The Physics arXiv Blog
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Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha)
The French start up Aldebaran-Robotics based in Paris has high hopes for its humanoid robot called NAO. The device is 57 cm high and weighs 4.5 kilograms (about the size of a 6 month old baby) and you may be about to see a lot more of it. The company has sent a simplified version…
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The puzzling wrinkles in graphene
Last year, Jannick Meyer at the Max Plank Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and pals discovered that single sheets of graphene are gently rippled, like the rolling hills of New England. That’s a puzzle because graphene behaves like a perfect 2D crystal. So how do these ripples form and what role do they…
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Musical relativity
Here’s a neat idea for a concert that’s going to blow a few minds if it ever takes to the stage. A combination of three or more notes played together is called a chord. We know that certain musical chords sound happy while others sound sad (although nobody knows why). The mood of a piece…
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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…