The Physics arXiv Blog
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World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records
The network of links between peasants who farmed a region of small region of south west France called Lot between 1260 and 1340 have been reconstructed by Nathalie Villa from the Universite de Perpignan in France et amis. The team took their data from agricultural records that have been preserved from that time. This is…
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Speech therapy revolutionised by hi-tech dentures
Dentures rarely find their place at the cutting edge of science (some say unfairly) but today is an exception. Christophe Jeannin at the Institut de la Communication Parlée in Grenoble, France, and a few pals have developed a set of hi-tech dentures that contain a number of tiny pressures sensors that record the position of…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…the pearls from this week’s physics arXiv blog: First evidence that water forms in interstellar space Why tiny helicopters are so hard to fly The puzzling discovery of a motor made from liquid film Blind date gives astronomers a new love of the stars The mathematics of tackling tax evasion
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Taxes ‘n’ tasters
The other highlights from the physics arXiv this week: Fermi at Los Alamos and the Early Britain’s Way to Nuclear Energy The Silencing of Neuronal Activity by Noise and the Phenomenon of Inverse Stochastic Resonance Molecular Thin Films: a New Type of Magnetic Switch No Many-Scallop Theorem: Collective Locomotion of Reciprocal Swimmers Probing a Bose-Einstein…
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The mathematics of tackling tax evasion
In recent years, economists have gained the luxury of actually being able to test their ideas in experiments involving the behaviour of real people. And one particularly new and promising area of experimental economics focuses on tax evasion, which ought to be of keen interest to many governments around the world. A couple of years…
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Blind date gives astronomers a new love of the stars
When it comes to studying the night sky, astronomers aren’t short of images. There are huge archives of both amateur and professional images taken in the the age before digital imaging. The Harvard College Observatory Astronomical Plate Stacks contain enough images to cover the entire sky 500 times over. But although the image quality is…
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The puzzling discovery of a motor made from liquid film
Here’s an interesting effect discovered by a group of Iranian physicists at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran (it’s not often we hear from these guys). They placed a thin film of water in a square cell and applied two perpendicular electric fields. One was an external electric field. For the other, they used…
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Why tiny helicopters are so hard to fly
Tiny remote control helicopters have become all the rage in the last few years as lightweight motors and materials have plummeted in price. But if you’ve ever played with one, you’ll know how hard they are to control. That’s not the result of poor construction. Small helicopters are harder to control than big ones because…
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First evidence that water forms in interstellar space
Water is the most abundant solid material in space. Astronomers see it on various planets, on moons, in comets and in interstellar clouds. But how did it get there? Nobody really knows how water could possibly form in the freezing darkness of interstellar space. At least they didn’t until now. Today, Akira Kouchi and buddies…
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In case ya missed ’em…
…the gold and silver from this week’s arxivblog: First superheavy element found in nature Solving the faint young Sun problem Stats prove Red Baron’s WW1 victories were down to luck The next high temperature superconductor? How antineutrino monitoring could prevent nuclear proliferation