Etc... and All Physics

A solid case of entanglement

2010-11-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

For the first time, physicists have convincingly demonstrated that physically separated particles in solid-state devices can be quantum-mechanically entangled. The achievement is analogous to the quantum entanglement of light, except that it involves particles in circuitry instead of photons in optical systems. Both optical and solid-state entanglement offer potential routes to quantum computing and secure communications, but solid-state versions may ultimately be easier to incorporate into electronic devices.

Demonic device converts information to energy

2010-11-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

The laws of physics say that you can't get energy for nothing -- worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information.

Relativistic trading: The speed of light isn't fast enough for some market transactions

2010-11-13T01:24:00.000-08:00

The profit made on a stock share bought and sold a moment later might only be a penny or so, but if multiplied by millions of shares over the course of a day the money earned can be big.

Holometer experiment to test if the universe is a hologram

2010-10-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

Many ideas in theoretical physics involve extra dimensions, but the possibility that the universe has only two dimensions could also have surprising implications. The idea is that space on the ultra-small Planck scale is two-dimensional, and the third dimension is inextricably linked with time. If this is the case, then our three-dimensional universe is nothing more than a hologram of a two-dimensional universe.

Topological insulators could help define fundamental constants

2010-10-26T01:38:00.000-07:00

A newly discovered class of materials known as "topological insulators" could help physicists to obtain new ways of defining the three basic physical constants – the speed of light (c); the charge of the proton (e); and Planck’s constant (h). That’s the claim of a team of physicists in the US, which has proposed a new experiment to measure the fine-structure constant (α), which is a function of h, c and e, by scattering light from such a material. Topological insulators are unusual in that electrical current flows well on their surface, but not through their bulk.

The quest for dilute ferromagnetism in semiconductors: Guides and misguides by theory

2010-10-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

A material that exhibits both ferromagnetic and semiconductor properties offers the exciting prospect of combining nonvolatile magnetic storage and conventional semiconductor electronics in a single device. Magnetic semiconductors offer a number of interesting possibilities in the pursuit of  spintronics , a branch of science and technology that exploits the spin dimension of the electron in addition to its charge, for novel electronic devices. These materials combine the properties of a semiconductor and a magnetic material, providing, for instance, a way to create 100 %  spin-polarized currents, and by the same token, the promise of electrical control of magnetic effects. While in some magnetic semiconductors, for example, magnetite, all of the material’s constituent ions are intrinsically magnetic (  concentrated magnets  ), the most recent focus has been on nonmagnetic semiconductor host materials that can be doped by a small amount of magnetic transition-metal ions or by defects that promote magnetism (  dilute magnets  ).

Understanding behavioural patterns: why bird flocks move in unison

2010-09-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

Animal flocks, be it honeybees, fish, ants or birds, often move in surprising synchronicity and seemingly make unanimous decisions at a moment’s notice, a phenomenon which has remained puzzling to many researchers.

New research published today in the New Journal of Physics ( co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society ), uses a particle model to explain the collective decision making process of flocks of birds landing on foraging flights.

Using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system, which sees the birds represented by particles with such parameters as position and velocity, the researchers from Budapest, Hungary, find that the collective switching from the flying to the landing state overrides the individual landing intentions of each bird.

Relativity with a human touch

2010-09-24T04:03:00.000-07:00

In the famous twin paradox, a sibling who journeys in a fast-moving spacecraft will return home younger than the sibling who remained on Earth. While this apparent slowing of time occurs whenever a body is set in motion, it had been much too small to be detected for movement on a human scale.

Who wants to live for ever? A scientific breakthrough could mean humans live for hundreds of years

2010-09-24T03:50:00.001-07:00

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

Einstein's theory is proved – and it is bad news if you own a penthouse

2010-09-24T03:38:00.000-07:00

The world's most accurate clock has neatly shown how right Albert Einstein was 100 years ago, when he proposed that time is a relative concept and the higher you live above sea level the faster you should age.

Quantum Time Machine Lets You Travel to the Past Without Fear of Grandfather Paradox

2010-07-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

Looking to build a time machine but nervous about the classic grandfather paradox, aka the Marty McFly conundrum, aka the idea that you might unwittingly do something that causes you to never exist in the first place? An MIT professor and a few of his quantum quoting buddies have published a theory that allows for time travel while circumventing the grandfather paradox . All you need is a quantum teleportation device and a precise understanding of the idea of postselection--Flux Capacitor optional.

Topological insulators: Star material

2010-07-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

A topological insulator sounds simple enough: A block of material that lets electrons move along its surface, but not through its inside . In fact, it is far from straightforward. Ordinary metals conduct electrons all the way through, whereas ordinary insulators don't conduct electrons at all. A copper-plated block of wood conducts only on the surface, but that is two materials, not one. The idea of a topological insulator is so strange that for a long time, physicists had no reason to believe that such a material would exist .

Researchers also believe that the collective motions of electrons inside topological insulators will mimic several of the never-before-seen particles predicted by high-energy physicists. Among them are axions, hypothetical particles predicted in the 1970s; magnetic monopoles, single points of north and south magnetism; and Majorana particles — massless, chargeless entities that can serve as their own antiparticles.

Could some entangled states be useless for quantum cryptography ?

2010-07-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

↑ ↓

One of the widely accepted properties of quantum entanglement is secrecy. Since scientists and researchers began working with quantum key distribution, entanglement has been considered an essential part of keeping communications private. What if entanglement didn't always mean secrecy, though ? New work is shedding light on the nature of entanglement and quantum key distribution - and possibly proving that a high degree of entanglement does not necessarily lead to complete secrecy .

What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory

2010-06-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time ?.

