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Tantalizing rumors about gravitational waves have been spreading through the scientific community.
Almost 100 manuscripts have been submitted following last week's tantalizing announcement from CERN.
There's three things every good alien movie needs, in my opinion: aliens, spaceships and tractor beams; so far, science hasn't really delivered well on the "alien" part, and our spaceships still have a way to go. However, recent work in the UK might pull the third element out of the realm of sci-fi into reality.
You know how the old saying goes, that "diamonds are forever," and giving your significant other a piece of diamond jewelry is considered to be a declaration of eternal love? Well, scientists working at the Borexino experiment in Italy may change the saying and send enamored young men scrambling for something that's really eternal to profess their love -- electrons.
The full extent of Japan's 2011 Fukushima meltdown is still being uncovered, with measured levels of contamination increasing in previously identified sites throughout the North American coast. While it's still too low to threaten human or ocean life, this confirms that the power plant continues to leak radioactive isotopes researchers report.
To make diamonds, the industry typically resorts to subjecting graphite to immense pressure and temperature, which makes production volumes low and costly. This paradigm is about to change, since researchers at North Carolina State University found a new phase for carbon called Q-carbon, produced at ambient temperatures and pressure. This is surprisingly close to diamond in structure, with the added benefit of exhibiting a couple of unique properties.
In a new study published in Nature, researchers have demonstrated a technique that allows the mapping of organs at microscopic scales.
An University of Queensland study of mantis shrimp discovered a new form of light communication employed by the animals, the findings having potential applications in satellite remote sensing, biomedical imaging, cancer detection, and computer data storage.
Until the advent of calculus and computing infinite series, not that many digits were added to the ones found by Archimedes for more than a 1,500 years.
University of New South Wales devised a two-qubit system inside a silicon chip and ran a computer code adapted to the quantum world. Their code passed the notoriously intransigent 'Bell test', making it the strongest evidence yet that quantum computers can be instructed to handle operations.
Even inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, outside of Cairo, researchers have found something interesting.
Not every groundbreaking idea is complicated to understand. Ryan Chester, a high school senior from Ohio, seems to think so too. Using simple props and graphics, Chester produced a fantastic short video explaining one of the most important theories in physics - the Theory of Special Relativity proposed by Albert Einstein one hundred years ago. If the name doesn't say too much, maybe E = mc2 will.
Nikola Tesla had it right since 1908.
All models of particle physics are based on the mundane assumption that matter and anti-matter are indistinguishable, but we can't be sure. Luckily, an experiment at Brookhaven National Lab seems to confirm this basic caveat of particle physics after it found the attractive forces between antiprotons are the same as those seen in regular matter.
French scientist working on the Hall thrusters -- an advanced type of engine that harnesses a stream of plasma to generate forward momentum -- have recently figured out a way to optimize them, allowing them to run on (wait for it) a staggering 100 million times less fuel than conventional chemical rockets. The research has been published in Applied Physics Letters.
eam at Lawrence Livermore, helped by researchers from all around the world, announced the discovery of five new isotopes, adding to the already extensive list of 3,000 isotopes of 114 confirmed chemical elements. The exotic atomic variations discovered are one isotope each of heavy elements berkelium, neptunium and uranium and two isotopes of the element americium.
A team of scientists from Switzerland, Russia, Denmark, Belgium and Canada has for the first time demonstrated that it is possible to track the movement of an electron inside a molecule in real time. Moreover, the scientists claim the electron movements can be manipulated allowing unprecedented control over chemical reactions and biological processes.
After decades of searching, researchers believe they have finally discovered a glueball - a proposed particle that consists solely of gluon particles.
Scientists working at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have created a very specific type of material from over 1 billion magnets placed in a specific configuration. Astonishingly, its magnetic properties now change with temperature, just like water can be liquid, solid and gaseous based on temperature.
A group of scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has managed to successfully transfer information from on proton to another one 100 kilometers away (60 miles). This could ultimately lead not to actual teleportation, but rather to unhackable conversations.
Take a candle, light it, turn it on its side -- we all know what will happen. The convection cell that forms around the flame keeps licking up towards the sky (or ceiling) regardless of the orientation of the fuel. But can the movement of air be overcome, can we make a fire burn horizontally? Well, the short answer is yes, yes we can -- we just have to use science.
Usually, we have to use all sorts of disinfectants, soaps and detergents to scrub away smudge, be it sticky, oozy or greasy. This is not only annoying during housekeeping, but also following medical procedures when instruments have to be cleaned. Researchers at University of Southampton have been working for several years on a different kind high tech solution. They developed a gun-shaped device called the StarStream equipped with a special nozzle that injects water bombarded with ultrasound waves. The mix is so powerful that virtually any kind contamination can be removed.
A team of Dutch and Belgian researchers demonstrated an electric circuit coupled with a magnetic insulator. The circuit uses so-called 'spin waves' instead of electrons to transmit information, something that was considered unpractical until not too long ago. The findings could help lead to a new class of electronics which are far more efficient since there's less heat loss.
