With Oxygen so you can breathe And Fluorine for your pretty teeth Neon to light up the signs Sodium for salty times

Magnesium, Aluminium, Silicon Phosphorus, then Sulfur, Chlorine and Argon Potassium, and Calcium so you’ll grow strong Scandium, Titanium, Vanadium and Chromium and Manganese

CHORUS This is the Periodic Table Noble gas is stable Halogens and Alkali react agressively Each period will see new outer shells While electrons are added moving to the right

Iron is the 26th Then Cobalt, Nickel coins you get Copper, Zinc and Gallium Germanium and Arsenic

Selenium and Bromine film While Krypton helps light up your room Rubidium and Strontium then Yttrium, Zirconium

Niobium, Molybdenum, Technetium Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium Silver-ware then Cadmium and Indium Tin-cans, Antimony then Tellurium and Iodine and Xenon and then Caesium and…

Barium is 56 and this is where the table splits Where Lanthanides have just begun Lanthanum, Cerium and Praseodymium

Neodymium’s next too Promethium, then 62′s Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium and Terbium Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium Ytterbium, Lutetium

Hafnium, Tantalum, Tungsten then we’re on to Rhenium, Osmium and Iridium Platinum, Gold to make you rich till you grow old Mercury to tell you when it’s really cold

Thallium and Lead then Bismuth for your tummy Polonium, Astatine would not be yummy Radon, Francium will last a little time Radium then Actinides at 89

REPEAT CHORUS

Actinium, Thorium, Protactinium Uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium Americium, Curium, Berkelium Californium, Einsteinium, Fermium Mendelevium, Nobelium, Lawrencium Rutherfordium, Dubnium, Seaborgium Bohrium, Hassium then Meitnerium Darmstadtium, Roentgenium, Copernicium

Ununtrium, Flerovium Ununpentium, Livermorium Ununseptium, Ununoctium And then we’re done!!

http://youtu.be/zUDDiWtFtEM

Illustration of an air shower

Wolfgang Bietenholz
This year we are celebrating 101 years since the discovery of cosmic rays.
They are whizzing all around the Universe, and they occur at very different energies, including the highest particle energies that exist. However, theory predicts an abrupt suppression (a “cutoff”) above a specific huge energy.
This is difficult to verify, the measurements are controversial, but it provides a unique opportunity to probe established concepts of physics – like Lorentz Invariance – under extreme conditions.
If the observations will ultimately contradict this “cutoff”, this could require a fundamental pillar of physics to be revised….
Read more: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.1346v1.pdf

NASA’s lunar monitoring program has detected hundreds of meteoroid impacts. The brightest, detected on March 17, 2013, in Mare Imbrium, is marked by the red square.

For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. “Lunar meteor showers” have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year.
They’ve just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the program.
“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion—no telescope required. For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star.
Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescopes. “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” he recalls.
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hit the Moon traveling 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion1 packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.

Cooke believes the lunar impact might have been part of a much larger event.
“On the night of March 17, NASA and University of Western Ontario all-sky cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors right here on Earth,” he says. “These fireballs were traveling along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt.”

This means Earth and the Moon were pelted by meteoroids at about the same time.
“My working hypothesis is that the two events are related, and that this constitutes a short duration cluster of material encountered by the Earth-Moon system,” says Cooke

One of the goals of the lunar monitoring program is to identify new streams of space debris that pose a potential threat to the Earth-Moon system. The March 17th event seems to be a good candidate.
Controllers of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have been notified of the strike. The crater could be as wide as 20 meters, which would make it an easy target for LRO the next time the spacecraft passes over the impact site. Comparing the size of the crater to the brightness of the flash would give researchers a valuable “ground truth” measurement to validate lunar impact models.

Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed. “Lunar meteors” crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event. Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are sporadic meteors—random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.
U.S. Space Exploration Policy eventually calls for extended astronaut stays on the lunar surface. Identifying the sources of lunar meteors and measuring their impact rates gives future lunar explorers an idea of what to expect. Is it safe to go on a moonwalk, or not? The middle of March might be a good time to stay inside.
“We’ll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-Moon system passes through the same region of space,” says Cooke. “Meanwhile, our analysis of the March 17th event continues.”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-bright-explosion-moon.html#jCp

Space neutrinos found in Antarctica (Image: Sven Lidstrom/NSF)

Fancy seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and enormous stellar explosions may give up their secrets now thatneutrinos from space can be detected.

The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy.

“We are witnessing the birth of this field,” says Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a member of IceCube.

Until now, the only space neutrinos definitively detected came from the sun and a 1987 supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Last month, the IceCube collaboration published news of the detection of two high-energy neutrinos, each with an energy of about one petaelectronvolt. These neutrinos, discovered by accident a year ago and nicknamed Bert and Ernie, prompted the collaboration to go back and look at their data in more detail.

Flavour shift

The new analysis, reported today at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has raised the stakes….

Read more at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23547-neutrinos-from-outer-space-open-new-eye-in-the-sky.html

Leafing through his yellowed (but still robust enough for me to touch) pages of notes, I felt a certain connection—as I tried to imagine what he was thinking when he wrote them, and tried to relate what I saw in them to what we now know after three more centuries:
….. Read more at Stephen Wolfram – Blog: beev.us/a3cyP/

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA. Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola

When we look into the distant cosmos, the great majority of the objects we see are galaxies: immense gatherings of stars, planets, gas, dust, and dark matter, showing up in all kind of shapes. This Hubble picture registers several, but the galaxy catalogued as 2MASX J05210136-2521450 stands out at a glance due to its interesting shape.

This object is an ultraluminous infrared galaxy which emits a tremendous amount of light at infrared wavelengths. Scientists connect this to intense star formation activity, triggered by a collision between two interacting galaxies.

The merging process has left its signs: 2MASX J05210136-2521450 presents a single, bright nucleus and a spectacular outer structure that consists of a one-sided extension of the inner arms, with a tidal tail heading in the opposite direction, formed from material ripped out from the merging galaxies by gravitational forces.

The image is a combination of exposures taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, using near-infrared and visible light.

European Space Agency/NASA Hubble

Read more at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place– the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.

These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.

This is an artist’s impression of a white dwarf (burned-out) star accreting rocky debris left behind by the star’s surviving planetary system. It was observed by Hubble in the Hyades star cluster. At lower right, an asteroid can be seen falling toward a Saturn-like disk of dust that is encircling the dead star. Infalling asteroids pollute the white dwarf’s atmosphere with silicon. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observed silicon and only low levels of carbon in the white dwarfs’ atmospheres. Silicon is a major ingredient of the rocky material that constitutes Earth and other solid planets in our solar system. Carbon, which helps determine properties and origin of planetary debris, generally is depleted or absent in rocky, Earth-like material.

“We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets,” said Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge in England. He is lead author of a new study appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance they currently retain some of them. The material we are seeing is evidence of this. The debris is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system.”

This discovery suggests rocky planet assembly is common around stars, and it offers insight into what will happen in our own solar system when our sun burns out 5 billion years from now.

Farihi’s research suggests asteroids less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide probably were torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong gravitational forces. Asteroids are thought to consist of the same materials that form terrestrial planets, and seeing evidence of asteroids points to the possibility of Earth-sized planets in the same system.

The pulverized material may have been pulled into a ring around the stars and eventually funneled onto the dead stars. The silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the dead stars.

“It’s difficult to imagine another mechanism than gravity that causes material to get close enough to rain down onto the star,” Farihi said.

By the same token, when our sun burns out, the balance of gravitational forces between the sun and Jupiter will change, disrupting the main asteroid belt. Asteroids that veer too close to the sun will be broken up, and the debris could be pulled into a ring around the dead sun.

