Month: October 2007
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The galactic foxtrot revisited
A coupla months back, Michael “Bongo” Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he’d been a-starin’ and a-studyin’ some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about ’em: they is all pointing in the same direction. The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story but it now turns…
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Delayed-choice and double slits
Send single photons through a double slit and they will somehow interfere with themselves to produce an interference pattern, as if they were waves. That’s quantum mechanics for ya. ‘Cept it don’t work if the photons are being watched, in which case each photon appears to pass through one slit or the other, as if…
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Cellphone records reveal new patterns of human activity
Switch yer mobile phone on and it checks into the local network giving your location and the time you were there. The network also records the calls you make, their frequency, duration and to whom you make them plus wherever they happen to be too. Multiply that by the entire popualtion (mobile phone penetration approaches…
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Stones ‘n’ pebbles
The shiny leftovers from the physics arXiv this week: The Galactic Bulge: getting a rise outta star gazin’ The Tibet Air Shower Array Pioneer Anomaly: evaluating newly recovered data Clustering at CiteULike
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Lake Baikal’s neutrino dreams
When a neutrino smashes into matter it generates light, lots of it. So stare into the dark night for long enough and you’ll see ’em flash as they pass by. The problem is that neutrino hits are rare events. So you need a big volume of dark and whole lot of time to sit back…
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Recipes for other Earths
It ain’t gonna be long now before we find another Earth orbiting a nearby star and the question is: what are we gonna do when we find one? (By some accounts we already found at least one but in reality these bodies are too big to be like Earth.) Eric “Nose” Gaidos at the University…
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How mathematics identifies urban ghettos
Ya’ll know how the distribution of crime is closely correlated to the space in which it occurs. Nobody gets mugged on a busy high street. But ya wander down a darkened, deadend alley at ya peril. Right? In recent years a number of eggheads have been a-speculatin’ and a-wondrin’ about the nature of urban space…
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The science of the Edelweiss
The Sound of Music always brings a tear to mah eye. And now it’ll have new meaning thanks to the sterling work of Jean Pol “Pot” Vigneron and his buddies at the Facultes Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Belgium. Pol Pot has been a-caressin’ and a-cuddlin’ one of the movie’s stars: the Alpine flower…
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The birth and death of spookytechnology
Quantum mechanics is seriously sexy . That’s what keeps the public coming back for more with the drool hangin from their spittle-flecked lips (repeat this often enough and it might actually come true). Without a sexy lingo to bamboozle and baffle, physics eggs ain’t got nothing to keep people’s attention ‘cept their rugged good looks…
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Particle physicists build time machine
Back to the future, here we come. A couple a eggheads over at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, Russia, reckon that the boys at CERN have a surprise up their sleeves. They’ve gone and built themselves a time machine. Yep, ya’ll heard right: a time machine. The fellas at the world’s largest particle physics…