Free Republic

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – A trio of top solar scientists said on Wednesday they had solved the mystery behind the disappearance of sunspots, a phenomenon that has stumped astrophysicists worldwide for more than two centuries. The research, which will be published on Thursday in the journal Nature, shows that unusually weak magnetic fields on the sun paired with reduced solar activity cause sunspots to disappear. Sunspots appear to the human eye as dark spots on the sun, some as wide as 49,000 miles, according to NASA. They are caused by intense magnetic activity, or storms, on the sun's surface, which...

14 January 2004--In the 15 January 2004 issue of the journal Nature, two physicists from Penn State University will announce their discovery of a new phase of matter, a "supersolid" form of helium-4 with the extraordinary frictionless-flow properties of a superfluid. "We discovered that solid helium-4 appears to behave like a superfluid when it is so cold that the laws of quantum mechanics govern its behavior," says Moses H. W. Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics at Penn State. "We apparently have observed, for the first time, a solid material with the characteristics of a superfluid." "The possible discovery of...

Superfluids are strange states of matter, typically forming at very low and very high temperatures, exhibiting gonzo properties like a seemingly gravity-defying tendency to climb up the walls of containers and friction-free superconductivity. That is, they are perfect conductors that don't lose energy during transmission. And the fact that they appear to exist at the center of neutron stars tells scientists a lot about nuclear interactions in high-density matter and the life-cycles of neutron stars. The pressure within neutron stars is so intense that in the stars' cores, charged particles merge, resulting in a star mostly consisting of neutrons (hence...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wormholes are one of the stranger objects that arise in general relativity. Although no experimental evidence for wormholes exists, scientists predict that they would appear to serve as shortcuts between one point of spacetime and another. Scientists usually imagine wormholes connecting regions of empty space, but now a new study suggests that wormholes might exist between distant stars. Instead of being empty tunnels, these wormholes would contain a perfect fluid that flows back and forth between the two stars, possibly giving them a detectable signature. The scientists, Vladimir Dzhunushaliev at the Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and coauthors,...

The 2009 indie film Moon features Sam Rockwell as an employee (named Sam) of the fictional Lunar Industries, a mining corporation back on Earth. Just wrapping a three-year solitary stint on the moon, Sam is charged with overseeing the automated harvesters which extract helium-3 from the lunar regolith. Canisters of the harvested helium-3 are then sent to Earth to be used to generate fusion energy.

In research appearing in today’s issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Nongjian “NJ” Tao, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, has demonstrated a clever way of controlling electrical conductance of a single molecule, by exploiting the molecule’s mechanical properties. Such control may eventually play a role in the design of ultra-tiny electrical gadgets, created to perform myriad useful tasks, from biological and chemical sensing to improving telecommunications and computer memory. Tao leads a research team used to dealing with the challenges entailed in creating electrical devices of this size, where quirky effects of the quantum world...

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe. In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe. Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so...

When people on airplanes ask Alan Newell what he works on, he tells them "flower arrangements." He could also say "fingerprints" or "sand ripples" or "how plants grow." "Most patterns you see, including the ones on sand dunes or fish or tigers or leopards or in the laboratory – even the defects in the patterns – have many universal features," said Newell, a Regents' Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. "All these different systems exhibit strikingly similar features when it comes to the patterns they form," he said. "Patterns arise in systems when they're under some kind of...

Physicists have built the world's first device that can cancel out a laser beam - a so-called anti-laser.The device, created by a team from Yale University, is capable of absorbing an incoming laser beam entirely. But this is not intended as a defence against high-power laser weapons, the researchers said. Instead they think it could be used in next-generation supercomputers which will be built with components that use light rather than electrons. Professor Douglas Stone and colleagues at Yale University had initially been developing a theory to explain which materials could be used as the basis of lasers.

Below is the O so apt resignation of  Steven J. Welcenbach from the American Chemical Society (ACS). In it he describes how the largest scientific society in the world has become a non-scientific activist group bowing to political pressure and ignoring it’s members objections. Such is his ire and dismay, he is not only pulling his membership but vows to do all he can to make sure ACS does not receive public money. He suggests that many former members will form a new society that rigorously follows the scientific method (hear hear). It’s time to start talking about that new...

