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Enlarge Image Breathing fire. A distant cosmic explosion detected 28 March (left) continues to put out a series of high-energy flares (right). Astronomers believe it's a star being consumed by a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away. Credit: (left, galaxy) ASA/Swift/Stefan Immler; (right, diagram) NASA/Swift/Penn State/J. Kennea Astronomers have observed possibly the biggest blast ever seen in the cosmos. When NASA's SWIFT space observatory first spotted it 10 days ago, observers thought it was a massive star blowing up as a supernova and expected it to fade within hours or even minutes. But the high-energy radiation from the source...

PASADENA, Calif.—When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on—until now. "We've found ways to visualize warped space-time like never before," says Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). By combining theory with computer simulations, Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech, Cornell University, and the National Institute for Theoretical Physics in South Africa have developed conceptual tools...

This FAQ covers Andrea Rossi's technology, which combines small amounts of ubiquitous and safe Nickel and Hydrogen in the presence of proprietary catalyst under pressure and heat to generate a large amount of heat. It also addresses questions about the commercialization under way. FAQ What is the Energy Catalyzer? It is a "Cold Fusion" device developed by Italian engineer and inventor Andrea Rossi. It produces heat by placing nickel powder of very small particle size (nano-meters to micro-meters) in a pressurized hydrogen environment along with currently undisclosed (for proprietary reasons) catalysts that enhance the reaction. When this environment is heated...

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a resent paper posted at arXiv.org and submitted to Astrophysical Journal, Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen, physicists at Fermilab in Illinois, present the theory that cold and dark planets, not heated by a star, could be heated by dark matter. In theory, this dark matter could produce habitable planets outside of what is known as a habitable zone. While no one knows exactly what dark matter is, it is believed to make up about 83 percent of the universe. The most accepted theory is this dark matter is made up of what are called WIMPs, or weakly...

Antimatter: The Conundrum of Storage by Paul Gilster on March 11, 2011 Are we ever going to use antimatter to drive a starship? The question is tantalizing because while chemical reactions liberate about one part in a billion of the energy trapped inside matter — and even nuclear reactions spring only about one percent of that energy free — antimatter promises to release what Frank Close calls ‘the full mc2 latent within matter.’ But assuming you can make antimatter in large enough amounts (no mean task), the question of storage looms large. We know how to store antimatter in...

Actual Test Was Success Japan developed and successfully tested an atomic bomb three days prior to the end of the war. She destroyed unfinished atomic bombs, secret papers and her atomic bomb plans only hours before the advance units of the Russian Army moved into Konan, Korea, site of the project. Japanese scientists who developed the bomb are now in Moscow, prisoners of the Russians. They were tortured by their captors seeking atomic "know-how." The Konan area is under rigid Russian control. They permit no American to visit the area. Once, even after the war, an American B-29 Superfortress en...

White dwarfs are dead stars that pack a Sun's-worth of matter into an Earth-sized ball. Astronomers have just discovered an amazing pair of white dwarfs whirling around each other once every 39 minutes. This is the shortest-period pair of white dwarfs now known. Moreover, in a few million years they will collide and merge to create a single star... The newly identified binary star (designated SDSS J010657.39 -- 100003.3) is located about 7,800 light-years away in the constellation Cetus. It consists of two white dwarfs, a visible star and an unseen companion whose presence is betrayed by the visible star's...

Images from NASA's Swift satellite were combined in this UV/optical/X-ray view of the explosion, which is known as GRB 110328A. The blast was detected in X-rays, which were collected on March 28. CREDIT: NASA/Swift/Stefan ImmlerA huge, powerful star explosion detonated in deep space last week — an ultra-bright conflagaration that has astronomers scratching their heads over exactly how it happened. The explosion may be the death cry of a star as it was ripped apart by a black hole, scientists said. High-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from the March 28 blast's location, about 3.8 billion light-years from Earth...

Tweet TO MUCH fanfare, Italy celebrated 150 years since its unification two weeks ago. Less exuberantly, America is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, a failed attempt to undo its union. Amid this flurry of historical fissions and fusions it is easy to overlook another, arguably more significant unification set in motion in spring 1861. In March of that year James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist (pictured above), published the first piece of a four-part paper entitled "On physical lines of force". Sprinkled amid the prose in the Philosophical Magazine were equations which revealed...

