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It's Friday at Florida International University, which means a few things for Sky Choi: physics lab, Calculus II -- and a trip to the game room. For this 12-year-old, the youngest student ever to attend FIU, college is a long-awaited challenge and a daily adventure. ''We have fun here,'' he said as he prepared to start a work sheet on pistons, gases, and pressure with his lab partners. Welcome to the world of Sky, who is taking a full course load of physics, calculus, and Chinese language classes at the university -- and still finds time to play pool and...

Perfect liquids suggest theory’s math mirrors something real Shadows live in a simple world. They glide effortlessly across any sort of surface, oblivious to the higher dimension of space in which 3-D bodies move, collide and sometimes block the paths of rays of light. Shadows have no idea how important that third dimension is, and how objects in it endow those very shadows with their quasi-physical existence. Indeed, the laws of shadow physics all depend on the third dimension’s presence. And just as the clueless inhabitants of the shadow world require an extra dimension to explain how they exist and...

Is theoretical physics becoming the next battleground in the culture wars? Not according to some theologians and scientists.People have long sought after a theory of everything, even when they had nothing but their five senses as tools of measurement. In the 6th century BCE Thales asserted that all matter is made of water; Anaximenes responded that itÂ’s all air. Parmenides a century later concluded with exacting proofs that everything we see is an illusion and that reality really consists of a single, unchanging sphere. Today, scientists are once again looking beyond the pale of measurable time and space to answer...

The quantum stickiness between very close surfaces produces no drag when they move, researchers claim.The 'sticky' Casimir force can even be repulsive.Jay Penni and Federico Capasso The quantum-mechanical effect that makes objects stick together when they are very close produces no friction when the objects are moving, two physicists claim. The results suggest that the operation of nanoscale machinery might not be as sticky a problem as feared. It's long been thought that the 'Casimir force', which pulls together two objects when they are much less than a hair's breadth apart, will create a drag force when the objects move....

Flexible display screens and cheap solar cells can become a reality through research and development in organic electronics. Physicists at Umeå University in northern Sweden have developed a simple method for producing cheap electronic components, writes Cellular-News.

Twenty years ago this week, a pair of previously unknown scientists stunned the world by announcing they'd done the impossible by achieving nuclear fusion in a lab flask at room temperature. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons quickly became celebrities as the news media hailed them for discovering a cheap source of nearly limitless power. But it all fell apart as other scientists couldn't duplicate their results, and the pair later admitted they'd made mistakes in the experiments. Now a U.S. Navy researcher, speaking on the anniversary of and in the same city where they made their announcement, thinks Fleischmann and...

LONDON: Scientists have detected vast turbulent waves in the sun's lower atmosphere that at a time spew the energy equivalent of 10 billion nuclear warheads. Queen's University Belfast (QUB) scientists with researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and California State, have shed some light on why the corona, the region around the sun, has a much higher temperature than its surface - something of a puzzle to scientists. Their discovery has revealed the existence of a new breed of solar waves, called the Alfven wave, known to transport energy into the corona. The surface of the sun, known as the...

HEAT WAVEThe Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope captured this image of an approximately 8,000 kilometer by 8,000 km region on the sun’s surface. Scientists observed Alfvén waves oscillating from the bright spot near the middle of the image, a highly magnetized area.D. JessMagnetic waves theorized to transfer heat from the surface of the sun to its atmosphere have been directly observed for the first time, researchers report in the March 20 Science. Astrophysicists have long puzzled over why the sun’s atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun itself. “It’s counterintuitive — when you hold your...

Enlarge ImageStrange swirls. The vortices in the type-2 superconductor niobium diselenide form an orderly pattern (bottom); those in the "type-1.5" superconductor magnesium diboride form a disorderly pattern filled with stripes and voids. Credit: V. V. Moshchalkov and M. Menghini/K. U. Leuven Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field--or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. "If the experiment is true, this would add a whole new class of superconductors," says Egor...

Enlarge ImageSolid evidence? An ultracold gas of rubidium atoms shows a crystalline-like arrangement of magnetic regions, making a possible supersolid material. Credit: M. Vengalattore et al., arXiv.org (24 January 2009) PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA--Five years ago, researchers in the United States saw the first evidence of a "supersolid," a bizarre state of matter in which crystals of ultracold helium could flow like a liquid without viscosity. But the evidence for supersolidity in helium has not been ironclad. Now, there is a new contender for the supersolidity claim. At the American Physical Society meeting here today, Dan Stamper-Kurn, a physicist at the...

