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An idea hatched around a Dallas swimming pool 50 years ago has blossomed into one of the world’s most prestigious scientific conferences. Starting Sunday, more than 450 experts on gravity, black holes and the newly discovered Higgs boson — the subject of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics — will gather at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas to discuss the newest findings and most pressing mysteries in their fields

The problem is that our understanding of both particle physics and the geometry of gravity is incomplete. “Having gone from basically philosophical understandings of why things fall to mathematical descriptions of how things accelerate down inclines from Galileo, to Kepler’s equations describing planetary motion to Newton’s formulation of the Laws of Physics, to Einstein’s formulations of relativity, we’ve been building and building a more comprehensive view of gravity. But we’re still not complete,” said Dr. Pamela Gay. “We know that there still needs to be some way to unite quantum mechanics and gravity and actually be able to write down...

Sonner then set about to create quarks to see if he could watch what happens when two are entangled with each other. Using an electric field, he was able to catch pairs of particles coming out of a vacuum environment with a few “transient” particles in it. - Once he caught the particles, he mapped them in terms of space-time (four-dimensional space). Note: gravity is believed to be the fifth dimension because it can bend space-time [5th Dimension?], as you can see in these images of galaxies below. - Sonner then tried to figure out what would happen in the...

Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived. Physicists at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University in New York believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another. But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a UW physics professor. Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a...

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

Using a compact but powerful laser, a research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has developed a new way to generate synchrotron X-rays. Although the high quality of synchrotron X-rays make them ideal for research ranging from the structure of matter to advanced medical images, access to the technology has been limited until now. Most traditional synchrotron X-ray devices are gigantic and costly, available only at a few sites around the world. As reported in this week's issue of the top-ranked optics journal Nature Photonics, researchers at UNL's Extreme Light Laboratory developed a novel method to generate research-quality X-rays using...

 Most mathematicians have a sense that the twin primes conjecture should be true — the positioning of the prime numbers appear to be more or less random, even though on average the gaps between primes get larger, and if one has an infinitely long list of random odd numbers, we should have an infinite collection of pairs in our list. If at some point, prime numbers are always more than two numbers away from each other, we have a non-random aspect to their distribution that goes against this intuition.

An exploded star some 3.8 billion light-years away is forcing scientists to overhaul much of what they thought they knew about gamma-ray bursts – intense blasts of radiation triggered, in this case, by a star tens of times more massive than the sun that exhausted its nuclear fuel, exploded, then collapsed to form a black hole. Last April, gamma rays from the blast struck detectors in gamma-ray observatories orbiting Earth, triggering a frenzy of space- and ground-based observations. Many of them fly in the face of explanations researchers have developed during the past 30 years for the processes driving the...

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays. Photography is about creating images by recording light. At the MIT media lab, professor Ramesh Raskar and his team members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.

Explanation: What are black hole jets made of? Many black holes in stellar systems are surely surrounded by disks of gas and plasma gravitationally pulled from a close binary star companion. Some of this material, after approaching the black hole, ends up being expelled from the star system in powerful jets emanating from the poles of the spinning black hole. Recent evidence indicates that these jets are composed not only electrons and protons, but also the nuclei of heavy elements such as iron and nickel. The discovery was made in system 4U1630-47 using CSIRO’s Compact Array of radio telescopes in...

Scientists at the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota running the biggest, most sensitive dark matter detector yet released its first round of results yesterday -- and they found nothing. The Large Underground Xenon dark matter experiment, or LUX, consists of a vat of 368 kilograms of liquid xenon to minus 110 degrees Celsius, surrounded by a tank of water. LUX sits 4,850 feet underground at the old mine, shielded from cosmic rays. An international team of researchers watched for three months to see if any WIMPS -- weakly interacting massive particles -- would pass through the rock and reveal...

Astronomers from York University in Canada have identified an undocumented type of quasar where gas appears to be getting sucked into a black hole. This may not sound surprising, but current theories say that isn't supposed to happen. Quasars are hyperactive and extremely bright discs of hot gas that surround supermassive black holes. They're also known as galactic nucleuses. The Milky Way has one at its center. All the junk that's rapidly spinning down the drain hole forms a compact disc with a radius that's larger than Earth's orbit around the Sun and a temperature that's hotter than the surface...

Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals, researchers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering have designed a power-harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels. The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device, according to a report appearing in the journal Applied Physics Letters in December 2013. (It is now available online.) It operates on a similar principle to solar panels, which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest...

"It is widely accepted now that, without a doubt, information is physical and quantum physics provides the rules of that physical behavior," George Mason University computer science professor Richard Gomez told NewsFactor. Alan Turing might be considered the "John Forbes Nash of computer science" -- a troubled young Princeton genius who achieved prominence in the 1950s. Turing published one of the top 10 papers in all of 20th-century science -- "On the Computability of Numbers." He killed himself over a conviction for homosexuality at the height of his genius, but since his death, his definition of "computability" has stood untouched...

Okay, but what exactly is a gravitational wave and how could they help us crack the conundrum of the black hole code? A gravitational wave is akin to a ripple in space-time. Albert Einstein predicted that massive bodies changing speed or direction generate these gravitational waves. Picture bodies like a pair of black holes orbiting each other. This then creates a gravitational wave that ripples outwards, like a disturbance in a still pool of water after a leaf has dropped onto its surface and ripples are sent across the surface. Like star-crossed lovers, the black holes of two merging galaxies...

To understand the coronal heating problem, imagine a flame coming out of an ice cube. A similar effect occurs on the surface of the Sun. Nuclear fusion in the center of the Sun heats the solar core to 15 million degrees. Moving away from this furnace, by the time one arrives at the surface of the Sun, the gas has cooled to a relatively refreshing 10,800° Fahrenheit (6,000° Celsius). But the temperature of the gas in the corona, above the solar surface, soars back up to over 1.8 million degrees F (1 million degrees C). What causes this unexpected temperature...

The strongest material ever could be carbyne, atom-thick chains of carbon, according to theoretical calculations by Rice University Physicists. The big question is now if and when anyone can make it in bulk. Carbyne is a chain of carbon atoms held together by either double or alternating single and triple atomic bonds. That makes it a true one-dimensional material, unlike atom-thin sheets of graphene, which have a top and a bottom, or hollow nanotubes, which have an inside and outside. These carbyne nanorods or nanoropes, if they can be made, would have a host of remarkable and useful properties, as...

Wikimedia Commons, ULBPhysics laureates. Peter Higgs (left) and François Englert. The most eagerly anticipated and potentially controversial Nobel Prize for physics in many years was awarded today—following a nail-biting hourlong delay—exactly according to the expected script: The winners are Peter Higgs and his fellow theorist François Englert for, essentially, predicting the Higgs boson. The winners were much heralded following last year’s discovery of the Higgs by physicists at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, using its Large Hadron Collider (LHC).That finding put in place the last piece of the puzzle to complete the standard model of fundamental particles...

Explanation: It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors. Here are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism-like device. The spectrum was created at the McMath-Pierce Solar Observatory and shows, first off, that although our white-appearing Sun emits light of nearly every color, it does indeed appear brightest in yellow-green light. The dark patches in the above spectrum arise from gas at or above the Sun's surface absorbing sunlight emitted below. Since different types of gas absorb different colors of light, it is possible to determine...