Category: Mountain climbin’
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Visible light metamaterials on the cheap
Only a couple of years, more than a few physicists doubted that it would ever be possible to build decent metamaterials with a negative refractive index for visible light. Metamaterials have bulk properties that depend on the structure of their components rather than the bulk properties of the materials from which they are made. The…
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How superconducting sheets could reflect gravitational waves
Gravitational waves are the elusive distortions in spacetime created by the universe’s most violent events–collisions between black holes, stars exploding and even the big bang itself. Nobody has bagged a confirmed sighting of these waves but that may change thanks to an intriguing idea from Raymond Chiao and pals at the University of California, Merced.…
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Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?
In 1987, Joe Weber, a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected gravitational waves at exactly the same moment that other astronomers witnessed the famous supernova of that year, SN1987A. His equipment consisted of several massive aluminium bars that were designed to vibrate in a unique way when a large enough gravitational…
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Liquid film motors finally explained
Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made the extraordinary discovery that motors can be made of nothing more than a thin film of water sitting in a cell bathed in two perpendicular electric fields. The unexpected result of this set up is that the water begins to rotate. Divide the water into smaller cells…
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The frightening origins of glacial cycles
Climatologists have known for some time that the Earth’s motion around the Sun is not as regular as it might first appear. The orbit is subject to a number of periodic effects such as the precession of the Earth’s axis which varies over periods of 19, 22 and 24 thousand years, its axial tilt which…
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Watch this space for the chemistry of dust
It’s not often that chemists get new tools with which to investigate the building blocks of the world around us, so a paper on the arXiv today gives them good reason to pop a few corks. Vladlen Shvedov at the Australian National University in Canberra and a few mates have today unveiled a way of…
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Glider guns created in chemical Game of Life
If you’ve ever played Conway’s Game of Life, you’ll be familiar with cellular automata and, more importantly, glider guns. So get this: a team of British chemists and computer scientists have created a chemical cocktail that behaves like a cellular automata and which reproduces this behavior: chemical guns firing chemical gliders across a chemical grid.…
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Next generation search engines could rank sites by “talent”
How will the next generation of search engines outperform Google’s all-conquering Pagerank algorithm? One route might be to hire Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles and his buddies who have found a fascinating new way to tackle the problem of website rankings.
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How chaos could improve speech recognition
If you’ve ever used speech recognition software, you’ll know how often it fails to work well. Recognition rates are nowhere near what is needed for anything but the simplest applications. So a new approach for analysing speech by Yuri Andreyev and Maxim Koroteev at the Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of…
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Entangled atoms could “sense” quantum gravity
The notion of quantum gravity has mystified many physicists, not least because there has never been a prospect of measuring the fabric of the universe on this scale. That looks set to change. A few years back, a number of physicists suggested that atom interferometry might do the trick. The thinking was that two atoms…