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), snip D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. snip Third view Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If...

A group of researchers in Tennessee and Denmark has discovered a way to sensitively detect explosives based on the physical properties of their vapors. Their technology, which is currently being developed into prototype devices for field testing, is described in the latest issue of the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which is published by the American Institute of Physics. "Certain classes of explosives have unique thermal characteristics that help to identify explosive vapors in presence of other vapors," says Thomas Thundat, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee who conducted the research with his...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2009) — In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action at a distance' of quantum mechanics directly, Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth, poses a conundrum...

Books claiming that science disproves ‘young-earth’ creationism are very common, and books that claim the Bible itself does not mandate a literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis are not in short supply either. David Snoke’s book A Biblical Case for an Old Earth ostensibly falls in the latter group, though his main reason for rejecting biblical creation is really uniformitarian ‘science’. Books like these generally don’t pose a threat to informed creationists, and this one is no exception. In fact, Snoke could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had actually taken the time to...

A research group in Germany has discovered a semiconducting material that can switch its semiconducting properties -- turning from one type of semiconductor to another -- via a simple change in temperature. This intriguing behavior may make the material useful in efforts to create better performing integrated circuits, which form the backbone of almost all electronic devices. Semiconductors are essential to integrated circuits, and any significant advances in semiconductor materials could mean big changes for the future of electronic technologies. For example, this new finding may further developments in data-storage technology. At a more fundamental level, the material could change...

Ytterbium ion is the first element to be teleported over a distance. Ytterbium ions have been 'teleported' over a distance of a metre.MM_photo / Alamy Researchers have teleported a single ion of the element ytterbium over a metre in distance, shattering previous records. Photons have gone further but teleportation of matter has only occurred between ions in the same trap over a few micrometers.Although still highly inefficient, their technique provides an important proof-of-principle for long-distance quantum teleportation and brings the era of quantum communication closer to reality. The work appears in the journal Science1.The spandexed crew of Star Trek has...

Abstract: Large scale manned space flight within the solar system is still confronted with the solution of two problems: 1. A propulsion system to transport large payloads with short transit times between different planetary orbits. 2. A cost effective lifting of large payloads into earth orbit. For the solution of the first problem a deuterium fusion bomb propulsion system is proposed where a thermonuclear detonation wave is ignited in a small cylindrical assembly of deuterium with a gigavolt-multimegampere proton beam, drawn from the magnetically insulated spacecraft acting in the ultrahigh vacuum of space as a gigavolt capacitor. For the solution...

Supercar to use wind power to reach amazing speeds A revolutionary new supercar will be able to hit a top speed of 155mph - using wind power. By Daily Telegraph Reporter 11 Jan 2009 The new environmentally-friendly high performance car was designed in California The Formula AE car will use a solar-powered battery to get it moving but will then use the airflow passing over the vehicle to power a turbine. It will be able to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds and is expected to cost around £100,000 when it hits the market.

U.S. scientists have found a way to levitate the very smallest objects using the strange forces of quantum mechanics, and said on Wednesday they might use it to help make tiny nanotechnology machines. They said they had detected and measured a force that comes into play at the molecular level using certain combinations of molecules that repel one another. The repulsion can be used to hold molecules aloft, in essence levitating them, creating virtually friction-free parts for tiny devices, the researchers said. Federico Capasso, an applied physicist at Harvard University in Massachusetts, whose study appears in the journal Nature, said...

Since Aristotle’s first theory on the Milky Way to present times, there’s still so much astronomers need to learn about the galaxy our Solar System lies in. Over the course of time, the observations made on the Milky Way itself seemed harder to do than on any other galaxy, simply because they had to be made from within the galaxy, offering very little perspective. That is why the latest findings by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics should come as no surprise. As it appears, not only were we wrong about the speed and weight of our Galaxy, but...

Our galaxy is much bigger than once thought, according to research presented at a major astronomy meeting this week. The results suggest the Milky Way is roughly the same size as Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our local group. What is more, it is moving 15% faster than earlier predictions. The greater mass means that future collisions with nearby galaxies could happen sooner than thought, according to the researchers. Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, US, and his colleagues made use of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to deduce the Milky Way's size and...

