Month: October 2008
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And the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy is…
31573.52 No really. At least according to Duncan Forgan at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. The Drake equation famously calculates the number of advanced civilisations that should populate our galaxy right now. The result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of planets that…
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Ways ‘n’ errors
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: Recent Results from Super-Kamiokande Detection of Organic Materials by Spectrometric Radiography Method Why Do Cosmological Perturbations Look Classical to Us? Emergent Spacetime and The Origin of Gravity “Fractal Expression” in Chinese Calligraphy
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Entangled photons to produce better quantum images
A while back, we saw how quantum imaging had been put on a firmer theoretical footing, thanks to some new thinking by Seth Lloyd at MIT. Quantum imaging involves sending one of a pair of entangled photons towards an object while holding on to the other. For a long while nobody was quite sure what…
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How chemotherapy can make tumors bigger
While our understanding and treatment of cancer has advanced significantly in recent years, most specialists would readily admit that the dynamics of tumor growth are poorly understood. It’s easy to see why. Tumor growth is a multifaceted process that involves complex interactions between many types of cells and their surrounding tissue. So it’s interesting to…
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The waves beneath the sea
Dead water is the curious phenomenon when ships become sluggish and difficult to control in stratified waters in which a fresh layer sits on top of salty water. Such conditions often occur in arctic regions where water run off from melting glaciers or ice flows can float on top of denser salty water. The effect…
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Solving the mouth-puckering mystery of tannins
The distinctive sensation of tannins on the tongue will be familiar (overfamiliar, perhaps?) to many arXivblog readers. And if you’ve ever wondered what causes that mouth-puckering dryness, you now have an answer thanks to the dedicated and selfless work of Drazen Zanchi and colleagues at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Energies in Paris.…
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Cold ‘n’ cool
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: Clathration of Volatiles in the Solar Nebula and Implications for the Origin of Titan’s atmosphere Why Do Cosmological Perturbations Look Classical To Us? Hyper-Gratings: Nanophotonics in Planar Anisotropic Metamaterials Fish Biomass Structure at Pristine Coral Reefs and Degradation by Fishing The Decline in the Concentration of…
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The neglected puzzle of low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion won’t go away and perhaps rightly so. Numerous groups have reported idiosyncratic behaviour of palladium hydrides sitting in heavy water when a current passes through them. Many of these experiments are said to be repeatable. Of course, serious questions remain over what exactly is going on in these experiements. They may or may…
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On the origin of Saturn’s rings
One of the outstanding mysteries of our Solar System is how Saturn’s rings formed. We know they rings are made of water ice with very few contaminants. We know they are different to the rings around Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus which are much smaller and probably the result of the surface erosion of nearby moonlets.…
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How religions spread like viruses
“Religions are sets of ideas, statements and prescriptions of whose validity and applicability individual humans can become convinced,” say Michael Doebeli and Iaroslav Ispolatov at the University of Vancouver. In other words, religions are memes, units of cultural inheritance just like songs, languages or political beliefs. Richard Dawkins proposed the idea that memes spread much…