Month: December 2007
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Does surgery cause cancer to metastasize?
Medicos are increasingly turning to mathematical and computer models of disease to better understand how it works. But these models ain’t easy to build: the human body has many nonlinear properties that are hard to measure let alone model. But mathematicians have a tool called superstatistics for dealing with nonlinear phenomena. It’s essentially the superposition…
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The encouraging habitability of exoplanets
Not alotta of planets around other stars could support life judging by the criteria we look for now: the possible presence of liquid water. In fact none of ’em could (with the possible exception of one). But our method for determining whether liquid water could be present is crude to say the least. It’s based…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…this week’s posts: The viscoelastic flytrap The biopolymer scourge of insect life How atom lasers are coming of age The world’s first continuously pumped atom laser…we think The birth of piezo-spintronics Vibrating bridge that spin polarises electrons The number of fundamental dimensional constants reduced to two Length and time but not mass Is spacetime an…
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Bricks ‘n’ mortar
The best of the rest from the arXiv this week The Conception of Atom in Greek and Indian Physics Emergent Rainbow Spacetimes An Introduction to String Theory Influence of a Humidor on the Aerodynamics of Baseballs How to Study the Variation of Fundamental Constants using Molecules
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The viscoelastic flytrap
Nepenthes are cruel carnivorous plants from the Asian tropics that eat any crittur unlucky enough to fall into the digestive juices they secret inside their bowl-shaped petals. It’s a slow sticky death in which the insect slowly dissolves while a-strugglin’ and a-scramblin’ to get out. But exactly how the plants trap their prey has puzzled…
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How atom lasers are coming of age
Atom lasers are gonna be mighty useful for testing quantum mechanics to its limits. But ain’t nobody built one that can operate continuously, which is what yerl need for these kindsa experiments. We’ve had pulsed atom lasers for about a decade and it looks as if a continuous version may be close. Atom lasers work…
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The birth of piezo-spintronics
Everything we do with electrons depends on their charge, for example the whole of electronics is based around an electron’s negative charge. But electrons have another property, their spin, that could also be used to manipulate them. So a lot of engineers are trying to think up ways we can fiddle with an electron’s spin…
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The number of fundamental dimensional constants reduced to two
Yer only have to go back to Plank to find a pretty detailed argument that there are three fundamental dimensional constants from which all others can be derived. They are length, time and mass. Plank argues that as long as you got a tape measure, a clock and set of scales you can measure anything…
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Is spacetime an emergent phenomenon?
A lotta physicists are spending more time a-dwellin’ and a-worryin about emergent phenomenon. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, emerge from the statistical rules that govern many-particle behavior, the complexities of our society seem to emerge from simple rules that govern human behavior and some physicists believe the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics can be…
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Bread ‘n’ butter
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Washboard Road: The Dynamics of Granular Ripples Formed by Rolling Wheels Sheep Collisions: the Good, the Bad, and the TBI N-Dimensional Quantum Cellular Automata Subwavelength imaging of visible light with arrays of metal-coated semiconductor nanoparticles Coevolution of Mercy and Altruistic Cooperation