Category: Sparks ‘n’ thunderbolts
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The LHC’s dodgy dossier?
There’s no reason to worry about the Large Hadron Collider that is due to to be switched on later this year for the second time. The chances of it creating a planet-swallowing black hole are tiny. Hardly worth mentioning really. But last month, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few…
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The forecast for hydrogen peroxide snow on Mars
On Earth, wind blown dust storms generate powerful electric fields of up to 200 kV/m, with the ground becoming positively charged and the dust particles negatively charged. The mechanism behind this is poorly understood but various scientists have assumed that a similar process takes place on Mars and that it leads to bizarre phenomenon. One…
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Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes
There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right? Err, yep. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. And the new calculations are throwing up some surprises. One potential method of…
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Harvesting energy from the airwaves
Antennae are the most fundamental energy harvesting devices that we know, says Sung Nae Cho at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in south Korea. So why aren’t they more widely used? Turns out that helical antennae are already used to harvest energy and most of us probably own one already in the form of…
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The day the solar wind disappeared
It happened on 11 May 1999…nobody knows why and the event was not related to well known drivers of solar weather such as coronal mass ejections or large flares. According to Durgess Tripathi at the University of Cambridge, UK, and pals, the cause seems to be linked to the appearance a few days earlier of…
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Why small black holes cannot grow
Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the minimum quanta of energy that can be associated with a bit of energy. It’s about 10^-50 Joules, which ain’t much. That has important implications for black holes, says Scott Funkhouser, a physicist at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, in Charleston. As black holes accretes…
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Why black holes could be antimatter factories
Here’s an interesting chain of thought… Imagine a black hole sucking in protons and electrons. With their higher mass, protons are likely to be preferentially sucked, giving the black hole a positive charge. (That’s not so unusual in space: a similar mechanism can give planets a charge because electrons escape their gravity more easily.) But…
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How to bury an ion (and find it again later)
The future of computing depends on our ability to bury single ions within the crystal structure of silicon and diamond in a way that allows us to find them again, quickly and repeatably. The burying part of all this isn’t difficult: simply aim a beam of ions at a substrate and you can be pretty…
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Why ET will phone using neutrinos not photons
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that ET will be communicating using photons. But despite decades of listening out, we’ve heard nothing. But today, John Learned from the University of Hawaii and pals say forget photons. We should be looking for evidence of ET using neutrinos. The reason is that any civilisation advanced enough to…
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How orbiting electrons can lengthen nuclear half-life
Nuclear fission is the process in which a nucleus decays into two fragments. For large nucleii, this process is a complicated one in which the nucleus undergoes several stages of deformation before tearing itself apart. In recent years, physicists have predicted that fission ought to be affected by the presence of electrons in orbit about…