Month: April 2008
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In case ya missed em…
The cherries from this week’s physics arXiv blog: A Moore-like law for suspension bridges Diamonds in the sky: a miner’s guide Interference between photons that never meet How many politicians spoil the broth? More than 20… Quantum zeno effect explains bird navigation
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Zeno ‘n’ zero
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: The Void Phenomenon Explained Frequency Spectrum of the Casimir force: Interpretation and a Paradox Three-Dimensional Metamaterials with an Ultra-High Effective Refractive Index over Broad Bandwidth Afterglows of Gamma-Ray Bursts: Short vs. Long GRBs The Secret World of Shrimps: Polarisation Vision at its Best How…
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Quantum zeno effect explains bird navigation
Just how birds use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. But in recent years, a growing body of evidence points to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction in bird retinas involving radical ion pairs. The idea is that…
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How many politicians spoil the broth? More than 20…
The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson once said: “politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.” Given that these people run the world’s biggest (and smallest) economies, how many are needed to do a decent job? It is well known in management circles that decision making becomes difficult in groups…
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Interference between photons that never meet
The pantheon of impossible photon tricks grows ever larger. Today, a new addition from Andrew Shields and pals at Toshiba Research Europe in Cambridge, UK: “We report an experiment in which two-photon interference occurs between degenerate single photons that never meet. The two photons travel in opposite directions through our fibre-optic interferometer and interference occurs…
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Diamonds in the sky: a miner’s guide
Astronomers have recently wondered whether carbon might form a supercooled liquid under the huge pressures that exist in side carbon-rich white dwarf stars and even inside medium-sized gaseous planets such as neptune and uranus. If that’s the case, then small disturbances in the liquid could trigger the formation of diamonds the size of automobiles. The…
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A Moore-like law for suspension bridges
The world’s longest suspension bridge could easily be built if its cables were made from bundles of carbon nanotubes, say Alberto Carpinteri and Nicola Pugno from the Polytechnic University of Turin. The thinking for this rather unsurprising news is that carbon nanotube cables would allow the main span of a suspension bridge to increase in…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…a round up of this week’s plums from the physics arxivblog: The hunt for superheavy elements Criticality and the brain A survey of quantum programming languages Global warming: 10 years to avoid catastrophe World record superconductivity claim for aluminium nanoclusters
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Clusters ‘n’ crowds
The best of the rest from the physcis arxiv this week: Is Science Nearing Its Limits? A Homage to E.C.G.Sudarshan: Superluminal Objects and Waves Combustion of Biomass as a Global Carbon Sink Transcriptional Bursts: a Unified Model of Machines and Mechanisms Quark-Gluon Plasma: Present and Future On the Phenomenon of Emergent Spacetimes: An Instruction Guide…
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Nanoclusters break superconductivity record
Wow! Every now and again a paper on the arxiv leaps out at you and today there’s work from Indiana University in Bloomington that has got my eyeballs on stalks. Get this: a team led by Martin Jarrold is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K . Yep, 200…