Month: December 2008
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Flashback: Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”?
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 29 September 2008 : Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”? The fellas at CERN have gone to great lengths to reassure us all that they won’t destroy the planet (who says physicists are cold…
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Flashback: Cloaking objects at a distance
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 5 November 2008: Cloaking objects at a distance One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong…
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Flashback: Quantum communication: when 0 + 0 is not equal to 0
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 5 August 2008: Quantum communication: when 0 + 0 is not equal to 0 One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and…
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Flashback: Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun?
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 29 August 2008: Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun? Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except…
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Flashback: Feline ballistics
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 1 February 2008: Feline ballistics Here’s a straightforward question in ballistics: What velocity do you need to launch a 350 pound object over a 12.5 foot barrier that is 33 feet away? Read on…
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Flashback: First superheavy element found in nature
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 28 April 2008: 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,…
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Flashback: Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves
Over the holiday period, the arXivblog is running a selection of the most popular posts from 2008 26 March 2008: Rubik’s cube proof cut to 25 moves Last year, a couple of fellas at Northeastern University with a bit of spare time on their hands proved that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube could be…
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How chaos could improve speech recognition
If you’ve ever used speech recognition software, you’ll know how often it fails to work well. Recognition rates are nowhere near what is needed for anything but the simplest applications. So a new approach for analysing speech by Yuri Andreyev and Maxim Koroteev at the Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of…
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How chaos could improve speech recognition
If you’ve ever used speech recognition software, you’ll know how often it fails to work well. Recognition rates are nowhere near what is needed for anything but the simplest applications. So a new approach for analysing speech by Yuri Andreyev and Maxim Koroteev at the Institute of Radioengineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of…
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Entangled atoms could “sense” quantum gravity
The notion of quantum gravity has mystified many physicists, not least because there has never been a prospect of measuring the fabric of the universe on this scale. That looks set to change. A few years back, a number of physicists suggested that atom interferometry might do the trick. The thinking was that two atoms…