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While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day. On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011. Normally the star is so bright it can be seen with the naked eye even by city dwellers. For all but the most rural star-gazers, though, the mystery object that eclipses the star causes it to vanish for about 18 months every 27.1...

U.S. scientists say they have achieved a breakthrough in quantum cascade laser output power, delivering 120 watts from a single device at room temperature. The Northwestern University researchers, led by Professor Manijeh Razeghi, said their accomplishment is particularly attractive for infrared countermeasures -- a way of misguiding incoming missiles to protect commercial and military aircraft. Unlike conventional interband semiconductor lasers, the scientists said their quantum cascade laser is an intersubband device requiring only electrons to operate. Razeghi's team demonstrated the ridge width of a broad-area quantum cascade laser can be increased up to 400 microns, without suffering from filiamentation --...

Table-top experiments unlock quantum realm predicted by Dirac equation. Trapped ions masquerading as high-speed particles have been used to confirm a bizarre 80-year-old prediction of quantum mechanics. Quantum particles racing at close to the speed of light were first predicted to jitter violently as they moved — a phenomenon known as the Zitterbewegung — in 1930, by the father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger. The prediction was based on the Dirac equation, developed by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, which merges quantum mechanics with special relativity to describe how particles such as electrons behave. "The motion is particularly unexpected...

Caption: This composite color image is of the new infrared Hubble Ultradeep Field taken at 1.0 micron (blue), 1.25 micron (green), and 1.6 micron (red) with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3/IR) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Highlighted are the record-breaking high redshift galaxies, where the redshift "z"indicates the amount of stretching the light underwent on its voyage through the expanding universe. Higher redshift means larger distance and hence looking further back in time. The newly found objects are at z~7 (700 million years after the Big Bang: light blue circles) and z~8 (600 million years: dark blue circles) Credit:...

SCIENCE is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx...

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at...

Paul Titze, who somehow finds time to write the excellent Captain InterStellar blog when not preoccupied with his maritime duties in Sydney, passed along a 2009 paper on warp drives yesterday that I want to be sure to consider before the year is over. Warp drives as in Miguel Alcubierre’s notion of a method of reaching speeds that are faster than light. The Star Trek echo in the choice of names was playful and intentional on Alcubierre’s part, and the physicist kicked off a cottage industry in exotic spacetimes and their geometries when he used it in a 1994 paper...

"Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe. The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe. The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the...

Scientists announced Thursday that they believe they have detected evidence of dark matter in data collected at an underground physics lab in Soudan... According to the Department of Energy's Fermilab, which is conducting the search for dark matter at the Soudan lab, "judging by the way galaxies rotate, scientists have known for 70 years that the matter we can see does not provide enough gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. There must exist some form of matter that does not emit or reflect light." In the announcement, the lab said the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has "detected...

MOUNT VERNON, Wash., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- A string of lawn gnome disappearances in Washington state was solved when winds blew down a fence around the yard where they were being kept, authorities said. Lisa Soneda of Mount Vernon said her daughter told her this month that the fence separating her back yard from that of her next-door neighbor had blown down to reveal an unusual sight,

In a remarkable home movie, an international team of researchers has filmed individual metal atoms as they move around and react within the confines of a carbon nanotube. As well as demonstrating the power of the imaging technique, the work has shown that the interior of carbon nanotubes may not be as inert as previously assumed.Andrey Chuvilin from the University of Ulm in Germany and colleagues trapped single atoms of the heavy metal dysprosium within hollow fullerene spheres made up of 82 carbon atoms, and enclosed a series of these dysprosium-seeded cages within single-walled carbon nanotubes, with the fullerenes stringing themselves along the...

Shortly after the first of the year (if not already), the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator ever built — will smash protons together at record energies. If the Earth remains intact, doomsayers will once again have been falsified. Every time they forecast the demise of the planet, those prophets of Earthly annihilation prove themselves no more foresightful than mortgage bankers or phony psychics.

The new research may help explain why large galaxies tend to have super-massive black holes at their cores. Astronomers have long wanted an answer to the chicken-and-egg question of what comes first, a super-massive black hole or the stars surrounding it. A new observation of a far away object five billion light years from Earth may now help to solve the riddle. The object is a quasar, a powerful source of energy believed to mark the location of an active giant black hole. Nothing that gets close enough to a black hole can escape its powerful gravity. However, material swirling...

> For this to work, the wire's surface must be extremely clean, allowing electrons to move freely and spread along the wire to create a uniform temperature. A material with a critical temperature of -193 °C could superconduct at room temperature, provided some sections were kept to -253 °C, they found. In principle, the colder these refrigeration points are, the fewer you need, Dubi says. >

An engineer peers at damaged magnets inside the Large Hadron Collider on December 11, 2008 -- almost a month after an electrical glitch stopped the first attempt at sending a beam of protons around the world's largest particle accelerator. After more than a year of repairs, physicists now have both beams of protons stable and circulating though the collider's main ring, LHC managers announced on November 23, 2009. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity. Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr Hořava,...

Ultracold beryllium ions tackle 160 randomly chosen programs Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to run many different programs on a single piece of machinery. The new...

So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again. It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,”...

<snip>2.4 Diagnosis #4: The Attraction of Magnificent Academic Trusels. A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel and probably will not be thought to be magnificent.) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" (MAT) is a trusel that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its...

Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip. It’s ironic, then, that the search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.