The Physics arXiv Blog
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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…
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Anonymizing data without damaging it
If scientists are to study massive datasets such as mobile phone records, search queries and movie ratings, the owners of these datasets need to find a way to anonymize the data before releasing it. The high profile cracking of data sets such as the Netflix prize dataset and the AOL search query data set means…
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Cloaking objects at a distance
One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come up with a way round this using the remarkable idea of cloaking at a distance. This involves…
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Breakthrough calculations on the capacity of a steganographic channel
Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realise it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the…
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Solving a quantum conundrum
“Can one be convinced of the correctness of the computation of every quantum circuit, namely, every quantum experiment that can be conducted in the laboratory?” ask Dorit Aharonov and colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. That’s an interesting question of quantum computer science. If you can’t simulate the answer to calculation on…
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Booms ‘n’ busts
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: FeTe as a Candidate Material for New Iron-based Superconductor Selective Atomic Heating in Plasmas: Implications for Quantum Theory Can a Microscopic Stochastic Model Explain the Emergence of Pain Cycles in Patients? The Transmission Sense of Information Stirring Astronomy into Theology: Sir Isaac Newton on…