the physics arXiv blog

Month: April 2008

  • Stats prove Red Baron’s WW1 victories were down to luck

    Here’s a great anecdote from Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles: During the “Manhattan project” (the making of the nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what was the definition of a “great” general. Groves replied that any general who had won…

  • Solving the faint young Sun problem

    We know by studying ancient rocks that liquid water existed on the surface of Earth at least 3.7 billion years ago. That implies that the surface temperature at that time was at least 273K. We also know by studying stars similar to ours that the Sun must have been significantly less bright than it is…

  • First superheavy element found in nature

    The hunt for superheavy elements has focused banging various heavy nuclei together and hoping they’ll stick. In this way, physicists have extended the periodic table by manufacturing elements 111, 112, 114, 116 and 118, albeit for vanishingly small instants. Although none of these elements is particularly long lived, they don’t have progressively shorter lives and…

  • In case ya missed ’em…

    …this week’s sparklers from the physics arXiv blog: ET more likely to pick up radar bursts than radio transmissions Bluetooth surveillance secretly tested in the city of Bath First observation of antibonding in artificial molecules Modelling how birds mistime egg-laying due to climate change The iron arsenide superconductivity challenge

  • Iron ‘n’ stone

    The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: From Formal Proofs to Mathematical Proofs: a safe, incremental way for building in first-order decision procedures A  Single Molecule Transistor Based on Amino-substituted Butanethiol Molecular Junctions A Survey of Quantum Computational Complexity Unusual Magnetic Behavior in Ferrite Hollow Nanospheres Mesoscopic Study on Historic Masonry…

  • The iron arsenide superconductivity challenge

    Until a few weeks ago, all so-called high temperature superconductors were layered copper oxides of the type discovered by Karl Muller and Georg Bednorz back in 1986. These are so-called because they become superconducting at temperatures above 30K, the theoretical limit predicted by the BCS theory (after Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) of superconductivity that ruled…

  • Modelling how birds mistime egg-laying due to climate change

    Many birds have to time egg-laying to coincide with a peak in food availability, for example , to match the hatching shcedule of a particular type of caterpillar. This is a tricky business because many caterpillars are available for only a few weeks and the birds must lay their eggs around a month in advance…

  • First observation of antibonding in artificial molecules

    When electrons are confined in a flat space, they interact in much the same way as electrons in ordinary atoms by forming into pairs of various energy levels. They can even be made to emit light when they jump from one level to the next, just like electrons in the orbitals in real atoms. These…

  • Bluetooth surveillance secretly tested in the city of Bath

    “In 2001 Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras was jailed in a Spanish prison for drug related offences. Whilst imprisoned, Trashorras established regular contact with Jamal Ahmidan who was serving time for a petty crime. Both individuals embraced radical Islamic fundamentalist ideas within the prison and were recruited in the Takfir wa al-Hijra group, a Moroccan terrorist…

  • ET more likely to pick up radar bursts than radio transmissions

    Radar astronomy is a crucial tool in measuring the trajectories of Earth-crossing asteroids. If we’re going to be hit, radar is how we’ll work out when. The technique has also been used to image various bodies such as the asteroid 216 Kleopatra, to measure distances with extreme accuracy and to test relativity by monitoring the…