Category: Secrets
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Celebrating 10 years of the Physics arXiv Blog
Back in 2007, I started an experiment. My idea was to use the relatively novel technique of blogging to explore exciting new ideas on the Physics arXiv, an online server for scientific papers. I called this thing the Physics arXiv Blog and 11 August 2017 is the 10th anniversary of its birth. Every day, I…
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Important changes to the Physics arXiv Blog
From Monday 13 March, the Physics arXiv Blog will appear exclusively on technologyreview.com This is an exciting move for the blog because it will allow me to concentrate on reading and filtering the fantastic ideas on the arXiv while leaving the increasingly onerous task of administering a popular website to the talented tech guys at…
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The secret of world class putting
Watch professional golfers putt and you’ll eventually notice three common features about their style, says Robert Grober, an expert on the physics of golf at the Yale University. First, the putter head always moves at a constant speed when it hits the ball. Second, the length of time the putting stroke takes has little impact…
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Why spiders’ silk is so much stronger than silkworms’
Spider silk and silkworm silk are almost identical in chemical composition and microscopic structure. And yet spider silk is far tougher. “One strand of pencil thick spider silk can stop a Boeing 747 in flight,” say Xiang Wu and colleagues at the National University of Singapore. Whereas a pencil thick strand of silkworm silk couldn’t.…
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Simulating Sweden
If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes. But…
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Challenging the nature of black holes
The nature of black holes has puzzled physicists for decades. But while the debate has fizzled in recent years, some new thinking is about to set it alight again. Black holes are fundamentally a product of general relativity, which allows for a gravitational collapse so violent that no other force can oppose it. When that…
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Fermi’s paradox solved?
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they? The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the…
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Is meditating good for the heart?
Let’s calm things down with some deep breaths: in…out…in…out. Relax. Feel your pulse rate slowing? We’ve known for some time that there’s more to pulse rate than beats per minute. Heart rate variability–the change in intervals between beats–can be used to distinguish healthy hearts from diseased and damaged ones. One sign of a healthy heart…
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How Google’s PageRank predicts Nobel Prize winners
Ranking scientists by their citations–the number of times they are mentioned in other scientists’ papers– is a miserable business. Everybody can point to ways in which this system is flawed: not all citations are equal. The importance of the citing paper is a significant factor scientists in different fields of study use citations in different…
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Memristors made into low cost, high density RRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory)
The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Memristors (from memory-resistors, geddit?) are resistors whose resistance depends on their past. In that sense they remember the past or, as an electronics engineer might put it, they store information. So new are…