UCF physicist says Hollywood movies hurt students' understanding of science

Two University of Central Florida professors show just how poorly Hollywood writers and directors understand science in an article published in the German journal “Praxis der Naturwissenschaften Physik”.
 
Common sense may indicate that people should know the stunts in movies are just make believe, but the professors say that’s not necessarily true. Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed. And, if that were realistic, a ramp would be needed to adjust the direction of motion to even try to make the leap, said UCF professor Costas J. Efthimiou, who co-authored the article. “Students come here, and they don’t have any basic understanding of science,” he said. “Sure, people say everyone knows the movies are not real, but my experience is many of the students believe what they see on the screen.” And that’s not just a UCF problem. Efthimiou said students across the United States seem to have the same challenge with science. It starts young. The Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 report seems to support his observations. The report shows that the average science scores among 12th graders in the U.S. dropped from the previous year. The scores remained stagnant in the fourth and eighth grades. Worse, only about one-third of all students tested were proficient, meaning they had a solid understanding of what they should know.

Using Superheroes to Teach Physics: College Courses in Sci-Fi

One of the more perplexing questions facing science these days is this one: How do we get more young people interested in science? Leading the way are a number of college courses -- that can be taken for credit -- that focus on the science in science fiction. After all, why can't superheroes, Star Trek and Harry Potter teach us about the answer to life, the universe and everything? (Or, at least debate the merits of the answer "42".)

Quantum communication: When 0 + 0 is not equal to 0

One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs. Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit for such a process a channel and the limits imposed by the universe on this process the channel capacity. The capacity of a communications channel is hugely important idea. It tells you, among other things, the rate at which you can send information from one location to another, without loss. If you’ve ever made a phone call, watched television or surfed the internet you’ll have benefited from the work associated with this idea. In recent years, our ideas about communication have been transformed by the possibility of using quantum particles to carry information. When that happens the strange rules of quantum mechanics govern what can and cannot be sent from one region of space to another. This kind of thinking has has spawned the entirely new fields of quantum communication and quantum computing.

Time as a Dynamical Variable

Clocks are dynamical systems, notwithstanding our usual formalism in which time is treated as an external parameter. A dynamical variable which may be identified with time is explicitly constructed for a variety of simple dynamical systems. This variable is canonically conjugate to the Hamiltonian. The complications brought about by the semiboundedness of the Hamiltonian are taken into account and the spectral properties of the time operator are examined. For relativistic systems boosts affect the time variable in a familiar manner. It is pointed out that all physical clock times are cyclic, contrary to Newton’s view of a ‘uniformly flowing time’.

Theory of Tachyons (Faster than Light Propagation)

It had long been assumed that the theory of relativity has established the speed of light as the highest speed allowed. If this were so, we would never be able to study the contemporary physical conditions beyond our galaxy; and in practice, beyond the solar system. It would be, therefore, desirable to have particles that travel beyond the speed of light.

Quantum Zeno Effect

In a closed quantum system an "unstable particle" which seems to decay, is a metastable state which evolves in a probability conserving manner; some of the probability goes with the fraction that has "decayed." A systematic analysis of the decay amplitude in terms of the spectral density of the decaying state determines the evolution. Classical law of radioactivity has a strict exponential decay, but in quantum theory this is only approximately so; for very short times the decay probability increases as the square of the time interval; so a metastable quantum system which is frequently observed (and reset) would remain essentially unchanged. This is the Quantum Zeno effect discovered by Misra and Sudarshan (J. Math. Phys.). Chiu and Sudarshan studied the rigorous theory of decay and exhibited the short time Zeno regime, and the long term Khalfin regime in addition to the exponential regime. With Gorini and Chiu, Sudarshan developed a formalism of analytic continuation of the vector space of quantum mechanics; he developed it fully into Quantum Mechanics in Dual Spaces.