According to Farihi, using Hubble to analyze the atmospheres of white dwarfs is the best method for finding the signatures of solid planet chemistry and determining their composition.

“Normally, white dwarfs are like blank pieces of paper, containing only the light elements hydrogen and helium,”Farihi said. “Heavy elements like silicon and carbon sink to the core. The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we just won’t get with any other planet-detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets.”

The two “polluted” Hyades white dwarfs are part of the team’s search of planetary debris around more than 100 white dwarfs, led by Boris Gansicke of the University of Warwick in England. Team member Detlev Koester of the University of Kiel in Germany is using sophisticated computer models of white dwarf atmospheres to determine the abundances of various elements that can be traced to planets in the Hubble spectrograph data.

Fahiri’s team plans to analyze more white dwarfs using the same technique to identify not only the rocks’ composition, but also their parent bodies.
Read more at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/hyades-dwarf.html

blog.worldswithoutend.com

What initiates a lightning strike? In the image above, multiple cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes are observed during a night-time thunderstorm. (Courtesy: NOAA)

Cosmic rays interacting with water droplets within thunderclouds could play an important role in initiating lightning strikes. That is the claim of researchers in Russia, who have studied the radio signals emitted during thousands of lightning strikes. The work could provide new insights into how and why lightning occurs in the first place.
Although most people have witnessed a flash of lightning during a thunderstorm at some point in their lives, scientists still do not completely understand what triggers the discharge in the first place. Lightning has been studied for hundreds of years, yet while many possibilities for observation are available – there are about 40 to 50 lightning strikes per second across the globe – predicting the onset of a strike is difficult…. Read more at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/07/new-insights-into-what-triggers-lightning

One of the exciting possibilities of metamaterials – engineered materials that exhibit properties not found in the natural world – is the potential to control light in ways never before possible. The novel optical properties of such materials could lead to a “perfect lens” that allows direct observation of an individual protein in a light microscope or, conversely, invisibility cloaks that completely hide objects from sight.
Although metamaterials have revolutionized optics in the past decade, their performance so far has been inhibited by their inability to function over broad bandwidths of light. Designing a metamaterial that works across the entire visible spectrum remains a considerable challenge.
Now, Stanford engineers have taken an important step toward this future, by designing a broadband metamaterial that more than doubles the range of wavelengths of light that can be manipulated.
The new material can exhibit a refractive index – the degree to which a material skews light’s path – well below anything found in nature.
“The library of refractive indexes that nature gives us is limited,” said Jennifer Dionne, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering and an affiliate member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “All natural materials have a positive refractive index.”
For example, air at standard conditions has the lowest refractive index in nature, hovering just a tick above 1. The refractive index of water is 1.33. That of diamond is about 2.4. The higher a material’s refractive index, the more it distorts light from its original path.

All natural materials have a positive index of refraction — the degree to which they refract light. The nanoscale artificial “atoms” that constitute the metamaterial prism shown here, however, were designed to exhibit a negative index of refraction, and skew the light to the left. Technology that manipulates light in such unnatural ways could one day lead to invisibility cloaks.

