Category: Hellraisin’
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Entanglement beats gravitational test
When does a quantum measurement end? Surprisingly, quantum physicists cannot agree. Some say the measurement ends when you register a result on a piece of classical equipment such as a photomultiplier. Others says the measurement ends when the information in the quantum system has irreversibly leaked into the environment. There are still more who believe…
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Are primordial quark nuggets hiding among the asteroids?
Jorge Horvath from the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil seems to think so and believes that our current search for near Earth asteroids may uncover them. Here is his thinkin’. About 20 years ago, a number of physicists investigated the possibility that a quark gluon plasma–a state of matter that should only have existed…
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Avoiding heat death at the end of the Universe
The second law of thermodynamics is a bummer. It says that the entropy of an isolated system will increase with time. It’s the reason why teacups break when they fall, why smashing eggs is easier than mending them and why teenagers’ bedrooms inevitably become messier. That’s all rather annoying but when applied to the Universe,…
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Can data overload protect our privacy?
If you were chatting on MSN messenger in June 2006, your conversation was being recorded and the details (but not the content) passed to Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Using this data, these scientists have created “the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date”. They’ve now published their…
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Food for thought
Evolution seems to crop up all over the place. In life, business, ideas. And now in recipes through the ages. Yup, that’s recipes. For food. Osame Kinouchi from the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil and buddies, have studied the way in which ingredients used in recipes vary around the world and through the ages.…
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Dark matter: we’ve been staring at it all along
Astrobods have been searching for dark matter for a decade or so now. And despite it filling the known Universe, there’s been no sign of the stuff . But could it be that we’ve been staring at it all along without knowing what we’ve been looking at? That’s the claim of a couple of theorists…
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They came from Mercury…
Astrobods have found several dozen meteorites from Mars and the Moon that have made their way to Earth over the years. These rocks were launched during major impacts there. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a meteorite from Venus arrive on Earth: the Venusian atmosphere is just too thick. But what of Mercury? According to…
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Saving Earth from the Sun’s expansion
About 7 billion years from now the Sun will have swelled into a red giant with a radius larger than Earth’s orbit. We’re doomed. Or so we thought. A ray of hope has been thrown our way by astronomers who say that as the Sun expands it will lose a significant portion of its mass…
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Who’s that on the runway?
As an air traffic controller, the last thing you want is the catastrophic failure of your technology infrastructure. And thankfully it doesn’t usually happen like that. More often, there is a gradual degradation as one part of the system or another collapses. Perhaps the communications die, the radar falls over or the computers crash, or…
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Soliton attacks and freak waves
“I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped – not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in the motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of…