3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question

You saw the 3D Monsters vs Aliens commercial during the Super Bowl — maybe with the special glasses or, without them, as a myopic blur. If you took your kids to the Jonas Brothers movie, you sat through nearly a dozen trailers for 3D movies to be released this year. Perhaps you saw the latest issues of TIME, People and three other Time Inc. publications promoting 3D as "pretty darn cool," and citing such top directors as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson as being in in love with the process.

The nanorians are amongst us - and everyone knows why

"European Nano2life prize for Münster scientist: the complex world of the nanoparticle simply explained They are all around us, but no-one can see them: no, Torsten Vielhaber is not describing a sci-fi screenplay when he starts talking about nanorians. The Münster chemist has, rather, created a world in order to explain the essence of nanoparticles in a comprehensible way. The 27 year-old has now been awarded the European Nano2life Prize for his clear translation of complex scientific relationships (see also attached interview). Nanorians are tiny beings, invisible to the naked eye. As soon as they are brought to life, they begin helping us to heal diseases or to extend the service life of machines. This has woken the urge to research in the University of Münster scientist. You cannot get hold of, sniff or taste nanobiotechnology, he says. The particles at the heart of everything are much smaller than a hair on your arm. Up to 60,000 times smaller, to be precise. To explain: the 27 year-old compares nanoparticles to apples. “If the earth were an apple, then an apple would be the size of an atom. 3,500 of these atoms in a crate would be a nanoparticle five nanometres (nm) in size: 12,000 times thinner than a hair.”

Experience WorldWide Telescope

Immerse yourself in a seamless beautiful environment. WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.

Reinventing HTML (Tim BL)

Making standards is hard work. Its hard because it involves listening to other people and figuring out what they mean, which means figuring out where they are coming from, how they are using words, and so on. There is the age-old tradeoff for any group as to whether to zoom along happily, in relative isolation, putting off the day when they ask for reviews, or whether to get lots of people involved early on, so a wider community gets on board earlier, with all the time that costs. That's a trade-off which won't go away. The solutions tend to be different for each case, each working group. Some have lots of reviewers and some few, some have lots of time, some urgent deadlines.

Web Hypertext Application Technology

This is a series of demos intended for showing implementations of HTML5 in (non-final) browsers available in September 2008. Configuration:

• Open Terminal in Presentation mode
• Hide dock
• Open Opera, Firefox, Safari, VMWare with IE, Chrome
• Clear all their caches, form autofill, history, download history

HTML 5 Draft Recommendation — 28 March 2009

HTML5

This specification evolves HTML and its related APIs to ease the authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, a full duplex client-server communication channel, more semantics, audio and video, various features for offline Web applications, sandboxed iframes, and scoped styling. Heavy emphasis is placed on keeping the language backwards compatible with existing legacy user agents and on keeping user agents backwards compatible with existing legacy documents.

Also, see /http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/
y
http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/

Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough

Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community. The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions. "Our finding is very significant," said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California. "To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device," added the study's co-author in a statement. The study's results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.

D. V. Shirkov: 60 years of Broken Symmetries in Quantum Physics (From the Bogoliubov Theory of Superfluidity to the Standard Model)

A retrospective historical overview of the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) in quantum theory, the issue that has been implemented in particle physics in the form of the Higgs mechanism. The main items are:

1)	The Bogoliubov's microscopical theory of superfluidity (1946)
2)	The BCS-Bogoliubov theory of superconductivity (1957)
3)	Superconductivity as a superfluidity of Cooper pairs (Bogoliubov - 1958)
4)	Transfer of the SSB into the QFT models (early 60s)
5)	The Higgs model triumph in the electro-weak theory (early 80s)

The role of the Higgs mechanism and its status in the current Standard Model is also touched upon.

