Month: October 2007
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Watching other Earths
One of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of science was carried out in 1993 when the NASA spacecraft Galileo flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. Carl Sagan and pals analysed the data and concluded after much head scratchin that life on Earth was a distinct possibility. That was a dry run…
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First laser built from an artificial atom
Strike a light, artificial atoms are excitin critters to be playin around with right now. Get this: some nanobods at the NEC Nano Electronics Research Laboratories in Tskuba, Japan, have gone and built a laser out of one. Yep, a single artificial atom that produces laser light. Here’s what’s goin on. In real atoms, electrons…
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Why our time dimension is about to become space-like
It don’t get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it. The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us…
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Why the Phoenix lander could miss life on Mars
What a balls up. When NASA sent Viking to look for life on Mars more than 30 years ago, the one experiment that could identify lil green bugs came up trumps: it produced an overwhelmingly positive result. That’s when the trouble started. Another experiment had found no evidence for organic molecules so, with the eggheads…
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Bag o’ nuts
The also-ran preprints from the physics server this week Doughnuts and Metamaterials How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics A Review of Dark Energy Theories The Grenoble Town Hall and Why we Wish it would Crumble Fluctuation Theory: how Irreversibility emerges from Reversible dynamics A New Interpretation of Bell’s inequality
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Money, it’s a gas…
…so said Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon. And how right they turned out to be. The statistical rules governing the distribution of money and wealth bear more than a passing resemblance to the ideal gas laws. In fact, the statistical mechanics of money and wealth distribution have their own sub-headings in the…
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The mystery of the missing photons
A few hundred thousand years after the big bang, the Universe was a-hummin’ and a-jigglin’ with a plasma of hydrogen and helium nuclei as well as electrons. As the universe cooled, the electrons combined with the nuclei to form neutral atoms, giving off photons in the process. These photons are what we see as the…
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Improving “in silico” drug discovery
Drug discovery is a time consuming business and ah don’t mean those Friday nights searchin’ for Berkeley frat parties. Now some Frenchmen have found a new way to do it that don’t involve no dealers, middle men or rolled up $20 notes. For decades now, drug companies have tried the suck it ‘n’ see approach…
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The dim light of dark energy
Dark energy is another one of them mysteries that astronomers love. Turns out there are a whole loada observations suggesting that the universe ain’t just expanding, but acceleratin’ away from us. Something has gotta be providing the oomph for this cosmological acceleration and for want of a better term, theorists have nick-named it dark energy…
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Mathematics: the foundation of reality
“Our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics.” That’s the conclusion of Max “Peg Leg” Tegmark, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he ain’t nuts, even if he sounds as if he’s a couple of planets short of a solar system. His argument is actually kinda convincing. In…