Month: November 2007
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Nanowire magnets
Take a handful of Cobalt-Nickel (Co80-Ni20) alloy nanowires and drop them into a mixture of toluene and the synthetic polymer PMMA. Zap the mixture with a decent magnetic field, sit back and wait. The field causes the nanowires to align and as the toluene evaporates, the PMMA traps them in place as it solidifies. The…
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The heterohydrogen question
Can hydrogen and and antihydrogen bind to form a stable molecule? That’s the question that a growing number of particlebods have been scratchin’ their eggs over. And it ain’t merely hypothetical, neither. In the last few years, engineers at CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab near Chicago have been a-tinkerin’ and a-toyin’ with their particle traps…
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Shells ‘n’ pebbles
The pick of the other stories form the physics arXiv this week: A Survey of Chaos-based Secure Communications Neutrons from Piezonuclear Reactions How to build a safe web crawler Time Transfer Laser Link between China and France How Much Can We Know about the Universe Before the Big Bang
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Could X-ray afterglows be standard candles?
Astrobods love standard candles. Love ’em. And it ain’t hard to understand why. When ya look out into the darkness, it’s easy to see where everything fits into the celestial sphere. It ain’t quite so simple to see in which layer it sits in the celestial onion. So astronomers look for standard candles, objects whose…
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Web traffic and sand piles
Drop grains of sand onto a flat surface and they form a pile. Keep adding grains and eventually ya’ll witness an avalanche. The curious thing about avalanches is that yer can’t tell how big they is going to be. A single dropped grain could dislodge a handful of other grains or hundreds of grains or…
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The terrible truth about extremism
Why is our way o’ living threatened by extremists? A natural question for anybody a-fretting and a-worrying about the state of world order. But the answer ain’t gonna please ya’ll. It’s looking increasingly as if extremism is an ordinary emergent property of societies like ours that we can’t do nothing about. Andre Martins at the…
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The electrifying physics of windblown sand
Wind blown sand is a damned nuisance. And not just cos it sandblasts cars, fills the atmosphere with aerosols and makes yer eyes water. Geophysicists ain’t never been able to explain it good ‘n’ proper. Why does the average height of the sand above the ground remain constant as wind speed increases, when their models…
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The hunt for a repulsive Casimir force
Place a couple of infinite metal plates just a few micrometers apart and ya can measure the so-called Casimir force pushing them together. The thinkin is that virtual particles are constantly a-popping and a-peaking in and outta existence. When the particles bang into the plate, they exert a force which is normally balanced out by…
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Near-to-far field image magnification
There was a time when magnifying glasses were good for nothing but fryin’ ants and helping the over-60s with newsprint. Now everyone’s a-peekin’ and a-peerin’ at things that are even smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The conventional thinkin is that you can’t see nothing smaller than about a quarter of the wavelength of…
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Shells ‘n’ pebbles
Other highlights from the arXiv this week If the LHC is a Mini-Time-Machine Factory, Would We Notice? Is the evidence for dark energy secure? Following red blood cells in a pulmonary capillary Urban and Scientific Segregation: a Review of the Schelling-Ising Model An Atom Laser is not monochromatic