Dropping ultra-cold quantum gas down an elevator shaft could help prove Einstein wrong

2010-06-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Scientists have shown that it’s possible to keep sufficiently close tabs on quantum mechanical objects in free fall to tell whether two such objects experience gravity the same way. In 1907, Einstein suggested that if you were in a windowless elevator that was plunging towards Earth in free fall, you would feel the same weightlessness as if you were floating in outer space. This notion, known as the equivalence principle, laid the foundation for general relativity. It explains why a pebble and a piano fall at the same speed if dropped from the same roof, despite their different masses. It’s also a necessary first step toward describing the effects of gravity as curvature in spacetime.

Stretched molecule puts a new spin on electrons

2010-06-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

Physicists in the US have invented a way of measuring the magnetic properties of a single molecule as it is being stretched. The technique provides a

new approach for studying quantum chemistry and how the spin of an electron affects its passage through tiny structures.

The technique could one day even be adapted for use in spintronic devices, which use the spin of the electron to process and store information.

Physicists build quantum amplifier with single artificial atom

2010-06-14T01:18:00.001-07:00

By demonstrating how a single artificial atom can be used to amplify electromagnetic waves, physicists from Japan are opening up new possibilities for quantum amplifiers, which can be used in a variety of electronic and optical applications.

Entropy study suggests Pictish symbols likely were part of a written language

2010-06-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

How can you tell the difference between random pictures and an ancient, symbol-based language ?

A new study has shown that concepts in entropy can be used to measure the degree of repetitiveness in Pictish symbols from the Dark Ages, with the results suggesting that the inscriptions appear be much closer to a modern written language than to random symbols

. The Picts, a group of Celtic tribes that lived in Scotland from around the 4th-9th centuries AD, left behind only a few hundred stones expertly carved with symbols. Although the symbols appear to convey information, it has so far been impossible to prove that this small sample of symbols represents a written language.

Physicsts reveal how to cope with 'frustration'

2010-06-07T23:10:00.001-07:00

For most people, frustration is a condition to be avoided. But for scientists studying certain "frustrated" ensembles of interacting components -that is, those which cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction-

it may be the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism.

Math behind Internet encryption wins top award: Abel prize awarded to number theorist John Tate

2010-05-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Abel prize--considered the "Nobel" prize of mathematics--has been awarded to John Tate, recently retired from the University of Texas at Austin, for his work on algebraic number theory, the mathematical discipline that deals with connections between whole numbers and lies at the heart of Internet security.
Established in 2002, the Abel Prize is presented annually by the King of Norway and carries a cash award of $1 million.

Ian Stewart: Try to find the prime factors of a 200-digit number with pencil and paper--or even with a computer program--and it would take longer than the age of the Universe .

John Tate Biography in Wikipedia

Electrical properties of glass at the nanoscale lead to a pump the size of a red blood cell

2010-05-22T19:39:00.000-07:00

Researchers have devised a way to fabricate tiny electrodes from glass, harnessing a phenomenon by which nanoscale glass walls can be transformed from insulators to conductors and back again. At larger scales, that phenomenon, known as dielectric breakdown , leads to excess heating and structural damage, but at the nanoscale the process appears to be harmless and reversible.

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg

2010-05-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, who made important contributions in many fields of theoretical physics, passed away on 8 November 2009 in Moscow; he had suffered for several years from a blood disease.

Recurrence Analysis of Stock and Commodity indices

2010-05-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

In the contemporary global scenario, the working of the complex and multidimensional factors on the time behaviour of financial series necessitates an investigation of the underlying characteristic features of the same. In addition to the state of the art econometric approaches, analysis in terms of state space dynamics considering the financial time series as deterministic chaos has emerged to be of utmost importance. Understanding the dynamics of a financial series, as a stock market index or a commodity market index is still however, a complex task having its specific requirements. Market behaviour, in case of both commodity and securities is ultimately reflected by the average trading price movement . Thus the time series representing the indices in the respective markets is a key to understanding the economic similarities/dissimilarities in the two markets. Our purpose was to analyse the time series representing the indices of commodity and stock markets .

CSS3 Examples and Code

2010-05-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

We present a set of CSS3 examples which include the state of art in web design. Simple code for the examples are included.

http://fisica.ciens.ucv.ve/felix/css3/

Global classical solutions of the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions

2010-05-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

Ludwig Boltzmann
1844-1906

This is a brief announcement of our recent proof of global existence and rapid decay to equilibrium of classical solutions to the Boltzmann equation without any angular cutoff, that is, for long-range interactions. We consider perturbations of the Maxwellian equilibrium states and include the physical cross-sections arising from an inverse-power intermolecular potential r^-(p-1) with p > 2, and more generally. We present here a mathematical framework for unique global in time solutions for all of these potentials. We consider it remarkable that this equation, derived by Boltzmann in 1872 and Maxwell in 1867, grants a basic example where a range of geometric fractional derivatives occur in a physical model of the natural world . Our methods provide a new understanding of the effects due to grazing collisions.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5744.abstract?sid=9d675b61-b4d1-4bc0-88d1-b450d0b4b5ca

Philip T. Gressman and Robert M. Strain
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6395

Time travel? Maybe

2010-05-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

Einstein and Rosen made a very bold supposition: What if a traveler fell into the mouth of something that looked like a black hole, but rather than being crushed by a singularity at the center of a black hole, instead emerged from another mouth, potentially many light-years from where he or she started ?. This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Einstein's theory of general relativity -- our current working model for how gravity and space work -- has been confirmed with countless experiments. And, as ad hoc as it sounds, an Einstein-Rosen bridge is a perfectly valid solution to the equations of general relativity.

Graphene transistor could advance nanodevices

2010-05-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

For years, scientists and researchers have been looking into the properties of carbon nanotubes and graphene for use in nanoelectronics. There is no real mass application of devices based on graphene and carbon nanotubes , Zhenxing Wang tells PhysOrg.com. This is really an opportunity for them to show their capabilities .

Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 173104 ( 2010 )

Death of a star in 3D

2010-05-11T13:17:00.000-07:00

( PhysOrg.com ) -- Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching have for the first time managed to reproduce the asymmetries and fast-moving iron clumps of observed supernovae by complex computer simulations in all three dimensions. To this end they successfully followed the outburst in their models consistently from milliseconds after the onset of the blast to the demise of the star several hours later. ( Astrophysical Journal, May 10th, 2010 ).

Unraveling the physics of DNA's double helix

2010-04-23T04:26:00.000-07:00

The stability of DNA is so fundamental to life that it's important to understand all factors , said Piotr Marszalek, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials sciences at Duke. If you want to create accurate models of DNA to study its interaction with proteins or drugs, for example, you need to understand the basic physics of the molecule . For that, you need solid measurements of the forces that stabilize DNA .

DNA construction kit for nanoengines

2010-04-23T04:12:00.000-07:00

For a rotaxane molecule consists essentially of an axle and a ring, or hoop, threaded over it. To prevent the hoop from slipping off the axle, bulky stoppers are placed at each end. These, in turn, consist of intertwined rings. The whole construction looks rather like a dumbbell with a hoop around its handle ( see diagram ).

Laser technology provides a quantum leap (La tecnología láser da un salto cuántico)

2010-04-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

En la Universidad de Innsbruck ( Austria ), un equipo de investigación financiado con fondos comunitarios ha creado un láser de átomo único que se rige por el mismo principio que los láseres clásicos pero que además presenta propiedades cuánticas en sus interacciones entre átomos y fotones. Los resultados de su investigación, publicados en la revista Nature Physics, ampliarán el conocimiento que se posee de las propiedades de los láseres y podrán utilizarse para medir composiciones de oligoelementos gaseosos e isótopos de carbono en el aire y el suelo.

At the University of Innsbruck ( Austria ), a team of private funded research has created a single atom laser which is governed by the same principle as lasers but also presents classical quantum properties in interactions between atoms and photons. The results of their research, published in the journal Nature Physics, expand the knowledge of the lasers properties and may be used to measure gas compositions of trace elements and isotopes of carbon in the air and soil.

La mayor tormenta solar en 500 días inquieta a los científicos

2010-04-06T23:26:00.001-07:00

Una vez más, y esta vez con más fuerza y de forma totalmente inesperada, el Sol ha dado muestras de que ha despertado de su letargo. El telescopio espacial 'Tesis' registró el lunes la mayor tormenta geomagnética desde octubre de 2008, según informa el Instituto ruso de Física 'Lebedev'. La tormenta solar alcanzó el nivel 7 en una escala de 10, el máximo histórico del último año y medio. Su fase activa se prolongó de las 10.00 a las 19.00 horas. "No se han producido fluctuaciones de tal magnitud durante 540 días, desde el 11 de octubre de 2008", aseguran los técnicos. Una gran actividad solar no presagia nada bueno en un mundo absolutamente dependiente de la tecnología.

Once again, this time harder and quite unexpectedly, the Sun has shown that he has awakened from its slumber. The Hubble Space 'thesis' posted on Monday, the largest geomagnetic storm of October 2008, according to the Russian Institute of Physics 'Lebedev'. The solar storm reached level 7 on a scale of 10, the record high last year and a half. Active phase lasted from 10.00 to 19.00. "There have been no fluctuations of such magnitude for 540 days, from October 11, 2008", say the technicians. A high solar activity does not bode well in a world utterly dependent on technology.

Viajar a la velocidad de la luz mataría en pocos segundos

2010-04-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

Malas noticias para todos los que soñábamos con recorrer la galaxia a velocidades relativísticas. Según parece, al desplazarnos a velocidades cercanas a la de la luz, los escasos átomos de hidrógeno que existen en el espacio vacío nos golpearían tan duro como las partículas aceleradas por el Gran Colisionador de Hadrones ( LHC ). Si los científicos de la Universidad Johns Hopkins están en lo cierto, esos pequeños átomos nos freirían en pocos segundos .

Bad news for all those who dreamed of exploring the galaxy at relativistic speeds. Apparently, the motion at speeds approaching that of light, the few hydrogen atoms that exist in the  vacuum  would hit us as hard as particles accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ). If    scientists at Johns Hopkins University are right,  these little atoms will fry us in a few seconds .

Charging Ahead: Carbon Nanotubes Could Hold Long-Sought Battery Technology Breakthrough

2010-04-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

With battery technology advances long overdue, researchers are racing to develop more efficient ways to store power. One hopeful option is in the use of carbon nanotubes, which can store much more electricity by weight than lithium-ion batteries while keeping their charge and remain durable for far longer .

Fossil finger points to new human species

2010-03-25T00:41:00.000-07:00

Its genetic material told another story. When German researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fossil, they found that it did not match that of Neanderthals — or of modern humans, which were also living nearby at the time.

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

2010-03-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

ATOMIC TRAP cools by means of two different mechanisms

First, six laser beams ( red ) cool atoms, initially at room temperature, while corralling them toward the center of an evacuated glass box.

Next, the laser beams are turned off, and the magnetic coils ( copper ) are energized. Current flowing through the coils generates a magnetic field that further confines most of the atoms while allowing the energetic ones to escape. Thus, the average energy of the remaining atoms decreases, making the sample colder and even more closely confined to the center of the trap.

Ultimately, many of the atoms attain the lowest possible energy state allowed by quantum mechanics and become a single entity known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Light Improvement: Could Quantum Dots Boost the Quality of Cell Phone Pix?

2010-03-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

Semiconductor crystals known as quantum dots have long held the promise of improving solar cells, lasers and lighting fixtures, but the reality is that integrating these fluorescent nanoparticles into existing technologies has proved difficult. One Silicon Valley start-up now aims to change this by the end of next year using quantum dots to vastly improve the picture-taking quality of cell phone cameras.

