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Several speculative theories in physics involve extra dimensions beyond our well-known four (which are broken down into three dimensions of space and one of time). Some theories have suggested 5, 10, 26, or more, with the extra spatial dimensions "hiding" within our observable three dimensions. One thing that all of these extra dimensions have in common is that none has ever been experimentally detected; they are all mathematical predictions. More recently, physicists have been theorizing the possibility of lower dimensionality, in which the universe has only two or even one spatial dimension(s), along with one dimension of time. The theories...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Berkeley researchers find enhanced and controllable magnetization in unique bismuth ferrite films. "The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe," famed fictional detective Dick Tracy predicted back in 1935. Probably an overstatement, but there's little doubt the nation that leads the development of advanced magnetoelectronic or "spintronic" devices is going to have a serious leg-up on its Information Age competition. A smaller, faster and cheaper way to store and transfer information is the spintronic grand prize and a key to winning this prize is understanding and controlling a multiferroic property known as "spontaneous magnetization." Now, researchers with...

Physicists at UCLA set out to design a better transistor and ended up discovering a new way to think about the structure of space. Space is usually considered infinitely divisible — given any two positions, there is always a position halfway between. But in a recent study aimed at developing ultra-fast transistors using graphene, researchers from the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy and the California NanoSystems Institute show that dividing space into discrete locations, like a chessboard, may explain how point-like electrons, which have no finite radius, manage to carry their intrinsic angular momentum, or "spin." While studying graphene's...

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – Underground quartz deposits worldwide may be behind earthquakes, mountain building and other continental tectonics, a discovery that may aid in predicting tremblers, according to a study released on Wednesday. The findings by Utah State University geophysicist Anthony Lowry and a colleague at the University of London, to be published Thursday in the journal Nature, may solve a riddle of the ages about the formation and location of earthquake faults, mountains, valleys and plains. "Certainly the question of why mountains occur where they do has been around since the dawn of time," Lowry told Reuters. He and...

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time. “Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.” One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons...

New brain imaging study reveals the structures that support color synesthesiaMilan, Italy, 9 March 2011 – The Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once wrote in his autobiographical book (What do you care what other people think?): "When I see equations, I see letters in colors - I don't know why […] And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students." This neurological phenomenon is known to psychologists as synaesthesia and Feynman's experience of "seeing" the letters in colour was a specific form known today as "grapheme-colour" synaesthesia. What is perhaps most puzzling about this condition is...

The website Cold Fusion Now is reporting about a recent interview conducted by James Martinez with physicist and researcher, Dr. Edmund Storms, formerly of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who is commenting on Andrea Rossi’s cold fusion technology. He has recently returned from the ICCF-16 conference in India where researchers in the field of low energy nuclear reaction discuss the latest research in the field. Storms makes some interesting statements on the importance of Rossi’s technology, and is of the belief that it is a significant breakthrough which can have far reaching effects in the world of energy production. Here...

UK researchers have demonstrated the highest-resolution optical microscope ever - aided by tiny glass beads. The microscope imaged objects down to just 50 billionths of a metre to yield a never-before-seen, direct glimpse into the "nanoscopic" world. The team says the method could even be used to view individual viruses. Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of "evanescent waves", emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether. Instead, the beads gather the light and re-focus it, channelling it into a standard microscope. This allowed researchers to see with their own eyes a level of detail that is...

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...