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Keyword: stringtheory

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  • 1 clock with 2 times

    10/19/2011 4:45:47 PM PDT · by decimon · 13 replies
    University of Vienna ^ | October 19, 2011 | Unknown
    When quantum mechanics meets general relativityThe unification of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity is one of the most exciting and still open questions in modern physics. General relativity, the joint theory of gravity, space and time gives predictions that become clearly evident on a cosmic scale of stars and galaxies. Quantum effects, on the other hand, are fragile and are typically observed on small scales, e.g. when considering single particles and atoms. That is why it is very hard to test the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Now theoretical physicists led by Prof. ÄŒaslav Brukner at the...
  • Quantum levitating (locking) video goes viral

    10/19/2011 7:01:34 AM PDT · by Red Badger · 36 replies
    http://www.physorg.com ^ | 18 October 2011 | Bob Yirka
    A video created by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel has the Internet buzzing. Though rather simple, it just looks really cool, hence all the attention. It’s a demonstration of quantum locking, though to non-science buffs, it looks more like science fiction come to life. In the video a disc, obviously frozen due to the vapor rising from its surface hovers over a surface. This is nothing new of course, everyone’s seen it in science class. What is new is that when the demonstrator turns the disc, it stays hovered at that angle. This is in contrast to the...
  • Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry

    10/18/2011 9:35:29 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 29 replies
    New York Times ^ | October 16, 2011 | Alan Schwarz
    Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses. And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master's degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid's Proposition 32 the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because...
  • Excess Heat and Particle Tracks from Deuterium-loaded Palladium

    10/18/2011 3:33:30 PM PDT · by Errant · 60 replies
    University of Missouri ^ | May 29, 2009 | Numerous
    Many research groups have reported excess heat from deuterated palladium using many different experimental techniques. Recently, the Navy's SPAWAR laboratory published experimental results that document the production of nuclear particles, thereby suggesting that nuclear reactions are occurring. However, these observed particle tracks are at levels that are much smaller than would be expected if this excess heat resulted from conventional nuclear fusion. These excess heat reports often vastly exceed that which would likely be produced by chemical reactions or by structural phase transitions in the palladium. On May 29, 2009, the University of Missouri hosted a seminar titled, "Excess Heat...
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Movie: Approaching Light Speed

    10/18/2011 2:58:17 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 30 replies
    NASA ^ | October 18, 2011 | (see photo credit)
    Explanation: What would it look like to travel near the speed of light? Strange visual effects would appear as documented in the above relativistically-accurate animation. First of all, relativistic aberration would cause objects to appear to bunch up in front you. Next, the Doppler shift would cause the colors of forward objects to shift toward the blue, while things behind you would shift toward the red. Similarly, the world in front of you would seem to move unusually fast, while the world behind you would appear to slow down. Objects to the sides will appear rotated, possibly enabling surfaces normally...
  • New form of superhard carbon observed

    10/13/2011 10:58:04 AM PDT · by Red Badger · 44 replies
    http://www.physorg.com ^ | 11 Oct 2011 | Provided by Carnegie Institution
    Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms, called allotropes, including diamond and graphite. Scientists at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory are part of a team that has discovered a new form of carbon, which is capable of withstanding extreme pressure stresses that were previously observed only in diamond. This breakthrough discovery will be published in Physical Review Letters. The team was led by Stanford's Wendy L. Mao and her graduate student Yu Lin and includes Carnegie's Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, Li Zhang, Paul Chow, Yuming Xiao, Maria Baldini, and Jinfu Shu. The experiment started...
  • Watch Large Hadron Collider Collisions with an Android App

    10/12/2011 5:46:18 AM PDT · by ShadowAce · 34 replies
    Network World ^ | 10 October 2011 | Rikki Kite
    If you have a phone or tablet that runs Google Android, you should check out the new LHSee app, released by the University of Oxford and available in the Android Market. Funded by the Science & Technology Facilities Council, the LHSee app delivers data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN directly to your handheld device. LHSee, released last week and currently in version 1.0, requires Android 2.2 and up and will need full Internet access. The new app is already a hit — it has a 4.5 star rating and 123 reviews in the Android Market. ATLAS is a particle...
  • Scattering Confirms Wideband Invisibility Cloak Using Fractal Metamaterials

    10/10/2011 8:20:16 PM PDT · by bkopto · 28 replies
    Fractal Antenna Systems ^ | September 15, 2011 | Jane Winter
    Researchers from Boston-area Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc., report additional measurements that confirm its claims of a working ‘invisibility cloak’. In March, 2009, the firm’s research group disclosed the first invention of the invisibility cloak. It had unprecedented ability to work ‘wideband’ and render an object invisible to microwaves. The wideband aspect also demonstrated a path for making invisibility cloaks in the full spectrum of visible light. A previous invisibility cloak effort by Duke University-based researchers had shown some degree of cloaking , but over a narrow frequency band. That cloaking also rendered the object partially detectable/visible by the presence of...
  • Quantum life: The weirdness inside us

    10/08/2011 11:36:11 AM PDT · by Reeses · 30 replies
    NewScientist ^ | October 6, 2011 | Michael Brooks
    Ever felt a little incoherent? Or maybe you've been in two minds about something, or even in a bit of delicate state. Well, here's your excuse: perhaps you are in thrall to the strange rules of quantum mechanics. We tend to think that the interaction between quantum physics and biology stops with Schrödinger's cat. Not that Erwin Schrödinger intended his unfortunate feline - suspended thanks to quantum rules in a simultaneous state of being both dead and alive - to be anything more than a metaphor. Indeed, when he wrote his 1944 book What is Life?, he speculated that living...
  • Graphene shows unusual thermoelectric response to light

