The Physics arXiv Blog
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Holes ‘n’ spaces (part 1)
The best of the rest from the physics preprint server this week: Matter-wave Cavity Gravimeter Fractality Feature in Oil Price Fluctuations Digital Control of Force Microscope Cantilevers Using a Field Programmable Gate Array Modeling of Plasma-Assisted Conversion of Liquid Ethanol into Hydrogen Enriched Syngas in the Nonequilibrium Electric Discharge Plasma-Liquid System Traversable Wormholes from Surgically…
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How supermassive black holes help galaxies evolve
It’s easy to imagine that our understanding of the way galaxies form and evolve is more or less complete. After all, we’ve been fitting missing pieces into the jigsaw at an alarming rate in recent years with all this data from WMAP etc about the structure of the early universe, a better understanding of the…
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Supernova over south pole caused Ordovician mass extinction
About 444 million years ago, more than half of all marine invertebrates were wiped out at the end of the Ordovician era in the third worst mass extinction in history. A couple of years ago, Brian Thomas at the University of Kansas pointed out that this holocaust could have been caused by a nearby supernova…
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The LHC: let the lead fly
There’s no doubt that protons will be the stars of the show when the LHC switches on this morning. But in all the fuss it’s easy to forget that the machine is designed to carry other particles too. So Paolo Giubellino at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Turin, Italy, outlines what to…
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The puzzle of knotted proteins
At one time, molecular biologists swore blind that proteins would never become knotted, at least not in the natural course of things. But in recent years, they’ve been forced to eat their words as one protein after another has been shown to have a knotted structure. The question is why; what purpose do knots…
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The amazing powers of silicon carbide
Silicon carbide is one of those workhorse materials that can do almost anything. Because it has a high melting point, it is used in high performance brake discs, as a the matrix for particulate filters in engines, and because it is a semiconductor in high temperature and high voltage applications. Come to think of it,…
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Art ‘n’ crafts (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv this week: The Cepheid Galactic Internet More Really is Different The Length of Time’s Arrow Possibility of High Tc Superconductivity in Doped Graphene Satellite Dynamics on the Laplace Surface
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Art ‘n’ crafts (part 1)
The other highlights from the arXiv this week: Maximum Size of Drops Levitated by an Air Cushion How Cells Tiptoe on Adhesive Surfaces Before Sticking The First-Mover Advantage in Scientific Publication Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from Precision Cosmology to Fundamental Physics Image of Another Universe Being Observed Through a Wormhole Throat
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A short history of computer art in Soviet bloc countries
Many of us think of little else than the history of computer art in former Soviet bloc countries and today our prayers are answered in the form of a curious paper that examines just this topic. The paper says that the Soviet bloc country most advanced in this respect appears to have been Yugoslavia. The…
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Could life have come from other stars?
Late in the last century, researchers calculated that an asteroid impact on Mars could jettison rocks towards Earth in a way that preserved bacterial life within them; the implication being that life could have evolved first on a warmer wetter Mars and later seeded life on Earth. Now Mauri Valtonen from Turku University in Finland and…