Category: Hellraisin’
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The iron arsenide superconductivity challenge
Until a few weeks ago, all so-called high temperature superconductors were layered copper oxides of the type discovered by Karl Muller and Georg Bednorz back in 1986. These are so-called because they become superconducting at temperatures above 30K, the theoretical limit predicted by the BCS theory (after Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) of superconductivity that ruled…
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Bluetooth surveillance secretly tested in the city of Bath
“In 2001 Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras was jailed in a Spanish prison for drug related offences. Whilst imprisoned, Trashorras established regular contact with Jamal Ahmidan who was serving time for a petty crime. Both individuals embraced radical Islamic fundamentalist ideas within the prison and were recruited in the Takfir wa al-Hijra group, a Moroccan terrorist…
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Diamonds in the sky: a miner’s guide
Astronomers have recently wondered whether carbon might form a supercooled liquid under the huge pressures that exist in side carbon-rich white dwarf stars and even inside medium-sized gaseous planets such as neptune and uranus. If that’s the case, then small disturbances in the liquid could trigger the formation of diamonds the size of automobiles. The…
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Global warming: we have 10 years to avoid catastrophe
The arxiv isn’t usually the place where climate scientists make predictions about global warming but yesterday, they made an exception. A group led by James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists who works at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, warned that global warming is having much worse effects on Earth’s climate than…
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Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball
How many major league baseball players have used performance-enhancing drugs? The answer turns out to be buried in the performance statistics of players, if you know where to look. Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University have done the appropriate number crunching and say that a whopping 5 per cent of players must have been…
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The coming blackout
On Monday, 17th December 2007, Europe narrowly avoided disaster. A cold snap had lowered the temperature across much of continent to several degrees below average and that evening, as households across the continent switched on their heating systems, the power consumption hit critical levels. France, Italy and Spain all set new records for power consumption.…
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Questioning the Big Bang
The Big Bang dominates current thinking in cosmology. But the experimental evidence that backs it up is surprisingly thin. In fact there are only two pieces of evidence: the galactic redshift and the cosmic background radiation. The Big Bang explains these observations but only by introducing problems of their own. So are there any alternative…
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The curious case of the disappearing physicist
If you work in particle physics, cosmology or condensed matter, you’ll probably be familiar with the name Majorana, as in Majorana fermions and Majorana neutrinos. But Ettore Majorana is famous for another reason. As one of the leading lights of theoretical physics in the 1930s, he made important contributions to nuclear, atomic and molecular physics…
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How Hawking radiation may explain dark energy
In 1993, the Dutch Nobel prize-winning physicist Gerard t’Hooft suggested that all the information in a region of space can be represented as a hologram, an idea that implies that the laws of physics that govern our universe are somehow encoded on its (higher dimensional) boundary. This idea, known as the holographic principle, has a…
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The wound ballistics question
The gloves are off in the world of wound ballistics. The question is: how do handgun bullets do their damage? According to Martin Fackler, a retired colonel and battlefield surgeon in the US Army Medical Corp, the main cause of injury is along or close to the wound channel, the path the bullet takes through…