls to pieces. Comets are primitive leftovers from our solar system’s… [Read more…]
February 3, 2012
In 2006, NASA dispatched an ambassador to the planetary frontier. The New Horizons spacecraft is now halfway between Earth and Pluto, on approach for a dramatic flight past the icy planet and its moons in July 2015. After 10 years and more than 3 billion miles, on a historic voyage that has already taken it… [Read more…]
February 2, 2012
Summary: By looking at the wavelengths of light from nearby stars, researchers have determined the abundance of certain elements for more than a hundred stars. Trace elements in such stars may influence their habitable zones, where planets with life might dwell…. Read more:astrobio.net
February 2, 2012
An undergraduate engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, Tiras Lin, has used high-speed, high-resolution cameras to gain a new perspective on the mechanics of a painted lady butterfly’s flight patterns. Information gathered from his research may be used to construct better designs for micro-aerial vehicles that could be used by the United States military. http://youtu.be/azQeJLUWljc… [Read more…]
February 2, 2012
Dione on a Diagonal Saturn and Dione appear askew in this Cassini spacecraft view, with the north poles rotated to the right, as if they were threaded along on the thin diagonal line of the planet’s rings. This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across). North on Dione… [Read more…]
February 1, 2012
Thomas K. Gaisser This paper reviews the status of the search for high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources. Results from large neutrino telescopes in water (Antares, Baikal) and ice (IceCube) are discussed as well as observations from the surface with Auger and from high altitude with ANITA. Comments on IceTop, the surface component of IceCube are… [Read more…]
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February 29, 2012
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