The Physics arXiv Blog
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Reinventing the dismal science
The discipline of economics in crisis. The credit crunch has exposed many economists’ most cherished ideas for the nonsense they manifestly are. With its theories in tatters, what now for the dismal science? It looks as if the best bet is take a a few leaves out of some network science text books. Economies are…
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Spotting alien Earths on the cheap
Spotting Earth-like planets orbiting other stars is all the rage these days. But unless you have access to a space-based telescope it’s kinda tricky. The problem is that the reflected light from a Jupiter-sized planet is roughly 10^4 fainter than the parent star. That’s hard to spot at any time but when this is coupled…
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Tango ‘n’ foxtrot
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: The Chemical Diversity of Comets A Mathematical Proof of The Existence of Trends in Financial Time Series The WMAP Cold Spot Why Do Dolphins Form Mixed-Species Associations in the Azores? New Kinds of Quantum Statistics
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The waltz of the spherical algae
“Long after he made his great contributions to microscopy and started a revolution in biology, Antony van Leeuwenhoek peered into a drop of pond water and discovered one of nature’s geometrical marvels,” say Ray Goldstein and pals at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Val Leeuwenhoek had discovered Volvox, a spherical green algae that…
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Trick of the light boosts atom interferometer sensitivity
While preparing for the job of US Secretary of Energy in the incoming Obama administration (and being director of one the top labs in the US and Nobel Prize winner to boot), Steven Chu has somehow found time to post the results of his latest experiment on the arXiv. And it’s an impressive piece of…
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How the credit crisis spread
Where did the credit crunch start? According to Reginald Smith at the Bouchet-Franklin Research Institute in Rochester, it began in the property markets of California and Florida in early 2007 and is still going strong. To help understand how the crisis has evolved, Smith has mapped the way it has spread as reflected in the…
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How to spot vegetation on Earth-like planets
In December 1990, scientists analysing data from the Galileo spacecraft found compelling evidence for the existence of life in space. The data famously came from the craft’s first fly by of Earth, a planet on which life seemed a definite possibility. The exercise led to the establishment of a number of criteria that if found…
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Harvesting energy from the airwaves
Antennae are the most fundamental energy harvesting devices that we know, says Sung Nae Cho at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in south Korea. So why aren’t they more widely used? Turns out that helical antennae are already used to harvest energy and most of us probably own one already in the form of…
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Ohms ‘n’ bytes
The best of the rest fromthe physics arXiv this week: Folding@Home and Genome@Home: Using Distributed Computing to Tackle Previously Intractable Problems in Computational Biology Dark Matter — a Review Sociology of Modern Cosmology Writing Electronic Devices on Paper with Carbon Nanotube Ink Cloud Computing and Grid Computing 360-Degree Compared
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Memristors made into low cost, high density RRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory)
The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Memristors (from memory-resistors, geddit?) are resistors whose resistance depends on their past. In that sense they remember the past or, as an electronics engineer might put it, they store information. So new are…