Category: Fightin’
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Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball
How many major league baseball players have used performance-enhancing drugs? The answer turns out to be buried in the performance statistics of players, if you know where to look. Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University have done the appropriate number crunching and say that a whopping 5 per cent of players must have been…
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The wound ballistics question
The gloves are off in the world of wound ballistics. The question is: how do handgun bullets do their damage? According to Martin Fackler, a retired colonel and battlefield surgeon in the US Army Medical Corp, the main cause of injury is along or close to the wound channel, the path the bullet takes through…
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Do galactic cosmic rays influence global warming?
A vipers nest on the arXiv today from two groups covering the question of whether cosmic rays can trigger cloud formation and may therefore be a significant player in the global warming debate. The thinking goes like this: cosmic rays ionise the atmosphere, triggering the formation of aerosols which in turn nucleate cloud cover. The…
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Future brightens for quantum imaging
This is the idea behind quantum imaging: create an entangled pair of photons and send one towards the object you want to image and hang on to the other. But then what? For some time, physcists have been whisperin’ about the extraordinary potential of this technique. Some imagine that it might be possible to create…
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Winning and the marathon of life
Look at the finishers in a typical marathon and a simple pattern immediately emerges. After the race winner, there is a trickle of fast finishers that gradually turns into a steady flow as the finish time approaches 3 hours. The main pack arrives in the range of 3–6 hours, with a decreasing stream of progressively…
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Feline ballistics
Here’s a straightforward question in ballistics: What velocity do you need to launch a 350 pound object over a 12.5 foot barrier that is 33 feet away? The answer, thanks to Raza Syed, a physicist at Northeastern University in Boston, and a pal is: 26.7 miles per hour at an angle of about 55 degrees.…
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Extreme ice and the blues
There are 15 different types of ice known to science and I’m not talkin’ Baskin Robbins here. These are materials with different structures that form when water freezes at various temperatures and pressures. Types XIII and XIV were only discovered in 2006 Most ice we come across naturally is type I, which forms at ambient…
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Extragalactic meteor spotted over Russia
On 28 July 2006, Victor Afanasiev from the Russian Academy of Sciences observed the spectrum of a faint meteor as it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. He recorded the event using a 6 metre telescope in the remote Zelenchuksky region of Russia near the border with Georgia. It soon became clear to Afanasiev that…
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The cold dark matter scrap
There’s a race on to find the first direct evidence of cold dark matter. And it ain’t pretty. There’s probably a Nobel at stake for the winner which means the leading groups are at each other’s throats, like alleycats over chicken bones. For any of ya’ll who wanna know who’s who in this backstreet brawl,…
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The fractal drip wars
The gloves are off in this week’s big fight over the fractal analysis of paintings by Jackson Pollock. In the blue corner: Lawrence “Beam me up Scotty” Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and few pals who a few weeks back rubbished the idea that fractal analysis couold spot a genuine Pollock from a fake.…