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics

2010-03-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Scanner scans a 200 page book in one minute (w/ Video)

2010-03-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

A research team led by Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo has developed a prototype scanner that allows users to scan a book simply by rapidly flipping its pages. A high-speed camera operating at 500 fps and producing pictures with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels, takes pictures of the page and its contents of text and images under ordinary light. A laser then projects lines on the page, and the camera captures this image as well. The lines allow the system to adjust for the curvature and distortion of pages as they are being flipped, and the software reconstructs the image into a digitized picture of a flat, regular page.

Perelman wins Millenium Prize for proving Poincaré conjecture

2010-03-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

The American Clay Mathematics Institute has awarded the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman a million dollars for proving what is known as the Poincare Conjecture, a milestone theorem which opens up a whole new field in geometry. The Institute says such breakthroughs happen once in a millennium and cannot be allowed to pass unrewarded. Forty-six-year-old Mr. Perelman meantime is a known recluse who has already rejected a gold medal and cash from the latest World Mathematical Congress for his remarkable discovery. He has spent the period since 2006 in a remote suburban location without contact with colleagues. His former superior at the Steklov Mathematical Institute Professor Sergei Kislyakov warns the Clay Institute that Dr. Perelman is likely to ignore his latest international honour.

A Theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All

2010-03-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Although any T. Rex–enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away,

and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago.

A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator: Scientific American

2010-03-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

But that is precisely what a group of Japanese researchers has found, as detailed in a study in the March 11 issue of Nature. The electric current induces a collective excitation in the magnetic insulator that can travel relatively long distances before unloading its momentum to generate a voltage when it reaches an electric conductor.

A precision measurement of the gravitational redshift by the interference of matter waves

2010-02-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

One of the central predictions of metric theories of gravity, such as general relativity, is that a clock in a gravitational potential U will run more slowly by a factor of 1 + U/c², where c is the velocity of light, as compared to a similar clock outside the potential1.

This effect, known as gravitational redshift, is important to the operation of the global positioning system, timekeeping, and future experiments with ultra-precise, space-based clocks ( such as searches for variations in fundamental constants ).

The gravitational redshift has been measured using clocks on a tower, an aircraft and a rocket, currently reaching an accuracy of 7×10^-5.

Here we show that laboratory experiments based on quantum interference of atoms enable a much more precise measurement, yielding an accuracy of 7×10^-9.

Our result supports the view that gravity is a manifestation of space-time curvature, an underlying principle of general relativity that has come under scrutiny in connection with the search for a theory of quantum gravity.

Improving the redshift measurement is particularly important because this test has been the least accurate among the experiments that are required to support curved space-time theories.

Paul Krugman: Good and Boring ("Right now, Canada is a very important role model")

2010-02-16T15:53:00.000-08:00

First, some background. Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.
But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there.

In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently ?

NIST’s Second ‘Quantum Logic Clock’ Based on Aluminum Ion is Now World’s Most Precise Clock

2010-02-07T21:47:00.000-08:00

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world’s most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom. The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements to be reported in Physical Review Letters ( preprint ). The new clock is the second version of NIST’s quantum logic clock , so called because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing, another major focus of the same NIST research group. ( The logic process is described at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/logic_clock/logic_clock.html#background ) The second version of the logic clock offers more than twice the precision of the original.

The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis

2010-02-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

By hitting single molecules with quadrillionth-of-a-second laser pulses, scientists have revealed the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis, the process used by plants and bacteria to convert light into energy, at efficiencies unapproached by human engineers. The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path.

Pablo Antillano: "Tomás Eloy Martínez cambió el Periodismo Venezolano"

2010-02-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

En mi generación casi nadie discute que Tomás Eloy Martínez partió en dos la historia de nuestro periodismo. En la época que él llegó al país, los periodistas de El Nacional asumían como maestros a Moradell y a Mario Delfín Becerra, y se sentían herederos de Miguel Otero Silva y Federico Álvarez, de Sergio Antillano y Héctor Mujica, de Arístides Bastidas y Pascual Venegas Filardo, de Antonio Arráiz y Jesús Sanoja. Se hacía un periodismo correcto, devoto de la noticia, el tubazo, el objetivismo y la pirámide invertida. Aunque simpatizaban, en su mayoría, con causas de izquierda suscribían las normas clásicas del diarismo norteamericano.

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Buscan crear super computadoras sin límite de velocidad

2010-01-23T14:40:00.000-08:00

Un equipo de investigadores liderados por científicos de la Universidad de Yale ejecutó exitosamente operaciones simples de mecánica cuántica, lo cual podría significar la creación de hardware con potencial ilimitado de procesamiento.

Quantum Simulation of a Relativistic Particle

2010-01-07T21:17:00.000-08:00

Researchers of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck, Austria, used a calcium ion to simulate a relativistic quantum particle, demonstrating a phenomenon that has not been directly observable so far:

The Zitterbewegung

They have published their findings in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Golden Ratio Discovered in Quantum World: Hidden Symmetry Observed for the First Time in Solid State Matter

2010-01-07T20:41:00.000-08:00

The magnetic field is used to tune the chains of spins to a quantum critical state. The resonant modes ( notes ) are detected by scattering neutrons. These scatter with the characteristic frequencies of the spin chains. (Credit: Image courtesy of Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres)

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie ( HZB ), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.

Venezuela gana por tercera vez la «Letra de Oro» en Leipzig

2010-01-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

...esta vez con Geohistoria de la Sensibilidad en Venezuela, de Pedro Cunill Grau, edición de la Fundación Empresas Polar, Caracas, 2007.

