Trillion Dollar Bailout (an interactive game)

Punish greedy fat cats and save honest peoples! Hand out moneys to homeowners. Put the hurt on dudes in suits! Do it right and save the world!

Getting a handle on spin

The response of quantum dots to an electric field can be greatly enhanced by forming quantum dot molecules: two InAs quantum dots are stacked on top of each other, separated by a GaAs barrier a few nanometers thick. The pair of dots can be controlled by applied voltage such that they share a single hole [4]. Normally the hole energy levels of the two dots are much different (because of differences in structure), tunneling between dots is negligible, and the dot states are atomiclike. However, when the two dots are tuned by an applied electric field to have the same hole energy, resonant tunneling of the hole becomes significant, and the state of the hole becomes molecularlike. The two atomiclike states combine to form a molecular “bonding” orbital with enhanced wave function in the barrier, and a molecular “antibonding” orbital with suppressed amplitude in the barrier.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo

Dirac's achievements as a theoretical physicist were clearly remarkable. However, his personality, as the title of Graham Farmelo's book implies, was very odd indeed. Upon meeting him one soon discovered (if one had not been forewarned) that he had no small talk and little appreciation of other people's. Irony was foreign to him. His utterances were few and far between, and their main function was to communicate information about matters that were important to him, such as theoretical physics. The many mismatches between his style of communication and that of most other people gave rise to a large number of humorous anecdotes, many of which are quoted in this book.

Linux for Busy People

For people who always wanted to try out Linux but never had the time or the energy ( or courage to risk moving to a Linux only environment) here is a great application which allows you to keep Linux as well as Windows for double booting environment. You need 256 mb ram and 5 gb hard disk and you are good to go. It is a single click download and install to try out Ubuntu Linux and it preserves your Windows too. If you wanted to try out R with Linux , then it is an easy way out for you ( and me). Saves quite a lot of money per desktop per OS and per office productivity software. Sounds good to be true – well the site is http://wubi-installer.org/.

Bizarre bird behavior predicted by game theory

A team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, has used game theory to explain the bizarre behaviour of a group of ravens. Juvenile birds from a roost in North Wales have been observed adopting the unusual strategy of foraging for food in 'gangs'. New research, published in the journal PLoS One (on Wednesday 25 February 2009), explains how this curious behaviour can be predicted by adapting models more commonly used by economists to analyse financial trends.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis

Liz Smith Leaves the NY Post for wowOwow!

Beginning next week Liz Smith will be posting more news, hot gossip and opinions all the time on wowOwow — free from the constraints of newspaper deadlines. Thursday will be the last Liz Smith column for The New York Post — the first time in 33 years that Liz Smith’s column will not be in a New York newspaper. This sad news for the New York print business is spectacular news for us. Our fabulous and beloved Diva of Dish will be here on wowOwow, posting exclusive-to-Liz breaking celebrity news as it happens. It will, occasionally, be highlighted with audio and film and all the tools of an internet-entrepreneur.

Google’s Gmail service crashes across world

The email service went offline at around 10.25am GMT, and the outage appears to have affected users throughout the UK as well as across Europe, and even as far afield as Australia and India. It appears that only web-based Gmail access is affected, and users can continue to send and receive messages using other devices, such as mobile phones and third-party mail clients. Google could not confirm what had caused the outage. “A number of users are having difficulty accessing Gmail,” said the company in a statement. “We are working to resolve the problem. We know how important Gmail is to users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologise for the inconvenience.

Social websites harm children's brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist

But while the sites are popular - and extremely profitable - a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists believe they may be doing more harm than good. Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain. Psychologists have also argued that digital technology is changing the way we think. They point out that students no longer need to plan essays before starting to write - thanks to word processors they can edit as they go along. Satellite navigation systems have negated the need to decipher maps.

See A Fish With A Transparent Head

Today there's a new addition to the "real life is stranger than fiction" category. Check out the fish Macropinna microstoma. It has tubular eyes and a see-through head.

The Anderson-Higgs mechanism

To understand the Higgs mechanism, imagine that a room full of physicists quietly chattering is like space filled only with the Higgs field....

... a well known scientist walks in, creating a disturbance as he moves across the room, and attracting a cluster of admirers with each step ...

... this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field ...

... if a rumour crosses the room ...

