Month: July 2008
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The Casimir conundrum
When it comes to the Casimir force, physicists are in an embarrassing position. “Weak intermolecular forces have a truly pervasive impact, from biology to chemistry, from physics to engineering. It may therefore come as a surprise to know that there still exist, in this well established field, unresolved problems of a fundamental character. This is…
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The painful search for gravitational waves
Gravitational wave detectors have a sorry history of disappointing results. Joseph Weber at the University of Maryland first claimed to have spotted these waves in 1969. He did it by listening to the way a giant cylindrical bars vibrate, thinking that passing gravitational waves would cause them to ring like a bell. Nobody has been…
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The day the solar wind disappeared
It happened on 11 May 1999…nobody knows why and the event was not related to well known drivers of solar weather such as coronal mass ejections or large flares. According to Durgess Tripathi at the University of Cambridge, UK, and pals, the cause seems to be linked to the appearance a few days earlier of…
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Why small black holes cannot grow
Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the minimum quanta of energy that can be associated with a bit of energy. It’s about 10^-50 Joules, which ain’t much. That has important implications for black holes, says Scott Funkhouser, a physicist at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, in Charleston. As black holes accretes…
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In case ya missed ’em…
The baubles from the physics arXivblog this week: Musical relativity The puzzling wrinkles in graphene Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha) How likely is an avian flu pandemic?
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Flu ‘n’ achoo
The best of the rest from the physics arxiv this week: A New Look at Bell’s Inequalities and Nelson’s Theorem Controlling Transistor Threshold Voltages using Molecular Dipoles Exploiting Bird Locomotion Kinematics Data for Robotics Modeling Atmospheric Calorimetry above 10^19 eV: Shooting Lasers at the Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory Escherlike Quasiperiodic Heterostructures Thornhill, de Broglie and…
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How likely is an avian flu pandemic?
With winter approaching, many governments in the northern hemisphere are stocking up on Tamiflu and fine tuning their civil defense plans to cope with the disruption a bird flu outbreak might cause. But how likely is an outbreak? While various groups have written about how a pandemic might happen, Rinaldo Schinazi at the University of…
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Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha)
The French start up Aldebaran-Robotics based in Paris has high hopes for its humanoid robot called NAO. The device is 57 cm high and weighs 4.5 kilograms (about the size of a 6 month old baby) and you may be about to see a lot more of it. The company has sent a simplified version…
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The puzzling wrinkles in graphene
Last year, Jannick Meyer at the Max Plank Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and pals discovered that single sheets of graphene are gently rippled, like the rolling hills of New England. That’s a puzzle because graphene behaves like a perfect 2D crystal. So how do these ripples form and what role do they…
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Musical relativity
Here’s a neat idea for a concert that’s going to blow a few minds if it ever takes to the stage. A combination of three or more notes played together is called a chord. We know that certain musical chords sound happy while others sound sad (although nobody knows why). The mood of a piece…