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Surprising discovery may offer clues to emergence of high-temperature superconductivityUPTON, NY — Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a “quantum spin liquid” — a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of...

RICHMOND, Va. (June 8, 2011) – A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a new class of 'superatoms' – a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table – with unusual magnetic characteristics. The superatom contains magnetized magnesium atoms, an element traditionally considered as non-magnetic. The metallic character of magnesium along with infused magnetism may one day be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster processors, larger memory storage and quantum computers. In a study published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy...

I've been grappling with whether the Energy Catalyzer that Focardi & Rossi are claiming will go into production in 6 months is a fraud or not. I wandered over to the Energy from Thorium discussion board to see how they are dealing with the latest set of facts, and I find many of their comments constructive to the ongoing debate. So I'm cherry picking some of them below, the ones I found most valuable. I think it's important to preserve this discussion because they have had threads on cold fusion pulled before, and this one is getting heated. various excerpts...

Enlarge Image Out with a bang. In this artist's rendition, an antihydrogen atom rattles around the ALPHA trap before escaping to create a pair of pions. Credit: CERN/ALPHA collaboration Just 6 months ago, physicists reported that they had trapped atoms made of antimatter for a fraction of a second. Now, the same team has held on to individual atoms of antihydrogen, each of which consists of an antiproton bound to a positron, for up to 15 minutes. That's long enough for an atom to lose all of its internal energy and settle into its least-energetic "ground state," a prerequisite...

The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years. And while the carbon dating technique is well known and understood (the ratio of carbon-14 to other carbon isotopes is measured to determine the age of objects containing the remnants of any living thing), the reason for carbon-14's slow decay has not been understood. Why, exactly, does carbon-14 have a half-life of nearly 6,000 years while other light atomic nuclei have half-lives of minutes or seconds? (Half-life is the time it takes for the nuclei in a sample to decay to...

Researchers have shown off a "DNA computer" of unprecedented complexity, which can calculate square roots.> For example, it was used to calculate the square root of a four-bit number, but the process took between six and 10 hours. However, Professor Winfree said that contrary to conventional electronics, the goal is not just high speeds. "We are no longer pursuing the goal targeted by Len Adleman's original DNA computing experiment: to compete with silicon by using the massive parallelism of chemistry to solve combinatorial problems in mathematics," he explained. "Instead, our goal is now - and has been for many years...

GENEVA (Reuters) - British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago. Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson," which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year."The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told...

Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 1 of 2Imagining the Tenth Dimension part 2 of 2 I thought this was particularly interesting and I always thought a 3rd dimensional creature couldn't visualize a higher dimensional outlook.

A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, the burst lies far beyond any known quasar and could be more distant than any previously known galaxy or gamma-ray burst. Multiple lines of evidence in favor of a record-breaking distance for this burst, known as GRB 090429B for the 29 April 2009 date when it was discovered, are presented in a paper by an international team of astronomers led by former Penn State University...

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...