Month: January 2008
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The bar at the heart of the galaxy
Bars are common features of galactic structure but we ain’t talking whiskey chasers. 56 per cent of galaxies have strong bars and a large fraction of these have spiral arms emanating from the ends of the bars. The question: is how did these structures form and why are they so common? Now Merce Romero-Gomez at…
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Information and evolution
Living things need to know what conditions are like in the outside world so they can adapt to their environment. Is there food, light, heat out there and if so, where. So a certain amount of information must flow into the organism. This information flow is crucial–without it life could not exist so it’s reasonable…
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The Turing alternatives
Ya’ll heard of the Turing test for measuring machine intelligence. Seems kinda odd, doncha think, that after 50 years we ain’t never thought of any other ways to test machine intelligence. Same thing occurred Shane “Hind” Legg at the IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale) in Switzerland and his buddy Marcus so they…
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The puzzle of flyby anomolies
On 8 December 1990, something strange happened to the Galileo spacecraft as it flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. As the mission team watched, the spacecraft’s speed suddenly jumped by 4 mm per second. Nobody took much notice — a few mm/s is neither here or there to mission planners. Then on 23…
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How to spot a wormhole
I know ya’ll heard of wormholes, tunnels in the fabric of the cosmos that connect one region of the universe to another. These ain’t just the fanciful dreams of impressionable young astrobods: wormholes represent real solutions of Einstein’s equation of general relativity. If general relativity is correct, wormholes ought to be out there somewhere. But…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…a round up of this week’s posts: Best of the arXivblog: Breaking the Netflix prize dataset Best of the arXivblog: Why our time dimension is about to become space-like How to predict a brainquake Graphite valley The cold dark matter scrap
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Gloves ‘n’ mittens
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: Quantum Nanomagnets and Nuclear Spins: an Overview A Model for Erosion-deposition Patterns Testing Atom and Neutron Neutrality with Atom Interferometry Modelling the Navigation Potential of a Web Page The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST
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The cold dark matter scrap
There’s a race on to find the first direct evidence of cold dark matter. And it ain’t pretty. There’s probably a Nobel at stake for the winner which means the leading groups are at each other’s throats, like alleycats over chicken bones. For any of ya’ll who wanna know who’s who in this backstreet brawl,…
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Graphite valley
Them chemists have been bewitched by carbon in recent years. Ya can’t move in chemistry departments without being abused ‘n’ bombarded with nanotubes, buckyballs and all mannner of carbononsense. But in all their hurry to blow their own carbon nanotrumpets, it loooks as if they missed a wonder material staring them in the face. Now…
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How to predict a brainquake
Welcome back. Hope ya’ll had a good holiday and that 2008 brings your hearts’ desires. First up this year, a cracker of a paper showing how epileptic fits might be predicted following the discovery of a profound statistical analogy between earthquakes and “brainquakes”. Ivan Osirio at the University of Kansas Medical Centre and a…