The Physics arXiv Blog
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Rocks ‘n’ comets (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv: Local Causality and Completeness: Bell vs. Jarrett Superconducting Atom Chips: Advantages and Challenges The Atmospheric Signatures of Super-Earths: How to Distinguish Between Hydrogen-Rich and Hydrogen-Poor Atmospheres Networks of Quantum Nanorings: Programmable Spintronic Devices The Meccano of Life
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Rocks ‘n’ comets
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Why it has Become more Difficult to Predict Nobel Prize Winners A Local Scheme Accounting for EPR Quantum Correlations Enhanced Heating of Salty Water and Ice Under Microwaves Phonon-Induced Artificial Magnetic Fields Ranges of Atmospheric Mass and Composition of Super Earth Exoplanets
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How to find another Earth
“We stand on a great divide in the detection and study of exoplanets,” says the Exoplanet Task Force on the arXiv today in describing their plan for finding another Earth orbiting another star. On one side of this divide are the hundreds of known massive exoplanets, they say. And on the other” lies the…
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The black hole at the center of our galaxy
Is there a supermassive black hole at the center our galaxy, asks Mark Reid from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. There sure is and Reid gives a good account of the evidence to prove it. How can astronomers be so sure? The first evidence began to emerge in the 1950s when the…
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How big is a city?
That’s not as silly a question as it sounds. Defining the size of a city is tricky task that has major economic implications: how much should you invest in a city if you don’t know how many people live and work there? The standard definition is the Metropolitan Statistical Area, which attempts to capture the…
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Carbon nanotubes sucessfully deliver cancer drugs (in mice)
“A holy grail in cancer therapy is to deliver high doses of drug molecules to tumor sites for maximum treatment efficacy while minimizing side effects to normal organs,” write Zhuang Liu and colleagues at Stanford University before revealing the results of experiments they have carried out with a material that has the potential to be…
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How to measure macroscopic entanglement
If macroscopic objects become entangled, how can we tell? The usual way to measure entanglement on the microscopic level is to carry out a Bell experiment, in which the quantum states of two particles are measured. If the results of these measurements fall within certain bounds, the particles are considered to be entangled. These kinds…
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Sand ‘n’Sun (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv this week: Injection of Short-Lived Radionuclides into the Early Solar System from a Faint Supernova with Mixing-Fallback Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases Quantum Algorithm Design using Dynamic Learning A Biophysical Model of…
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Sand ‘n’ sun (part 1)
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv: The NuMoon Experiment: First Results The Role of Microtubule Movement in Bidirectional Organelle Transport Links Between Traumatic Brain Injury and Ballistic Pressure Waves Originating in the Thoracic Cavity and Extremities Testing the Dark-Energy-Dominated Cosmology by the Solar-System Experiments Shelf Space Strategy in Long-Tail Markets Image Steganography,…
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The puzzling beauty of Abelian sandpiles
Pour real sand, a grain at a time, onto a flat surface and the result is a rather dull pyramidal shape. but in the mathematical world, the result is a little different. The image above is produced using a theoretical model called an Abelian sandpile model. It is produced by dropping some 200,000 grains onto…