Really interesting physical phenomena can occur, however, if the refractive index is near-zero or negative.
Picture a drinking straw leaning in a glass of water. If the water’s refractive index were negative, the straw would appear inverted – a straw leaning left to right above the water would appear to slant right to left below the water line.
In order for invisibility cloak technology to obscure an object or for a perfect lens to inhibit refraction, the material must be able to precisely control the path of light in a similar manner. Metamaterials offer this potential.
Unlike a natural material whose optical properties depend on the chemistry of the constituent atoms, a metamaterial derives its optical properties from the geometry of its nanoscale unit cells, or “artificial atoms.” By altering the geometry of these unit cells, one can tune the refractive index of the metamaterial to positive, near-zero or negative values.
One hitch is that any such material needs to interact with both the electric and magnetic fields of light. Most natural materials are blind to the magnetic field of light at visible and infrared wavelengths. Previous metamaterial efforts have created artificial atoms composed of two constituents – one that interacts with the electric field, and one for the magnetic. A drawback to this combination approach is that the individual constituents interact with different colors of light, and it is typically difficult to make them overlap over a broad range of wavelengths.
As detailed in the cover story of the current issue of Advanced Optical Materials, Dionne’s group – which included graduate students Hadiseh Alaeian and Ashwin Atre, and postdoctoral fellow Aitzol Garcia – set about designing a single metamaterial “atom” with characteristics that would allow it to efficiently interact with both the electric and magnetic components of light.
The group arrived at the new shape using complex mathematics known as transformation optics. They began with a two-dimensional, planar structure that had the desired optical properties, but was infinitely extended (and so would not be a good “atom” for a metamaterial).
Then, much like a cartographer transforms a sphere into a flat plane when creating a map, the group “folded” the two-dimensional infinite structure into a three-dimensional nanoscale object, preserving the original optical properties.
The transformed object is shaped like a crescent moon, narrow at the tips and thick in the center; the metamaterial consists of these nanocrescent “atoms” arranged in a periodic array. As currently designed, the metamaterial exhibits a negative refractive index over a wavelength range of roughly 250 nanometers in multiple regions of the visible and near-infrared spectrum. The researchers said that a few tweaks to its structure would make this metamaterial useful across the entire visible spectrum.
“We could tune the geometry of the crescent, or shrink the atom’s size, so that the metamaterial would cover the full visible light range, from 400 to 700 nanometers,” Atre said.
That composite material probably won’t resemble an invisibility cloak like Harry Potter’s anytime soon; while it could be flexible, manufacturing the metamaterial over extremely large areas could be tricky. Nonetheless, the authors are excited about the research opportunities the new material will open.
“Metamaterials will potentially allow us to do many new things with light, things we don’t even know about yet. I can’t even imagine what all the applications might be,” Garcia said. “This is a new tool kit to do things that have never been done before.”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-metamaterial-invisibility-video.html#jCp

The Asinelli Tower,which Giovanni Riccioli considered to be “as commodious as possible” to falling-body experiments, stands nearly 100 m above the heart of Bologna, Italy.
(a) Riccioli’s sketch illustrates his experimental findings: A ball dropped from the tower’s summit, point O, reaches points C, Q, R, S, and T in times corresponding to 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 pendulum strokes, respectively.
(b) A photo shows the tower as seen today.

Christopher M. Graney
Every physics student learns about falling bodies and g, the acceleration due to Earth’s gravitational field. But few physicists learn the story of the first experiments—now more than three centuries old—to measure g.
That story begins in earnest with the famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. In his 1632 tome, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo writes that the acceleration of straight motion in heavy [falling] bodies proceeds according to the odd numbers beginning from one.
That is, marking off whatever equal times you wish . . . if the moving body leaving a state of rest shall have passed during the first time such a space as, say, an ell, then in the second time it will go three ells; in the third, five; in the fourth, seven, and it will continue thus according to the successive odd numbers.
In sum, this is the same as to say that the spaces passed over by the body starting from rest have to each other the ratios of the squares of the times in which such spaces were traversed.
To Giovanni Battista Riccioli—an astronomer, Jesuit priest, and fellow Italian—Galileo’s claims were dubious, especially the assertion that an iron ball dropped from a height of 100 cubits took five seconds to reach the ground.
The ball seemed too heavy, and the time of fall too long, to be plausible. Plus, Galileo had provided few details about his experimental procedure.
So Riccioli conducted his own free-fall study. His experiments, which for the most part vindicated Galileo’s theory, have come to be regarded by historians as the first precise measurements of g.
Although historians of science have discussed the experiments in some detail, Riccioli’s own report has yet to be fully translated into a modern language. That remains the physics world’s loss, for Riccioli’s report on falling bodies tells the story of a remarkable experiment performed by a remarkable scientist….
Read more at www.physicstoday.org or scitation.aip.org

