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Our universe has existed for nearly 14 billion years, and as far as most people are concerned, the universe should continue to exist for billions of years more. But according to a new paper, there's one theory for the origins of the universe that predicts time itself will end in just five billion years—coincidentally, right around the time our sun is slated to die.The prediction comes from the theory of eternal inflation, which says our universe is part of the multiverse. This vast structure is made up of an infinite number of universes, each of which can spawn an infinite...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have solved a quest in fundamental material science that has eluded scientists since the 1960s, and could form the basis of a new approach to electronics. The discovery, just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials, outlines the creation for the first time of a high-performance "metal-insulator-metal" diode. "Researchers have been trying to do this for decades, until now without success," said Douglas Keszler, a distinguished professor of chemistry at OSU and one of the nation's leading material science researchers. "Diodes made previously with other approaches always had poor yield and...

Pairs of photons linked by the weird quantum effect of entanglement can pass through sheets of metal without the entanglement being destroyed. The finding means the quantum linking of particles is far more robust than scientists thought and could help them develop new ways of making quantum computers. Scientists think quantum computers could be hugely powerful because of their ability to perform many calculations at once, instead of doing one after another like regular computers. When photons are entangled, the physical properties of one are intimately linked to the other. Measuring the properties of one will instantly tell you the...

Benoit B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. His death, at a hospice, was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge. Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature. “Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you...

How fast should a wet dog rotate its body to dry its fur? It's a question that many dog owners will have spent sleepless nights pondering. How rapidly should a wet dog oscillate its body to dry its fur? Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of Andrew Dickerson at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a few buddies. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. Dickerson and co filmed a number of dogs shaking their fur and used the images to measure the...

Homing in on an object found during the Hubble Space Telescope's long, deep stare into the distant past, astronomers have fished out a galaxy whose light has traveled more than 13 billion light-years to get here, making it the oldest astronomical object found so far. The universe's most senior citizen is called UDFy-38135539, but scientists suspect its title as record-holder -- previously held by a gamma-ray burst -- will not last.

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...