.pdf arXiv preprint

Einstein's unpublished opening lecture for his course on relativity theory in Argentina, 1925

In 1922 the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Council approved a motion to send an invitation to Albert Einstein to visit Argentina and give a course of lectures on his theory of relativity. The motion was proposed by Jorge Duclout (1856-1927), who had been educated at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (ETH). This proposal was the culmination of a series of initiatives of various Argentine intellectuals interested in the theory of relativity. In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877-1935), then the university's administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university's invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March-April 1925. The Argentine press received Einstein with great interest and respect; his early exchanges covered a wide range of topics, including international politics and Jewish matters. Naturally, the journalists were more eager to hear from the eminent pacifist than from the incomprehensible physicist. However, after his initial openness with the press, the situation changed and Einstein restricted his public discourse to topics on theoretical physics, avoiding some controversial political, religious, or philosophical matters that he had freely touched upon in earlier interviews.. [abridged].

Can one see entanglement ?

The human eye can detect optical signals containing only a few photons. We investigate the possibility to demonstrate entanglement with such biological detectors.

While one person could not detect entanglement by simply observing photons, we discuss the possibility for several observers to demonstrate entanglement in a Bell-type experiment, in which standard detectors are replaced by human eyes. Using a toy model for biological detectors that captures their main characteristic, namely a detection threshold, we show that Bell inequalities can be violated, thus demonstrating entanglement. Remarkably, when the response function of the detector is close to a step function, quantum non-locality can be demonstrated without any further assumptions. For smoother response functions, as for the human eye, post-selection is required.

Visual Trace Route Tool

The visual trace route tool displays the path Internet packets traverse to reach a specified destination. A proxy trace (the default) maps the route across the network from your computer, to yougetsignal.com, to the URL you specify. A host trace is typically quicker - it simply maps the network route from yougetsignal.com (hosted at a central location by DreamHost) to the URL you specify. The tool works by identifying the IP addresses of each hop along the way to the destination network address. The estimated geophysical location of each hop is identified using MaxMind's GeoIP database. After all of the hops locations' are identified, the path to the destination is plotted on a Google Map.

Who Protects The Internet ?

For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your e-mail coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie--a congenial, 6'4", 57-year-old Scotsman--patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

Search for Life in the Solar System

“It is critical to know what to look for in the search for life in the solar system. The search so far has focused on Earth-like life because that’s all we know, but life that may have originated elsewhere could be unrecognizable compared with life here. Advances throughout the last decade in biology and biochemistry show that the basic requirements for life might not be as concrete as we thought.” John Baross - Professor of Oceanography and the Astrobiology Program at the University of Washington and lead author U.S. National Research Council report: “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems”

The human brain is on the edge of chaos

Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

Robot to do its little turn on the catwalk

“Next up, the always lovely HRP-4C modeling the very best in this year’s faux industrial designs for the discerning robot. Soft curves accentuate the feminine side, while polished chrome reminds us that this line is as functional as it is sexy!” The HRP-4C, seen here in the nude, is a walking robot designed to model clothing on fashion runways. With 30 motors in her body, and 8 motors in her face to produce a limited set of expressions, she looks a lot better than that robot schoolmarm. HRP-4C looks pretty good while standing still, but it looks like it has a long way to go before it masters that sashay that is the trademark of runway models everywhere.

La Real Academia Española retira "tonto" como sinónimo de gallego

En 2013, cuando vea la luz la vigésimo tercera edición del diccionario de la Real Academia Española (RAE), "tonto" ya no será sinónimo de "gallego". Dentro de un par de meses, según José Manuel Blecua, secretario de la Academia, en la página de Internet http://www.rae.es/ ya se indicará que el artículo está enmendado. La RAE sigue sosteniendo que en el habla coloquial de Costa Rica se utiliza "gallego" con el significado de "tonto", pero ha decidido retirarlo porque no se han hallado "documentos escritos" en los que aparezca plasmado este uso.

Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year. Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.

Old age begins at 27: Scientists reveal new research into ageing

Getting old already? 27-year-old singer Beyonce Knowles is already past her mental peak according to new research.

