Category: The good ol’ days
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10 years of the Physics arXiv Blog: 2007
The Physics arXiv Blog is 10 years old today. Over the next few days, we’ll be celebrating by publishing links to the top stories from each year of its existence. Today, 2007. Enjoy! The incredible galactic foxtrot Game theory and the future of Adwords The frightening prospect of flu Cellphone records reveal new patterns of…
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Why Galileo underestimated the distance to the stars
“Galileo argued that with a good telescope one could measure the angular sizes of stars, and that the stars typically measured a few arc-seconds in diameter,” says Chris Graney at Jefferson Community College in Louisvile in good ol’ Kentucky. That doesn’t sound right. We know today that stars appear as point sources of light, so…
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Deconstructing DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak
“The incredible record of Joe DiMaggio in the summer of 1941 is unparalleled. No one has come close—before or since—to equaling his streak of hitting safely in 56 games in a row.” So begin Steve Strogatz and Sam Arbesman from Cornell University in their paper discussing the likelihood of DiMaggio’s record. “People have…stated that it…
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World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records
The network of links between peasants who farmed a region of small region of south west France called Lot between 1260 and 1340 have been reconstructed by Nathalie Villa from the Universite de Perpignan in France et amis. The team took their data from agricultural records that have been preserved from that time. This is…
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Statistical evidence of drug abuse in baseball
How many major league baseball players have used performance-enhancing drugs? The answer turns out to be buried in the performance statistics of players, if you know where to look. Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University have done the appropriate number crunching and say that a whopping 5 per cent of players must have been…
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The curious case of the disappearing physicist
If you work in particle physics, cosmology or condensed matter, you’ll probably be familiar with the name Majorana, as in Majorana fermions and Majorana neutrinos. But Ettore Majorana is famous for another reason. As one of the leading lights of theoretical physics in the 1930s, he made important contributions to nuclear, atomic and molecular physics…
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How cleanliness can kill
The hygiene hypothesis is that our immune system requires the presence of pathogens to grow and function properly. The thinkin is that dirt ‘n’ muck provides a kinda training ground on which the immune system “learns” it’s trade when we’re all youngsters. So mothers who keep a-scrubbin and a-cleanin them germs away are actually doin’…
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The mystery of the missing photons
A few hundred thousand years after the big bang, the Universe was a-hummin’ and a-jigglin’ with a plasma of hydrogen and helium nuclei as well as electrons. As the universe cooled, the electrons combined with the nuclei to form neutral atoms, giving off photons in the process. These photons are what we see as the…
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Why the first stars could have been filaments
Star formation in the early universe ain’t particularly well understood. Why should a pristine cloud of dust suddenly collapse to form a star? One theory is that clumps of dark matter create gravitational wells into which the dust clouds collapse (although why dark matter should be clumpy and not smooth is anybody’s guess). But Liang…
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The missing language link
The distribution of languages is the result of the movin’ and migratin’ of millions of people over tens of thousands of years. As a fossil of human history, it’s unrivalled in its richness. So understandin’ this distribution is major task for them linguists and them historians who want to know more about our ancestors’ locomotin’…