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Keyword: stringtheory

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  • The Amazing Potential of Thorium

    09/08/2011 9:16:25 PM PDT · by RussP · 40 replies
    RussP.us ^ | Russ P.
    The Amazing Potential of Thorium Imagine a new kind of nuclear power plant that * cannot melt down * produces less than 1% of the amount of waste that current nuclear power plants produce * is based on proven technology and requires no new scientific breakthroughs * uses an abundant fuel that will last for thousands of years * cannot contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation * can actually burn up existing stockpiles of nuclear waste * is much simpler to build than current nuclear power plants because it operates at low pressure and does not require a huge pressure vessel
  • Symphony of Science - the Quantum World [Turn up the Volume!!!]

    This is seriously cool... You Tube: A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles
  • Space Cannibal: Ginormous Black Hole Caught Eating Another

    08/31/2011 6:35:43 PM PDT · by NormsRevenge · 40 replies
    SPACE.com ^ | 8/31/11 | Charles Q. Choi
    A monstrous black hole at the heart of one galaxy is being devoured by a still larger black hole in another, scientists say. The discovery is the first of its kind. At the centers of virtually all large galaxies are black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. Models simulating the formation and growth of galaxies predict their black holes evolve as the galaxies do, by merging with others. Astronomers had witnessed the final stages of the merging of galaxies of equal mass, so-called major mergers. Minor mergers between galaxies and smaller companions should be even...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day -- SDSS J102915+172927: A Star That Should Not Exist

    09/07/2011 1:17:20 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 37 replies
    NASA ^ | September 07, 2011 | (see photo credit)
    Explanation: Why does this star have so few heavy elements? Stars born in the generation of our Sun have an expected abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium mixed into their atmospheres. Stars born in the generation before our Sun, Population II stars, the stars that created most of the heavy elements around us today, are seen to have some, although less, elements heavier than H and He. Furthermore, even the elusive never-seen first stars in the universe, so-called Population III stars, are predicted to have a large mass and a small but set amount of heavy elements. Yet...
  • How to go out with a bang — score points for censorship — (Science Journal EDITOR resigns)

    09/05/2011 12:34:03 PM PDT · by Ernest_at_the_Beach · 23 replies
    JoNova ^ | September 5th, 2011 | Joanne
    Full Title: How to go out with a bang — score points for censorship — a poseur for honor! An editor has resigned after committing the dastardliest of crimes: He helped publish a skeptical paper in a peer-reviewed journal. God-forbid, imagine a paper being reviewed only by people who have some sympathies with your results? It’s unthinkable. We all know that Nature and Science, for example, dutifully send all the papers by alarmists to at least one skeptical reviewer, and since 97% of 77 climate scientists are alarmists, that means the other two scientists who aren’t, are very busy people. ...
  • Science and the Left

    08/29/2011 2:54:54 PM PDT · by neverdem · 20 replies
    NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE ^ | August 29, 2011 | Yuval Levin
    In an effort to scratch up Rick Perry’s bourgeoning presidential campaign, some on the left (with the usual sort of help from some on the right) have trotted out the familiar tale of a conservative war against science. The themes are just as they were in the middle of the last decade (although the embryonic stem cell debate has yet to rear its head this year), and the arguments of the left are pretty much as you would find them in Al Gore’s 2007 book The Assault on Reason (which, despite what the title might lead you to expect, was...
  • How a Distant Black Hole Devoured a Star [ Swift J1644+57 ]

    08/29/2011 3:44:56 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 15 replies
    ScienceDaily ^ | Thursday, August 25, 2011 | NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
    Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco. Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event -- the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years...
  • Molecules Imaged Most Intimately

    08/24/2011 12:32:32 AM PDT · by neverdem · 12 replies
    ScienceNOW ^ | 23 August 2011 | Kim Krieger
    Enlarge Image Shadow of the orbitals. The pictures on the left show the highest occupied molecular orbital (top) and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (bottom) of pentacene, as mapped by the STM. The pictures on the right show the same orbital structures, calculated mathematically. Credit: Adapted from L. Gross et al., PRL, 107 (2011) If you took high school chemistry, then you undoubtedly recall the bizarre drawings of the "orbitals" that describe where in an atom or a molecule an electron is likely to be found. Resembling strange clouds with multiple lobes, the shapes and orientation of the orbitals...
  • When algorithms control the world (done deal?)

    08/23/2011 5:34:40 AM PDT · by decimon · 35 replies · 2+ views
    BBC ^ | August 22, 2011 | Jane Wakefield
    If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements. In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe. Their weapon of choice - the algorithm. > "We are writing these things that we can no longer read," warned Mr Slavin. "We've rendered something illegible. And we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world...
  • Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear

    08/21/2011 9:28:54 PM PDT · by neverdem · 25 replies
    NY Times ^ | August 20, 2011 | WILLIAM J. BROAD
    Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants. One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation. Until now. In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by...
  • Superman's memory crystals may become reality in computers (rewritable crystals?)