... it creates the same kind of clustering, but this time among the scientists themselves. In this analogy, these clusters are the Higgs particles.

References

P. W. Anderson. Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass.
Phys. Rev. 130, 439 (1963)
 
Peter Higgs. Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.
Phys. Rev. Letters 13, 508 (1964)

STATPHYS 24, the XXIV International Conference (2010)

The STATPHYS Conference series takes place every three years in a different continent to enhance the international relevance and visibility of the leading world event in the broad field of Statistical Physics and all its interdisciplinary developments. Recent meetings have been held in GENOVA (Italy), BANGALORE (India), CANCUN (Mexico) and PARIS (France). STATPHYS 24 will be the first time this event is held in Australia and only the second time in the southern hemisphere. The entire Australian scientific community enthusiastically supports this meeting and warmly welcomes all international participants.

SourceTool Search engine accuses Google of antitrust violations

TradeComet.com, a small New York-based Internet search engine company, has filed suit against Google, accusing the king of Web search of violating antitrust laws. TradeComet, in a statement, said it filed a complaint this week in US District Court in New York asserting "Google violates antitrust laws by eliminating competition and choice." "Google's anticompetitive conduct eliminated TradeComet as a competitor," said the company, which was founded in September 2005.

Nueva estatua de cera de Britney Spears

Tanto es así, que el museo de cera más famoso del mundo, el Madame Tussauds, ha añadido hoy día 16 de Febrero en su sede de Londres, una nueva figura de Britney Spears, imitando el momento inicial de su regreso musical el pasado año 2008, cuando recogía sus flamantes premios VMA por Piece Of Me en Los Ángeles. El parecido es realmente asombroso… aunque el premio que la Britney de cera sostiene no es un Moon Man de los VMA, pero el resto es increíble.

Ashley Judd Calls for End to Mountaintop Mining

Judd was among some 500 people who gathered outside the Kentucky state Capitol on Tuesday for a rally in support of legislation that would essentially end the practice of blasting away mountaintops to unearth coal. The actress who was born in northeastern Kentucky said she visited mountaintop removal sites last September and was unprepared for the destruction she saw. She described "barren moonscapes" and "nothingness" where Appalachian peaks once rose skyward.

Higgs Boson: Race for 'God particle' heats up

The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass. Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris. The LHC has been out of action since last September when an accident damaged some of the magnets that make up its giant colliding ring. Project leader Lyn Evans conceded the enforced downtime might cost the European lab one of the biggest prizes in physics. Cern and Fermilab officials squared up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago.

Perseverance Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space

For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, “Star Trek”-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand. Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body “twists” nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.

Hot or not: The rules of attraction

It is the oldest of questions. "What is love! It is a pretty thing, as sweet unto a shepherd as a king," wrote Robert Greene back in the 16th century. Four hundred years on, the poser is as tricky as ever. Ahead of Valentine's Day, theories still abound as to why two people are attracted to each other. To some, it is a romance-laden "bolt from the blue", a deftly timed arrow from Cupid. To the scientists, it is a mixture of factors: everything from status to age, similarity, and pheromones.

Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard. Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science said many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple lifeforms. He was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. So far, telescopes have been able to detect just over 300 planets outside our Solar System. Very few of these would be capable of supporting life, however. Most are gas giants like our Jupiter; and many orbit so close to their parent stars that any microbes would have to survive roasting temperatures.

Baby-faced boy Alfie Patten is father at 13

Baby-faced Alfie, who is 13 but looks more like eight, became a father four days ago when his girlfriend Chantelle Steadman gave birth to 7lb 3oz Maisie Roxanne. He told how he and Chantelle, 15, decided against an abortion after discovering she was pregnant.

Darwin 2009 commemorations

The year 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859) and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (12 February 1809). This page aims to list the associated worldwide events and publications.

Electronic cigarettes: A safe substitute?

I've just "lit up" an e-cigarette, a battery-powered electronic device that I bought for $60 from a UK website. It looks just like a real cigarette - the tip even glows red - and with every drag a few micrograms of nicotine from a disposable cartridge (I got six with my purchase) should reach my lungs. My e-cigarette even produces puffs of "smoke", but it isn't burning, and so it's not banned. I'm not the only one smoking these sticks. In the growing number of public places worldwide where smoking has been banned, a new breed of smoker has appeared puffing on similar gadgets.

