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Keyword: stringtheory

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  • Manhattan Project Physicist York Dies

    05/23/2009 1:26:08 PM PDT · by nickcarraway · 11 replies · 515+ views
    Express ^ | 22 May 2009 | Tony Perry
    Herbert York, a leading physicist in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II who later became an arms-control advocate and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, USA, passed away. He was 87. York died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego, the university announced, after a long illness. His death was attributed to acute myelogenous leukemia. “Herb York made this campus and this world a better place,” UC San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox said in a statement. Beginning with his work on the Manhattan Project, York held a series of high-level scientific,...
  • Parallel Universes: Are They More Than a Figment of Our Imagination? A Galaxy Classic

    05/21/2009 1:44:04 PM PDT · by LibWhacker · 41 replies · 965+ views
    "The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models.” ~Aurelien Barrau, particle physicist at CERN The Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass, adapted from the first volume of Pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "His Dark Materials" portrays various universes as only one reality among many, but how realistic is this kind of classic sci-fi plot? While it hasn’t been proven yet, many highly respected and credible scientists are now saying there’s reason to believe that parallel dimensions could very well be more than figments of our imaginations. "The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic...
  • 13 things that do not make sense

    05/14/2009 2:03:46 PM PDT · by Hawthorn · 36 replies · 1,712+ views
    New Scientist ^ | April 14, 2009 | Michael Brooks
    Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
  • Science, Spirituality, and Some Mismatched Socks

    05/12/2009 7:22:49 AM PDT · by Squidpup · 11 replies · 1,058+ views
    Wall Street Journal ^ | May 5, 2009 | GAUTAM NAIK
    One of quantum physics' crazier notions is that two particles seem to communicate with each other instantly, even when they're billions of miles apart. Albert Einstein, arguing that nothing travels faster than light, dismissed this as impossible "spooky action at a distance." The great man may have been wrong. A series of recent mind-bending laboratory experiments has given scientists an unprecedented peek behind the quantum veil, confirming that this realm is as mysterious as imagined. Quantum physics is the study of the very small -- atoms, photons and other particles. Unlike the cause-and-effect of our everyday physical world, subatomic particles...
  • New nanocrystals show potential for cheap lasers, new lighting (crystals continuously emit light!)

    05/10/2009 6:36:13 PM PDT · by LibWhacker · 16 replies · 872+ views
    For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called "blinking," but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Company, created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light. The findings, detailed online in today's issue of Nature, may open the door to dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers, brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug interact with a cell at a level never...
  • New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers

    05/10/2009 5:17:09 PM PDT · by decimon · 55 replies · 2,355+ views
    PhysOrg.com ^ | May 8th, 2009 | Lisa Zyga
    In a recent study, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have discovered a new pattern in primes that has surprisingly gone unnoticed until now. They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. In addition, this same pattern also appears in another number sequence, that of the leading digits of nontrivial Riemann zeta zeros, which is known to be related to the distribution of primes. Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications...
  • Should Administration Fund New Breakthroughs in Alternative Energy

    05/10/2009 10:51:25 AM PDT · by energyguy99 · 19 replies · 573+ views
    Green Energy News ^ | 5/10/09 | energyman
    One of the technologies that seems a likely candidate for this funding is the rebirth of cold fusion, or now known as a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) such as featured in a 60 Minutes TV news magazine segment on April 19.
  • The day the universe froze; New dark energy model includes cosmological phase transition

    05/08/2009 1:40:50 PM PDT · by Mike Fieschko · 19 replies · 478+ views
    euarekalert.org ^ | May 8, 2009 | David F. Salisbury [?]
    Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today. The model, published online May 6 in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by Research Associate Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon. A cosmological phase transition -- similar to freezing -- is one of the distinctive aspects of this...
  • Lights Out for Dark Matter Claim?

    05/05/2009 4:10:40 PM PDT · by neverdem · 37 replies · 1,433+ views
    ScienceNOW Daily News ^ | 2 May 2009 | Adrian Cho
    Enlarge ImageKilljoy. NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has not reproduced a previously claimed signature of dark matter. Credit: NASA and General Dynamics Last November, data from a balloon-borne particle detector circling the South Pole revealed a dramatic excess of high-energy particles from space--a possible sign of dark matter, the mysterious substance whose gravity seems to hold our galaxy together. But satellite data reported today stick a pin in that claim. Researchers working with NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope say they do not see the purported excess. The observations don't disprove the existence of dark matter, but they...
  • Dark matter intrigue deepens - Space telescope may have glimpsed hint of mystery particles.