AstroPhysics: La profesora del millón de dólares

2009-12-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

La astrofísica Kelly Holley-Bockelman, de la Universidad de Vanderbilt (Estado de Tennessee) ha obtenido la dotación más elevada de la historia para profesores jóvenes, en el área de astronomía, que otorga la Fundación Nacional para la Ciencia de Estados Unidos. Son más de un millón de dólares que destinará a proseguir sus estudios sobre los agujeros negros y a financiar el programa que pretende conseguir que su universidad sea la que produzca más doctores en física y astronomía de las minorías sociales hasta ahora discriminadas.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY

2009-12-15T22:08:00.001-08:00

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made: 1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

Read 99 more reasons at this page link ( above )

E=mc2 is Wrong – Einstein’s “Special Relativity” Fundamentally Flawed

2009-12-11T05:26:00.001-08:00

Is Albert Einstein’s Special Relativity incompatible with the very equations upon which science’s greatest theory is built ?. New observations made by many scientists and engineers appear to contradict the great German scientist’s ideas. Apparently there are implicit contradictions present within Relativity’s foundational ideas, documents and equations. One individual has even pointed that quotations from the 1905 document and Einstein’s contemporaries as well as interpretations of the Relativity equations clearly and concisely describe a confused and obviously erroneous theory. It is time therefore, for science to update its thinking on this theory with a comprehensive analysis of the history leading up to, during and after that revolutionary year of Special Relativity.

Brain Stimulation with Infrared Light

2009-12-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

Researchers have recently found that infrared light has the capability of stimulating brain cells. Infrared light causes the excitation of neurons thus altering their activity. This new type of brain stimulation method is referred to as infrared nerve stimulation (INS). INS has a variety of applications for altering the functioning of central nervous system disorders. For many brain disorders, brain activity is altered in comparison to more normal states. Infrared light has a very high selectivity and can target very small sub-populations of brain cells. This type of stimulation could potentially reduce many of the side effects of current brain stimulation.

Synthetic magnetism achieved by optical methods: Technique enables unprecedented insights

2009-12-04T19:08:00.000-08:00

For the first time, physicists have used laser light to create  synthetic magnetism , an exotic condition in which neutral atoms suddenly begin to behave as if they were charged particles interacting with a magnetic field -- even though no such field is present and the atoms have no charge. The achievement provides unprecedented insights into fundamental physics and the behavior of quantum objects, and opens up entirely new ways to study the nature of condensed-matter systems that were barely imaginable before.

The Dark Attractor: What's Pulling the Milky Way Towards It at 14-Million MPH?

2009-11-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

Astronomers have known for years that something unknown apears to be pulling our Milky Way and tens of thousands of other galaxies toward itself at a breakneck 22 million kilometers (14 million miles) per hour. But they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what, or where it is. A huge volume of space that includes the Milky Way and super-clusters of galaxies is flowing towards a mysterious, gigantic unseen mass named mass astronomers have dubbed "The Great Attractor," some 250 million light years from our Solar System. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant structures in a galaxy cluster called the Local Group which is, in turn, an outlying member of the Virgo supercluster. Andromeda--about 2.2 million light-years from the Milky Way--is speeding toward our galaxy at 200,000 miles per hour...

EconoPhysics (On offer: laws of nature)

2009-10-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post I asked why economics doesn't have a few laws of nature that could prevent people from basing decisions on the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Enter the econophysicists, academics, ( usually physicists delving outside the field and not economists borrowing from physics ), who want to apply the rigorous mathematical methods of physics to understanding the economy. By modeling the economy as a collection of minor actors, like the molecules of gas, they hope to uncover how individual actions give rise to the emergent, large-scale phenomena that have sweeping effects—the booms and busts that take us by surprise.

Preserving the past for the future; Grant aids archival work at Institute. (Old Einstein pictures)

2009-10-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

Princeton Township --The archivist lifted the pearl-gray cover off of an oversized folio of photographs recently found at the The National Medal of Science, Awarded by the President of the United States to Kurt Gödel in 1974, part of the Institute for Advanced Study archive collection, photographed on Friday, October 23, 2009. here. From beneath the protective tissue paper emerged a black and white photograph of the great, leonine face of Albert Einstein.

Stephen Wolfram: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...

2009-10-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

..."The climax of the book is the principle of computational equivalence, which may as well be called "Wolfram's law." After hundreds of pages of laying groundwork, presenting case after case of visual examples where simple rules generate counterintuitively complex results, Wolfram concludes that this phenomenon is overwhelmingly commonplace - it's at the base of everything from morphology to traffic jams. Then he goes further, stating that once a system achieves a certain, easily attainable degree of complexity, it's reached the point of maximum complexity, as measured by the computation required to crank out the end result. Everything at that level of complexity - and that means almost everything you can think of, from human thought to rain hitting pavement - is exactly as complex as anything else."...

String theory pioneer succeeds Hawking in Lucasian role

2009-10-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

One of the founders of string theory has been elected to replace Stephen Hawking as Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Professor Michael Green becomes the 18th holder of the professorship. Prof Green, who currently holds the John Humphrey Plummer Professorship of Theoretical Physics is one of the founders of string theory, generally regarded as the most successful candidate to date to unify quantum theory and general relativity, the two fundamental physical theories of the early twentieth century, and thereby formulate a consistent quantum theory of gravity.

Richard Dawkins: The world's most famous atheist

2009-10-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, arrives in the celebratory year that marks Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the On the Origin of the Species.

Richard Dawkins home page

Douglas Eadline, Ph.D.: The Return of the Vector Processor

2009-10-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

Before I dive into Fermi the GPU, I wanted to take a moment and pay tribute to Enrico Fermi the person — for whom the new GPU was named. For you young whippersnappers out there, Enrico Fermi is one of the giants of physics. He was instrumental in advancing physics on many fronts including quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics ( a favorite subject of mine ). He had a rare combination of talent that allowed him to be both an excellent theorist and experimentalist. His legacy is legendary as he has an element named after him ( Fermium, a synthetic element created in 1952 ), a national lab ( the Fermi National Accelerator Lab ), and a class of particles that bare his name ( fermions ). No lightweight this Fermi fellow.

