Month: January 2009
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Beats ‘n’ bars
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Natural Selection Maximizes Fisher Information Carbon Nanotubes in Biology and Medicine: in vitro and in vivo Detection, Imaging and Drug Delivery Ultracold Molecules: New Probes on the Variation of Fundamental Constants Can Quantum Mechanics be an Emergent Phenomenon? Using Kolmogorov Complexity for Understanding Some…
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Rippling in muscles caused by molecular motors detaching
Muscle tissue is made of molecular engines called sarcomeres, which contract and expend when the muscle is flexed. In sarcomeres the business of contracting is carried out by molecular motors called myosins as they pull themselves along filaments of a protein called actin. When you flex your arm, it is these myosin molecular motors that…
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Is meditating good for the heart?
Let’s calm things down with some deep breaths: in…out…in…out. Relax. Feel your pulse rate slowing? We’ve known for some time that there’s more to pulse rate than beats per minute. Heart rate variability–the change in intervals between beats–can be used to distinguish healthy hearts from diseased and damaged ones. One sign of a healthy heart…
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Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid
It just gets worse for CERN and its attempts to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won’t make mincemeat of the planet. It’s beginning to look as if a massive miscalculation in the safety reckonings means that CERN scientists cannot offer any assurances about the work they’re doing. In a truly frightening study, Toby…
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The forecast for hydrogen peroxide snow on Mars
On Earth, wind blown dust storms generate powerful electric fields of up to 200 kV/m, with the ground becoming positively charged and the dust particles negatively charged. The mechanism behind this is poorly understood but various scientists have assumed that a similar process takes place on Mars and that it leads to bizarre phenomenon. One…
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Rule breakers make traffic jams less likely
Rules are a good thing when it comes to road traffic: drive on the wrong side of the highway and you’ll cause chaos, if you live. If that seems forehead-smackingly obvious, then an analysis by Seung Ki Baek at Umea University in Sweden and pals my come as a surprise. They say that a small…
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Holes ‘n’ moles
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Naked-Eye Optical Flash from GRB 080319B Neural Networks as Dynamical Systems Predator-Prey Model for Stock Market Fluctuations Reverse Doppler Effect of Sound Particle-Unparticle Duality in Super-Relativity
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Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes
There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right? Err, yep. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. And the new calculations are throwing up some surprises. One potential method of…
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Electronic nose spots anthrax bacteria by smell alone
In the last ten years or so electronic noses have become commercially available, based on a detection device known as a Taguchi sensor. These are heated semiconductor oxide films that change their resistance when they absorb gases. The gases break down inside the film and the various molecular species gather at grain boundaries within the…
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How Google’s PageRank predicts Nobel Prize winners
Ranking scientists by their citations–the number of times they are mentioned in other scientists’ papers– is a miserable business. Everybody can point to ways in which this system is flawed: not all citations are equal. The importance of the citing paper is a significant factor scientists in different fields of study use citations in different…