Category: Secrets
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Tune into the snowflake channel
Snowflakes can emit radio signals as they form and a better understanding of this process could provide a new way to monitor and study snow formation in the atmosphere. That’s the ice-cool conclusion of a group o’ physicists from France and Israel who have begun to tease apart some of the more subtle processes at…
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Solar System heading thataway
Take a look at the cosmic microwave background radiation and ya can see a slight bias caused by the movement of the solar system. Now Christopher “He’s Alive” Gordon at the University of Oxford and a coupla pals have worked out where we’re goin’ by estimating our motion relative to the CMB using Type Ia…
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Breaking the Netflix Prize dataset
Hell, this is good work. In October last year, Netflix released over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 subscribers to their online DVD rental service. The company then offered a prize of $1million to anyone who could better the company’s system of DVD recommendation by 10 per cent or more. Of course, Netflix assured…
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Perfect steganography
Steganography is the practice of hiding a message within another object such as an image, video or audio file. In some sense, it’s akin to camouflage, a-lurkin’ and a-hidin’ behind an image. By contrast, cryptographers make no attempt to hide their work but instead merely encrypt it. “Steganography differs from cryptography in that the presence…
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A load of Pollocks
In 1999, Richard “Drippy” Taylor at the Univesity of New South Wales in Australia announced that he was able to tell a painting by the American abstract expresisonist Jackson Pollock by analysing the fractal patterns made by the paint on the canvas. He claimed that the fractal signature Pollock made as he dripped paint onto…
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Delayed-choice and double slits
Send single photons through a double slit and they will somehow interfere with themselves to produce an interference pattern, as if they were waves. That’s quantum mechanics for ya. ‘Cept it don’t work if the photons are being watched, in which case each photon appears to pass through one slit or the other, as if…
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Cellphone records reveal new patterns of human activity
Switch yer mobile phone on and it checks into the local network giving your location and the time you were there. The network also records the calls you make, their frequency, duration and to whom you make them plus wherever they happen to be too. Multiply that by the entire popualtion (mobile phone penetration approaches…
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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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Halting the horrible kilogram shrink
The kilogram is a-shrinkin’ and ain’t nobody sure why. The problem is the way it is defined: the mass of a lump o’ metal stored in a vault in Paris. That’s no good cos a few atoms rub off each time it is picked up and others seem to fall off even when it ain’t…
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The surprise at the bottom of the infinite quantum well
Who remembers the quantum particle trapped in an infinite square well? Ya’ll probably still havin nightmares about it. Turns out there is an interesting new take on this problem that has physicists all a-sea. For any bods out there who ain’t familiar with it, the simplest problem in any course of quantum mechanics is this:…