There has been no increase in solar irradiance since at least 1978

2009-10-06T14:20:00.000-07:00

There has been work done reconstructing the solar irradiance record over the last century, before satellites were available. According to the Max Planck Institute, where this work is being done, there has been

no increase in solar irradiance since around 1940

This reconstruction does show an increase in the first part of the 20th century, which coincides with the warming from around 1900 until the 1940s. It's not enough to explain all the warming from those years, but it is responsible for a large portion. See this chart of observed temperature, modelled temperature, and variations in the major forcings that contributed to 20th century climate.

Historical Physicist Smackdown Explained: Electric Theory

2009-10-06T14:17:00.000-07:00

So, who are the people in yesterday's poll about theoretical physicists, and why should you know them? Three of the four shared a Nobel Prize for developing quantum electrodynamics. In reverse order of voting: Julian Schwinger was an American physicist who came up with a very formal, mathematically rigorous way of describing the behavior of electrons interacting with light. This turns out to be a hard problem, because any attempt to calculate an electron's energy by simple, straightforward means ends up giving an infinite answer. Schwinger helped "renormalize" the theory, getting rid of the infinity with some elegant mathematics.

Deconstructing the electron

2009-10-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Explaining the behavior of interacting electrons in a solid is one of the long-standing problems in condensed matter. For most systems, the problem has been masterfully addressed by Landau, who showed that even though interactions can be very large, excitations behaving essentially as free fermions still exist in the system. The Landau Fermi-liquid theory allows sweeping the interactions under the rug and saying that the properties of many materials will be very similar to those of free electrons. However, this theory fails spectacularly when an electron gas is confined to one dimension. In that case, a completely new universality class appears, and the Fermi liquid turns into a Luttinger liquid.

download .pdf ( free )

Superheavy Element 114 Finally Re-created

2009-10-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

By firing calcium isotopes into a plutonium target inside a particle accelerator, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have finally confirmed the Russian discovery of the superheavy element 114. It wasn’t easy. It took more than a week of running the experiment to generate a measly two atoms of the stuff, which they reported in Physical Review Letters last week. It’s basic science at the outer limits of matter.

Pedagogía by Andrés Ibáñez

2009-09-25T19:47:00.000-07:00

Pedagogía. Enseñar a enseñar. La falacia dice que no sólo es necesario saber de algo, sino que también es necesario saber enseñarlo . Este principio o axioma casi místico se basa, como el amable lector habrá visto enseguida, en una presuposición no menos axial y mística, y no menos falaz que la anterior: A saber, que todos aquellos que no son pedagogos, no son ni pueden ser nunca buenos profesores.

Michelson–Morley experiment is best yet

2009-09-23T00:48:00.000-07:00

Physicists in Germany have performed the most precise Michelson-Morley experiment to date,

confirming that the speed of light is the same in all directions

The experiment, which involves rotating two optical cavities, is about 10 times more precise than previous experiments – and a hundred million times more precise than Michelson and Morley's 1887 measurement.

U of S helps discover new family of superconductors

2009-09-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

The superconductor family Tse discovered in conjunction with a number of international researchers is a group of hydrogen compounds known as molecular hydrides. Tse and graduate student Yansun Yao worked out the theoretical basis for the experiment as well as the key chemical structures involved, while German scientist Mikhail Eremets did the lab work.

First Solid Evidence for a Rocky Exoplanet

2009-09-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

Mass and density of smallest exoplanet finally measured.

The longest set of HARPS measurements ever made has firmly established the nature of the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, revealing its mass as five times that of Earth's. Combined with CoRoT-7b's known radius, which is less than twice that of our terrestrial home, this tells us that the exoplanet's density is quite similar to the Earth's, suggesting a solid, rocky world. The extensive dataset also reveals the presence of another so-called super-Earth in this alien solar system.

First images of a carbon atom's electron clouds

2009-09-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

The images were captured by Igor Mikhailovskij 's team at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, Ukraine.

The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget

2009-09-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

The two students ( from MIT, of course ) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet v. 1.1

2009-09-13T17:17:00.001-07:00

Author: Jacob Seidelin

video – more than just a tag

2009-09-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

This article is written by Paul Rouget , Mozilla contributor and purveyor of extraordinary Open Web demos.

Starting with Firefox 3.5, you can embed a video in a web page like an image.

This means video is now a part of the document, and finally, a first class citizen of the Open Web. Like all other elements, you can use it with CSS and JavaScript. Let’s see what this all means …

Juan Aréchaga: Las revistas científicas españolas y el fraude bibliométrico

2009-09-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

Son muchos los problemas que continúan teniendo nuestras publicaciones para competir internacionalmente , dice el autor.

El reciente informe 2008 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition ( JCR, Institute for Scientific Information, Thomson Reuters, 2009 ) ofrece algunas novedades de interés, como el incremento, más bien escaso, de revistas españolas entre las 6.598 seleccionadas ( 0,56 % del total ) y un nuevo parámetro bibliométrico, denominado 5-Year Impact Factor, que mejora notablemente ediciones precedentes. Con toda seguridad, el último JCR ha sido espoleado por su nuevo competidor, conocido como SCImago Journal & Country Rank, desarrollado íntegramente en España sobre la base de datos SCOPUS de la multinacional holandesa Elsevier. Así, este repertorio amplía su análisis ya a 16.033 revistas científicas y, entre ellas, 227 ( 1,4 % ) españolas...¡ No hay nada mejor que la competencia para renovar productos y servicios ! Pero, también, el 2008JCR dedica un espacio importante al tema de las auto-referencias ( no confundir con las autocitas de los propios autores, que esto es harina de otro costal ), un aspecto que suele pasar desapercibido para muchos, pero que merece una especial atención por su trascendencia en España.

