Month: December 2007
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Black holes may convert dark matter into cosmic rays
Active galactic nuclei are the brightest objects in the universe and among the most puzzlin’. Astrobods think they are supermassive black holes that spew out huge amounts light over some or all of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now a coupla Ruskies are saying that active galactic nuclei are capable of converting dark matter into high energy…
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Tune into the snowflake channel
Snowflakes can emit radio signals as they form and a better understanding of this process could provide a new way to monitor and study snow formation in the atmosphere. That’s the ice-cool conclusion of a group o’ physicists from France and Israel who have begun to tease apart some of the more subtle processes at…
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The sunset on HD 189733b
HD 189733b is a Jupiter-sized gaseous planet orbiting a yellow dwarf in the constellation of Vulpecula. With a good pair of binoculars ya can see this star just a hair’s breadth to the east of the Dumbbell Nebula. With something a little more sophisticated, ya can see the star darkening as this planet passes in…
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The puzzling presence of DIBs
For more than 80 years, astrobods have a-pondered and a-peered at strange sets of dark bands that appear in the spectra of distant stars. These bands are entirely different from the absorption sepctra of specific ions, atoms and molecules which absorb light at specific, sharp frequencies. Instead these bands are broad and diffuse. And there…
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Why MHD propulsion won’t work
Them space engineers are always looking for promising new ways of a-jettin’ and a-zoomin’ around the solar system. They’ve looked at conventional rockets, ion propulsion and even solar sails and nuclear drives. But nobody has spent much time dreamin about magnetohydrodynamics. The principle is relatively straightforward–shoot a charged particle through a conducting ring and the…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s posts: Pencil ‘n’ Paper The best of the rest The fractal drip wars Academics fight it out over Pollock The encouraging habitability of exoplanets Changing the way we define habitable should make us look again at some exoplanets Does surgery cause cancer to metastasize? Statistical evidence emerges that it might WiFi worms: the…
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Pencil ‘n’ paper
The best of the rest from physics arXiv: Observational Tests of Planet Formation Models The Numerical Simulation of Turbulence APSIS – an Artificial Planetary System in Space to probe extra-dimensional gravity and MOND How Paper Folds: Bending with Local Constraints The Jagiellonians and the Stars
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The fractal drip wars
The gloves are off in this week’s big fight over the fractal analysis of paintings by Jackson Pollock. In the blue corner: Lawrence “Beam me up Scotty” Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and few pals who a few weeks back rubbished the idea that fractal analysis couold spot a genuine Pollock from a fake.…
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The curious case of the CMB cold spot
Astrobods have found a cold spot in the the cosmic microwave background radiation. Now that’s a problem cos there shouldn’t be no cold spot up there. And this has set them a-frettin’ and a-worryin’ about how to explain it away. Today Pavel Neselsky at the Niels Boh Institute at the University of Copenhagen and…
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WiFi worms: the next generation of virus
If the next generation of malware targets our WiFi routers, it’s gonna spread like wildfire, taking out 37 per cent of routers within two weeks of infection That’s the conclusion of Steve Meyers and buddies, computer security experts at Indiana University in Bloomington. They say that the density of WiFi routers within our cities has…