Category: Highlights

Over the holiday period the arXivblog is re-running the most popular posts from 2008 23 May 2008: First test of exotic space thruster ends in explosion In 2006, Mason Peck at Cornell University in Ithaca dreamt up with an entirely new way to control satellites orbiting planets that have a magnetic field. The idea is…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 29 September 2008 : Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”? The fellas at CERN have gone to great lengths to reassure us all that they won’t destroy the planet (who says physicists are cold…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 5 November 2008: Cloaking objects at a distance One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 5 August 2008: Quantum communication: when 0 + 0 is not equal to 0 One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 29 August 2008: Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun? Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 1 February 2008: Feline ballistics Here’s a straightforward question in ballistics: What velocity do you need to launch a 350 pound object over a 12.5 foot barrier that is 33 feet away? Read on…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 28 April 2008: 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,…

Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 26 March 2008: 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…

The iced buns from the physics arxiv blog this week: The Casimir conundrum The painful search for gravitational waves The day the solar wind disappeared Why small black holes cannot grow

The baubles from the physics arXivblog this week: Musical relativity The puzzling wrinkles in graphene Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha) How likely is an avian flu pandemic?