The uncalculability of electron systems

2009-09-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

The electric and magnetic properties of solids are impossible to calculate exactly: The complex interactions of the many electrons which underly these phenomena cannot be computed even by the most powerful classical computers. Here, the central task is to determine the ground state of the electrons moving in the field of the positively charged nuclei. The most widely used method for treating such systems is Density Functional Theory, which reduces the many-body problem to a single particle interaction. As Dr. Norbert Schuch, scientist in the theory division of Prof. Ignacio Cirac at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, and Prof. Frank Verstraete from the University of Vienna, report in Nature Physics ( DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1370 ), there exist however fundamental limitations to the applicability of this theory. The scientists succeeded by using methods developed in Quantum Information Theory, demonstrating that these methods can give deep insights beyond the development of quantum computers.

Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox

2009-09-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

The laws of physics, which describe everything from electricity to moving objects to energy conservation, are time-invariant. That is, the laws still hold if time is reversed. However, this time reversal symmetry is in direct contrast with everyday phenomena, where it’s obvious that time moves forward and not backward .

For example, when milk is spilt, it can’t flow back up into the glass, and when pots are broken, their pieces can’t shatter back together. This irreversibility is formalized through the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases or stays the same, but never decreases. This contrast has created a reversibility paradox, also called Loschmidt’s paradox , which scientists have been trying to understand since Johann Loschmidt began considering the problem in 1876. Scientists have proposed many solutions to the conundrum, from trying to embed irreversibility in physical laws to postulating low-entropy initial states.

IBM eyes molecule 'anatomy' for future computers

2009-09-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

IBM scientists have imaged the chemical structure of an individual molecule, increasing the possibility for creating electronic building blocks on the atomic and molecular scale.

Scientists In Zurich, Switzerland, have, for the first time, imaged the "anatomy," or chemical structure, of an individual molecule with "unprecedented" resolution, using noncontact atomic force microscopy (AFM), IBM said Thursday. Resolving individual atoms within a molecule has been a long-standing goal of surface microscopy, according to the computer company, which has a research and development program dating back to 1945.

Schoolgirl 'wanted to lose virginity before Large Hadron Collider caused end of world'

2009-09-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

The girl, who is aged between 13 and 15, had heard rumours that particle accelerator under the Franco-Swiss border would bring about Armageddon when it was switched on last September. At the time leading scientists including Prof Stephen Hawking were forced to deny claims that the £4.4bn accelerator would generate a black hole capable of swallowing up the earth. In the event the collider kicked into life peacefully, although it has since been beset by technological problems. But police in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories. Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones. Police have launched an investigation under child pornography laws , although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

El agujero negro más lejano tiene una galaxia enorme a su alrededor

2009-09-03T22:30:00.001-07:00

El agujero negro más lejano que se conoce, un objeto supermasivo situado a 12.800 millones de años luz de la Tierra, tiene alrededor una galaxia tan grande como nuestra Vía Láctea, algo sorprendente en el universo primitivo tan joven ( sólo 840 millones de años después del Big Bang ), dicen los científicos. La galaxia y el agujero negro, que tiene al menos mil millones de veces más materia que el Sol, debieron formarse muy rápidamente en el cosmos primitivo , dice Tomotsugu Goto ( Universidad de Hawai ), líder de esta investigación, en la que participan, además, cuatro astrofísicos de instituciones japonesas. De hecho, las observaciones se realizaron en agosto del año pasado con el gran telescopio nipón Subaru, ubicado en el observatorio de Mauna Kea ( Hawai ), sobre todo para probar un nuevo sensor ( CCD ) avanzado instalado en una de sus cámaras.

Rafael Cadenas agradece Premio FIL de Literatura

2009-09-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

El poeta venezolano recibirá el reconocimiento dotado con 150 mil dólares que busca destacar al autor que haya aportado una valiosa obra de creación, en cualquier género literario

Luego de que el jurado decidió que el poeta venezolano Rafael Cadenas sea quien se lleve el Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances 2009, el vate agradeció la distinción vía telefónica.

Cadenas, quien recibirá el galardón dotado con 150 mil dólares en el marco de la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, el 28 de noviembre próximo, manifestó que tiene muchas cosas que agradecerle a México y dijo estar muy contento con el Premio.

Autor de una obra marcada por una continua meditación sobre la relación entre ética, lenguaje y poesía, el escritor sudamericano nacido en Barquisimeto en 1930, aseguró en entrevista, desde Caracas, que lo que  brota ahora en mí es la palabra gracias .

Cadenas también habló de su relación con México y sus autores y recordó que su obra completa está publicada en el Fondo de Cultura Económica, que este día se sumó a las felicitaciones para este autor.

El acta del jurado, que fue leída por Gustavo Guerrero, destacó a Cadenas como  una de las voces más reconocidas de la poesía latinoamericana contemporánea .

Señaló que su obra  encarna hoy para los más jóvenes el horizonte de una palabra que se aleja del lirismo tradicional y trae consigo el imperativo de darle voz a aquello que, de otro modo, ya no encuentra espacios para decirse en nuestra época .

Dotado con 150 mil dólares y convocado por la Asociación Civil del Premio de Literatura Latinoamericana y del Caribe Juan Rulfo, el Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances busca reconocer a un escritor que haya aportado una valiosa obra de creación, en cualquier género literario.

