Month: September 2007
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Bobs ‘n’ bits
Other highlights from the physics preprint server this week Is our Sun a Singleton? Two Distinct Logical Types of Network Control in Gene Expression Profile Spinflation for Preschoolers Kinetic Exchange Models for Income and Wealth Distributions How photons can escape into extra dimensions New Insights into Traffic Dynamics
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Why the first stars could have been filaments
Star formation in the early universe ain’t particularly well understood. Why should a pristine cloud of dust suddenly collapse to form a star? One theory is that clumps of dark matter create gravitational wells into which the dust clouds collapse (although why dark matter should be clumpy and not smooth is anybody’s guess). But Liang…
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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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Galactic rings: the smoking gun for modified gravity
For a while now, them star gazers have been banging heads over the nature o’ gravity. Here’s the problem: when you look at the way galaxies are a-spinnin and a-spiralin, there just ain’t enough gravity to hold em together. So either there is some hidden mass putting its gravitational shoulder to the wheel: the so-called…
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Public transport: the cities most vulnerable to attack
Public transport networks are easy targets for terrorist attacks: anybody in London, Tokyo or Madrid will tell ya that. So Christian “Furbie” von Ferber at Coventry University in the UK and his buddies have decided to model a few of ’em from the point of view of network theory and find out how vulnerable they…
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The world’s first visible light invisibility cloak
Last year, the world went bonkers when scientists at Duke University in North Carolina unveiled the world’s first invisibility cloak. There weren’t no let up in the wall-to-wall media coverage it generate. And impressive though it was, what many reporters forgot to mention was that the cloak works only for microwaves at a single frequency…
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Einstein and the greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century
In 1926, when the scientific world was still a-puzzling and a-wondrin over the wave-particle duality of light, Einstein asked a pal, Emil “Hurry” Rupp, to conduct an experiment that would settle the matter. If anyone could do it, thought Einstein, it was Rupp who was considered the latest and greatest experimental physicists of the day.…
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How do black holes move?
There’s more to that question than meets the eye. Black holes ain’t like nothing else in the Universe, havin’ all kinds strange quantum properties as well as some curious gravitational ones too. So when it comes to cruisin’ the cosmos, do black holes move like classical objects such as stars or like quantum objects such…
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Bits ‘n’ pieces
The best of the rest from the physics preprint server Analysing Google’s PageRank Algorithm Designing Molecular Motors: a Beginner’s Guide Seeking a Solution of the Pioneer Anomaly
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Sims and music makers
There ain’t no limit to how impressive computer simulations of the real world can be. Ya only gotta switch on an SP3 or an Xbox 360 to see how far thing have come since since Pong hit the small screen in the 70s as a poor excuse for tennis. But there are still plenty of…