The Physics arXiv Blog
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The fundamental patterns of traffic flow
Take up the study of earthquakes, volcanoes or stock markets and the goal, whether voiced or not, is to find a way to predict future “events” in your field. In that sense, these guys have something in common with scientists who study traffic jams. The difference is that traffic experts might one day reach their…
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Sheets ‘n’ pillows
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Alkali-Helium Snowball Complexes Formed on Helium Nanodroplets Holo-Television System with a Single Plane Towards a Quantum Fluid Mechanical Theory of Turbulence Social Networking: An Astronomer’s Field Guide Single-Particle Foucault Oscillator Powered by Laser
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How superconducting sheets could reflect gravitational waves
Gravitational waves are the elusive distortions in spacetime created by the universe’s most violent events–collisions between black holes, stars exploding and even the big bang itself. Nobody has bagged a confirmed sighting of these waves but that may change thanks to an intriguing idea from Raymond Chiao and pals at the University of California, Merced.…
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Centimetre scale models could compute Casimir forces
The Casimir force is notoriously difficult to measure. So tricky is it, that the first accurate measurements weren’t made until 1997 and even today only a handful of labs around the world of capable of taking its measure. Of course there are various ways of modelling what goes on theoretically but even the most powerful…
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Were gravitational waves first detected in 1987?
In 1987, Joe Weber, a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected gravitational waves at exactly the same moment that other astronomers witnessed the famous supernova of that year, SN1987A. His equipment consisted of several massive aluminium bars that were designed to vibrate in a unique way when a large enough gravitational…
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The LHC’s dodgy dossier?
There’s no reason to worry about the Large Hadron Collider that is due to to be switched on later this year for the second time. The chances of it creating a planet-swallowing black hole are tiny. Hardly worth mentioning really. But last month, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few…
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Spiders ”n’ Mars
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Discovery of the Arsenic Isotope The Origin of the Universe as Revealed Through the Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Chemical Self Assembly of Graphene Sheets Pricing Strategies for Viral Marketing on Social Networks Scale Invariance, Bounded Rationality and Non-Equilibrium Economics
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Why spiders’ silk is so much stronger than silkworms’
Spider silk and silkworm silk are almost identical in chemical composition and microscopic structure. And yet spider silk is far tougher. “One strand of pencil thick spider silk can stop a Boeing 747 in flight,” say Xiang Wu and colleagues at the National University of Singapore. Whereas a pencil thick strand of silkworm silk couldn’t.…
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Liquid film motors finally explained
Last year, a group of Iranian physicists made the extraordinary discovery that motors can be made of nothing more than a thin film of water sitting in a cell bathed in two perpendicular electric fields. The unexpected result of this set up is that the water begins to rotate. Divide the water into smaller cells…
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Calculating the cost of dirty bombs
One of the more frightening scenarios that civil defence teams worry about is the possibility that a bomb contaminated with radioactive material would be detonated in a heavily populated area. Various research teams have considered this problem and come to similar conclusions–that the actual threat to human health from such a device is low. Some…