Month: May 2008
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Can dark matter explain the flyby anomalies?
The flyby anomalies, you may remember, are a set of fascinating data indicating that spacecraft flying past Earth undergo a strange, step-like change in their acceleration. The Galileo, Near, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft all seem to have been hit by this weird phenomenon and while that’s not a large number of data points, it is…
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Why ET will phone using neutrinos not photons
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that ET will be communicating using photons. But despite decades of listening out, we’ve heard nothing. But today, John Learned from the University of Hawaii and pals say forget photons. We should be looking for evidence of ET using neutrinos. The reason is that any civilisation advanced enough to…
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The trouble with optical invisibility cloaks
You could be forgiven for thinking that invisibility cloaks are a few R&D dollars away from hitting the high streets. Not so. While it’s true that a number of high profile cloaks have been built, the best of these work only in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum and then only in at…
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In case ya missed ’em…
This week’s sure things from the arXiv blog: Speech therapy revolutionised by hi-tech dentures World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records Phobos could form Saturn-like ring around Mars How ESA plans to search for other Earth’s How orbiting electrons can lengthen nuclear half-life
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Hafnium ‘n’ hafnotium
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: A Limiting Rule for the Variability of Coding Sequence Length in Microbial Genomes High-Sensitivity Diamond Magnetometer with Nanoscale Resolution Parity-Violating Macroscopic Force between Chiral Molecules and Source Mass Statistics of Multiphoton Events in Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion Neutrinos from active black holes, sources of ultra…
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How orbiting electrons can lengthen nuclear half-life
Nuclear fission is the process in which a nucleus decays into two fragments. For large nucleii, this process is a complicated one in which the nucleus undergoes several stages of deformation before tearing itself apart. In recent years, physicists have predicted that fission ought to be affected by the presence of electrons in orbit about…
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How ESA plans to search for other Earth’s
We’re getting close to the day when we’ll spot an Earth-like planet orbiting another star. Astronomers have already seen a number of superEarth candidates–rocky planets in the habitable zone that are many times larger than Earth. They’ve even begun to analyse the atmosphere of these places and got some idea of what it might be…
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Phobos could form Saturn-like ring around Mars
The martian moon Phobos is spiralling towards Mars at a rate of 20 cm a year. (That compares with our own moon which is spiralling away from us at about 4cm per year). The question is when will it hit. On the arxiv today, Bijay Kumar Sharma calculates that we have about 11 million years…
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World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records
The network of links between peasants who farmed a region of small region of south west France called Lot between 1260 and 1340 have been reconstructed by Nathalie Villa from the Universite de Perpignan in France et amis. The team took their data from agricultural records that have been preserved from that time. This is…
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Speech therapy revolutionised by hi-tech dentures
Dentures rarely find their place at the cutting edge of science (some say unfairly) but today is an exception. Christophe Jeannin at the Institut de la Communication Parlée in Grenoble, France, and a few pals have developed a set of hi-tech dentures that contain a number of tiny pressures sensors that record the position of…