Free Republic

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

What do earthquakes, spinning stellar remnants, bright space objects and a host of other natural phenomena have in common? Some of their properties conform to a curious and little known mathematical law, which could now find new uses. A subject of fascination to mathematicians, Benford's law states that for many sets of numbers, the first or "leading" digit of each number is not random. Instead, there is a 30.1 per cent chance that a number's leading digit is a 1. Progressively higher leading digits get increasingly unlikely, and a number has just a 4.6 per cent chance of beginning with...

Rubrene crystal raises hope for the use of organic semiconductors and cheaper, more efficient solar cells Rutgers University physicists have found new properties within a material that could lead to the production of less expensive and more efficient plastic solar cells. Vitaly Podzorov, co-author of the study and assistant professor of physics at Rutgers University, along with his research team have discovered that organic semiconductors allow energy-carrying particles -- which are created by "packets" of light -- to journey a thousand times farther than researchers previously thought. "Organic semiconductors are promising for solar cells and other uses, such as video displays, because they can be...

PARIS (AFP) – European astrophysicists said on Wednesday they could settle a mystery about how galaxies crank up in size, developing from proto-structures in the early Universe to the billion-star behemoths of today. Analysis of ancient light, known as redshift, indicates that the first galaxies were formed nearly 13 billion years ago, about a billion years after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe. They then dramatically fattened up to become the giant systems we see today, and the question is why. Until now, many experts believed that galaxies increased in size by colliding with others, in the same way...

9/24/2010 - ARLINGTON, Va. -- Air Force Office of Scientific Research-supported physicists at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, became the first researchers to observe the motion of an atom's valence or outermost electrons in real-time by investigating the ejection of an electron from an atom by an intense laser pulse. In the experiments, an electron in a krypton atom is removed by a laser pulse that lasts less than four femtoseconds (one femtosecond is one millionth of one...

An attempt to show the scale of things from the tiniest to the galactic. Wow.

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Scientific integrity and scientific progress continue to take a beating from the Left.In Part I of my series of essays on Science and its Enemies on the Left, I looked at the toll of junk science, quackery and anti-technological Luddism and the role of the social and political Left in promoting all three. In Part II, I looked at politicized science (both the misuse of science by politicians and the politicization of scientists themselves) and the temptations presented to scientists by their ability to gain power through science.I’m overdue to finish Part III of the series, but in the meantime,...

Guest post by mama4x who blogs at Farming Salt & Light. Set aside all the 2012 and Mayan calendar hysteria and consider this. According to NASA, 2012 will usher in a period of massive solar activity. It's possible these coming solar storms will produce the same effects as an EMP caused by a nuclear blast. I type this post on my laptop in an air-conditioned room. I hear the hum of the refrigerator and the low drone of the TV in the other room. As night falls, I'll turn on the lamp and later, I'll take a shower, water pulled...

The ‘slow boat’ to Centauri concept we’ve discussed before in these pages envisions generation ships, vessels that take thousands of years to cross to their destination. And based on current thinking, that’s about the best we could manage with the propulsion systems currently in our inventory. Specifically, a solar sail making a close solar pass (a ‘sundiver’ maneuver) could get us up to 500 or 600 kilometers per second (0.002c), making a 2000-year journey to the nearest star possible. It’s hard to imagine under what circumstances such a mission might be launched.But let’s think long-term, as Greg Matloff (New York...

Enlarge Image Catalysts are prized for their ability to speed chemical reactions by grabbing molecular building blocks and knitting them together. But most catalysts are either on or off—and there hasn't been much scientists could do to flip the switch. Now, however, researchers have created a sandwich-shaped scaffold for turning on and off nearly any catalyst at will. If developed further, the new design could allow researchers to detect minute amounts of a wide range of small molecules—from explosives such as TNT to neurotransmitters that carry messages in the nervous system. Unlike industrial catalysts, many enzymes—biological catalysts made from...

An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged. Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it. Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g. The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night...

WASHINGTON – One of the tools that teachers use to get kids jazzed about science — hands-on science kits — could face an uncertain future amid a debate on safety. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been mired for weeks in deliberation as it writes guidelines on what makes a product a "children's product" — and consequently which products would have to undergo more stringent safety testing as part of a 2008 law. Caught up in the debate are the classroom science kits and some of the items they contain, such as paper clips to show kids how magnets work....

Like a vignette from The Twilight Zone, new research shows that you'll age slightly faster standing on a staircase than you do on the floor below. The finding is linked to the strange, time-bending effects of Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, which for the first time have been shown to affect earthbound distances and time frames. (Related: "Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale.") Specifically, Einstein's special theory of relativity predicts that time does not flow at a steady rate, and it can be affected by acceleration. As a result, a clock speeding away from an observer will appear to...

If I put my hand in the Large Hadron Collider what would happen ?

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- For months, Anthony West could hardly believe what he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab -- or the only explanation for the unexpected phenomena that seemed to make sense. Several of the slightly doped high-purity barium titanate (BT) ceramics his research group was investigating were not following the venerable Ohm's Law, which relates electrical voltage to current and resistance. Applying or removing a voltage caused a gradual change in the materials' electrical resistance. The new effect was seen consistently regardless of the temperature or whether the experiments were conducted in vacuum, air,...

Nobel Prize-winning and eccentric physicist Richard Feynman has been called a buffoon and a magician, but is lauded as a man who could make science accessible and interesting for all. When I was a child I desperately wanted to be a scientist, but then it all went wrong. Unfortunately, during the early years of my secondary school education, science became joyless. It was a subject that seemed disjointed from the world even though it is the method that attempts to explain the world and the universe. If only it were possible to place an automaton Richard Feynman in every school....

As Sir Isaac Newton himself replied in response to similar questions, "hypotheses non fingo." Which roughly translates as "I don't have a clue." That such a simple question, about so common a phenomenon, has defied a direct answer for centuries might explain why the physics world has been atwitter lately over a novel attempt to resolve the riddle. A flurry of recent papers have examined this new idea, which mixes principles from string theory and black hole physics with basic old-fashioned thermodynamics. If this notion is right, gravity turns out to be a special sort of entropy, a result of...

http://news.discovery.com/space/hubble-spots-ghostly-space-spiral.html

Scientists have invented a tractor beam which is able to move large objects longer distances than ever before by using a laser light. A team of researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra have brought the art of molecular transportation, made famous by the catchphrase 'Beam me up, Scotty' from the TV series Star Trek, a fraction closer. Using what they call tractor beams - rays of energy that can move objects - they have managed to move tiny particles up to 59 inches from one place to another.