Category: Changin’ the world
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Inflatable mountains
It’s best to ignore the crazier ideas on the physics arXiv. But every now and again something comes out of left field that is just too extraordinary to pass on. Today, it’s a cheap way of changing the entire climate over relatively small regions of the Earth. Alexander Bolonkin (unaffiliated) suggests that inflatable mountains could…
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How to spot a wormhole
I know ya’ll heard of wormholes, tunnels in the fabric of the cosmos that connect one region of the universe to another. These ain’t just the fanciful dreams of impressionable young astrobods: wormholes represent real solutions of Einstein’s equation of general relativity. If general relativity is correct, wormholes ought to be out there somewhere. But…
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How to predict a brainquake
Welcome back. Hope ya’ll had a good holiday and that 2008 brings your hearts’ desires. First up this year, a cracker of a paper showing how epileptic fits might be predicted following the discovery of a profound statistical analogy between earthquakes and “brainquakes”. Ivan Osirio at the University of Kansas Medical Centre and a…
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Is spacetime an emergent phenomenon?
A lotta physicists are spending more time a-dwellin’ and a-worryin about emergent phenomenon. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, emerge from the statistical rules that govern many-particle behavior, the complexities of our society seem to emerge from simple rules that govern human behavior and some physicists believe the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics can be…
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The smoking gun that may prove our climate models wrong
If ya live in Europe, fall 2006 musta been one helluva season. Many climatologist worry that climate models severely underestimate the effects of global warming. The extraordinary temperatures recorded in Europe in Autumn 2006 might just be the smoking gun that proves that these models really do get it wrong, big time. Here’s what happened.…
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Quantum dreamin and optical illusions
Quantum consciousness, a phrase that sends most eggheads running for the hills, is currently on a roll. A coupla months back, Efstratios “Moussaka” Manousakis of Florida State University in Tallahassee published a paper suggesting that a certain kinda optical illusion could be explained in quantum terms. The optical illusion in question is the double image…
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The first brain image taken with an ultra low field MRI
Ya’ll know that MRI machines are great hulking lumps o’ metal filled with pulsing tubes of liquid helium and evil superconducting magnets that’ll rip yer fillings out if ya as much as smile at ’em. All that bulk is necessary to create the fantastic magnetic fields of several Tesla needed make the protons in yer…
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How cleanliness can kill
The hygiene hypothesis is that our immune system requires the presence of pathogens to grow and function properly. The thinkin is that dirt ‘n’ muck provides a kinda training ground on which the immune system “learns” it’s trade when we’re all youngsters. So mothers who keep a-scrubbin and a-cleanin them germs away are actually doin’…
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Why our time dimension is about to become space-like
It don’t get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it. The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us…
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Unparticles and supernovas
Unparticles are all the rage in physics at the moment. Yep, ya heard right: unparticles. A few months back, Howard “Jumpin” Georgi at Harvard University stumbled across an entirely new type of stuff while foolin’ around with the field theories behind particle physics. Ordinary particles pop out of these theories as solutions at certain scales.…