Free Republic

A Monash student has made a breakthrough in the field of astrophysics, discovering what has until now been described as the Universe’s ‘missing mass’. Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, working within a team at the Monash School of Physics, conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter and within just three months found it – or at least some of it. What makes the discovery all the more noteworthy is the fact that Ms Fraser-McKelvie is not a career researcher, or even studying at a postgraduate level. She is a 22-year-old undergraduate Aerospace Engineering/Science student who pinpointed the missing mass during a summer...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been trained on a single variable star that in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. V1 is a special class of pulsating star called a Cepheid variable that can be used to make reliable measurements of large cosmic distances. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Progress Toward the Dream of Space Drives and Stargates by Paul Gilster on May 23, 2011 by James F. WoodwardI first wrote about James Woodward’s work in my 2004 book Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration, and have often been asked since to comment further on his research. But it’s best to leave that to the man himself, and I’m pleased to turn today’s post over to him. A bit of biography: Jim Woodward earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at Middlebury College and New York University (respectively) in the 1960s. From his undergraduate days, his chief...

An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Radio-emitting features...

First results from a major astronomical survey have confirmed the existence of mysterious dark energy using a cutting-edge technique. Dark energy makes up some 74% of the Universe and its existence explains why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. The finding was based on studies of more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists used two separate kinds of observation to provide an independent check on previous dark energy results. Two papers by an international team of researchers have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. One type of observation used by...

Greenbelt - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured a spectacular image of a comet diving into the sun just as a coronal mass ejection came out on the right side. On one hand, the universe can be one of shimmering beauty, harmony and order. On the other hand, there can be utter entropy, randomness and sheer coincidences. The latter is what happened between our sun and a comet last week. According to NASA’s SOHO, a bright comet, most likely from the Kreutz family of comets, which was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, slammed...

A mathematical mystery that has baffled top minds in the field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades was cracked last year by a 63-year-old former Israeli security guard. Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician who worked as a laborer after immigrating to Israel from Russia, succeeded in solving the elusive Road Coloring Problem. The conjecture assumes that it is possible to create a universal map that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location. Experts say this proposition, which seems to defy logic, could actually have real-life applications in the fields...

PASADENA, Calif.—Stronger than steel or titanium—and just as tough—metallic glass is an ideal material for everything from cell-phone cases to aircraft parts. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new technique that allows them to make metallic-glass parts utilizing the same inexpensive processes used to produce plastic parts. With this new method, they can heat a piece of metallic glass at a rate of a million degrees per second and then mold it into any shape in just a few milliseconds. "We've redefined how you process metals," says William Johnson, the Ruben F. and Donna...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Whether they know it or not, anyone who's ever gotten a speeding ticket after zooming by a radar gun has experienced the Doppler effect – a measurable shift in the frequency of radiation based on the motion of an object, which in this case is your car doing 45 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone. But for the first time, scientists have experimentally shown a different version of the Doppler effect at a much, much smaller level – the rotation of an individual molecule. Prior to this such an effect had been theorized, but it took...

German and US researchers calculate a carbon nucleus of crucial importanceThe researchers published their results in the coming issue of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. "Attempts to calculate the Hoyle state have been unsuccessful since 1954," said Professor Dr. Ulf-G. Meißner (Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik der Universität Bonn). "But now, we have done it!" The Hoyle state is an energy-rich form of the carbon nucleus. It is the mountain pass over which all roads from one valley to the next lead: From the three nuclei of helium gas to the much larger carbon nucleus. This fusion reaction takes...

John Baez expounds on what makes the numbers 5, 8 and 24 so specialIn the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory. Baez and his co-author John Huerta wrote, "If string theory is right, the octonions...

This is the fusion company that PopSci said might save the world Bring up the prospect of fusion power, and often eyes glaze over. It’s not that it’s not a thrilling prospect--cheap and inexhaustible energy would solve a lot of problems here on planet Earth--but it’s been such a pipe dream for so long that it’s often hard to make people care. But at least one person with a proven track record in recognizing potential when he sees it has taken an interest in a fusion-powered future: Amazon founder and gazillionaire Jeff Bezos has thrown $19.5 million to Canada’s General...

In eight magnetization tests a small amount of the compound (Tl5Pb2)Ba2MgCu10O17+ consistently produced sharp diamagnetic transitions (the Meissner effect) near 20 Celsius (see above graphic), and resistive transitions that appeared near 18.5C. These temperatures are believed accurate +/- 2 degrees. In 2008 a Sn-In-Pb-Tm cuprate produced superconductivity near 195K . That material had a C-axis lattice constant around 33 angstroms. Attempts to go beyond 33 Å within that system failed to produce signs of superconductivity. That fact pointed to 33 Å being a rough upper size limit for a superconductive unit cell within this family of copper perovskites. Since the...

Australian researchers have done the impossible -- they’ve found the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared! The calculation would have taken a single computer processor unit (CPU) 1,500 years to calculate, but scientists from IBM and the University of Newcastle managed to complete this work in just a few months on IBM's "BlueGene/P" supercomputer, which is designed to run continuously at one quadrillion calculations per second. Their work was based on a mathematical formula discovered a decade ago in part by the Department of Energy's David H. Bailey, the Chief Technologist of the Computational Research Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National...

UCLA researchers have redefined the concept of a microscope by removing the lens to create a system that is small enough to fit in the palm of a hand but powerful enough to create three-dimensional tomographic images of miniscule samples. The advance, featured this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents the first demonstration of lens-free optical tomographic imaging on a chip, a technique capable of producing high-resolution 3-D images of large volumes of microscopic objects. "This research clearly shows the potential of lens-free computational microscopy," said Aydogan Ozcan, senior...

Scientists outline a test for the theory, which, if proven, would address major problems in particle physics BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010. They suggested that the early universe -- which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first -- was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today). The theory,...

Beam me up, Scotty; scientists have finally done it! Using what looks like an incredibly complicated setup, scientists have not just figured out how to transport information using the quantum highway; they have actually made it happen. > To do this, the researchers developed a "broadband, zero-dispersion teleportation apparatus" and a whole new set of "hybrid protocols involving discrete- and continuous-variable techniques in quantum information processing for optical sciences," along with some other things that I completely do not understand. In the end, the researchers managed to 'remove' the quantum information from space, and it was resurrected in another place....

Is an Adjacent Universe Causing the Dark Flow of Hundred of Millions of Stars at the Edge of the Observable Universe? Or, Might It Be Something ElseBack in the Middle Ages, maps showed terrifying images of sea dragons at the boundaries of the known world. Today, scientists have observed strange new motion at the very limits of the known universe -- kind of where you'd expect to find new things, but they still didn't expect this. A huge swathe of galactic clusters seem to be heading to a cosmic hotspot and nobody knows why. The unexplained motion has hundreds of...

There are some indications today that the mainstream scientific community's attitude towards cold fusion and specifically the Rossi/Focardi energy catalyzer may not be as dismissive as some may seem. An article by Natalie Wolchover on the website Life's Little Mysteries today included a review of the E-cat and comments from some leading researchers in the field of nuclear science -- and an interesting invitation was extended by one of them.

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature. The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it. “Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the...