Month: September 2008
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Art ‘n’ crafts (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv this week: The Cepheid Galactic Internet More Really is Different The Length of Time’s Arrow Possibility of High Tc Superconductivity in Doped Graphene Satellite Dynamics on the Laplace Surface
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Art ‘n’ crafts (part 1)
The other highlights from the arXiv this week: Maximum Size of Drops Levitated by an Air Cushion How Cells Tiptoe on Adhesive Surfaces Before Sticking The First-Mover Advantage in Scientific Publication Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from Precision Cosmology to Fundamental Physics Image of Another Universe Being Observed Through a Wormhole Throat
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A short history of computer art in Soviet bloc countries
Many of us think of little else than the history of computer art in former Soviet bloc countries and today our prayers are answered in the form of a curious paper that examines just this topic. The paper says that the Soviet bloc country most advanced in this respect appears to have been Yugoslavia. The…
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Could life have come from other stars?
Late in the last century, researchers calculated that an asteroid impact on Mars could jettison rocks towards Earth in a way that preserved bacterial life within them; the implication being that life could have evolved first on a warmer wetter Mars and later seeded life on Earth. Now Mauri Valtonen from Turku University in Finland and…
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How fast could Usain Bolt have run the 100m?
You’ll probably have seen footage of “the greatest 100m performance in the history of the event” as Michael Johnson put it. But if not, here’s short description: In the Olympic final of the 100 metres in Beijing, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt accelerated away from the field and then, with victory assured but with 20…
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Predicting mine collapse
Northern France is riddled with limestone mines that occasionally collapse creating a ring-shaped crater on the surface that can cause serious damage to nearby buildings. Is there any way to predict these failures and thereby attempt to prevent them? If there is, Siavash Ghabezloo and Ahmad Pouya from the Laboratoire Centrale des Ponts et Chaussées…
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Orbiting observatory finds dark matter, but what kind?
The world of cosmology is abuzz with rumours that an orbiting observatory called PAMELA has discovered dark matter. Last month, the PAMELA team gave a few selected physicists a sneak preview of their results at a conference in Stockholm. Here’s the deal. The PAMELA people say their experiment has seen more positrons than can be…