Old age is often blamed for causing us to misplace car keys, forget a word or lose our train of thought. But new research shows that many well-known effects of ageing may start decades before our twilight years. According to scientists, our mental abilities begin to decline from the age of 27 after reaching a peak at 22. The researchers studied 2,000 men and women aged 18 to 60 over seven years. The people involved – who were mostly in good health and well-educated – had to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols.

Web's inventor (Tim Berners-Lee) gets a knighthood

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. Dubbed the "Father of the Web", he came up with a system over 10 years ago to organise, link and browse net pages. The famously modest man said he was "quite an ordinary person", and although it felt strange, he was "honoured". Sir Tim was recently reunited with the machine he used to invent the web when he e-mailed 80 schools from the UN's summit on the information society.

It was 20 years ago today: The Web (March 13, 2009)

Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored "Information Management: A proposal" and set the technology world on fire? Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.

A Mesoscopic Mystery

Researchers continue to push rival interpretations of a vexing problem in mesoscopic physics, the size scale where quantum and classical worlds co-exist. The conductance across a narrow bridge between two reservoirs of electrons--a so-called quantum point contact--was expected to follow simple quantum rules, but doesn't. A group publishing in the 9 December print issue of PRL proposes a model of automatic electron spin alignment to explain the conductance anomaly. But in the 4 November print issue, another group's theory supports the claim that physics concepts borrowed from the world of material impurities is key. Both teams hope they're approaching a resolution to a problem that has turned mesoscopic physics on its head.

MUBs and the 0.7 Anomaly in QPC conductance

Thank Nanoscale for bringing to my attention a long standing puzzle in mesocopic scale condensed matter physics, the “0.7 anomaly”. The problem is the behavior of the conductance (inverse of resistance) for a quantum point contact (QPC). Two experimental papers showing the effect are cond-mat/0706.0792 and cond-mat/0005082, which see. Shot noise decreases at the 0.7 anomaly just as it does at the integer conductance points, see cond-mat/0311435. A recent perturbation analysis of the situation is given by cond-mat/0707.1989. This blog post gives a non perturbational calculation.

Air QERV Technology Explained (Casimir effect)

Wikipedia: In physics, the Casimir effect and the Casimir-Polder force are physical forces arising from a quantized field. The typical example is of two uncharged metallic plates in a vacuum, placed a few micrometers apart, without any external electromagnetic field.

Relativistic Hydrogen molecules extract energy from Vacuum Flucuations (pre-paper)

The claims of sub zero states of hydrogen have been controversial for years and caused the study of this field to languish for what may prove to be nothing more than semantics. A 2005 paper by Jan Naudts paper (5 August 2005). "On the hydrino state of the relativistic hydrogen atom" [5] contends that the sub zero state argument overlooks relativistic effect inside Casimir cavities. Relativistic hydrogen implies a temporal axis solution where the hydrino orbital remains stationary relative to a moving boundary as the atom rotates away from our plane reshaping the 4D boundary. The Casimir cavity enlarges the temporal axis so the atom and its boundaries relax “upward” on the temporal axis while reducing its profile in our plane. The orbital gets no closer to the nucleus from a 4D perspective where the nucleus is further displaced from the orbital on the temporal axis.

Pay it forward: UH prof helps advance science in developing countries

A University of Houston professor takes the phrase "pay it forward" to heart in his quest to advance science in Third-World countries. Once a budding physicist seeking opportunities 30 years ago in his native Panama, Carlos Ordóñez, an associate professor of physics at UH, recruits up-and-coming scientists from Mexico, Peru, Cuba, Brazil and other countries, matching them with UH's top researchers in biology, chemistry and physics for post-doctoral fellowships. During these two-year fellowships, the Latin American students gain valuable experience working with prominent faculty and using state-of-the-art facilities often not available in their home countries.

"USB Finger Drive": When reality meets product concepts

The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu

France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.

