Category: Seein’ the light
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Triggering a molecular supernova
Place a fluorescing molecule next to a gold nanosphere and it lights up like a supernova. That’s what Vahid “Thou” Sandoghdar and his cronies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are telling ya’ll today. This simple trick turns a molecular matchflame into a full blown roman candle. Here’s what’s goin on. The…
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Lake Baikal’s neutrino dreams
When a neutrino smashes into matter it generates light, lots of it. So stare into the dark night for long enough and you’ll see ’em flash as they pass by. The problem is that neutrino hits are rare events. So you need a big volume of dark and whole lot of time to sit back…
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To the Moon in millimeters
This looks impressive: “The Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation has achieved one-millimeter range precision to the moon” So c’mon fellas: how many millimeters is it? Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.0890: APOLLO: the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation: Instrument Description and First Detections
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First laser built from an artificial atom
Strike a light, artificial atoms are excitin critters to be playin around with right now. Get this: some nanobods at the NEC Nano Electronics Research Laboratories in Tskuba, Japan, have gone and built a laser out of one. Yep, a single artificial atom that produces laser light. Here’s what’s goin on. In real atoms, electrons…
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Mathematics: the foundation of reality
“Our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics.” That’s the conclusion of Max “Peg Leg” Tegmark, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he ain’t nuts, even if he sounds as if he’s a couple of planets short of a solar system. His argument is actually kinda convincing. In…
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Why the first stars could have been filaments
Star formation in the early universe ain’t particularly well understood. Why should a pristine cloud of dust suddenly collapse to form a star? One theory is that clumps of dark matter create gravitational wells into which the dust clouds collapse (although why dark matter should be clumpy and not smooth is anybody’s guess). But Liang…
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The world’s first visible light invisibility cloak
Last year, the world went bonkers when scientists at Duke University in North Carolina unveiled the world’s first invisibility cloak. There weren’t no let up in the wall-to-wall media coverage it generate. And impressive though it was, what many reporters forgot to mention was that the cloak works only for microwaves at a single frequency…
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Beauty and the data beast
A human lifetime lasts about 3 × 10^9 seconds. The human brain has roughly 10^10 neurons, each with 10^4 synapses on average. Assuming each synapse can store not more than 3 bits, there is still enough capacity to store the lifelong sensory input stream with a rate of roughly 10^5 bits/s, comparable to the demands…
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How proteins cause cataracts
Some things are just too important to leave to biologists or chemists. Like science, for example, which requires a physicist if yer wanna solve anything decent. There ain’t nothing physicists can’t help with, if they got some spit ‘n’ elbow grease. This week its protein condensation. When proteins condense within the body they form plaques…