    08/20/2011 8:48:14 PM PDT · by TigerLikesRooster · 30 replies
    Telegraph ^ | 08/14/11 | Richard Gray
    Superman's memory crystals may become reality in computers Computers may soon be saving their data onto hard drives made of glass following research by British scientists who have developed a way of storing information similar to the "memory crystals" seen in the Superman films. By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent 9:45AM BST 14 Aug 2011 Researchers at Southampton University used lasers to rearrange the atoms in pieces of glass, turning it into new type of computer memory. They claim the glass memory is far more stable and resilient than current types of hard-drive memory, which have a limited lifespan of a...
  • Strain and spin may enable ultra-low-energy computing

    08/18/2011 10:23:53 PM PDT · by decimon · 13 replies
    American Institute of Physics ^ | August 15, 2011 | Unknown
    By combining two frontier technologies, spintronics and straintronics, a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University has devised perhaps the world's most miserly integrated circuit. Their proposed design runs on so little energy that batteries are not even necessary; it could run merely by tapping the ambient energy from the environment. Rather than the traditional charge-based electronic switches that encode the basic 0s and 1s of computer lingo, spintronics harnesses the natural spin – either up or down – of electrons to store bits of data. Spin one way and you get a 0; switch the spin the other way...
  • Time need not end in the multiverse

    08/14/2011 9:09:42 PM PDT · by LibWhacker · 17 replies
    New Scientist ^ | 8/11/11 | Amanda Gefter
    GAMBLERS already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all. It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1...
  • Transparent lithium ion batteries make electricity generating windows possible

    08/03/2011 12:16:01 AM PDT · by neverdem · 32 replies
    Chemistry World ^ | 26 July 2011 | Kate McAlpine
    Energy-harvesting windows are a step closer with the development of a transparent lithium ion battery, created by US researchers at Stanford University. The electrodes are confined to a grid 35µm wide, making them too narrow to be perceived by the naked eye.The electrodes pose the biggest challenge to transparent lithium ion batteries, as both anode and cathode materials are typically opaque. Yi Cui's team solved this problem by making them very thin. They set the electrode materials into a grid of trenches in clear polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). By stacking and aligning the grids with additional layers of electrodes, it is possible...
  • Sapphire scaffold builds flexoelectric film from the ground up

    08/11/2011 10:03:00 PM PDT · by neverdem · 6 replies · 1+ views
    Chemistry World ^ | 10 August 2011 | Kate McAlpine
    Researchers in South Korea and the UK have produced a film that makes electricity when you bend it - and crucially it is over a million times better at this than other crystalline solids with the same properties. Their approach makes it possible to control the strength of permanent electric fields in designer films, which is required for devices like photovoltaics. Piezoelectric materials generate electric fields when pressed or pulled. In contrast, flexoelectric materials produce these fields when bent - they react to variation in strain across the material, rather than strain itself. But because solids are typically difficult to bend,...
  • Antimatter Belt Found Circling Earth

    08/12/2011 12:24:36 AM PDT · by neverdem · 29 replies
    ScienceNow ^ | 9 August 2011 | Ron Cowen
    Enlarge Image Antimatter reservoir. A newly discovered belt of antiprotons lies within the innermost portion (pink) of Earth's magnetosphere, the large bubblelike region interior to the blue arc that is controlled by the planet's magnetic field. Credit: Aaron Kaase/NASA/Goddard A newly discovered belt of antimatter circling Earth could be an astronaut's best friend. The belt, which consists of antiprotons trapped by Earth's magnetic field several hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, may ultimately become a key source of fuel for missions venturing beyond the solar system. Researchers analyzing data from the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter/Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics)...
  • Neutrons Become Cubes Inside Neutron Stars

    08/11/2011 2:05:14 PM PDT · by LibWhacker · 29 replies · 1+ views
    Intense pressure can force neutrons into cubes rather than spheres, say physicistsInside atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons fill space with a packing density of 0.74, meaning that only 26 percent of the volume of the nucleus in is empty. That's pretty efficient packing. Neutrons achieve a similar density inside neutron stars, where the force holding neutrons together is the only thing that prevents gravity from crushing the star into a black hole. Today, Felipe Llanes-Estrada at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and Gaspar Moreno Navarro at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, say neutrons can do even better. These...
  • Manchester marks Rutherford centenary

    08/10/2011 6:18:06 PM PDT · by decimon · 6 replies
    BBC ^ | August 9, 2011 | Mark Kinver
    Manchester is hosting a series of events to mark the centenary of a paper by Ernest Rutherford that changed the way we looked at the world and Universe around us.In 1911, Rutherford, described as the father of nuclear physics, presented his research to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which - for the first time - described a "planetary structure" of atoms, one that we still recognise today. "Before Rutherford, people had thought about atoms as an amorphous lump, the "plum pudding model" we sometimes hear about," explained Catherine Rushmore, science curator at the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi)....
  • Scientists find anti-matter trapped in Van Allen belts that 'could fuel a spaceship'

    08/09/2011 7:10:48 PM PDT · by Free ThinkerNY · 33 replies
    heraldsun.com.au ^ | August 8, 2011
    TO infinity and beyond? We may not have any viable alternative fuel sources here on Earth yet, but scientists may have discovered an alternative – in space. Researchers at the Pamela satellite (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), discovered the largest known collection of anti-matter near Earth, trapped between the Van Allen belts. The Van Allen belts are a series of donut-shaped rings containing positively charged particles trapped by cosmic rays, solar winds and Earth's magnetic field. The belts themselves are formed by the particles “smashing” into molecules that make up Earth’s atmosphere, causing showers of particles. It...
  • Further on Thorium ( the advantage of thorium relative to uranium for nuclear power)

    08/09/2011 9:52:57 AM PDT · by Ernest_at_the_Beach · 23 replies
    watts up with that? ^ | August 9, 2011 | Anthony Watts
    While Matthew Nesbit opines on peak oil being a uniting cause, this short essay on thorium power is instructive and relevant. – Anthony Guest post by David ArchibaldEarly in June, I gave a lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” at the Institute for World Politics (a graduate school for the CIA and State Department) in Washington. From that lecture, following are a couple of slides pertaining to the advantage of thorium relative to uranium for nuclear power: To run a 1,000 MW reactor for a year requires one tonne of nuclear material to be fissioned. In the case of...