We all need a bit of quiet in our lives sometimes, but have you ever took a minute to ponder what 'total silence' might feel like? It's scary. Every bodily function, otherwise unnoticed, now sounds like a freight train. Feels like it, anyway. You can even hear your heart beats. Though not exactly 'perfect silence', a team of researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come mighty close. They report 99.7% absorption of low frequency pressure waves (sound) using subwavelength structures or materials.
A wormhole - a tunnel that connects two distant region in space by creating a shortcut through the spacetime - is thought as the only viable way to visit far away worlds and galaxies. Otherwise, you're stuck with traveling at the speed of light which, considering the vastness of interstellar space, is arduously slow. While for all practical reasons gravitational wormholes remain a staple of science fiction, the same can't be said about magnetic wormholes which were demonstrated for the first time by a group of Spanish physicists.
An intriguing signal reported at the LHC might signal some "cracks" in the Standard Model - the theory which describes how different forces interact with each other.
Today, Intel announced a 10 year collaboration with Delft University of Technology and TNO, the Dutch Organisation for Applied Research, to accelerate and enhance the advancements in quantum computing: the new type of computing which promises to revolutionize the world as we know it
Nothing can escape a black hole, not even light, any scientists schooled in modern physics will tell you. Eminent British physicists, Stephen Hawking, suggests however that information is still retained at the boundary of black holes, known as the event horizon.
These subatomic particles are created in the aftermath of violent cosmic events, like the explosion of a star or interactions with black holes. By capturing them here on Earth scientists can effectively peer into far away corners of the galaxies and tell what event spurred them to travel million of light years.
Matter accounts for 31.7% of the mass-energy content of the universe, and 84.5% of the matter is dark matter. In other words, what we can measure today (ordinary matter) accounts for only a tiny fraction of the Universe's mass-energy content. For years, scientists have been on the lookout for the elusive dark matter particles, as well as signs of dark energy. Efforts so far have been to no avail. Despite the setbacks, we know a thing for sure: dark matter exists. If it's there, we'll eventually find a way to detect it, but what if we've gone about this the wrong way? US physicists suggest a different approach: instead of looking for dark matter particles, we should be looking for evidence of their collision - dark radiation.
Advances in magnet technology have allowed MIT scientists to design a cheaper, more compact, modular and highly efficient fusion reactor that is efficient enough to use commercially. The era of clean, practically inexhaustible energy may be upon us in as little as a decade, scientists report.
Japan just powered up the world's most powerful laser, a monster that shines a 2-petawatt pulse of light. The pulse lasted only one picosecond, or a trillionth of a second, but during this brief time frame the laser definitely concentrated a phenomenal amount of power.
In what can only be heralded as a major breakthrough, a group at Arizona State University reports the demonstration of the first ever white laser - a laser that emits light over the full spectrum of visible colors. Up until now, lasers were designed to emit a distinct spectrum, either red, green, blue and so on. Combining multiple colors has always proved challenging and previous attempts had been slumped with shortcoming. This latest version seems to work wonderfully. If this technology can and will be scaled commercially, it could radically transform the industry. Its contrast and lighting capabilities, watt per watt, are well over LEDs and, moreover, it could help devise a new generation of Wi-Fi, called Li-Fi, which works on laser light and is 10 times faster.
After taking a short break in activity to be upgraded, the biggest atom smasher currently in use, CERN's Large Hadron Collider came back in business, and it did so with a bang. Using it, researchers have discovered yet another new kind of particle dubbed "pentaquarks" -that amounts to a new form of matter.
Studying ants could help us reduce or even eliminate traffic jams, but only if we let go of our ego. Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology found that ants don't have traffic jams, and we have much to learn from them when it comes to using a road.
Thousands of lightning bolts strike the Earth's surface roughly every couple of seconds, but despite their ubiquity this phenomena is somewhat poorly understand. Lightning is also unpredictable. While humans have been placing lightning rods for centuries to increase the probability of striking in a certain fixed point, its path can not be controlled. That may be true in nature, but in the confinement of a lab of the INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications research centre (Varennes, QC, Canada), scientists have defied this common knowledge and used lasers to coax lighting to follow a predefined path.
We tend to think of the Stonehenge as a lone giant, huge blocks of rock towering over the quiet British landscape. But as a new study has revealed, Stonehenge was likely a diverse and vibrant place, a complex of different religious and cultural settings. Painting Stonehenge in New Light Using geophysical techniques (mostly Ground […]
It's no secret that many animals can sense the Earth's magnetic field, but until now, researchers didn't know exactly how they could do this - what the sensor was. Now, a team from the University of Texas at Austin has found a simple, antenna-like structure in the brain of the simple worm C. Elegans that appears to be able to detect magnetic fields.
