Month: February 2009
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The telescope that Antarctica broke
First light from any instrument is always exciting but particularly so when exotic locations and exciting goals are involved. The CORONA experiment offers both. CORONA is a stellar coronagraph designed to spot extrasolar planets orbiting other stars. It is based at Dome C, some 10,000 feet above sea level in in Antarctica, a location that…
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What should robots do for us?
Robots have great potential for assisting the old and disabled (not to mention the rest of us) . But if you’re developing one of these devices, where do you start? What kind of assistance you should concentrate on providing? Young Sang Choi and buddies from the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology have…
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Swings ‘n’ roundabouts
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Black Hole Hair Removal Quantum Critical Analog of Cloud Chamber Tsetse Fly Population Outcomes for a Number of Aerial Spray Scenarios at Different Temperatures Self Collimation of Ultrasound in a 3D Sonic Crystal Some Reports of Snowfall from Fog During the UK Winter of…
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How to build a desktop Foucalt’s Pendulum
Foucalt’s pendulum–a 28 kilogram bob suspended on a 67 metre wire– famously hangs in the Pantheon in Paris where Leon Foucalt himself demonstrated it in 1851. The pendulum oscillates in a vertical plane which slowly rotates. The rotation is explained by the Earth’s motion which spins beneath the pendulum. The length of the wire is…
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The frightening origins of glacial cycles
Climatologists have known for some time that the Earth’s motion around the Sun is not as regular as it might first appear. The orbit is subject to a number of periodic effects such as the precession of the Earth’s axis which varies over periods of 19, 22 and 24 thousand years, its axial tilt which…
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Watch this space for the chemistry of dust
It’s not often that chemists get new tools with which to investigate the building blocks of the world around us, so a paper on the arXiv today gives them good reason to pop a few corks. Vladlen Shvedov at the Australian National University in Canberra and a few mates have today unveiled a way of…
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Simulating Sweden
If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes. But…
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Econophysicists identify world’s top 10 most powerful companies
The study of complex networks has given us some remarkable insights into the nature of systems as diverse as forest fires, the internet and earthquakes. This kind of work is even beginning to give econophysicists a glimmer of much-needed insight in the nature of our economy. In a major study, econophysicists have today identified the…
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Terror ‘n’ terroir
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Striped Superconductors: How the Cuprates Intertwine Spin, Charge and Superconducting Orders Measuring Accurately Liquid and Tissue Surface Tension with a Compression Plate Tensiometer Structure and Evolution of the Foreign Exchange Networks The Minimal Temperature of Quantum Refrigerators Comparing Bird and Human Soaring Strategies The…
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The power laws behind terrorist attacks
Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales. The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution,…