Month: September 2007
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The surprise at the bottom of the infinite quantum well
Who remembers the quantum particle trapped in an infinite square well? Ya’ll probably still havin nightmares about it. Turns out there is an interesting new take on this problem that has physicists all a-sea. For any bods out there who ain’t familiar with it, the simplest problem in any course of quantum mechanics is this:…
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“Solar rainstorm” filled the first oceans
Astrogeologists have been a-scratchin their egg-shapes for a good few years now about the origin of the oceans. Where did all that wet stuff come from? This is how they are workin it out: they look for somewhere else in the solar system that has water with a similar make up and assume ours came…
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Sensor fusion improves onboard navigation
Sensor fusion is the tricky task of combining different data streams to give an output that is better than the sum of the parts. Let me tell ya, it ain’t easy. Too often, too much data just confuses things. So hats off to Cherif “Very” Smaili at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science…
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And now the earthquake forecaste…
Ya’ll know there is no way to predict when the Gods plan to set the ground a-tremblin and a-rumblin. But a group of Italian geophysicists are sayin that the conventional thinkin about earthquakes may need a good shakin itself and that earthquake prediction is not as far fetched as ya’ll thought. In fact, rumble merchants…
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Einstein’s revenge over spooky action at a distance
One o’ the most bewilderin’ parts of quantum mechanics is its spooky action at a distance. Einstein couldn’t fathom it and other physicists have been a-puzzlin on it for decades. Today they gotta lil more to fret ‘n’ fuss about. Alexandre “Napkin” Matzkin at the Universite Joseph-Fourier in Grenoble has found a serious problem with…
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Chips ‘n’ chives
This week’s highlights from the physics preprint server that didn’t make the arXivblog A Quantum Matter Transporter How to Prevent Sonic Booms A Portrait of Kurt Godel How Low Viscosity Layers allow Plate Tectonics Sound Generation by a Turbulent Flow in Musical Instruments Why P and NP are likely to be different
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Beauty and the data beast
A human lifetime lasts about 3 × 10^9 seconds. The human brain has roughly 10^10 neurons, each with 10^4 synapses on average. Assuming each synapse can store not more than 3 bits, there is still enough capacity to store the lifelong sensory input stream with a rate of roughly 10^5 bits/s, comparable to the demands…
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Quantum metamaterials: the next generation of superweird stuff
Ya’ll heard about metamaterials–that stuff they made invisibility cloaks outta at Duke University last year. It’s mighty strange stuff and it’s about to get a lot weirder in a quantum kinda way. Metamaterials get their properties from their structure rather than their composition. So chuck a few capacitors, inductors and wires into an eggbox and…
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The incredible tongue balancing act
About ten years ago, some electrical engineers showed how ya can see with yer tongue. They built an array of electrostimulators and connected it up to a camera. Put the array on your tongue and it provides a pattern of stimulation that matches the pattern of light hittin the camera. This Tongue Display Unit turned…
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Google’s virtual telescope
Google ain’t just takin’ over the planet–it’s a-takin’ over the universe. The company created a big splash a couple a weeks ago by adding stars ‘n’ planets to Google Earth. They called it Sky. So now ya’ll can look down on Google Earth and up at Google Sky. This week, the company outlines its vision…