    05/08/2009 12:58:54 AM PDT · by neverdem · 8 replies · 1,088+ views
    Nature News ^ | 5 May 2009 | Eric Hand
    New data from two experiments -- one in space, one on a balloon floating above Antarctica -- hint at a tantalizing detection of dark matter, the mysterious stuff comprising 85% of the universe's matter. The evidence is a reported excess of high-energy electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which could be created as dark matter particles annihilate or decay. The signal from Fermi, the orbiting gamma-ray telescope, is subtle, whereas that claimed by the balloon-borne Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) is much more pronounced. The differences are puzzling, but the findings -- according to some -- could herald the birth...
  • Study plunges standard theory of cosmology into crisis

    05/05/2009 7:17:29 AM PDT · by decimon · 32 replies · 805+ views
    As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous "dark matter" to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. Competing theories of gravitation have already been developed which are independent of this...
  • How to map the multiverse

    05/05/2009 5:33:31 AM PDT · by LibWhacker · 41 replies · 1,950+ views
    New Scientist ^ | 5/4/09 | Anil Ananthaswamy
    BRIAN GREENE spent a good part of the last decade extolling the virtues of string theory. He dreamed that one day it would provide physicists with a theory of everything that would describe our universe - ours and ours alone. His bestselling book The Elegant Universe eloquently captured the quest for this ultimate theory. "But the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says Greene, who is a theoretical physicist at Columbia University in New York. In other words, string theory seems equally capable of describing universes very different from ours. Greene hoped...
  • 'Invisibility Cloak' Successfully Hides Objects Placed Under It

    05/02/2009 4:00:25 PM PDT · by Free ThinkerNY · 35 replies · 1,273+ views
    sciencedaily.com ^ | May 2, 2009
    ScienceDaily (May 2, 2009) — The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view. A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak”...
  • Rogue Black Holes May Roam the Milky Way

    04/29/2009 1:29:36 PM PDT · by Mike Fieschko · 30 replies · 728+ views
    Physorg.com ^ | April 29th, 2009 | Unknown
    This artist's conception shows a rogue black hole floating near a globular star cluster on the outskirts of the Milky Way. New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. Fortunately, the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years from Earth. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA) (PhysOrg.com) -- It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by...
  • The Nebula Awards for 2008 (science fiction)

    04/29/2009 1:11:10 PM PDT · by EveningStar · 21 replies · 821+ views
    The Nebula Awards ^ | April 25, 2009
    2008 Nebula Awards
  • Space Explosion Is Farthest Thing Ever Seen (gamma-ray burst about 13 billion light-years away)

    04/28/2009 8:54:57 AM PDT · by NormsRevenge · 52 replies · 1,608+ views
    A stellar explosion has smashed the record for most distant object in the known universe. The gamma-ray burst came from about 13 billion light-years away, and represents a relic from when the universe was just 630 million years old. "It easily surpassed the most distant galaxies and quasars," said Edo Berger, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and a leading member of the team that first demonstrated the burst's origin. "In fact, it showed that we can use these spectacular events to pinpoint the first generation of stars and galaxies." "The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive...
  • James Webb Space Telescope First Flight Mirror Completes Cryogenic Testing

    04/10/2009 7:10:43 AM PDT · by alnitak · 9 replies · 340+ views
    Science Daily ^ | Apr 10, 2009 | Unknown
    The first mirror segment that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope, built by Northrop Grumman Corporation, has completed its first series of cryogenic temperature tests in the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. ... Engineers will measure how the mirror changes shape going from room temperature to cryogenic (frigid) temperatures, as the metal expands and contracts. They can model these changes to some extent, but not perfectly. The mirrors will be polished to about 100 nanometers (a human hair is approximately 60,000 to 120,000 nanometers) accuracy at room temperature, based on...
  • New Mystery from Cosmic Dawn: The Blob

    04/22/2009 4:33:54 PM PDT · by LibWhacker · 7 replies · 612+ views
    Universe Today ^ | April 22nd, 2009 | Anne Minard
    This image of the Himiko object is a composite and in false color. The bar at the lower right represents 10,000 light years. Credit: M. Ouchi et al. This mysterious, giant object existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. Its length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk. Besides being a great candidate for a future “Where in the Universe Challenge,” what is it? In general, objects such as this one are dubbed extended...
  • Stephen Hawking hospitalized, reported very ill

    04/20/2009 9:27:14 AM PDT · by NormsRevenge · 78 replies · 5,372+ views
    AP on Yahoo ^ | 4/20/09 | Robert Barr - ap
    LONDON – Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking was rushed to a hospital Monday and was seriously ill, Cambridge University said. ... Hawking, 67, gained renown for his work on black holes, and has remained active despite being diagnosed at 21 with ALS, (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
  • Thieving dwarves cause supernovae

    04/14/2009 11:31:14 AM PDT · by decimon · 15 replies · 474+ views
    BBC ^ | Apr 14, 2009 | Unknown
    Researchers have come up with a theory for how stars can end in a spectacular so-called Type Ia supernova in less than 100 million years.While such early-stage supernovae are well-known, theory has been unable to explain them. The secret, the researchers say, is that white dwarf stars steal mass from nearby "helium stars" until they have enough mass to initiate a supernova.