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After 72 hours of exposure to ambient light, strands of nanoparticles twisted and bunched together. Credit: Nicholas Kotov Light can twist matter, according to a new study that observed ribbons of nanoparticles twisting in response to light. Scientists knew matter can cause light to bend – prisms and glasses prove this easily enough. But the reverse phenomenon was not shown to occur until recently. The researchers assembled strings of nanoparticles, which are tiny clumps of matter on the scale of nanometers (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter). In a darkened lab, the scientists linked nanoparticles together into...

From The Low Beyond. ©1996-©2001 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.  All rights reserved. The address of this document is http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html. If you found it elsewhere, please visit the foregoing link for the most recent version.   Created:  11/18/1996   Updated:  05/27/2001 The short version:If computing speeds double every two years,what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?Computing speed doubles every two years. Computing speed doubles every two years of work. Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months -...

"Dark flow" is no fluke, suggests a new study that strengthens the case for unknown, unseen "structures" lurking on the outskirts of creation. In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of hundreds of galaxy clusters streaming in the same direction at more than 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) an hour. This mysterious motion can't be explained by current models for distribution of mass in the universe. So the researchers made the controversial suggestion that the clusters are being tugged on by the gravity of matter outside the known universe. Now the same team has found that the dark flow extends...

Enlarge Image Limit breaker? The crystal structure of Fe16N2, which one group of researchers says beats the predicted limit for magnetism in a material. Credit: Jian-Ping Wang PORTLAND, OREGON—There are limits to just how magnetic a material can be. Or so researchers thought. A compound of iron and nitrogen is about 18% more magnetic than the most magnetic material currently known, a team of materials scientists claims. If such magnets could be produced commercially, they could, for example, allow electronics manufactures to equip computer hard drives with smaller "write heads" capable of cramming them with more information. Other researchers...

The world’s largest particle accelerator is feeling its oats. Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments.

Operators of the world's largest atom smasher on Friday ramped up their massive machine to three times the energy ever previously achieved, in the run-up to experiments probing the secrets of the universe. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The next major development is expected in a few days when CERN starts colliding the beams in a new round of research to examine the tiniest particles and forces within...

Enlarge Image Springboard. This little vibrating widget has been eased into the simplest quantum state of motion. Credit: O'Connell et al., Nature, Advance Online Publication (2010) The weird rules of quantum mechanics state that a tiny object can absorb energy only in discrete amounts, or quanta, and can literally be in two places simultaneously. Those mind-bending tenets have been amply demonstrated in experiments with electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules. Ironically, though, physicists have never observed such bizarre quantum-mechanical effects in the motion of a human-made mechanical device. Now, Andrew Cleland, John Martinis, and colleagues at the University of California,...

A potential new energy source so controversial that people once regarded it as junk science is moving closer to acceptance by the mainstream scientific community. That's the conclusion of the organizer of one of the largest scientific sessions on the topic -- "cold fusion" -- being held here for the next two days in the Moscone Center during the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). "Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about 'cold fusion' to a mainstream audience," said Jan Marwan, Ph.D., the internationally known expert who organized the symposium. Marwan heads the research firm,...

Largest ever object put into quantum state.A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply...

There has been an attempt ongoing for some time to harness the respectability of science and conflate it with an increasingly popular philosophy known as scientism. But scientism and science are different things. The latter is a powerful method of obtaining and applying material facts and information. The latter creates a subjective world view using the pretense that science has the capacity to tell us objectively right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical, best from worst, etc..

A new formula allows computers to simulate how new materials behave up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible, and could drastically speed up innovation relating to electronic devices and energy-efficient cars. Princeton engineers came up with the model based on an 80-year-old quantum physics puzzle. Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi first theorized in 1927 that they could calculate the energy of electrons in motion based on how electrons are distributed in a material. Knowing that kinetic energy of electrons in a material helps researchers understand the structure and properties of new materials, as well as how...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time.

The weird world of quantum mechanics describes the strange, often contradictory, behaviour of small inanimate objects such as atoms. Researchers have now started looking for ways to detect quantum properties in more complex and larger entities, possibly even living organisms. A German-Spanish research group, split between the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), is using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment - Schrödinger's superpositioned cat – to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus. New research...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time. The academy's president Menahem Yaari said: 'We wanted something unique that would have global...

BERLIN (AFP) – A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world's most powerful atom-smasher. The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman's appeal because she was "unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about." "The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers," the court added. CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the...

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A worldwide team of researchers, including 10 from Texas A&M University, have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called "Big Bang" – and it could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics because in essence, it creates a new form of matter. Researchers Carl Gagliardi, Saskia Mioduszewski, Robert Tribble, Matthew Cervantes, Rory Clarke, Martin Codrington, Pibero Djawotho, James Drachenberg, Ahmed Hamed and Liaoyuan Huo, all affiliated with the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute, along with numerous...

First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.

Princeton engineers have made a breakthrough in an 80-year-old quandary in quantum physics, paving the way for the development of new materials that could make electronic devices smaller and cars more energy efficient. By reworking a theory first proposed by physicists in the 1920s, the researchers discovered a new way to predict important characteristics of a new material before it's been created. The new formula allows computers to model the properties of a material up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible and vastly expands the range of properties scientists can study. "The equation scientists were using before was inefficient...

Prior to the December shutdown, the Large Hadron Collider had set a new world record in high-energy physics by accelerating two beams of proton particles to 1.8 tera (trillion) electron volts (TeV) each and smashing them together, for a combined collision energy of 2.36 TeV... The current schedule calls for operating the machine at a level that would result in collisions with the energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) until late 2011 or early 2012. The Large Hadron Collider will then be shut down once again so superconducting hardware can be upgraded to support collisions of 14 TeV...