Month: January 2009
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I know why the phase-locked wineglass sings
Here’s a neat party trick to impress your friends. Rub your finger around the rim of a wineglass and friction causes it, and any liquid it contains, to oscillate. When this vibration produces an audible pure tone, the wine glass is said to “sing”. Now Ana Karina Ramos Musalem and pals at the Weizmann Institute…
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Next generation search engines could rank sites by “talent”
How will the next generation of search engines outperform Google’s all-conquering Pagerank algorithm? One route might be to hire Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles and his buddies who have found a fascinating new way to tackle the problem of website rankings.
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First “movie” of fruitfly gene network aging
One of the major goals in biology is to reconstruct the complex genetic networks that operate inside cells, and to “film” how these networks evolve during the course of an organism’s development. Today, Eric Xing and buddies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh claim to have worked out how the way patterns of gene expression…
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Why Saturn’s rings are so sharp
Here’s a conundrum for you: why do Saturn’s rings have such sharp edges? It’s question that has puzzled planetary scientists for many years. Various ideas have been put forward but none adequately explain the structure we see today. To understand just how sharp the edges are consider this: pictures from Cassini show that the density…
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Flash ‘n’ cash
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: The Hydrodynamics of Swimming Microorganisms Trapping Ccold Atoms Using Surface-Grown Carbon Nanotubes Solution of Peter Winkler’s Pizza Problem Innovative In Silico Approaches to Address Avian Flu Using Grid Technology Quantum Generalized Reed-Solomon Codes: Unified Framework for Quantum MDS Codes
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First stars “powered by dark matter”
“95% of the mass in galaxies and clusters of galaxies is in the form of an unknown type of dark matter,” say Katherine Freese at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and buddies. What effect might this huge amount of stuff have on star formation? The answer according to these guys is astounding. In the…
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Flashback: First test of exotic space thruster ends in explosion
Over the holiday period the arXivblog is re-running the most popular posts from 2008 23 May 2008: First test of exotic space thruster ends in explosion In 2006, Mason Peck at Cornell University in Ithaca dreamt up with an entirely new way to control satellites orbiting planets that have a magnetic field. The idea is…