Month: January 2008
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Why silos burst
Believe it or not, grain silos are interesting structures. They’ve been known to explode without warning, which is hard to explain since they are filled with, well, grain. But grain turns out to be kinda interesting too. In recent years, researchers have begun to get a handle on some of the strange and counterintuitive ways…
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Australians make interstellar hologram
Measure the beam from a pulsar for an hour or so and you’ll see all kinds of interference fringes in amongst the noise. This intereference is caused by light scattered from the interstellar medium, probably in the form of whisps of gas and dust although nobody knows for sure. There’s all kinds of infromation locked…
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How to reduce extremism? Travel!
Andre Martins studies agent-based computer models of extremism at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. We’ve heard from him before following his claim that extremism is an emergent phenomenon in our society. Now he’s back with the results of a study on how to reduce extremism. Martins creates a network model in which agents…
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Extreme ice and the blues
There are 15 different types of ice known to science and I’m not talkin’ Baskin Robbins here. These are materials with different structures that form when water freezes at various temperatures and pressures. Types XIII and XIV were only discovered in 2006 Most ice we come across naturally is type I, which forms at ambient…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s posts The mysterious volume of a black hole Fractal fingers and zero surface tension Extragalactic meteor spotted over Russia Worm tracking: never lose another nematode Soliton attacks and freak waves
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Shades ‘n’ shadows
The best of the rest from the the physics arXiv: Extinction Risk and Structure of a Food Web Model The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks The Earth System Grid: Supporting the Next Generation of Climate Modeling Research Structural Motifs of Biomolecules Robustness of the European Power Grids under Intentional Attack
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Soliton attacks and freak waves
“I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped – not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in the motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of…
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Worm tracking: never lose another nematode
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a much loved workhorse in many biology labs. This worm may only be 1mm long and move at snails pace but it is one of the most heavily studied organisms on the planet. C. elegans was the first metazoan to have its genome sequenced. We know that a fully grown…
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Extragalactic meteor spotted over Russia
On 28 July 2006, Victor Afanasiev from the Russian Academy of Sciences observed the spectrum of a faint meteor as it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. He recorded the event using a 6 metre telescope in the remote Zelenchuksky region of Russia near the border with Georgia. It soon became clear to Afanasiev that…
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Fractal fingers and zero surface tension
Ah always thought a fingering instability was what happened after a misunderstanding on a first date. But apparently it’s also a hydrodynamic phenomenon, when one fluid displaces another. This kinda displacement is a complex process; so complex that in most cases it is mathematically intractable. Ya just gotta try it and see. However, one of…