A New Puzzle Challenges Math Skills

KenKen shares some properties with sudoku. Each is a pure logic challenge in which numbers are filled in the squares of a grid. Unlike sudoku, though, in which the numbers act solely as symbols (letters or pictures would work as well), KenKen requires arithmetic. The rules are simple: Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit within any row or column, and so the digits within each heavily outlined box (called a cage) go together using the arithmetic operation shown to make the target number indicated.

Of Maxwell, Uma and Omar the Car

IT’S not often that a conversation about the 1960s television spy-spoof sitcom “Get Smart,” starring Don Adams, segues effortlessly into “Kill Bill 2,” the second part of director Quentin Tarantino’s two-volume saga about a female assassin’s vendetta against her former boss. But if the topic happens to be the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, the transition isn’t such a stretch.

Bottom-up Nanoconstruction by the Welding of Individual Metallic Nanoobjects Using Nanoscale Solder

We report that individual metallic nanowires and nanoobjects can be assembled and welded together into complex nanostructures and conductive circuits by a new nanoscale electrical welding technique using nanovolumes of metal solder.

At the weld sites, nanoscale volumes of a chosen metal are deposited using a sacrificial nanowire, which ensures that the nanoobjects to be bonded retain their structural integrity. We demonstrate by welding both similar and dissimilar materials that the use of nanoscale solder is clean, controllable, and reliable and ensures both mechanically strong and electrically conductive contacts. Nanoscale weld resistances of just 20Ω are achieved by using Sn solder. Precise engineering of nanowelds by this technique, including the chemical flexibility of the nanowire solder, and high spatial resolution of the nanowelding method, should result in research applications including fabrication of nanosensors and nanoelectronics constructed from a small number of nanoobjects, and repair of interconnects and failed nanoscale electronics.

A Molecular Linear Motor Consisting of Carbon Nanotubes

We experimentally investigated a “molecular-linear-motor” system consisting of a capsule-like carbon nanotube (CNT) in the interior space of a host CNT. Transmission electron microscopy revealed the capsule traveled back and forth between both ends of the hollow space along the axial direction and rotated simultaneously. The mechanism was well explained with molecular dynamics simulation by considering the driving force supplied from thermal energy. The present system operates around room temperature and this opens up the possibility of designing novel nanodevices such as oscillators and switching memory devices.

Quantum Dot Behavior in Graphene Nanoconstrictions

Graphene nanoribbons display an imperfectly understood transport gap. We measure transport through nanoribbon devices of several lengths. In long (≥250 nm) nanoribbons we observe transport through multiple quantum dots in series, while shorter (≤60 nm) constrictions display behavior characteristic of single and double quantum dots. New measurements indicate that dot size may scale with constriction width. We propose a model where transport occurs through quantum dots that are nucleated by background disorder potential in the presence of a confinement gap.

Himno Universitario UCV

Fue fundado en 1.943 por Antonio Estévez, y declarado "Patrimonio Artístico de la Nación" en 1983. Es pionero de las agrupaciones corales universitarias venezolanas. Es el coro activo mas antiguo del país y desde su creación ha desarrollado una intensa actividad que lo ha llevado a los más apartados rincones de Venezuela y del mundo. Por otra parte cultiva todo género musical: universal, latinoamericano y venezolano. Ha grabado 10 ediciones discográficas y además ha participado en producciones de artistas nacionales, entre los que cuentan Ilan Chester, Serenata Guayanesa y las Voces Risueñas de Carayaca. Sus integrante son estudiantes, y estudiantes de la UCV.

A 'Theory of Everything' Is Just an Illusion

Nobody knows what "time" is, how to define it, so how can people speak of the beginning of the universe, of the beginning of time, and of the end of the universe. Such talk is completely futile, maybe there is no beginning and no end of time, nobody knows.

A new connection between electricity and magnetism

A magnetic domain wall moving along a ferromagnetic wire can generate a voltage across the wire. This electromotive force, which is not the same as Faraday’s law of induction, is part of a growing family of interactions that are being discovered in the field of spintronics.

Javascript: A Set of Animated Examples

5 Things YOU Can Do to Help Open Source

The thing is that when you tell someone about participation in a certain open source project they immediately think of programming, and they say “Hey I’m no geek dude, I can’t do [insert programming language here], there’s no way I can contribute to this project , even though I’d like to.

