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A NASA-sponsored researcher at the University of Iowa has developed a way for spacecraft to hunt down hidden magnetic portals in the vicinity of Earth. These portals link the magnetic field of our planet to that of the sun. Excellent video on the science of our magnetosphere and how we are just learning about field reversal that open and close between earth and the sun.

June 10, 2012 Image of the Day: Evidence of a Past Universe? Circular Patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background              Stephen Hawking has said: "We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past." Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable? This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. "Our best bet for a theory of everything...

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether. The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether. Although the findings might sound...

Got mass? Scientists observe electrons become both heavy and speedy Electrons moving in certain solids can behave as if they are a thousand times more massive than free electrons, but at the same time act as superconductors. A new study led by Princeton scientists shows that this happens because of a process known as quantum entanglement that determines the mass of electrons moving in a crystal. The discovery can help improve understanding of how certain materials become superconducting, which may have applications in areas such as power network efficiency and computing speed. Credit: the Yazdani Group A Princeton University-led team...

The Nikola Tesla Monument within Queen Victoria Park, Niagara Falls (Canadian Side) will be unveiled on July 9, 2006 at 12 noon celebrating the 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla.

Two years ago several of my Sci Am colleagues and I had an intense email exchange over a period of weeks, trying to figure out what to make of a new paper by string theorist Erik Verlinde. I don’t think I’ve ever been so flummoxed by physicists’ reactions to a paper. Mathematically it could hardly have been simpler—the level of middle-school algebra for the most part. Logically and physically, it was a head-hurter. I couldn’t decide whether it was profound or trite. The theorists we consulted said they couldn’t follow it, which we took as a polite way of saying...

Eight months after the multinational Opera research team caused an uproar among physicists with its findings that some neutrinos appeared to travel faster than light, its findings have been officially refuted. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on Friday said that four experiments have found that neutrinos actually travel no faster than the speed of light. Opera's original measurements can be attributed to a faulty element of its experiment's fiber optic timing system, CERN said. The findings were announced at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, by CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci. Life...

Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything by Margaret Wertheim Walker, 323 pp., $27.00                                                   Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource An engraving by William Blake from The Song of Los, 1795 Physics on the Fringe describes work done by amateurs, people rejected by the academic establishment and rejecting orthodox academic beliefs. They are often self-taught and ignorant of higher mathematics. Mathematics is the language spoken by the professionals. The amateurs offer an...

Teleportation, sci-fi-y as it sounds, is actually not fictional or even new; two years ago, Chinese physicists broke the then-current record for quantum teleportation by teleporting photons over 10 miles. But a new effort from that same team demolishes that record, beaming the photons over 97 kilometers. The physicists, working from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, have again taken advantage of quantum entanglement for the purposes of moving an object from one place to another without ever moving in the space between. According to Technology Review, "The idea is not that the physical object is...

Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today.(ISM) -- Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory,...

A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated. While nothing like enough matter to solve physics’ “dark matter” problem, the work by CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun (chief scientist at the agency’s Astronomy and Space Science division in Sydney) also helps explain why the rate of star formation has slowed down. While there’s more hydrogen than astronomers had thought, its distribution makes star formation more difficult. Andromeda – the galaxy headed for a catastrophic collision with our own in about four billion years...

Precocious young physicist Aisha Mustafa just patented a new system that could propel spacecrafts to the final frontier without using a drop of fuel. In short her system taps one of the odder facets of quantum theory, which posits that space isn't really a vacuum. It's really filled with particles and anti-particles that exist for infinitesimally small periods of time before destroying each other. Mustafa thinks she can harness them to create propulsion, resulting in space craft that need little-to-no fuel to maneuver around in space. Fast Company reports: Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what's...

May 25, 2012 By Cindy Weiss EnlargeThomas C. Blum, Associate Professor, Physics. Credit: Daniel Buttrey/UConn (Phys.org) -- An international collaboration of scientists, including Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics, is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. Ads by GoogleSix Sigma — Black Belt - Get Trained & Six Sigma Certified. Flexible, Top Program 100% online. - www.VillanovaU.com/SixSigmaThe research, reported online in the March 30, 2012 Physical Review Letters, used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to...

Looking at the fundamental properties of matter can take some serious computing grunt. Take the calculation needed to help understand kaon decay – a subatomic particle interaction that helps explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter: it soaked up 54 million processor hours on Argonne National Laboratory’s BlueGene/P supercomputer near Chicago, along with time on Columbia University’s QCDOC machine, Fermi National Lab’s USQCD (the US Center for Quantum Chromo-Dynamic) Ds cluster, and the UK’s Iridis cluster at the University of Southampton and the DIRAC facility. The reason so much iron was needed: the kaon decay spans...

A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see. Featuring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, and Frank Close. "The Quantum World" is the eleventh installment in the ongoing Symphony of Science music video series. Track back to source website: Symphony of Science

Whether you're a Trekkie or not, you have to admit that there's some sense of wonder toexploring the stars and trying to find life on distant planets. Of course, the U.S.S. Enterprise is a fictional ship, but have you ever put in the thought as to what it would take to actually build it, and when we could get it done if we really put in the effort? The man behind the well-researched site buildtheenterprise.org has, and he's determined that a fully functional Enterprise is only 20 years away if we put in the effort.

Tested takes a trip to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. This isn't just where Steve Jobs went to school, it's the home of the Reed Research Reactor, the only nuclear reactor in the world that's operated by undergraduate students. We learn how the reactor works and get a demonstration in sample irradiation. It's real science!

The so-called Republican brain, with its deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence, has played an indispensable role in the making of modern science, long before the emergence of the Grand Old Party. A new term of political opprobrium has been loosed upon the world: anti-science. Like many terms of abuse, it is easier to convey its meaning by an illustration than by a rigorous definition. For example, “If those damn Republicans weren’t so anti-science, we might have a chance of dealing with global warming.” Here’s another example: “Those damn Republicans are so anti-science that they want to see...

Explanation: What is all this fuss about the Higgs boson? The physics community is abuzz that a fundamental particle expected by the largely successful Standard Model of particle physics may soon be found by the huge Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe. The term boson refers to a type of fundamental particle with similarities to the photon, while Higgs refers to Peter Higgs, a physicist who among others published research predicting the mechanism through which such a particle might act. The above animated cartoon explains in humorous but impressive detail why the Higgs boson is expected, and one...

On Friday, March 23 I attended Session 462 Advanced Concepts: LENR, Anti-Matter, and New Physics of the Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space conference, one day after speaking with George H. Miley who would be presenting A Game-Changing Power Source for Spacecraft at the session. Part 1 of event was an account of my talk with Professor Miley. Part 2 continues with this paraphrase of the four talks included in Session 462. Unable to obtain video of the event, an audio recording formed the basis of this summary. ...................... “What happens is really intriguing here with this palladium-rich nano-particle run....