Month: July 2008
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In case ya missed ’em…
The cream from the physics arXiv blog this week: The science of the Grateful Dead The magnetic magic of liquid mirrors How to build a warp drive The weather on HD 189733b Dark energy and the bitterest pil
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Dead ‘n’ buried
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: The Dark Side of Gravity: Modified Theories of Gravity Approaches to Single Photon Detection Failure of Antibiotic Treatment in Microbial Populations Transfer of an Optical Frequency Over an Urban Fiber Link Revisiting the Perfect Lens Random Matrix Theory and the Evolution of Business Cycle…
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The science of the Grateful Dead
Good to see that Deadheads are alive and well at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In the heart of one of the world’s most secret weapons labs, these guys are hard at work developing a science of the Grateful Dead, the 60s psychedelic band that played together until 1995. Today, they take the…
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The magnetic magic of liquid mirrors
Liquid mirror telescopes are amazing contraptions. They start life as a puddle of mercury in a bowl. Set the whole thing spinning and the mercury spreads out in a thin film up the sides of the bowl. The result is a fabulously cheap mirror that can be used for a variety of astronomical surveys.…
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How to build a warp drive
Is faster than light travel allowed by the laws of physics? There’s no harm in speculating, right? In 1994, Michael Alcubierre, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, put warp drive on a firm (-ish) theoretical footing for the first time. His thinking was that what relativity actually prevents…
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The weather on HD 189733b
Our old friend HD 189733b is in the news again this week. As a Jupiter-sized gaseous planet orbiting a yellow dwarf in the constellation of Vulpecula, HD 189733b has become one of the best studied exoplanets. The reason is that it’s relatively big and close to its sun, which shines through the atmosphere as the…
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Dark energy and the bitterest pill
It’s hard to get your head around dark energy, this universe-accelerating stuff that is supposed to fill the cosmos. Dark energy was invented to explain measurements that seem to show that the most distant supernovas all appear to be accelerating away from us. The thinking is that something must be pushing them away and…
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In case ya missed ’em…
The rough diamonds from the physics arxivblog this week: The curious kernels of dictionaries Simple mod turns diode into photon counter Can entanglement exist in biological systems? Why red dwarfs could reveal first Earth-like planets If invisibility cloaks don’t work, try the invisibility sheet
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Cloak ‘n’ dagger
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Anomalous Conductance Response of DNA Wires Under Stretching The Rise of Quantum Mechanics The Lorentz Force and the Radiation Pressure of Light Turbulence and Holography Thermal Analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly The Age-Specific Force of Natural Selection and Walls of Death
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If invisibility cloaks don’t work, try the invisibility sheet
When it comes to invisibility cloaks, nobody has done more to advance the field than John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College, London. It was he who suggested the idea in the first place and mapped out how one could be built in theory. He even got his hands dirty by collaborating with the…