2 Seeing Exoplanets SeeWeb links on exoplanets Seeing might be believing, but for scientists belief rarely depends on seeing. The right squiggles coming out of an instrument are usually enough to confirm that they have caught their quarry, however infinitesimal, insubstantial, or bizarre. Astronomers searching for planets circling other stars, however, may have been getting just a tad impatient with their progress toward their ultimate goal: recognizing a habitable, even an inhabited, planet beyond our own solar system. For that, they'll need to see their target. But all exoplanet detections had been of the squiggly variety. Now, astronomers have seen...

On Christmas eve in 1938, the physicist Lise Meitner took a walk in the snowy woods of Kungalv, Sweden, with her nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist. A Jewish refugee who had recently escaped from Hitler's Germany, Meitner began discussing with Frisch some puzzling experimental results from a lab in Berlin. By the time their famous walk was over, Meitner had scribbled down for the first time the equations that demonstrated the possibility of extracting huge amounts of energy from the splitting or "fission" of uranium atoms. Seventy years ago today, the woman whom Albert Einstein called "our Madame Curie"...

Dec. 16, 2008: NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics. "At first I didn't believe it," says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction." The opening...

Proton discovery may cast doubt on dark-matter theories. The Milagro detector has seen cosmic-ray hot-spots.Milagro / U. Maryland / LANL Hot on the heels of speculation that cosmic rays may have revealed the signature of elusive dark matter in space, new observations could challenge that idea and reinforce an alternative explanation.A seven-year-long experiment at the Milagro cosmic-ray detector near Los Alamos, New Mexico, has revealed 'bright patches' of high-energy cosmic rays in the sky1 – something incompatible with a dark-matter source.Cosmic rays are charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, that are produced in space and generally have a characteristic energy...

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT. Using computer modeling and a variety of advanced chip-manufacturing techniques, they have applied an antireflection coating to the front, and a novel combination of multi-layered reflective coatings and a tightly spaced array of lines — called a diffraction grating — to the backs of ultrathin silicon films to boost the cells’ output by as much as 50 percent. The carefully designed layers deposited on the back of the cell cause the...

Correct calculation strengthens theory of quark-gluon interactions in nuclear particles When it comes to weighty matters, quarks and gluons rule the universe, a new study confirms. One of the largest computational efforts to calculate the masses of protons and neutrons shows that the standard model of particle physics predicts those masses with an uncertainty of less than 4 percent. Christian Hoelbling, affiliated with the Bergische Universtät Wuppertal in Germany, the Eötvös University in Budapest and the CNRS in Marseille, France, and his colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 21 Science. Nearly all the mass of ordinary matter consists of...

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 1997) — A team of 20 physicists from four institutions has literally made something from nothing, creating particles of matter from ordinary light for the first time. The experiment was carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) by scientists and students from the University of Rochester, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee, and Stanford. The team reported the work in the Sept. 1 issue of Physical Review Letters. Scientists have long been able to convert matter to energy; the most spectacular example is a nuclear explosion, where a small amount of matter creates tremendous energy....

Physics is too male and middle class, Wakeham says 30 October 2008 By Zoë Corbyn University physics departments are not well positioned for the future because they are too similar, too narrowly focused and contain too many upper middle-class white men. That is the message from Bill Wakeham, vice-chancellor of the University of Southampton, who is due to outline his concerns at an Institute of Physics meeting this week after the publication of his report into the health of the discipline. Speaking to Times Higher Education ahead of the event, Professor Wakeham said most departments had similar specialisations, very little...

Associated Press Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers. Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study...

HONOLULU — A federal judge in Hawaii has dismissed a lawsuit trying to stop the world's largest atom smasher. U.S. District Court Judge Helen Gilmor ruled Friday that federal courts don't have jurisdiction over the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, near Geneva. Two Hawaii residents sued because they feared that the machine could create small black holes or other phenomena that could destroy the planet.