Solving symmetric disordered systems (by Tobias J. Osborne)

In this post I want to describe a solution to a special class of symmetric disordered quantum systems. This solution is probably not new (it is pretty hard to come up with any solvable system which hasn’t been discovered before!) but I haven’t been able to find anything quite like it in a preliminary search of the literature. So I thought I’d write it up here; if anyone has seen something like this before then please let me know! This research is intended to be part of a larger project focussed on the computational complexity of disordered quantum systems: I’m starting by collecting results on solvable models to subsequently utilise in the analysis of algorithms like the density matrix renormalisation group.

How’s “Wolfram Alpha” different from Google and other search engines?

According to Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha search engine will be different from Google and other search engines. Wolfram Alpha will offer exact answer, instead of showing up the links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer, like Google and other search engines. It'll be like typing a question and getting the right answer.

... Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Physicists: They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street

Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985. After all, for almost 20 years, as a graduate student at Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at institutions like Oxford and the University of Colorado, he had been a spear carrier in the quest to unify the forces of nature and establish the elusive and Einsteinian “theory of everything,” hobnobbing with Nobel laureates and other distinguished thinkers. How could managing money compare?

Dr. Derman, who likes to say it is the models that are simple, not the world, maintains they can be a useful guide to thinking as long as you do not confuse them with real science — an approach Dr. Taleb scorned as “schizophrenic.”
 
Dr. Derman said, “Nobody ever took these models as playing chess with God.”
 
Do some people take the models too seriously? “Not the smart people,” he said.

Norwegian Websites Declare War on IE 6

Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site that is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its web page for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Dozens of other sites, including the influential tech news website Digi.no, have joined the campaign, but have widened the playing field by suggesting either upgrading to IE 7 or switching to an alternative like Firefox, Safari or, of course, Norway's own Opera browser. The drive is spreading to other countries. Sites in Sweden, Indonesia and Australia have joined in. Norwegian blogger Peter Haza is cataloging the participants, and an international wiki called "IE6 - DO NOT WANT" has been set up to track the spreading browsercide. There's a Facebook group, too.

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 simulations these struggle to cope with simple shapes let alone complex geometries. Consequently, our knowledge of the Casimir force and how to exploit it is poor.

Now Alejandro W. Rodriguez and pals at MIT are suggesting a rather entertaining third way: to calculate Casimir forces using scale models that work like analogue computers.

References

Alejandro W. Rodriguez, Alexander P. McCauley, John D. Joannopoulos, Steven G. Johnson. Ingredients of a Casimir analog computer.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0599

Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006

Criminals specializing in Internet fraud continued to ply much of their trade with the aid of security flaws in the Microsoft browser last year. In 2006, the company issued patches to fix a total of four "zero-day" flaws in IE. Zero-day (or 0day) attacks are so named because software vendors have no time to develop a fix for the flaws before they are exploited by cyber crooks for financial or personal gain.

Table of Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities in 2006

Click here

Why I (Aaron Greenspan) Sued Google (and Won)

In the end, printed on a baby blue sheet of paper by the clerk's aging dot matrix printer, the judgment was actually entered for $761.00 total, due to the $40.00 court costs. I couldn't help but to smile in front of the judge.

"But it's not fair!" Google's paralegal protested. "What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?"

It's a valid question. Yet until Google changes its policies to become more transparent, which might also reassure skeptics that AdWords and AdSense, which have oddly limited reporting capabilities, aren't just two sides of the same ponzi scheme (for why else would one want to terminate legitimate accounts with high monthly liabilities when they're supposed to be making money for Google on each click?)--I will give this answer:

Maybe everyone whose account was canceled, should.

Close Encounter: Earth-Asteroid Near Miss

The asteroid - about the size of a 10-storey building - flew past the Earth at roughly twice the distance of the highest Earth-orbiting satellites, according to website space.com. It is similar in size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908, flattening 80 million trees across an 800 square mile area. The impact had the force of a thousand atomic bombs, astronomers say. Asteroid 2009 DD45

was closest to the earth on Monday at around 8.30am, at just under 45,000 miles above the surface of the planet.

