Month: November 2008
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Counting negative links make network models more realistic
Spotting communities within networks is a big deal. Not least for search engines that rely heavily for their results on the communities that form when websites point to each other. If a lot of websites point to another site then that proves it is of value. At least that’s what everyone has assumed. But links…
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The exoplanet photo gallery is bigger than you think
Astronomers tend to get excited by pinpricks of light. And perhaps today they have more reason than usual to celebrate the pixels that Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley, and pals have found in one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s images. These pixels, they say, represent the first optical image of a planet…
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Cloak ‘n’ dagger
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Acoustic Noise in Deep Ice and Environmental Conditions at the South Pole Gravitational Strings. Do We See One? Computer Simulations of Pulsatile Human Blood Flow Through 3D-Models of the Human Aortic Arch, Vessels of Simple Geometry and a Bifurcated Artery: Investigation of Blood Viscosity…
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Quantum cloaking makes molecules invisible
Cloaking is surely the zeitgeist topic of the moment and for proof, you need look no further than the work of Jessica Fransson from the University of Upssala in Sweden and colleagues. This is a group who have who have applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and come up trumps. the result…
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And here is the sunspot forecast…
Astronomers have been monitoring sunspot numbers since 1700 and using them as an indicator of solar cycles since 1913. Today we know that peaks in sunspot numbers have an important influence on the Earth, increasing the amount of drag on satellites and contributing to telecoms and and power outages. Accurate forecasts of sunspot activity could…
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The cosmic ray revolution
Cosmic rays, the high energy protons and helium nuclei that constantly bombard the Earth, have puzzled astronomers for the best part of one hundred years. Where do they come from and how are they accelerated to energies in excess of 10^20 eV—that’s about the energy that Roger Federer gives a tennis ball during a serve?…
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Triggering a phase change in wealth distribution
Wealth distribution in the western world follows a curious pattern. For 95 per cent of the population, it follows a Boltzmann Gibbs distribution, in other words a straight line on a log-linear scale. For the top 5 per cent, however, wealth allocation follows a Pareto distribution, a straight line on a log-log scale, which is…
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Predicting the popularity of online content
The page views for entries on this site in the last week range from more than 17,000 thousand for this story to around 100 for this one. That just goes to show that when you post a blog entry and there’s no way of knowing how popular it will become. Right? Not according to Gabor…
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Orbits ‘n’ obits
The best of the rest from the physcis arXiv: Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring Techniques: A review and Current Trends Very Slow Surface Plasmons: Theory and Practice Cosmological Electromagnetic Fields and Dark Energy MMOGs as Social Experiments: the Case of Environmental Laws De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Theory: Many Worlds in Denial? Web Usage Analysis: New Science Indicators and…
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Saturn’s anomalous orbit flummoxes astronomers
One of the first tests of Einstein’s theory of general relativity was to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which had long bamboozled astronomers. Newton’s law of gravity simply cannot account for it. But relativity does. Now it’s Saturn’s turn to flummox astrophysicists. The Russian astronomer Elean Pitjeva, who heads the Laboratory of…