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Ex nihilo: Dynamical Casimir effect in metamaterial converts vacuum fluctuations into real photons March 8, 2013 by Stuart Mason Dambrot Copyright © PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1212705110 (Phys.org) —In the strange world of quantum mechanics, the vacuum state (sometimes referred to as the quantum vacuum, simply as the vacuum) is a quantum system's lowest possible energy state. While not containing physical particles, neither is it an empty void: Rather, the quantum vacuum contains fluctuating electromagnetic waves and so-called virtual particles, the latter being known to transition into and out of existence. In addition, the vacuum state has zero-point energy – the lowest quantized...

FULL TITLE: Solving nearly century-old problem: Using graphene, professor finds out what causes low-frequency electronic 1/f noise =========================================================== A University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering professor and a team of researchers published a paper today that show how they solved an almost century-old problem that could further help downscale the size of electronic devices. The work, led by Alexander A. Balandin, a professor of electrical engineering at UC Riverside, focused on the low-frequency electronic 1/f noise, also known as pink noise and flicker noise. It is a signal or process with a power spectral density inversely proportional to...

A ring of radiation previously unknown to science fleetingly surrounded Earth last year before being virtually annihilated by a powerful interplanetary shock wave, scientists say. NASA’s twin Van Allen space probes, which are studying the Earth’s radiation belts, made the cosmic find. The surprising discovery—a new, albeit temporary, radiation belt around Earth—reveals how much remains unknown about outer space, even those regions closest to the planet, researchers added. …

Try using the entire Earth to hunt for a new fundamental force of nature. So say Larry Hunter of Amherst College in Massachusetts, and colleagues. They have created a map of the spins of electrons deep within the Earth's mantle, which could be used to reveal the as-yet-unseen force as well as the strange particles – known as "unparticles" – that might carry it. We currently know of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The hypothetical fifth force can be thought of as a version of magnetism that does not weaken as quickly with...

Enlarge Image Ray maker. The "Jellyfish nebula" (IC 443) and another supernova remnant gave researchers firm evidence that cosmic rays come from exploding stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA For the past century, physicists have puzzled over cosmic rays, particles (mostly protons) that hurtle through space at high speed and seem to come from all directions equally. What's the source of these galactic projectiles? And how do they come to be traveling so fast? Today, an international team announced a major step toward answering those questions: conclusive evidence that at least some of the cosmic rays come from supernova remnants—expanding shells of...

Smack in the middle of where a D.C. developer hopes to build apartments on the Forest Hills-Chalfant border stands a small brick building adorned with a towering steel orb. The four-story weathered object, which resembles a giant light bulb, is the genesis of the Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s foray into nuclear power — a 1937 van de Graaff particle accelerator, the world's first industrial atom smasher. “Westinghouse was really in the vanguard of nuclear power,” said Cynthia Kelly, president of the Washington-based Atomic Heritage Foundation. “It's great that they kept (the accelerator.) It's a great piece of history.” Gary Silversmith thinks...

Enlarge Image A picture of heat. A high-resolution image of the solar atmosphere at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (right) reveals details of magnetic processes (middle and lower left; bright features denote intense energy release) likely providing much of the energy that heats the corona to temperatures ranging from 2 million°C to 4 million°C. The upper-left image denotes a region seen in close-up at right. Credit: Amy Winebarger/MSFC/NASA If you thought the exterior of the sun was hot, check out its corona. Although our star's visible surface is less than 6000°C, its atmosphere blazes at up to 4 million°C. Now, thanks...

Following up on my original post, I've scanned and virtualized my Pickett N4-ES Vector Type LOG LOG DUAL BASE SPEED RULE. That's the most complicated rule that Picket produced. It has 34 scales, which is good, because in the world of slide rule collecting, bigger is better. ().

Many galaxies appear to have stronger gravity - and thus more mass - than can be explained by their visible matter alone. Overly massive galaxies are most often attributed to dark matter, an invisible substance that interacts with matter through gravity. To date, though, no one has directly detected dark matter particles. But a well-established notion in physics could hold another explanation for their size. This says that empty space is really a frothy, turbulent sea full of virtual particles - matter and antimatter that spring in and out of existence so fast that we can't see them. Though they...

Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator. With billions of dollars in federal science funding hinging on the integrity of academic researchers, and billions more in health care dollars riding on the truthfulness of pharmaceutical research claims, the industry needs more websites like this, not fewer. Regular readers of Retraction Watch, a watchdog site run by two medical reporters, got the news along with a story about the blog’s anonymous editor, who...

FULL TITLE: New approach using nanoparticle alloys allows heat to be focused or reflected just like electromagnetic waves An MIT researcher has developed a technique that provides a new way of manipulating heat, allowing it to be controlled much as light waves can be manipulated by lenses and mirrors. The approach relies on engineered materials consisting of nanostructured semiconductor alloy crystals. Heat is a vibration of matter—technically, a vibration of the atomic lattice of a material—just as sound is. Such vibrations can also be thought of as a stream of phonons—a kind of "virtual particle" that is analogous to the...

The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III’s four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars, plus new information about objects in previous Sloan surveys (SDSS-I and II). “This is just the first of three data releases from BOSS,” says David Schlegel of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), an astrophysicist in the Lab’s Physics Division and BOSS’s principal investigator. “By the time...

Most cultural institutions and research laboratories still rely on magnetic tape to archive their collections. Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast not only this old-school format but also CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s. The electronics giant partnered with Kyoto University's Kiyotaka Miura to develop “semiperpetual” slivers of quartz glass that Hitachi says can preserve information for hundreds of millions of years with virtually no degradation. The prototype is made of a square of quartz two centimeters wide and two millimeters thick. It houses four layers of dots that are created with a femtosecond...

A string of 13 dwarf galaxies are in orbit around the galaxy Andromeda. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and 30,000 light years thick, moving in synchonicity with each other. The phenomenon is unlike behaviour of other observed galaxies and suggests a hole in our knowledge of galaxy formation. A string of 13 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the massive galaxy Andromeda are not behaving as they should. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and only 30,000 light years thick, moving...

It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no...

"Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”........This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers......But when his parents brought him to a toy store, [for a toy crane] the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one. This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down....

...The latest results from the ATLAS detector at the LHC suggest that when we look at its decay into two photons, we find that the new boson's mass is about 3 gigaelectronvolts greater than when calculated from its decay into particles called Z bosons. Albert De Roeck, one of the key Higgs hunters at ATLAS's sibling detector, CMS, finds this puzzling. "The results are barely consistent," he says... The ATLAS team also announced new results from analysing the Higgs boson's rate of decay into pairs of photons. The standard model of particle physics predicts exactly how often this should happen....

Recent observations prove revisions might be necessary for long support theory Data gathered by a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NSIT) suggest that certain aspects of the highly regarded quantum electrodynamics theory might require some revising.Observations made with the NSITÂ’s electron beam ion trap have led to questions regarding the accuracy of the quantum electrodynamics theory. What the group discovered, via the NSITÂ’s Electron Beam Ion Trap, is that ions with a strongly positive charge can display electrons that behave in ways inconsistent with what the theory suggests should happen. About the quantum electrodynamics theory The...

Free whitepaper – Shutterfly and Cleversafe: The Path to a Picture Perfect Data Storage Solution A state of magnetism predicted in 1987 has been observed for the first time at MIT, with researchers saying that it might one day find applications in storage and communications technologies. The “one day” is still quite some way off, however, with the researchers only at the very beginning of observing the properties of what’s called a “quantum spin liquid” (QSL). The properties of a quantum spin liquid are revealed in the spin properties of atoms in a crystal. Rather than settling into a stable...

Dec. 7, 2012 – By Steven B. Krivit – Researchers from Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories performed an independent replication of a Mitsubishi low-energy nuclear reaction transmutation experiment, according to a physicist from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries speaking at the American Nuclear Society LENR session on Nov. 14 in San Diego, Calif. The physicist, Yasuhiro Iwamura, told the ANS audience that the Toyota researchers confirmed that nuclear changes from one element to another took place without the use of high-energy nuclear physics. Most scientists who have not followed this field closely consider such profound claims inconceivable. Toyota used a LENR...