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The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies. "The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he...

Mysterious waves that help transport the sun's energy out into space have been detected by scientists for the first time. Researchers hope their discovery of the energetic ripples, known as Alfven waves, will shed light on other solar phenomena such as the sun's magnetic fields and its super-hot corona, or outermost atmosphere. A new video shows the ripples in action. "Alfven waves can provide us with a window into processes that are fundamental to the workings of the sun and its impacts on Earth," said Steve Tomczyk, a space scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Like a...

Radiation was used to pinpoint the normal matter, while the observation of gravitational lensing was used locate dark matter. Gravitational lensing allows matter to be oberved, even when it does not emit or absorb light, by examining the movement of galaxies as our line of sight passes through the area of interest. Massive objects will distort the image and cause it to move in unexpected directions. Because the normal matter could interact through electromagnetic radiation, it was found to have slowed violently during the collision while the dark matter sailed on through... In the meantime, other astronomers began using gravitational...

The team studied two gamma-ray flares in mid-2005 from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 501. They compared gammas in two energy ranges, from 1.2 to 10 tera-electron-volts (TeV) and from 0.25 to 0.6 TeV. The first group arrived on Earth four minutes later than the second. One team member, physicist John Ellis of CERN, says: "The significance of the time lag is above 95%, and the magnitude of the effect is beyond the sensitivity of previous experiments." Either the high-energy gammas were released later (because of how they were generated) or they propagated more slowly.

Science Daily — Australian and French scientists have made another breakthrough in the technology that will drive next generation computers and teleportation. The researchers have successfully superposed light beams, which produces a state that appears to be both on and off at once. Light beams that are simultaneously on and off are vital for the next-generation super computers which should be faster than current computers based on bits, that are either on or off. Previously, only smaller light particles had been superposed and the group has also proved a quantum physics theory known as Schrödinger's cat. This theory, named after...

Predictions Part I astronomy and climatology http://home.earthlink.net/~gravitics/LaViolette/Predict.html Superwave Theory Predictions and their Subsequent Verification Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. Prediction No. 1...

The "standard model" of physics views particles as infinitesimal points, some of which carry basic forces. In spite of the fact that it fails to include gravity and becomes gibberish at high energies, the time-tested theory is the best tool scientists have for explaining physics. "You hear people complain about how good the standard model is," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "It's an incomplete model, and yet we can't find flaws in it." Turner explained that discovering a mass-inducing particle, called the Higgs boson, remains the next big test for the standard model. If discovered,...

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of...

[Jane H] MacGibbon's analysis indicates that if the electric charge quantum is changing, it is due to the coupling between the cosmic background radiation and electrons. The photon soup acts to partially screen the charge of the electron. At the beginning of the universe, these photons were highly energetic, and were more effective at charge screening than they are now that they have cooled to near absolute zero. Although not addressed by MacGibbon's paper, this indicates an avenue of future work, where the form of the coupling and the rate of change of the electric charge quantum is derived using...

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY [8.8.07]By Freeman DysonFREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. His most recent book, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Page Barbour Lectures), is being published this month by University of Virgina Press.Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY1. The...

Czech physicist Dr. Martin Schnabl has been selected to receive a EURYI Award by the European science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCS) to help him pursue his project and build on five years of hard work culminating in the solution of an equation in string field theory that had gone unsolved for 20 years... "It's a sort of field theory for the infinite tower of oscillatory modes of a string, each of them representing different particle species," Schnabl said. As Schnabl observed, string field theory, by explaining also how quantum mechanics is compatible with general...

Suppose it were possible to go back in time and meet the dead. To say all the things you never got a chance to tell a loved one who died before there was a chance to make your peace. Just think if you could go back and warn someone that their lifestyle, their smoking or heavy drinking was driving them into an early grave. You would not only be able to meet the dead - but to save them as well. A new book tells the story of an extraordinary man whose life work is inspired by a longing to...