Astronomers knew it was coming after it was spotted last Saturday as a faint dot showing up in pictures at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. There was never any risk of collision, experts said, but anything flying within 50,000 miles of the Earth is taken very seriously.

El nanotubo de menor radio posible tiene una sección cuadrada

Los famosos nanotubos de carbono no son los únicos nanotubos posibles. Muchos metales permiten “fabricar” nanohilos huecos cuya sección transversal tiene muy pocos átomos.

Investigadores brasileños han observado con un microscopio electrónico de transmisión de alta resolución (HRTEM) los nanohilos de menor diámetro hasta el momento con una sección transversal de sólo 4 átomos de plata. En el vídeo podéis observarlos “en vivo y en directo.”

El diámetro del nanotubo cuadrado es inferior a 1 nanómetro. El descubrimiento nanotubos metálicos de sección transversal cuadrada es una gran sorpresa para todos los nanotecnólogos. Nos lo cuentan en “Brazilian research group discovers new family of metallic nanotubes,” January 27, 2009 , quienes se hancen eco del artículo técnico de M. J. Lagos et al., “Observation of the smallest metal nanotube with a square cross-section,” Nature Nanotechnology, Published online: 25 January 2009 .

Fish with human faces spotted in South Korea

The "humanoid" carp are attracting attention in the town of Chongju in the centre of the country where they live in a small pond. They are believed to be hybrid descendants of two carp species – the carp and the leather carp, also known as a tangerine fish. Both fish are females and more than three feet long. They appear to have distinctive human noses, eyes and lips.

Quantum paradox directly observed -- a milestone in quantum mechanics

In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action of quantum mechanics' directly.

Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth, poses a conundrum that quantum physicists have sought to overcome for decades.

How do you observe quantum mechanics, atomic and sub-atomic systems that are so small-scale they cannot be described in classical terms, when the act of looking at them changes them permanently?

References

Kazuhiro Yokota, Takashi Yamamoto, Masato Koashi and Nobuyuki Imoto.

Direct observation of Hardy's paradox by joint weak measurement with an entangled photon pair.

2009 New J. Phys. 11 033011

Hope Launches World's First Beatles MA

Liverpool Hope University has launched a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, the first of its kind in the world.

Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S. ?

As the debate over H-1B workers and skilled immigrants intensifies, we are losing sight of one important fact: The U.S. is no longer the only land of opportunity. If we don't want the immigrants who have fueled our innovation and economic growth, they now have options elsewhere. Immigrants are returning home in greater numbers. And new research shows they are returning to enjoy a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of being close to family and friends.

Eastwood da gracias a Francia mientras Cannes le rinde tributo

Clint Eastwood dio las gracias al cine francés después de que el Festival de Cine de Cannes le diera el premio a toda su carrera a la leyenda de Hollywood, quien presenta a los 78 años su nueva película.

Quantum Darwinism ( by Wojciech Hubert Zurek )

Quantum Darwinism describes the proliferation, in the environment, of multiple records of selected states of a quantum system. It explains how the quantum fragility of a state of a single quantum system can lead to the classical robustness of states in their correlated multitude; shows how effective 'wave-packet collapse' arises as a result of the proliferation throughout the environment of imprints of the state of the system; and provides a framework for the derivation of Born's rule, which relates the probabilities of detecting states to their amplitudes. Taken together, these three advances mark considerable progress towards settling the quantum measurement problem.

Darwin and Physics ?

Darwin and physics ?: The relevance of Darwin's ideas in physics, the wider context of Darwin's legacy and the controversy that rumbles on are explored in a special collection of articles marking the anniversary of the theory of evolution.

It is not obviously the business of a physics journal to mark the anniversary of a major development in biology. But the repercussions of Darwin's theory of evolution are relevant to all.