Category: At the seaside
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Speech therapy revolutionised by hi-tech dentures
Dentures rarely find their place at the cutting edge of science (some say unfairly) but today is an exception. Christophe Jeannin at the Institut de la Communication Parlée in Grenoble, France, and a few pals have developed a set of hi-tech dentures that contain a number of tiny pressures sensors that record the position of…
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Solving the faint young Sun problem
We know by studying ancient rocks that liquid water existed on the surface of Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago. That implies that the surface temperature at that time was at least 273K. We also know by studying stars similar to ours that the Sun must have been significantly less bright than it is…
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Bluetooth surveillance secretly tested in the city of Bath
“In 2001 Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras was jailed in a Spanish prison for drug related offences. Whilst imprisoned, Trashorras established regular contact with Jamal Ahmidan who was serving time for a petty crime. Both individuals embraced radical Islamic fundamentalist ideas within the prison and were recruited in the Takfir wa al-Hijra group, a Moroccan terrorist…
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ET more likely to pick up radar bursts than radio transmissions
Radar astronomy is a crucial tool in measuring the trajectories of Earth-crossing asteroids. If we’re going to be hit, radar is how we’ll work out when. The technique has also been used to image various bodies such as the asteroid 216 Kleopatra, to measure distances with extreme accuracy and to test relativity by monitoring the…
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A Moore-like law for suspension bridges
The world’s longest suspension bridge could easily be built if its cables were made from bundles of carbon nanotubes, say Alberto Carpinteri and Nicola Pugno from the Polytechnic University of Turin. The thinking for this rather unsurprising news is that carbon nanotube cables would allow the main span of a suspension bridge to increase in…
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Relativity sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine
Max Tegmark and Flora Lopis have been working hard on teaching the 8.033 course on relativity at MIT. They publish it today on the arXiv saying: “To maximize the learning experience from this technical review, the reader is encouraged to sing it to the tune of Yellow Submarine, with italicized lines going like the chorus…”…
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Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves
Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be solved in a maximum of 26 moves. Now Tomas Rokicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has gone one better. He’s shown that there are no configurations that can be…
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How Hawking radiation may explain dark energy
In 1993, the Dutch Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard t’Hooft suggested that all the information in a region of space can be represented as a hologram, an idea that implies that the laws of physics that govern our universe are somehow encoded on its (higher dimensional) boundary. This idea, known as the holographic principle, has a…
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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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Avoiding heat death at the end of the Universe
The second law of thermodynamics is a bummer. It says that the entropy of an isolated system will increase with time. It’s the reason why teacups break when they fall, why smashing eggs is easier than mending them and why teenagers’ bedrooms inevitably become messier. That’s all rather annoying but when applied to the Universe,…