Month: March 2008
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Avoiding heat death at the end of the Universe
The second law of thermodynamics is a bummer. It says that the entropy of an isolated system will increase with time. It’s the reason why teacups break when they fall, why smashing eggs is easier than mending them and why teenagers’ bedrooms inevitably become messier. That’s all rather annoying but when applied to the Universe,…
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Can data overload protect our privacy?
If you were chatting on MSN messenger in June 2006, your conversation was being recorded and the details (but not the content) passed to Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. Using this data, these scientists have created “the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date”. They’ve now published their…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s peaches from the arxivblog: When humans become entangled Food for thought Holographic quantum computing First observation of Hawking radiation? Goal difference, not points, the best way to rank soccer clubs
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Goals ‘n’ posts
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: Mental Arithmetic and Regulation of Centre of Foot Pressure The Cosmic Microwave Background for Pedestrians Is the CMB Cold Spot a Gate to Extra Dimensions? Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations The SuperNova Early Warning System
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Goal difference, not points, the best way to rank soccer clubs
I know ya’ll been wonderin’ which soccer team is best. Traditionally, them Europeans rank their teams by points accured during the season: 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw and zilch for a loss. Now a group of German physicists says this ain’t the best way to do it. After analysing all the…
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First observation of Hawking radiation?
In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes would emit radiation. So-called Hawking radiation is produced when pairs of virtual particles pop into existence near the event horizon of a black hole (as they do all over the universe). Usually these pairs simply annihilate each other and disappear. But Hawking predicted that in some cases,…
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Holographic quantum computing
After a decade or so in the lab, holographic data storage is about to burst into the hardware market big time. Its USP is that holographic data is stored globally rather than at specific sites in the storage medium. It is written using a pair of lasers to create an interference pattern that is recorded…
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Food for thought
Evolution seems to crop up all over the place. In life, business, ideas. And now in recipes through the ages. Yup, that’s recipes. For food. Osame Kinouchi from the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil and buddies, have studied the way in which ingredients used in recipes vary around the world and through the ages.…
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When humans become entangled
Something curious is happening at Nicolas Gisin’s lab at the University of Geneva. Gisin is a world expert in entanglement, the ghostly quantum phenomenon in which two or more particles become so deeply linked that they share the same existence, even when far apart. Entanglement is now a routine resource in many labs: it can…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…The pearls from the physics arxiv blog this week: The physics of human body weight changes How plankton blooms are born The vibration harvest First 3D image of a streamer Dark matter: we’ve been staring at it all along