the physics arXiv blog

Month: September 2007

  • The missing language link

    The distribution of languages is the result of the movin’ and migratin’ of millions of people over tens of thousands of years. As a fossil of human history, it’s unrivalled in its richness. So understandin’ this distribution is major task for them linguists and them historians who want to know more about our ancestors’ locomotin’…

  • Shorts n’ knickers

    This week’s papers that never made the dizzy heights of a full post in the arXivblog The Evolution of the World Trade Web Thermal Logic Gates: Computation with Phonons The History of Artificial Intelligence Modelling urban street patterns Where Dirac’s monopoles are a-hidin Invisibility Cloak 2.0

  • Game theory and the future of Adwords

    Ain’t Google Adwords a miracle o’ modern science? Here’s a system that searches your web page for keywords, hunts for advertisers who wanna have their message displayed next to these keywords and then auctions the advertising space to the highest bidder. All in the twinklin’ of an eye. Adwords is so good that it’s made…

  • The zeroth theorem

    The Zeroth Theorem in the history of physics states that a discovery named after an individual often did not originate with that person. It may be pompous and contrived (and let’s face, who ain’t?) but the zeroth theorem is surely worth a post since David “Orc” Jackson from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done…

  • The great gravity wave affair

    Gravity waves do one helluva job a-squeezin and a-squashin everything in their path. Plonk a big aluminum bar in the way and gravity waves will squash it in one direction while stretchin it in another. With careful measurements yer should be able to spot this. In fact in the 1960s, Joseph “Big foot” Weber at…

  • The personal genome machine

    One cool way to sequence DNA is to pull it through a nanopore in some kinda membrane in which electrodes are embedded. As each nucleotide passes , it gets zapped by the electrodes to see what it is. (That’s the thinkin, anyway. Ain’t nobody built one a these yet.) Trouble is that it’s hard tell…

  • Crowdquakes–the killers that cause stampedes

    The squeeze ‘n’ shove of Mecca pilgrimages are a-mighty frightenin. Thousands of people have been died in em. Now video analysis shows that a remarkable new phenomenon called crowdquakes are behind these stampedes. The analysis  also suggests how stampedes might be prevented. Dizzy Dirk Helbing and his mates at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology…

  • How proteins cause cataracts

    Some things are just too important to leave to biologists or chemists. Like science, for example, which requires a physicist if yer wanna solve anything decent. There ain’t nothing physicists can’t help with, if they got some spit ‘n’ elbow grease. This week its protein condensation. When proteins condense within the body they form plaques…

  • Trouble afoot for cosmic inflation

    Things ain’t all rosy for the Big Bang; it just don’t explain why the universe looks the way it does and the theoretical fixes proposed by them astrobods are a-crackin and a-crumblin. Here’s one problem with the Big Bang. It involves these giant space thermometers like COBE and WMAP which tell us that wherever we…

  • Do single photons tunnel faster than light?

    This ain’t as silly a question as it sounds. Almost 15 years ago a group at Berkeley raced photons down two tracks of identical length. One track was a straight line through a vacuum; the other was the same except for a barrier that the photons had to tunnel through to reach their destination. Believe…