The quantum physics of tailor-made organic macro-molecules – For the first time - as presented in Nature Communications - the quantum behaviour of molecules consisting of more than 400 atoms was demonstrated by quantum physicists based at the University of Vienna in collaboration with chemists from Basel and Delaware. The international and interdisciplinary team of scientists thus sets a new record in the verification of the quantum properties of nanoparticles. In addition, an important aspect of the famous thought experiment known as 'Schroedinger’s cat' is probed. However, due to the particular shape of the chosen molecules the reported experiment could...

At first glance it looks like a potato-shaped asteroid flying through space. But this multi-coloured image is actually the Earth - and shows how gravity varies on different parts of the globe. The images were unveiled today by the team behind the GOCE satellite at a conference in Munich and are the most accurate ever released. The 'geoid' map, as it is known, is used to illustrate how oceans would look in the absence of currents or tides. The bright yellow colours show gravity at its strongest, while it is at its weakest in the blue areas. There appears to...

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." -- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space. Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable...

The Audacious Epigone has a post up, Republicans are more scientifically literate than Democrats or independents are, where he reviews pro vs. anti-science attitude by party in the General Social Survey. He concludes that in fact Republicans are more scientifically literate across the issues than Democrats. Jason Malloy saw this trend four years ago in the GSS, and to some extent so have I. One point to keep in mind is that a few specific politicized scientific issues are very much the outliers in exhibiting tight partisan valences in opinion.

ANAHEIM, March 27, 2011 — A curtain of flame halts firefighters trying to rescue a family inside a burning home. One with a special backpack steps to the front, points a wand at the flame, and shoots a beam of electricity that opens a path through the flame for the others to pass and lead the family to safety. Scientists today described a discovery that could underpin a new genre of fire-fighting devices, including sprinkler systems that suppress fires not with water, but with zaps of electric current, without soaking and irreparably damaging the contents of a home, business, or...

At 12-years-old, Jacob Barnett is a genius. He’s already in college, his IQ is higher than Einstein’s, and for fun he‘s working on an expanded version of that man’s theory of relativity. So far, the signs are good. Professors are astounded. So what else does a boy genius with vast brilliance do in his free time? Disprove the big bang, of course. Original Story is below: http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011103200369 When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions. From within his 12-year-old, mildly...

When fresh water rivers flow into the sea the concentration difference leads to a change in entropy. US researchers have developed a battery that generates power from that entropy difference.Yi Cui's team at Stanford University, California, extract energy with 74 per cent efficiency using manganese dioxide nanorods and silver electrodes1. 'What we have really demonstrated that this idea can work,' says Cui.Cui's team estimate that if the technology was used on all world's rivers this renewable energy technology would hypothetically generate 2 TW, or approximately 13 per cent of current global consumption.Entropy based power generation has been done before but is most reliably done today...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have joined with researchers at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to mount a three-pronged attack on one of the most obstinate puzzles in materials sciences: what is the pseudogap?A collaboration organized by Zhi-Xun Shen, a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) at SLAC and a professor of physics at Stanford University, used three complementary experimental approaches to investigate a single material, the high-temperature superconductor Pb-Bi2201 (lead bismuth strontium lanthanum copper-oxide)....

The theory that our sense of smell has its basis in quantum physics events is gaining traction, say researchers.The idea remains controversial, but scientists reporting at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, are slowly unpicking how it could work. The key, they say, is tiny packets of energy, or quanta, lost by electrons. Experiments using tiny wires show that as electrons move on proteins within the nose, odor molecules could absorb these quanta and thereby be detected. If the theory is right, by extending these studies, an "electronic nose" superior to any chemical sensor could be devised. >...

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago. As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see? My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending...

It's long been the stuff of science fiction fantasy but time travel could be a real possibility say scientists. Furthermore, they believe the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based underground near Geneva holds the key. The theory is that the world’s biggest atom smasher might be able to unleash the Higgs singlet - a particle that could appear before the collision that produced it. The mind-boggling theory is that it will have entered from another dimension. There are a few obstacles in the way, however. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1368107/Is-Large-Hadron-Collider-world-s-time-machine.html#ixzz1HBpAEy8S