Enemies of GNU/Linux?

If you have been following the news last week, you may have stumbled upon a quite shocking news item. A teacher from Austin, Texas confiscated a bunch of CDs containing free Linux distributions from a student who was demonstarting GNU/Linux on his laptop and handing out the CDs. After this, the teacher sent an angry email to Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, where the student got his Linux CDs from.

Top 10 Responses to Why Should I Use Linux? - A Linux Evangelists’ Reference

If you’re a Linux enthusiast like me, you’ve probably tried to convert a few people over to Linux from another operating system. Even though you succeed many times, there are always a few ‘geniuses’ out there who need some real persuading to switch over to Linux. So here are some quick and simple things about Linux you can point out to your potential convert.

Ubuntu Desktop Edition

With Ubuntu Desktop Edition you can surf the web, read email, create documents and spreadsheets, edit images and much more. Ubuntu has a fast and easy graphical installer right on the Desktop CD. On a typical computer the installation should take you less than 25 minutes.

Turkey Physics (La Física del Pavo)

As you cook the turkey, muscle fibers contract until they begin to break up at around 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Bonds within the molecules begin to break down, causing proteins to unravel, and the dense muscle meat to become more tender. Collagen in the bird (one of three protein fibers that attaches muscles to the bone) breaks down into softer gelatin molecules as it unwinds.

El aceite de oliva ayuda a prolongar la sensación de saciedad

Ya se sabe desde hace tiempo que es bueno para la salud, pero una nueva investigación encontró una ventaja extra. Las comidas preparadas con este aceite mantienen la sensación de saciedad por más tiempo.

40,000 planets could be home to aliens

Researchers have calculated that up to 37,964 worlds in our galaxy are hospitable enough to be home to creatures at least as intelligent as ourselves.

Natureevents

Natureevents is the first place for scientists looking for the latest scientific conferences, meetings, courses and symposia. We publish the Natureevents directory, which covers a complete range of scientific events and conferences around the world in the current year.

A Christmas Present From Mendelssohn, Delivered at His Birthday Celebration

The Lyric Chamber Music Society of New York began its celebration of Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday last season, when it included a handful of rarities in its programming. It has a few more up its sleeve too, including a reconstruction of an unfinished piano concerto. But for the actual birthday, on Tuesday, the society presented a salon concert of the sort that was common in Mendelssohn’s day, bringing together vocal works and piano music.

Exploding mobile phone kills man in China

The shop worker from Guangzhou, China, died moments after he put a new battery in his phone, it has been claimed. It was believed that he may have just finished charging the battery and had put the phone in his breast pocket when it exploded. China's daily Shin Min Daily News said the accident happened on Friday, Jan 30, at 7.30pm. An employee at the shop told local media that she heard a loud bang and saw her colleague lying on the floor of the shop in a pool of blood. The employee said the victim had recently changed the battery in his mobile phone.

Do Nanoparticles in Food Pose a Health Risk?

Yet, the Washington, D.C.–based environmental group Friends of the Earth (FoE) reports that none of the more than 100 food or food-related products it identified that contain nanoparticles—puny particles between 100 and one nanometers—bears a warning label or has undergone safety testing by government agencies.

Ashley Judd

Defenders Action Fund's campaign to expose Gov. Palin’s anti-wildlife agenda has attracted the support of actress and activist, Ashley Judd.

Ashley Judd: "I am outraged by Sarah Palin's promotion of this cruel, unscientific and senseless practice which has no place in modern America," commented Ms. Judd. "Because she is apparently determined to continue and expand this horrific program, I am grateful that Defenders will aggressively fight to stop her. I am proud to be a part of that effort."

See the Ashley Judd video

Top ten open problems in physics

I think… the ultimate purpose of my work is solving unsolved mysteries in physics. I am afraid, this and only this makes my work enjoyable for me, makes it fun. For the sake of future reference, let me enlist here the most important (from my point of view), hard and interesting unsolved problems in physics.

Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger, hero of US Airways Flight 1549, breaks silence about emergency landing

"It was very quiet as we worked, my co-pilot and I. We were a team," Sullenberger told ESPN's Rick Reilly. "But to have zero thrust coming out of those engines was shocking - the silence."