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Here’s some good news. M. J. McDermott’s wonderful video about why Americans don’t know math has exceeded 1,000,000 views. This is one of the best videos about education on the web. If you haven’t viewed it, please do. Running time is about 15 minutes. In this video, McDermott explains the flaws in so-called Reform Math, which was introduced to the country around 1985. Reform Math actually consists of more than a dozen separate but basically identical curricula. As fast as a community figures out that one of these things is bad, the so-called experts introduce another. These experts are diabolically...

Enlarge Image Home sweet home. In the vicinity of the sun, our Milky Way galaxy seems to contain no dark matter, one team of astronomers claims. Credit: Serge Brunier/NASA If a new study is true, then the search for dark matter just got a lot weirder. Our little corner of the Milky Way contains no observable concentration of the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxy, claims one team of astronomers. That finding would present a major problem for models of how galaxies form and may undermine the whole notion of dark matter, the researchers claim. But some scientists...

If AmericaÂ’s ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure, we will need to think again about cultivating the necessary habits of the heart and resisting the allure of the ideology of technology. Why are Americans addicted to technology? The question has a distinctly contemporary ring, and we might be tempted to think it could only have been articulated within the last decade or two. Could we, after all, have known anything about technology addiction before the advent of the Blackberry? Well, as it turns out, Americans have a longstanding fascination and facility with technology, and the question...

Neutrinos are having a moment. They’re speeding across Europe (just how fast is under review), they’re changing flavors in China and, now, they’re carrying rudimentary messages through bedrock in Illinois. A team of physicists encoded a short string of letters on a beam of neutrinos at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and sent the message to a detector more than a kilometer away. On the journey the neutrinos passed through 240 meters of solid rock, mostly shale. What was the word they transmitted in the preliminary demonstration? “Neutrino.” The experiment is described in a paper posted to the...

Scientists at the University of Southern California have created a computer within a diamond to test quantum computing theories. This research could lead to super computer speeds, but for the present is still in the experimental stage. A gratuitous tip of the hat to The Weazmeister for the linkage. A qubit can represent a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This is thanks to the quantum property of superposition, and it’s the property that may one day make quantum computers insanely fast. Comments

Einstein is still the boss, say researchers with the BOSS project for measuring key properties of the universe. BOSS, for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, has measured the distance to faraway galaxies more precisely than ever before, mapping the universe as it existed roughly 6 billion years ago, when it was only 63 percent of its current size. The findings suggest that the mysterious “dark energy” causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate was foreseen by Einstein, the researchers reported April 1 at the American Physical Society meeting. To keep the universe in a static state, Einstein added a...

Analysis of data from the National Science Foundation-(NSF) funded 10-m South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica provides new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy, the source of the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The results begin to hone in on the tiny mass of the neutrinos, the most abundant particles in the universe, which until recently were thought to be without mass. The SPT data strongly support Albert Einstein's cosmological constant—the leading model for dark energy—even though researchers base the analysis on only a fraction of the SPT data...

A study led by a University of Utah astrophysicist found a new explanation for the growth of supermassive black holes in the center of most galaxies: They repeatedly capture and swallow single stars from pairs of stars that wander too close. Using new calculations and previous observations of our Milky Way and other galaxies, “We found black holes grow enormously as a result of sucking in captured binary star partners,” said Ben Bromley from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “I believe this has got to be the dominant method for growing supermassive black holes,” he said. “There...

Astronomers have measured the precise distance to over a quarter of a million galaxies to gain new insights into a key period in cosmic history. The 3D map of the sky allows scientists to probe the time six billion years ago when dark energy became the dominant influence on the Universe's expansion. No-one knows the true nature of this repulsive force, but the exquisite data in the international BOSS survey will help test various theories. The analysis appears in six papers. These have all been posted on the arXiv preprint server. "This is an incredibly exciting time to be working...

In a paper published in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of “spontaneous coherence,” “spin textures” and “phase singularities” when excitons—the bound pairs of electrons and holes that determine the optical properties of semiconductors and enable them to function as novel optoelectronic devices—are cooled to near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the spontaneous production of a new coherent state of matter which the physicists were finally able to measure in great detail in their basement laboratory at UC San Diego at a temperature of only one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero....

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 with a “telescope” nearly the size of our galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. They pack more than the mass of the Sun into a sphere no larger than a medium-sized city, making them the densest objects in...

Magnetic field researchers target Hundred-Tesla goal The 1,200-megajoule motor generator that powers the magnetic pulse.     ==> Previous world record shattered during six-experiment pulseLOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, March 22, 2012—Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s biggest magnet facility today met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth’s magnetic field.“This is our moon shot, we’ve worked toward this for a decade and a half,” said Chuck Mielke, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos.The team used...

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination...

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 laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel...

Squeezing hydrogen at extreme pressures changes it into a mix of honeycombed atoms layered with free-floating molecules — an entirely new state of the element and the first new phase found in decades. If confirmed, the discovery will be only the fourth known phase of hydrogen, the simplest element and one long probed for basic insights into the nature of matter. “I think we have pretty bulletproof evidence that there is a new phase,” says Eugene Gregoryanz of the University of Edinburgh, leader of the team that will report the work in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. Hydrogen’s first three...

With its latest research, Big Blue says it's reached device performance close to the minimum requirements for implementing a "practical quantum computer." But many hurdles remain.Seen here is a silicon chip housing three superconducting quantum bits, or qubits. IBM believes qubits are the key to its quantum computing efforts. (Credit: IBM Research) Scientists at IBM say they have made a quantum computing breakthrough that demonstrates that a full-scale quantum computer is not only possible but is within reasonable reach. In an announcement being made today at the American Physical Society in Boston, Matthias Steffen, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing...

Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, had a thing for nuclear bombs. He wanted them bigger, smaller, faster, used in ways that no one had thought of before or since, and always more of them. He suffered no fools, and though he would be more villified than any other American scientist in the 20th century, he always dismissed his critics as lacking in common sense or patriotism. Amid Cold War paranoia and fears of the Soviet nuclear program, the stakes were simply too high: for the free world, building the most powerful weapon in history was a matter...

Scientists are beginning to sort out the stellar ingredients that produce a type 1a supernova, a type of cosmic explosion that has been used to measure the universe’s accelerating expansion. Two teams of researchers presented new data about these supernovas at the American Astronomical Society meeting on January 11. One team confirmed a long-held suspicion about the kind of star that explodes, and the second provided new evidence for what feeds that star until it bursts. “This is a confirmation of a decades-old belief, namely that a type 1a supernova comes from the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf,” said...

When squeezed to pressures and temperatures like those inside giant planets, water molecules are less squeezable than anticipated, defying a set of decades-old equations used to describe watery behavior over a range of conditions. Studying how molecules behave in such environments will help scientists better understand the formation and composition of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune, as well as those being spotted in swarms by planet hunters. The new work, which appears in the March 2 Physical Review Letters, also suggests that textbooks about planetary interiors and magnetic fields may need reworking. “At this point, it’s worth putting together...

Faulty wiring has been proposed as the glitch that caused a European physics experiment to clock particles flying faster than light. Scientists at Italy’s OPERA experiment reported in September that nearly weightless particles called neutrinos were apparently traveling from the CERN laboratory on the Swiss-French border to an underground detector in Italy, 730 kilometers away, faster than the speed of light. The apparent violation of Einstein’s theory of special relativity immediately produced a chorus of theorists offering reasons why neutrinos simply could not be going that fast (SN: 11/5/11, p. 10). “It was always clear to me that the results...