Month: September 2008
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Flyby anomalies explained by special relativity
On 23 January 1998, when NASA’s Near spacecraft swung past Earth on a routine flyby towards more interesting lands, a curious thing happened to its speed. It jumped by 13 mm/s. This wasn’t the first time such an effect had been seen. Engineers saw similar jumps in speed during the Earth flybys of Galileo (in…
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The incredible climbing droplets
Here’s a curious finding from the University of Bristol in the UK. Place a droplet onto an inclined plexiglass sheet and shake it up and down. I know what you’re thinking: even without the shaking the drop should dribble down the plate due to gravity unless it is pinned in place by surface tension. Vertical…
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Nanotube springboard is world’s most sensitive weighing scales
Vibrating springboards have long been the darlings of nanomechanics wanting to measure the mass of small things. Their thinking goes like this: a springboard vibrates at a specific resonant frequency that depends on its stiffness and mass. So you can work out the mass of anything that becomes stuck to the springboard by measuring any…
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First printed graphene circuits
The world of solid state electronics is in awe of graphene. This single layer of carbon chickenwire has the potential to revolutionise electronics (and much else) because it has enviable electronic, mechanical and thermal properties that no other material can match. The news today is that Ellen Williams and buddies at the University of Maryland…
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Holes ‘n’ spaces (part 1)
The best of the rest from the physics preprint server this week: Matter-wave Cavity Gravimeter Fractality Feature in Oil Price Fluctuations Digital Control of Force Microscope Cantilevers Using a Field Programmable Gate Array Modeling of Plasma-Assisted Conversion of Liquid Ethanol into Hydrogen Enriched Syngas in the Nonequilibrium Electric Discharge Plasma-Liquid System Traversable Wormholes from Surgically…
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How supermassive black holes help galaxies evolve
It’s easy to imagine that our understanding of the way galaxies form and evolve is more or less complete. After all, we’ve been fitting missing pieces into the jigsaw at an alarming rate in recent years with all this data from WMAP etc about the structure of the early universe, a better understanding of the…
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Supernova over south pole caused Ordovician mass extinction
About 444 million years ago, more than half of all marine invertebrates were wiped out at the end of the Ordovician era in the third worst mass extinction in history. A couple of years ago, Brian Thomas at the University of Kansas pointed out that this holocaust could have been caused by a nearby supernova…
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The LHC: let the lead fly
There’s no doubt that protons will be the stars of the show when the LHC switches on this morning. But in all the fuss it’s easy to forget that the machine is designed to carry other particles too. So Paolo Giubellino at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Turin, Italy, outlines what to…
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The puzzle of knotted proteins
At one time, molecular biologists swore blind that proteins would never become knotted, at least not in the natural course of things. But in recent years, they’ve been forced to eat their words as one protein after another has been shown to have a knotted structure. The question is why; what purpose do knots…
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The amazing powers of silicon carbide
Silicon carbide is one of those workhorse materials that can do almost anything. Because it has a high melting point, it is used in high performance brake discs, as a the matrix for particulate filters in engines, and because it is a semiconductor in high temperature and high voltage applications. Come to think of it,…