    10/07/2011 11:42:34 AM PDT · by LibWhacker · 11 replies
    MIT ^ | 10/7/11 | David L. Chandler
    Finding could lead to new photodetectors or energy-harvesting devices.Graphene, an exotic form of carbon consisting of sheets a single atom thick, exhibits a novel reaction to light, MIT researchers have found: Sparked by light’s energy, the material can produce electric current in unusual ways. The finding could lead to improvements in photodetectors and night-vision systems, and possibly to a new approach to generating electricity from sunlight. This current-generating effect had been observed before, but researchers had incorrectly assumed it was due to a photovoltaic effect, says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and senior author of a...
  • Cosmic Speed-Up Nabs Nobel Prize

    10/07/2011 9:35:53 PM PDT · by neverdem · 26 replies
    ScienceNOW ^ | 4 October 2011 | Adrian Cho
    Enlarge Image Star power. Saul Perlmutter (left), Brian Schmidt (center), and Adam Riess share this year's Nobel Prize in physics. Credit: LBNL, ANU, JHU Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. At the time, many scientists expected that the gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to slow down the expansion. Today, researchers from both teams shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that dramatic observation, which has changed the conceptual landscape in cosmology, astronomy,...
  • Natural quasicrystals discovered

    06/04/2009 9:06:32 PM PDT · by neverdem · 11 replies · 771+ views
    Chemistry World ^ | 04 June 2009 | Phillip Broadwith
    Scientists have discovered a rare form of solid - a quasicrystal - in a rock sample from Russia's Koryak mountains. Quasicrystals have unusual properties and have previously only been made in the laboratory. The discovery could redefine the field of mineralogy and expand our understanding of how quasicrystals form, leading to new applications.Quasicrystals are a type of solid with structures in between those of crystals and glasses. They are often compared to Penrose tilings, where two different shapes of tile are tessellated in patterns with local symmetry but more complex overall periodicity. The materials have interesting properties, often being harder or...
  • Science publishing: The trouble with retractions

    10/06/2011 8:27:07 AM PDT · by toma29 · 9 replies
    Nature News ^ | 10/6/2011 | Richard Van Noorden
    This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters' vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science's ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature. It is reassuring that retractions are so rare, for...
  • The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 (2/3 to the US, again)

    10/04/2011 2:57:56 AM PDT · by AdmSmith · 14 replies
    The Nobel Foundation ^ | october 4, 2011 | staff
    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 with one half to Saul Perlmutter The Supernova Cosmology Project Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt The High-z Supernova Search Team Australian National University, and Adam G. Riess The High-z Supernova Search Team Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae" In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed...
  • The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 Daniel Shechtman (Israel)

    10/05/2011 2:57:44 AM PDT · by AdmSmith · 22 replies · 1+ views
    The nobel Foundation ^ | oct 6, 2011 | staff
    The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Daniel Shechtman Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel "for the discovery of quasicrystals" A remarkable mosaic of atoms In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Daniel Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.
  • Particles Moved Faster Than Speed of Light?

    09/24/2011 6:19:59 AM PDT · by Lonesome in Massachussets · 56 replies
    National Geographic ^ | September 23, 2011 | Ker Than
    Neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles—may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week. If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois.
  • Could the Higgs boson explain the size of the Universe?

    09/21/2011 7:26:02 AM PDT · by decimon · 23 replies
    EPFL ^ | September 21, 2011 | Nicolas Guérin
    The Universe wouldn’t be the same without the Higgs boson. This legendary particle plays a role in cosmology and reveals the possible existence of another closely related particle. The race to identify the Higgs boson is on at CERN. This Holy Grail of particle physics would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. The mysterious particle would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth, according to a group of EPFL physicists. If their theory is verified with data from the Planck satellite, it would clear up several questions about...
  • CERN scientists 'break the speed of light'

    09/22/2011 6:57:08 PM PDT · by danielmryan · 105 replies
    The Telegraph ^ | Sept. 22, 2011 | Uncredited
    Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe. Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done. "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."
  • Dwarf galaxies suggest dark matter theory may be wrong

    09/16/2011 3:33:06 PM PDT · by decimon · 56 replies
    BBC ^ | September 16, 2011 | Leila Battison
    Scientists' predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised.Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to. That may mean that the Large Hadron Collider will not be able to spot it. Leading cosmologist Carlos Frenk spoke of the "disturbing" developments at the British Science Festival in Bradford. The current theory holds that around 4% of the Universe is made up of normal matter - the stuff...
  • The Corruption of Science in America

    09/13/2011 2:43:26 PM PDT · by ForGod'sSake · 32 replies · 1+ views
    sott.net ^ | August 30, 2011 | J. Marvin Herndon
    Truth is the pillar of civilization. The word 'truth' occurs 224 times in the King James Version of the Holy Bible; witnesses testifying in American courts and before the United States Congress must swear to tell the truth; and, laws and civil codes require truth in advertising and in business practices, to list just a few examples. The purpose of science is to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe and to convey that knowledge truthfully to people everywhere. Science gives birth to technology that makes our lives easier and better. Science improves our health and enables us to...