The Physics arXiv Blog
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The frightening origins of glacial cycles
Climatologists have known for some time that the Earth’s motion around the Sun is not as regular as it might first appear. The orbit is subject to a number of periodic effects such as the precession of the Earth’s axis which varies over periods of 19, 22 and 24 thousand years, its axial tilt which…
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Watch this space for the chemistry of dust
It’s not often that chemists get new tools with which to investigate the building blocks of the world around us, so a paper on the arXiv today gives them good reason to pop a few corks. Vladlen Shvedov at the Australian National University in Canberra and a few mates have today unveiled a way of…
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Simulating Sweden
If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes. But…
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Econophysicists identify world’s top 10 most powerful companies
The study of complex networks has given us some remarkable insights into the nature of systems as diverse as forest fires, the internet and earthquakes. This kind of work is even beginning to give econophysicists a glimmer of much-needed insight in the nature of our economy. In a major study, econophysicists have today identified the…
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Terror ‘n’ terroir
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: Striped Superconductors: How the Cuprates Intertwine Spin, Charge and Superconducting Orders Measuring Accurately Liquid and Tissue Surface Tension with a Compression Plate Tensiometer Structure and Evolution of the Foreign Exchange Networks The Minimal Temperature of Quantum Refrigerators Comparing Bird and Human Soaring Strategies The…
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The power laws behind terrorist attacks
Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales. The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution,…
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Glider guns created in chemical Game of Life
If you’ve ever played Conway’s Game of Life, you’ll be familiar with cellular automata and, more importantly, glider guns. So get this: a team of British chemists and computer scientists have created a chemical cocktail that behaves like a cellular automata and which reproduces this behavior: chemical guns firing chemical gliders across a chemical grid.…
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Challenging the nature of black holes
The nature of black holes has puzzled physicists for decades. But while the debate has fizzled in recent years, some new thinking is about to set it alight again. Black holes are fundamentally a product of general relativity, which allows for a gravitational collapse so violent that no other force can oppose it. When that…
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Space Station simulator given emotions
Astronauts training to work on the International Space Station have to have mastered a mind-boggling amount of kit before they leave Earth. One of these devices is the Canadarm 2, a robotic arm used to manipulate experiments outside the station. On Earth, astronauts train on a Canadarm 2 simulator connected to a virtual assistant that…
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Fermi’s paradox solved?
We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they? The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the…