Category: Hellraisin’
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Solving the mouth-puckering mystery of tannins
The distinctive sensation of tannins on the tongue will be familiar (overfamiliar, perhaps?) to many arXivblog readers. And if you’ve ever wondered what causes that mouth-puckering dryness, you now have an answer thanks to the dedicated and selfless work of Drazen Zanchi and colleagues at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Energies in Paris.…
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How religions spread like viruses
“Religions are sets of ideas, statements and prescriptions of whose validity and applicability individual humans can become convinced,” say Michael Doebeli and Iaroslav Ispolatov at the University of Vancouver. In other words, religions are memes, units of cultural inheritance just like songs, languages or political beliefs. Richard Dawkins proposed the idea that memes spread much…
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How to test the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that before a measurement is made, identical copies of the observer exist in parallel universes and that all possible results of a measurement actually take place in these universes. Until now there has been no way to distinguish between this and the Born interpretation. This holds that…
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How politics manipulates science
In a fascinating and controversial paper, Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sets out to show how changes in the structure of scientific activity over the past half century have left the scientific endeavor vulnerable to political manipulation. In particular, he focuses on how political bodies try to control scientific institutions, how scientists…
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Periodic Pioneer anomaly points to modified general relativity
The Pioneer anomaly grows ever more fascinating. Here’s the background: Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively and, after sweeping past a number of the outer gas giants, have been heading out of the solar system ever since. NASA has been accurately tracking their position and speed using Doppler tracking measurements…
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New fractal pattern found in milk and coffee
Next time you stare into your 9am double tall latte, look with new respect. Japanese scientists have discovered a new type of fractal in the patterns coffee makes as mixes with milk. Placing a heavier fluid onto a lighter fluid always results in an disturbance at their boundary known as a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Michiko Shimokawa…
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Why spontaneous traffic jams are like detonation waves
We’re all familiar with phantom jams, traffic blockages that arise with no apparent cause and that melt away for no discernible reason. Today Ruben Rosales and pals at MIT and the University of Alberta in Canada coin a new term for the waves that cause these hold ups: they call them jamitons. And jamitons turn…
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Loophole found in quantum cryptography photon detectors
If you’re hoping to secure your data using quantum cryptography, you might want to find a shoulder to cry on. Quantum cryptography ought to be 100 percent secure. In theory , it provides perfect security against eavesdroppers. But in practice, a number of loopholes have emerged (see here and here). And today, Vadim Makarov and…
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Flyby anomalies explained by special relativity
On 23 January 1998, when NASA’s Near spacecraft swung past Earth on a routine flyby towards more interesting lands, a curious thing happened to its speed. It jumped by 13 mm/s. This wasn’t the first time such an effect had been seen. Engineers saw similar jumps in speed during the Earth flybys of Galileo (in…
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How supermassive black holes help galaxies evolve
It’s easy to imagine that our understanding of the way galaxies form and evolve is more or less complete. After all, we’ve been fitting missing pieces into the jigsaw at an alarming rate in recent years with all this data from WMAP etc about the structure of the early universe, a better understanding of the…