Does the sun revolve around the Earth? One in every three Russians thinks so, a spokeswoman for state pollster VsTIOM said on Friday. In a survey released this week, 32 percent of Russians believed the Earth was the center of the Solar system; 55 percent that all radioactivity is man-made; and 29 percent that the first humans lived when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

Our Universe is an enormous place; that’s no secret. What is up for discussion, however, is just how enormous it is. And new research suggests it’s a whopper – over 250 times the size of our observable universe. Currently, cosmologists believe the Universe takes one of three possible shapes: It is flat, like a Euclidean plane, and spatially infinite.It is open, or curved like a saddle, and spatially infinite.It is closed, or curved like a sphere, and spatially finite. While most current data favors a flat universe, cosmologists have yet to come to a consensus. In a paper recently submitted...

It's an incendiary topic in academia -- the pervasive belief that women are underrepresented in science, math and engineering fields because they face sex discrimination in the interviewing, hiring, and grant and manuscript review processes. In a study published Feb. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell social scientists say it's just not true. It's not discrimination in these areas, but rather, differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, the H.L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, and...

We always observe significant anniversaries, and this April 26th marks the 25th year of the ongoing nuclear disaster that began on that date in 1986 at the Lenin Nuclear Power Station, Chernobyl, in the Urkraine. The World did not find out about what really happened for some time, and the first indications that something had gone terribly wrong was when nuclear power stations all over Europe started experiencing radiation alarms from the plume of radioactive debris that Reactor 4 was spewing out like a volcano. I've been re-reading Gregori Medevedev's outstanding book "The Truth About Chernobyl" and the details of...

Nearly 25 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, it has emerged that only half the money needed to safely secure the wreckage of the Chernobyl power plant has been raised. A new shelter is being built to seal the almost 200 tonnes of melted nuclear fuel rods within the remains of the damaged reactor. But construction may have to be halted if donor nations fail to provide funds. The shelter will sit over an existing "sarcophagus" encasing the reactor. I was shown into the control room of Reactor Four. The room is a mess: dusty and unlit, the semi-circular...

Discovery of dark matter's behavior would solve many outstanding mysteries in physics Dark matter makes up five times more of the universe's mass that visible matter (~25% vs ~5%), yet scientists have yet to directly observe this ultra-abundant substance.  Scientists also have yet to observe dark energy, which may well beat out normal energy in universal abundance.  This lack of direct observations means that scientists no precious little about two of the most important physical components of our universe. That could soon change.  CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile long circular underground track that is chilled to almost zero degrees Kelvin,...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Inspired by the popular confidence trick known as "shell game," researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated the ability to hide and shuffle "quantum-mechanical peas" –– microwave single photons –– under and between three microwave resonators, or "quantized shells." In a paper published in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Nature Physics, UCSB researchers show the first demonstration of the coherent control of a multi-resonator architecture. This topic has been a holy grail among physicists studying photons at the quantum-mechanical level for more than a decade. The UCSB researchers are Matteo Mariantoni, postdoctoral fellow in...

The end of a black hole’s evolution may be a mind-bending kind of space-time independent of time. A new study proposes a method to tell how far any black hole is from reaching this end state. Black holes are some of the weirdest things in the universe. They occur when mass is packed into a tiny volume, squished to its ultimate density. Though observations suggest black holes are prevalent in the universe, scientists still don't really understand what goes on inside them. The equations of general relativity usually used to understand the physics of the universe break down in these...

A couple of weeks ago we reported that the Italian inventor Andrea Rossi has announced that he has a commercial ready cold fusion reactor that is safe and reliable, capable of producing 10 kW of heat; and is in process of going into production, with a 1 MW plant being built ganging 125 of these units together. Rossi has allowed outside scientists to perform tests on the module and report on their findings. Papers on these tests have begun to emerge. In a paper that came out Monday morning (Italy time), Prof. Giuseppe Levi of the University of Bologna describes...

Measuring the attractive forces between atoms and surfaces with unprecedented precision, University of Arizona physicists have produced data that could refine our understanding of the structure of atoms and improve nanotechnology. The discovery has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Van der Waals forces are fundamental for chemistry, biology and physics. However, they are among the weakest known chemical interactions, so they are notoriously hard to study. This force is so weak that it is hard to notice in everyday life. But delve into the world of micro-machines and nano-robots, and you will feel the force – everywhere....