Month: October 2007
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Quarters and nickels
The loose change from the arXiv this week: Planetesimal Formation The Case for an Aggressive Program of Dark Energy Probes A Group Theoretic Model for Information An Exact Solution to the Temperature Equation in a Column of Ice and Bedrock Detecting Life-bearing Extra-solar Planets with Space Telescopes
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More on Moon measurements
Ya’ll heard about lunar laser ranging last week: them laser legends can now bounce enough photons off the moon to calculate its distance to within a few millimetres (we’re still waitin’ to hear how many millimetres it is) This week, Victor “Brum” Brumberg at the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg, Russia, and chums…
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The horrible truth behind quantum games
If ya follow quantum game theory, you could be forgiven for thinking that quantum players always trounce their classical counterparts like T Rex versus the cavemen. But it ain’t so. After some egg scratchin’ physicists have realised that quantum games are actually entirely different from classical games and so it ain’t fair to compare them.…
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The hopeless hunt for dark matter
Dark matter is highly sought-after but like the unicorn, it is an elusive match for its hunters. Physics bods have been a-huntin’ for dark matter here on Earth for some time now. They’ve set an impressive number of traps all over the planet and and found zilch. So they’ve asked the astrobods to help out…
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Magnetic cloaking
The world has gone crazy over metamaterials cos they can be used to build invisibility cloaks, as ya’ll saw just the other week. There’s usually some drawback the media coverage never tells ya which means that we ain’t gonna see no Harry Potter-type invisibility cloaks any time soon. But that hasn’t stopped the living God…
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How your name reveals your age, sex, nationality, social status, religion…
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it turns out. Researchers are working out how to extract data such as ya sex, nationality, age and even ya social and economic status by looking at nothing but yer name. This week, Stasinos “King” Konstantopoulos at the National Center for Scientific Research in Athens, Greece gives us…
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Quamputing with atoms and photons
What kinda stuff is best at hosting ghostly bits of quantum information? It’s an important question cos we can’t tell what the next generation of quamputers will be like until we know what they gonna be made of. Photons are one option cos they can store qubits for relatively long periods (unlike ions and electrons…
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Bits ‘n’ pieces
The best of the rest from the physics preprint server How Ultra Slow Light Falls Under Gravity The Nature of Time and Causality on Physics: Review Paper Protein Folding: an Introduction for the Under 5s Quantum Control Landscapes: Review Paper Why the Pioneer Anomaly is Evidence of a 5th Force How to build a boron…
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When the storm surge hits NYC
The Big Apple has had its toes watered by storms surges from passing hurricanes on many an occasion. But how to hold back the waters in future? Alexander “Bonkin” Bolonkin reckons the best way to protect the city is to rap it in a textile storm surge barrier, a kinda giant gag. Sounds good to…
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To the Moon in millimeters
This looks impressive: “The Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation has achieved one-millimeter range precision to the moon” So c’mon fellas: how many millimeters is it? Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.0890: APOLLO: the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation: Instrument Description and First Detections