Estimated distribution of matter and energy in the universe (en.wikipedia.org)

Peter L. Biermann, Benjamin C. Harms
The idea that dark energy is gravitational waves may explain its strength and its time-evolution.
A possible concept is that dark energy is the ensemble of coherent bursts (solitons) of gravitational waves originally produced when the first generation of super-massive black holes was formed.
These solitons get their initial energy as well as keep up their energy density throughout the evolution of the universe by stimulating emission from a background, a process which we model by working out this energy transfer in a Boltzmann equation approach.
New Planck data suggest that dark energy has increased in strength over cosmic time, supporting the concept here.
The transit of these gravitational wave solitons may be detectable. Key tests include pulsar timing, clock jitter and the radio background….
Read more at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.0498v1.pdf

A COMPUTER-GENERATED IMAGE OF THE LIGHT DISTORTIONS CREATED BY A BLACK HOLE. FOR MORE INFORMATION: HTTP://WWW2.IAP.FR/USERS/RIAZUELO/BH/APOD.PHP
Credit: Alain Riazuelo, IAP/UPMC/CNRS

When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time.

Tony Piro, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, describes this signature light burst in a paper published in the May 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. While some dying stars that result in black holes explode as gamma-ray bursts, which are among the most energetic phenomena in the universe, those cases are rare, requiring exotic circumstances, Piro explains. “We don’t think most run-of-the-mill black holes are created that way.” In most cases, according to one hypothesis, a dying star produces a black hole without a bang or a flash: the star would seemingly vanish from the sky—an event dubbed an unnova. “You don’t see a burst,” he says. “You see a disappearance.”

But, Piro hypothesizes, that may not be the case. “Maybe they’re not as boring as we thought,” he says.

According to well-established theory, when a massive star dies, its core collapses under its own weight. As it collapses, the protons and electrons that make up the core merge and produce neutrons. For a few seconds—before it ultimately collapses into a black hole—the core becomes an extremely dense object called a neutron star, which is as dense as the sun would be if squeezed into a sphere with a radius of about 10 kilometers (roughly 6 miles). This collapsing process also creates neutrinos, which are particles that zip through almost all matter at nearly the speed of light. As the neutrinos stream out from the core, they carry away a lot of energy—representing about a tenth of the sun’s mass (since energy and mass are equivalent, per E = mc2).

According to a little-known paper written in 1980 by Dmitry Nadezhin of the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Russia, this rapid loss of mass means that the gravitational strength of the dying star’s core would abruptly drop. When that happens, the outer gaseous layers—mainly hydrogen—still surrounding the core would rush outward, generating a shock wave that would hurtle through the outer layers at about 1,000 kilometers per second (more than 2 million miles per hour).

Using computer simulations, two astronomers at UC Santa Cruz, Elizabeth Lovegrove and Stan Woosley, recently found that when the shock wave strikes the outer surface of the gaseous layers, it would heat the gas at the surface, producing a glow that would shine for about a year—a potentially promising signal of a black-hole birth. Although about a million times brighter than the sun, this glow would be relatively dim compared to other stars. “It would be hard to see, even in galaxies that are relatively close to us,” says Piro.

But now Piro says he has found a more promising signal. In his new study, he examines in more detail what might happen at the moment when the shock wave hits the star’s surface, and he calculates that the impact itself would make a flash 10 to 100 times brighter than the glow predicted by Lovegrove and Woosley. “That flash is going to be very bright, and it gives us the best chance for actually observing that this event occurred,” Piro explains. “This is what you really want to look for.”

Such a flash would be dim compared to exploding stars called supernovae, for example, but it would be luminous enough to be detectable in nearby galaxies, he says. The flash, which would shine for 3 to 10 days before fading, would be very bright in optical wavelengths—and at its very brightest in ultraviolet wavelengths.