At the center of every raindrop there is an impurity (dust, clay, etc) – basically all raindrops have something like that at its core, just like pearls do. So in a way, raindrops form just like pearls. Let’s look at this phenomenon in more detail. In one form or another, water is always present in […]
MIT researchers have managed to create incredibly cold molecules, much colder than even interstellar space. In this new experiment, sodium potassium (NaK) molecules were brought down to 500 nanokelvins, just a touch more than 0 Kelvin - the absolute lowest possible temperature.
A group of international researchers unveiled the world's thinnest light bulb. Remarkably it uses a carbon-based filament, just like Thomas Edison used in 1879 for the first truly commercially-viable incandescent bulb. Unlike Edison, however, the group used carbon in its pure form and ultimate size limit - one atom-thick graphene sheets. Remarkably, the tiny bulb emits light visible to the naked eye. Of course, these sort of designs aren't about setting milestones, though it's always interesting to see how low or high down the scale you can go with engineering. Mostly, graphene-based light sources might prove useful for optical communications where bits are transmitted via packets of photons, instead of electrons.
In a breakthrough moment, researchers at MIT successfully cooled sodium potassium gas molecules (NaK) near absolute zero. At this temperature, matter behaves significantly different and starts exhibiting quantum effects. This is the coldest any molecule has been recorded ever.
Computers and water don't mix well, but that didn't stop Manu Prakash, a bioengineering assistant professor at Stanford, to think outside the box. Using magnetic fields and droplets of water infused with magnetic nanoparticles, Prakash demonstrated a computing system that performs logic and control functions by manipulating H2O instead of electrons. Because of its general nature, the water clock can perform any operations a conventional CPU clock can. But don't expect this water-based computer to replace the CPU in your smartphone or notebook (electrons speed vs water droplet - not a chance). Instead, it might prove extremely useful in situations where logic operations and manipulation of matter need to be performed at the same time.
After the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) took a 2 year hiatus to up its power, it's finally back, and it's stronger than ever - strong enough to uncover some of physics best kept secrets. Today, June 3, the LhC started delivering physics data for the first time in 27 months.
Speaking at the event that celebrated his 50th year as a fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius college, Stephen Hawking expressed his doubts whether a young student of similar talents, as well as disabilities, would receive the kinda of support he had. The renowned physicist, now 73 years old, has been living for the past decades with a devastating motor neurone disease that doctors believed would kill him while he was still in his early 20s. His determination to live on despite being confined to a wheel chair all his life is inspiring, but it's unlikely he could have survived to live this day were it not for his fellows and support at Caius College; nevermind his outstanding achievements in physics.
Mars has auroras too, and in addition to the red and green tinted Northern Lights here on Earth, these also come in blue. According to NASA, these should be visible to the naked eye if a Martian astronaut were to look to the sky from one of the two poles.
Researchers at ETH Zurich "squeezed" the quantum states of a calcium ion to make it easily distinguishable, i.e. they measured one of its physical quantities more precisely. All while working within the confinements of Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty (as if they had a choice). The findings could prove useful for ultra-precise measurements which are particularly sensitive to unwanted external influences.
A team at Columbia University School of Engineering designed a new kind of diode comprised of a single molecule capable of halting or releasing current (a diode is basically a valve) that is 50 times better than previous molecular diode attempts. The breakthrough was its novel design: a clever tweaking of the tiny diode's environment, and not the molecule's structure itself as previously described. Though the currents involved are genuinely tiny, it might be enough to make this the first molecule-sized diode worthy of real world applications. Other universities and labs around the world also demonstrated working molecular resistors, switches or transistors. Together, all of these form the basis of a new kind of nano-circuitry that's as miniaturized as it can get. Already, these sort of circuits are plagued by the uncertainties and challenges that follow at the quantum scale. But can we build electronics even smaller than this? it's unfathomable at this point, but imagination must not succumb. Somewhere, there's a common ground between fantasy and reality, and who knows what we'll get
Two years ago, following the discovery of the Higgs boson - heralded as one of the greatest scientific achievements of this century - the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was shut down for much needed maintenance and upgrades. A few days ago, the massive particle accelerator was shifted into gear and powered up. The first test run wasn't only successful, it set a new record by producing collision energies of around 13 trillion electron-volts. The highest speed that was previously achieved was of only 6.5 TeV. More tests will be made throughout the remainder of this month and June.
A dedication ceremony was held today at the Advanced Laser Gravitational Wave Observatories (Advanced LIGO), a lab tasked with detecting gravitational waves. The two LIGO observatories located in the US' northwest - one at Hanford, the other at the LIGO observatory in Livingston, La - have received significant upgrades meant to increase their sensitivity, part of a huge international endeavor which took eight years and $200 million to complete. The discovery of gravitational waves is heralded as a milestone breakthrough in physics and astronomy, one that might teach us a lot about the Universe. This includes supernovae and colliding black holes, that generate the waves.
