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Q-balls zoom through the Universe, according to CERN physicist Brian Cox, vaporizing stars and flouting the laws of physics. Each one is like a new universe in a nutshell. Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an almighty cosmic explosion. This was the scientific premise of the scifi thriller, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach). That's the fiction. The fact is that a Q-ball would travel through a light star like the sun...

Researchers show that the big bang was followed by chaos Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments. The study, published by the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, reports not only that chaos is absolute but also the mathematical tools that can be used to detect it. When applied to the most accepted model for the evolution of the universe, these tools demonstrate that the early universe was chaotic. Certain...

HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS MARS CONFERENCEAdded : (Wed Aug 25 2004) For Immediate Release: HAWKING WRONG AGAIN, RESEARCHER TELLS MARS CONFERENCE by Belinda Drizdale (cleared for redistribution with World.Net.News credit )Dateline August 21, 2004 Chicago, Illinois, USA: Research and development engineer Marshall Barnes stood before a packed audience in PDR 9 in the luxurious Palmer House Hilton in Chicago and explained to members of the International Mars Conference (see http://www.marssociety.org/docs/sched_04.pdf bottom of Saturday's schedule, 4:30 ) how Stephen Hawking and others have made as yet undetected errors in their published works. These mistakes form a pattern of hidden assumptions...

The most recent supernova in our Galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA), has implications for understanding how often supernovas explode in the Milky Way galaxy. The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A. The recent supernova explosion was not seen in optical light about 140 years...

A galactic "super-volcano" in the massive galaxy M87 is erupting and blasting gas outwards, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array. The cosmic volcano is being driven by a giant black hole in the galaxy's center and preventing hundreds of millions of new stars from forming. Astronomers studying this black hole and its effects have been struck by the remarkable similarities between it and a volcano in Iceland that made headlines earlier this year. At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--A tiny optical device built into a silicon chip has achieved the slowest light propagation on a chip to date, reducing the speed of light by a factor of 1,200 in a study reported in Nature Photonics (published online September 5 and in the November print issue). The ability to control light pulses on an integrated chip-based platform is a major step toward the realization of all-optical quantum communication networks, with potentially vast improvements in ultra-low-power performance. Holger Schmidt, professor of electrical engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, leads the...

Mg20727753.800-1_300 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory located a cosmic "ghost" that scientists think is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken. "We'd...

The modern world -- with its ubiquitous electronic devices and electrical power -- can trace its lineage directly to the discovery, less than two centuries ago, of the link between electricity and magnetism. But while engineers have harnessed electromagnetic forces on a global scale, physicists still struggle to describe the dance between electrons that creates magnetic fields. Two theoretical physicists from Rice University are reporting initial success in that area in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Their new conceptual model, which was created to learn more about the quantum quirks of high-temperature superconductors...

The bright B spectral class star S2 has been observed by astronomers since 1995, because it is revolving around the radio source known as Sagittarius A, which most likely is the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way. Given that the object spins around the dark behemoth once every 16 years, it has already concluded a full orbit around the radio source since being discovered... Among its most important points is the fact that the orbit of an object located close to a star or black holes exerting a strong gravitational pull do not respect the rules...

Twenty years ago this week, a pair of previously unknown scientists stunned the world by announcing they'd done the impossible by achieving nuclear fusion in a lab flask at room temperature. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons quickly became celebrities as the news media hailed them for discovering a cheap source of nearly limitless power. But it all fell apart as other scientists couldn't duplicate their results, and the pair later admitted they'd made mistakes in the experiments. Now a U.S. Navy researcher, speaking on the anniversary of and in the same city where they made their announcement, thinks Fleischmann and...

An international team measures the charge radius of the hydrogen nucleus and stumbles across some mysteries of physics Big problems sometimes come in small packages. The problem with which physicists must now concern themselves measures a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimetre. This is precisely the difference between the new, smaller, dimension of the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, and the value which has been assumed so far. Instead of 0.8768 femtometres it measures only 0.8418 femtometres. At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers including physicists from the Max Planck...

Surprise To Physicists -- Protons Aren't Always Shaped Like A Basketball PHILADELPHIA -- When Gerald A. Miller first saw the experimental results from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, he was pretty sure they couldn't be right. If they were, it meant that some long-held notions about the proton, a primary building block of atoms, were wrong. But in time, the findings proved to be right, and led physicists to the conclusion that protons aren't always spherically shaped, like a basketball. "Some physicists thought they did the experiment wrong," said Miller, a University of Washington physics professor. "Even I thought...

The theory of evolution requires unfathomable lengths of time – eons ... billions and billions of years. Even with all that time, it's still hard to imagine how complex biochemicals such as hemoglobin or chlorophyll self assembled in the primordial goo. But to those of us who question the process, the answer is always the same. Time. More time than you can grasp – timespans so vast that anything is possible, even chance combinations of random chemicals to form the stunning complexities of reproducing life. Modern physics is now considering a theory that could throw into confusion virtually all of...

Indiana University Scientists First To Detect Rare Nuclear Fusion Violating Charge Symmetry BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Scientists at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility in Bloomington have made the first unambiguous detection of a rare process, the fusion of two nuclei of heavy hydrogen to form a nucleus of helium and an uncharged pion. The pion is one of the subatomic particles responsible for the strong force that holds every nucleus together. The achievement will be announced Saturday (April 5) at the meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia. "Scientists have searched for this rare fusion process since the 1950s," said...

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.> Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer....

PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have devised a new method for measuring perhaps the greatest puzzle of our universe -- dark energy. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds. For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space -- a massive cluster of galaxies -- to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods, significantly increase the accuracy of dark energy measurements. This may eventually lead to an explanation of what the...

Amateur astronomy lost one its most iconic figures today. Jack Horkheimer, known to millions as public television's ebullient "Star Gazer," died this afternoon at age 72. The exact cause of death was not disclosed, though he had been battled chronic respiratory problems for decades.

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

ITHACA, N.Y. — It's the Clark Kent of oxide compounds, and – on its own – it is pretty boring. But slice europium titanate nanometers thin and physically stretch it, and then it takes on super hero-like properties that could revolutionize electronics, according to new Cornell research. (Nature, Aug. 19, 2010.) Researchers report that thin films of europium titanate become both ferroelectric (electrically polarized) and ferromagnetic (exhibiting a permanent magnetic field) when stretched across a substrate of dysprosium scandate, another type of oxide. The best simultaneously ferroelectric, ferromagnetic material to date pales in comparison by a factor of 1,000. Simultaneous...

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, European astronomers have for the first time demonstrated that a magnetar — an unusual type of neutron star — was formed from a star with at least 40 times as much mass as the Sun. The result presents great challenges to current theories of how stars evolve, as a star as massive as this was expected to become a black hole, not a magnetar. This now raises a fundamental question: just how massive does a star really have to be to become a black hole?To reach their conclusions, the astronomers looked in detail at the...