Piro estimates that astronomers should be able to see one of these events per year on average. Surveys that watch the skies for flashes of light like supernovae—surveys such as the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), led by Caltech—are well suited to discover these unique events, he says. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), which improves on the PTF and just began surveying in February, may be able to find a couple of these events per year.

Neither survey has observed any black-hole flashes as of yet, says Piro, but that does not rule out their existence. “Eventually we’re going to start getting worried if we don’t find these things.” But for now, he says, his expectations are perfectly sound.

With Piro’s analysis in hand, astronomers should be able to design and fine-tune additional surveys to maximize their chances of witnessing a black-hole birth in the near future. In 2015, the next generation of PTF, called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), is slated to begin; it will be even more sensitive, improving by several times the chances of finding those flashes. “Caltech is therefore really well-positioned to look for transient events like this,” Piro says.

Within the next decade, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will begin a massive survey of the entire night sky. “If LSST isn’t regularly seeing these kinds of events, then that’s going to tell us that maybe there’s something wrong with this picture, or that black-hole formation is much rarer than we thought,” he says.

The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper is titled “Taking the ‘un’ out of unnovae.” This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation.

Written by Marcus Woo - http://www.caltech.edu/content/birth-black-hole

An artist’s impression of gravitational waves from two orbiting black holes. (Courtesy: T Carnahan, NASA GSFC)

Scientists in California have proposed a new type of gravitational-wave detector that is immune to laser noise – a problem that adds to the expense of current detector designs. The researchers believe that their proposal – a modified form of an atom interferometer – would be cheaper and easier to implement in space than current laser interferometers.
Gravitational waves are tiny perturbations in the curvature of space–time that arise from accelerating masses – according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The first hint that the waves exist was spotted in 1974 as a gradual decrease of the orbital period of the pulsar PSR B1913+16, which circles a neutron star. However, no-one has directly detected a gravitational wave. Such a discovery would provide confirmation of general relativity and also open a new field of gravitational-wave astronomy, in which distant objects could be studied by the waves they emit…
… Read more: physicsworld.com

Nima Arkani-Hamed

The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist
Nima Arkani-Hamed
Institute for Advanced Study
October 26, 2012 – 5:30pm
Our present framework for physics is difficult to modify without destroying its marvelous, successful properties. This provides a strong check on theoretical speculations and helps guide us to a small set of candidates for new laws. In this talk, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, illustrates these ideas in action by explaining why theoretical physicists knew the Higgs boson had to exist long before it was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in July 2012. While the discovery of the Higgs is a triumph for both experimental and theoretical physics, its existence opens up a set of profound conceptual paradoxes, whose resolution is likely to involve radical new ideas. The talk concludes with a description of possible avenues of attack on these mysteries, and what we might learn from the LHC in this decade. http://video.ias.edu/arkani-hamed-lecture-10-12

Read also: The Future of Fundamental Physics

You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film (see how it was made at http://youtu.be/xA4QWwaweWA). The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.

The Alpha experiment’s antimatter chamber uses magnetic fields to sequester antihydrogen atoms

Physicists have long wondered whether the gravitational interactions between matter and antimatter might be different from those between matter and itself. Although there are many indirect indications that no such differences exist and that the weak equivalence principle holds, there have been no direct, free-fall style, experimental tests of gravity on antimatter. Here we describe a novel direct test methodology; we search for a propensity for antihydrogen atoms to fall downward when released from the ALPHA antihydrogen trap. In the absence of systematic errors, we can reject ratios of the gravitational to inertial mass of antihydrogen >75 at a statistical significance level of 5%; worst-case systematic errors increase the minimum rejection ratio to 110. A similar search places somewhat tighter bounds on a negative gravitational mass, that is, on antigravity. This methodology, coupled with ongoing experimental improvements, should allow us to bound the ratio within the more interesting near equivalence regime….
Read more: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/full/ncomms2787.html

Read also: Antigravity gets first test at Cern’s Alpha experiment