Enlarge ImageBreaking their way. Makoto Kobayashi (left), Toshihide Maskawa (center), and Yoichiro Nambu share the prize for work on two different aspects of "broken symmetry."Credit: KYODO/Reuters This year's Nobel Prize in physics honors three particle theorist of Japanese origin, one for pioneering the use of a key conceptual tool and the other two for making, in essence, an inspired educated guess that expanded the family of fundamental subatomic particles. Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago in Illinois receives half the $1.4 million prize for, in the early 1960s, applying to particle physics the concept of spontaneous symmetry...

People anthropomorphize animals all the time. Amusingly, usually. And most of us are guilty (although I have a workmate who never indulges in this behavior. She did call me the other day, though, to have me instruct her in the pronunciation of the word, so that she might not sound like a fool while she ridicules those of her acquaintance who imagine their dogs to be smiling at them.) I myself frequently imagine Horus to be gazing at me in loving adoration, while he more probably is projecting the little dotted butcher’s lines onto the contours of my flesh and...

Three different trends in physics each suggest that our universe is just one of many.We usually think of the universe as being “everything there is.” But many astronomers and physicists now suspect that the universe we observe is just a small part of an unbelievably larger and richer cosmic structure, often called the “multiverse.” This mind-bending notion – that our universe may be just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, of real, physical universes – was front and center at a three-day conference entitled "A Debate in Cosmology — The Multiverse," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics...

GENEVA — The world's largest atom smasher — which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month — has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet. After more than a...

September 10 marked the startup of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland--the first attempt to circulate protons through its full 27 km circumference. International Science Grid This Week (www.isgtw.org) brings you podcasts straight from the local control centers and a report from the scene at Fermilab’s Remote Operations Center in Batavia, Illinois. We all know about the event at CERN, but what else is happening to mark this event? That is where LHC First Beam Events <http://www.uslhc.us/first_beam> comes in. It has information about what several U.S. institutions, involved in the construction and startup of the LHC, are doing. Probably...

Excerpt - GENEVA, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) started up a huge particle-smashing machine on Wednesday, aiming to re-enact the conditions of the "Big Bang" that created the universe. Experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, a 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) accelerator built underneath the Swiss-French border, could unlock the remaining secrets of particle physics and answer questions about the universe and its origins.

Batavia, Ill. - Physicists of the DZero experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b (Ωb). The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass. The discovery of the doubly strange particle brings scientists a step closer to understanding exactly how quarks form matter and to completing the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons (derived from the Greek word "barys," meaning "heavy") are particles that contain...

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

Here's an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analyzed the raw...

Inside a bland industrial building in Wilmington, N.C., an experiment is in the works that could vastly reduce the cost, time, and space needed to make fuel for nuclear power plants and, some nonproliferation experts say, for nuclear bombs as well. In that building, secret uranium-enrichment technology licensed by GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy is nearing a pilot test. If successful, the new technology will enable the company to supply low-cost nuclear fuel to power reactors worldwide, officials say. -Snip- If SILEX is successful, GE-Hitachi could produce low-enriched uranium fuel for power plants at half the cost of centrifuge-based technology, Dr. Eerkens...

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

Proof-of-concept system could lead to ultra-secure international communication. Entangled photons of light could help to create ultra-secure communication systems.Punhstock Physicists have built a communication network, secured by quantum cryptography, that could one day work on a global scale. Quantum cryptography scrambles data using the laws of quantum mechanics, relying on a concept known as entanglement to ensure absolutely security. Entanglement allows two particles to be quantum-mechanically connected even when they are physically separated. Although the specific condition of either particle cannot be precisely known, taking measurements of one will instantly tell you something about the other. The trick can't be...

If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC. Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest...

http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/boyd/presentations/Boyd_UMD-Q-Im_08.pdf

Quantum weirdness even stranger than previously thought.Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws...

Travel by bubble might seem more appropriate for witches in Oz, but two physicists suggest that a future spaceship could fold a space-time bubble around itself to travel faster than the speed of light. We're talking about the very distant future, of course. The idea involves manipulating dark energy — the mysterious force behind the universe's ongoing expansion — to propel a spaceship forward without breaking the laws of physics. "Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Gerald Cleaver, a physicist at Baylor University. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would...

Strange events that Einstein himself called "spooky" might happen at least 10,000 times the speed of light, according to the latest attempt to understand them.

Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all-time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the strength of the invisible glue that holds atomic nuclei together, may have been different in the past. "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are." The observed differences are small — roughly a few parts in a...