Category: Changin’ the world
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Extraterrestrial nucleobases found in meteorite
In 1969, a large meteorite fell near the town of Murchison in Victoria, Australia. Scientists collected more than 100 kilograms of rock, making it the largest sample of carbonaceous chondrite ever recovered. Since then numerous groups have found evidence that the Murchison meteorite contains common amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, as well as…
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Testing “spooky action-at-a-distance” on the International Space Station
Entanglement is the strange and beautiful property of certain quantum particles to become so deeply linked that they share the same existence. According to quantum theory, that link should be maintained whatever the distance between the particles, whether the width of an atom or the diameter of the universe. This led Einstein to claim that…
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The surprisingly rich physics of peeling paper
Take a standard piece of copier paper (80 g/m^2) and carefully peel it into two sheets. Listen out for the way it tears and watch how fast the peel line creeps. What you’ll see and hear is a stick-slip phenomenon in which the creep velocity varies over many orders of magnitude, with small movements of…
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Can dark matter explain the flyby anomalies?
The flyby anomalies, you may remember, are a set of fascinating data indicating that spacecraft flying past Earth undergo a strange, step-like change in their acceleration. The Galileo, Near, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft all seem to have been hit by this weird phenomenon and while that’s not a large number of data points, it is…
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First superheavy element found in nature
The hunt for superheavy elements has focused banging various heavy nuclei together and hoping they’ll stick. In this way, physicists have extended the periodic table by manufacturing elements 111, 112, 114, 116 and 118, albeit for vanishingly small instants. Although none of these elements is particularly long lived, they don’t have progressively shorter lives and…
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Nanoclusters break superconductivity record
Wow! Every now and again a paper on the arxiv leaps out at you and today there’s work from Indiana University in Bloomington that has got my eyeballs on stalks. Get this: a team led by Martin Jarrold is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K . Yep, 200…
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Global warming: we have 10 years to avoid catastrophe
The arxiv isn’t usually the place where climate scientists make predictions about global warming but yesterday, they made an exception. A group led by James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists who works at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, warned that global warming is having much worse effects on Earth’s climate than…
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A survey of quantum programming languages
It cannot be long before somebody breathes life into a useful quantum computer. And when that happens, an entirely new breed of keyboard monkey will be born: the quantum computer programmer. This strange animal will have to work with the weird and wonderful tools of the quantum world, such as superposition of quantum bits, entanglement,…
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When humans become entangled
Something curious is happening at Nicolas Gisin’s lab at the University of Geneva. Gisin is a world expert in entanglement, the ghostly quantum phenomenon in which two or more particles become so deeply linked that they share the same existence, even when far apart. Entanglement is now a routine resource in many labs: it can…
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The quantum graphity question
Physicists have been searching for a quantum theory of gravity some time. Most believe that the new theory will require some kind of modification to general relativity or quantum theory. One of the ideas in vogue at the moment is that general relativity is actually an emergent phenomenon from some deeper physics. Now Tomasz Konopka…