Nicholas Maxwell's Is Science Neurotic? contains one very big revisionist vision: Science needs to make its aims explicit in an underlying scheme or set of principles... The traditional aim of science has been standard empiricism (SE) and he accuses SE of a neurosis, a scientific misconstrual of what science ought to be doing and not just the discovery of facts based on experimental evidence... Maxwell, like his fellow authors... suggests a more comprehensive view of the aim of science: to postulate how science can better serve us. To make the world better. He wishes to humanize science so that we...

The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space. The idea would explain how these dimensions remain stable - a big problem for the unified scheme of physics called string theory... quantum vibrations in the vacuum of space (called vacuum energy or the cosmological constant) that could produce repulsive gravity... should either possess a ridiculously high energy density - 122 orders of magnitude larger than are observed - or cancel out to exactly zero. To make them almost-but-not-quite cancel, in agreement with astronomical observations, means fudging...

Two years after his 2002 graduation with honors as a double major in physics and math, Cottrell was charged and convicted as one of the nation's first ecoterrorists of the post-Sept. 11 era. He was found guilty of conspiracy and arson in the 2003 firebombings of Hummer and other sport-utility vehicle dealerships in the Los Angeles area to advocate a radical environmentalism. Two conspirators remain at large... In what prosecutors say was an example of his brazenness -- his supporters say it evidenced his behavioral disorder, one that's akin to a high-functioning autism -- Cottrell became a remorseless braggart while...

Scientists say they have cracked a nearly eight-decade-old riddle involving the Moebius strip, a mathematical phenomenon that has also become an icon of art. Popularised by the Dutch artist MC Escher, a Moebius strip entails taking a strip of paper or some other flexible material. You take one end of the strip, twist it through 180 degrees, and then tape it to the other end. This creates a loop that has an intriguing quality, dazzlingly exploited by Escher, in that it only has one side. Since 1930, the Moebius strip has been a classic poser for experts in mechanics. The...

...the scientists who develop theoretical predictions for high-energy particle physics experiments say "outsourcing" in their field has allowed the U.S. to lag behind in this area of high-profile, global science... LHC-TI is a consortium of theoretical physicists whose goal is to train more U.S. graduate students in theoretical high-energy particle physics calculations relevant to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built near Geneva, Switzerland... After several years of grass-roots organizing among theoretical physicsts, the group is celebrating success: the awarding of the first LHC Theory Graduate Fellowship Awards, funded by the National Science Foundation and administered by The Johns Hopkins...

Arguably, the Information Age began in 1665. That was the year the Journal des scavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London started regular publication. Making new scientific information more easily and widely available was the spark that ignited the Industrial Revolution. The founding editor of the Journal des scavans, Denis de Sallo, chose to publish his new journal weekly because, as he explained, "news ages quickly." Scientific news ages even more quickly in the 21st century than it did in the 17th century. Last week, one of the world's leading scientific journals, Nature, conceded this fact by...

Nearly three years ago, NASA's oft-canceled $750 million Gravity Probe B Relativity Mission finally shot into space with one goal -- to quantify Einstein's predictions from Earth's orbit. Earlier this year, at the meeting of the American Physics Society, principal investigator Francis Everitt delivered the first results: Gravity Probe B has verified Einstein's theory to within 1 percent... Einstein's theory predicts that the axes should shift by a tiny amount -- 0.0018 degree -- under the influence of Earth's pull on space-time. After 18 months of data analysis, Everitt and his team measured the axial shift to within 1 percent...

One of the great paradoxes of physics is that while gravity was the first force in nature to be described physically and mathematically -- Isaac Newton worked out its basic laws more than 300 years ago -- it may be the last to be understood. Generations of physicists have remained stumped by the utter strangeness of gravity: Not only is it the weakest of the four natural forces, but it is also the only one that appears to be directly related to the nature of space and time... The uniquely geometric nature of gravity has made it frustratingly difficult to...