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A superlens would let you see a virus in a drop of blood and open the door to better and cheaper electronics. It might, says Durdu Guney, make ultra-high-resolution microscopes as commonplace as cameras in our cell phones.No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won’t usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the size of the smallest bacterium. Scanning electron microscopes can capture objects that are much smaller,...

Are there any other fans of FABRIC OF THE COSMOS out there? I found it to be perhaps the most fascinating science show ever produced. The information in the show is nothing less than stunning and definitely changed my view of the universe. Some of the information is so stunning that it is hard to comprehend. But guess what? Even physicists have a hard time getting their minds around it. And an oatmeal cookie to the first person who can post who the major backer of this series is.

Revealed: The priest who changed the course of history ... by rescuing a drowning four-year-old Hitler from death in an icy river * Future Fuhrer was plucked from certain death by boy who grew up to join the church * German newspaper from 1894 reveals incident It may be the most devastating act of mercy in history. A newspaper report chronicling how a boy of four was saved from drowning has surfaced in a German archive. The child – who historians believe could have been Adolf Hitler – was plucked from the icy waters of the River Inn in Passau,...

AP Photo/Heather Deal, Cornell University Scientists demonstrate how they have have created a new invisibility technique that doesnt just cloak an object -- like in Harry Potter books and movies -- but masks an entire event by briefly bending the speed of light around an event. In this illustratio, an art thief walks into a museum and steasl a painting without setting off laser beam alarms or even showing up on surveillance cameras. WASHINGTON – It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have...

Explanation: The monster at the center of our Galaxy is about to get fed. Recent observations by the Very Large Telescopes indicate that a cloud of gas will venture too close to the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. The gas cloud is being disrupted, stretched out, heated up, and some of it is expected to fall into the black hole over the next two years. In this artist's illustration, what remains of the blob after a close pass to the black hole is shown in red and yellow, arching out from the gravitational death trap to its right....

I'm talking about the old multiplication and long division calculation methods. I know what you are probably thinking. That I am some public school advocate, even though I was pissed as hell when my kindergarten daughter asked me if I knew the happy kwanzaa song. But are these really useful anymore? I mean you can buy a calculator for $1 that does all these things and the software developers didn't use those methods for creation of the devices. Did you even understand why these algorithms worked at the time you were taught them? Not trying to be controversial; just want...

This claim is made for two reasons: There is anomalous heat/energy being generated by the device, as evidenced by water that has been heated and/or boiled by the e-Cat. This heat is measured by outside observers and cannot be accounted for, completely, by the external power input. A sample of the claimed products of the reaction was made available, which contained some nickel powder, but about 10% of the sample was copper, claimed to be completely generated from an initial sample that was 100% nickel. Right here, this very site claimed that these results were probably faked, and now we're...

Theoretical Feasibility of Cold Fusion According to the BSM Supergravitation Unified Theory Mon, 19 Dec 2011 New monograph is available on Cold Fusion. 26 pages excerpted Author: Stoyan Sarg Sargoytchev, York Univeristy, Toronto, Canada Source: http://vixra.org/abs/1112.0043 Discussion: http://www.ecatplanet.net/content.php?140-bsm-supergravitation PDF: http://ecatplanet.net/downloads/pdf/1112.0043v2.pdf Abstract: Advances in the field of cold fusion and the recent success of the nickel and hydrogen exothermal reaction, in which the energy release cannot be explained by a chemical process, need a deeper understanding of the nuclear reactions and, more particularly, the possibility for modification of the Coulomb barrier. The current theoretical understanding based on high temperature fusion does...

A metallic lattice of hair-thin pipes is now the lightest solid yet created — less dense than air, scientists revealed. The strategy used to create these intricate structures could lead to revolutionary materials of extraordinary strength and lightness, including ones made of diamond, researchers added. Ultra-lightweight materials such as foams are widely used in thermal insulation and to dampen sounds, vibrations and shocks.

Explanation: What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe -- a nearly complete ring. Since such a lensing effect was generally predicted in some detail by Albert Einstein over 70 years ago, rings like this are now known as...

Washington, D.C. -- The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth's deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth's lower mantle, ferropericlase. The finding, published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, could alter our understanding of deep Earth dynamics and the behavior of the protective magnetic field, which shields our planet from harmful cosmic rays....

Explanation: Why do objects have mass? To help find out, Europe's CERN has built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator yet created by humans. Since 2008, the LHC smashed protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds. The LHC is exploring the leading explanation that mass arises from ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive field of virtual Higgs particles. Were high energy colliding particles to create real Higgs bosons, the Higgs mechanism for mass creation will be bolstered. Last week, two LHC groups reported on preliminary indications that the Higgs boson might exist...

...The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world... Physicists thought that a Higgs boson, when discovered, would take this supersymmetric form, so how have we discovered one so apparently identical to the impossible standard-model version? Working out how to interpret this could be a large step towards the underlying broader theory that will extend the standard model. One explanation could come from an unexpected source: string theory or its extension, M-theory. Contrary to what you may have...

More than 100 apples mysteriously rained down upon a small British town on Monday night. The still-unexplained apple shower left 20 yards of city streets and car windshields covered in the cascading fruit just after the daily rush hour.

Uploaded by MITNewsOffice on Dec 12, 2011 MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects. Video: Melanie Gonick.

Last Friday, I realized the sort of place I work in: an academic Computer Science institute that bears more than a passing resemblence to the ficticious TV town of 'Eureka'. We don't have flying cars, or intelligent, rebellious, precocious attack bots, but we do have some cool stuff. Take the 128-QuBit Quantum Computer housed the ground floor of parking lot where a sandwich shop used to be, for example. This is the next generation of computers, using the superposition effects of quantum mechanics to process vastly many more states than our current 'classical' computers can accomplish. This is the sort...

The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle which scientists believe gives mass to everything in the universe, and is a key component of the Standard Model of physics. While finding it in its expected form would confirm common theories on how atoms are put together, identifying a number of Higgs bosons with different masses or disproving the particle entirely would overturn many assumptions of modern physics.

Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale. Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." It's a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small... Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there's no input of outside...

Utah chemists: Water doesn't have to freeze until minus 55 FahrenheitSALT LAKE CITY -- We drink water, bathe in it and we are made mostly of water, yet the common substance poses major mysteries. Now, University of Utah chemists may have solved one enigma by showing how cold water can get before it absolutely must freeze: 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That's 87 degrees Fahrenheit colder than what most people consider the freezing point of water, namely, 32 F. Supercooled liquid water must become ice at minus 55 F not just because of the extreme cold, but because the molecular...

News from the American Physical SocietyHydrodynamics of writing with inkFor millennia, writing has been the preferred way to convey information and knowledge from one generation to another. We first developed the ability to write on clay tablets with a point, and then settled on a reed pen, as preserved from 3000 BC in Egypt when it was used with papyrus. Cont... Faster-than-light neutrinos may leave trails at the LHCIs Einstein's venerated theory of special relativity challenged by neutrinos? Cont... Why it's hard to see Schroedinger's catWhy do we not see quantum physical effects in our daily lives? This question was...