AAAI Fall Symposium - Nov. 5 - 7, 2009 - Arlington, VA

2009-08-31T14:48:00.000-07:00

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural and Social Sciences

Most interesting phenomena in natural and social systems include constant transitions and oscillations among their various phases. Wars, companies, societies, markets, and humans rarely stay in a stable, predictable state for long. Randomness, power laws, and human behavior ensure that the future is both unknown and challenging. How do events unfold ? When do they take hold ? Why do some initial events cause an avalanche while others do not ? What characterizes these events ? What are the thresholds that differentiate a sea change from a non-event ?

Complex Adaptive Systems have proven to be a powerful tool for exploring these and other related phenomena. We characterize a general CAS model as having a large number of self-similar agents that:

utilize one or more levels of feedback;
exhibit emergent properties and self-organization; and
produce non-linear dynamic behavior.

Advances in modeling and computing technology have led not only to a deeper understanding of complex systems in many areas, but they have also raised the possibility that similar fundamental principles may be at work across these systems, even though the underlying principles may manifest themselves differently.

Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse

2009-08-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

The Shanghai Composite Index was supposed to burst before July 27 but didn't. A few days after that deadline, however, it dropped by 20 percent. Coincidence ?.

Last month, we looked at a prediction that the Shanghai Composite stock market index was about to crash. The forecast was made by a team lead by the econophysicist Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who has made a study of economic bubbles and how they burst. His thinking is that bubbles are the result of some kind of feedback mechanism that creates faster-than-exponential growth. This kind of growth rate is straightforward to measure, and so bubbles should be easy to identify. In July, he and his buddies pointed out that the Shanghai Composite stock market index was following exactly this kind of trend. But they also made an extraordinary prediction. They said that this bubble would burst between July 17 and 27.

IBM looks to DNA to sustain Moore's Law

2009-08-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Low concentrations of triangular DNA origami bind to wide lines on a lithographically patterned surface. Credit: PRNewsFoto/IBM.

As chip geometries get infinitesimally small, IBM is looking to DNA to make the manufacture of future chips feasible. On Monday, IBM researchers and collaborator Paul W.K. Rothemund, of the California Institute of Technology, announced an advancement of a method to arrange DNA origami structures on surfaces compatible with today's semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The cost involved in shrinking (chip) features to improve performance is a limiting factor in keeping pace with Moore's Law and a concern across the semiconductor industry, said Spike Narayan, a manager in the Science & Technology division of IBM Research, in a statement. Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. For more than four decades, chip manufacturers have been able to consistently shrink chip geometries, allowing Moore's Law to remain on track.

A coincidence of errors: Critical exponent for the quantum Hall transition

2009-08-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

One of the most studied problems in the last twenty years is the integer quantum Hall effect, which describes the response of electrons confined in two-dimensions to a strong perpendicular magnetic field: The electrons move in circular orbits that fill bands, called Landau levels, and the Hall conductance ( i.e., the conductance perpendicular to an induced current ) of the electrons is quantized.

Like any phase transition, the change of the Hall conductance between quantized values ( as the electrons are moved between Landau levels by an external voltage or magnetic field ) can be described by a critical exponent, ν. Both numerical calculations and experiment agree fairly well about the value of ν.

But as Keith Slevin at Osaka University and Tomi Ohtsuki at Sophia University, both in Japan, argue in a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, this may be because of a coincidence of errors. Namely, numerical calculations have so far ignored Coulomb interactions between electrons, which should in fact be important, while the experimentally measured value of ν is based on approximations.

Quarks, gluons and corroborating E = mc2

2009-08-21T23:03:00.000-07:00

It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula E = mc² has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists. A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

Escuela Franco-Venezolana de Nanotecnología 2009 ( ENANO2009 ) del 2 al 6 de noviembre de 2009 en Caracas y Choroní, Venezuela

2009-08-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

Contacto

http://www.redvnano.org/congreso/contactanos.html

La Red Venezolana de Nanotecnología está ayudando a organizar la Escuela
Franco-Venezolana de Nanotecnología 2009 ( ENANO2009 ) del 2 al 6 de noviembre de 2009 en Caracas y Choroní ( Venezuela ), bajo el patrocinio de:
FONACIT
Programa de Cooperación de Postgraduados ( PCP )
Embajada de Francia en Caracas
Fundación IDEA
Academia de Ciencias Físicas, Matemáticas y Naturales
Universidad Central de Venezuela

Para el primer día del evento ( 2/11/09 ) se ha programado una jornada en la Fundación IDEA ( Caracas, Venezuela ) en la cual varios investigadores presentarán los desarrollos obtenidos fruto de la cooperación franco-venezolana en nanociencia y nanotecnología, gracias al apoyo de las herramientas de cooperación científica entre estos dos países.

El Comité Organizador de la ENANO2009 también ha programado sesiones de cursos, charlas y carteles del 3 al 6 de noviembre de 2009. Esta segunda parte de la Escuela tendrá lugar en Choroní, Edo. Aragua. Las sesiones van dirigidas a estudiantes e investigadores sensibles al desarrollo de estos conocimientos en Venezuela.

Se programarán además mesas de trabajo sobre aspectos asociados al programa de doctorado interinstitucional de nanotecnología que la Red se encuentra promoviendo, la cooperación nacional e internacional en actividades de I+D+i dirigidas a atender los problemas de interés nacional, la definición de mecanismos que faciliten la comunicación entre el sector científico, productivo y la sociedad en general.

Formalismo de Keldysh (Keldysh Technique)

2009-08-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

This technique provides the correct evaluation of the quantum mechanical average of an observable. It means that there is not any assumption about the final system state whenever we perform the above mentioned average. As a consequence, it is a suitable tool to study small systems in contact with macroscopic systems which are in "different" thermodynamic equilibrium states.

See the original Keldysh's papers:

L. V. Keldysh, ZhEFT 47, 1515 (1964)
L. V. Keldysh, Soviet Physics JEPT 20, 1018 (1965)

Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate

2009-08-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

Official government measurements show that the world's temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998. That's given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary. Proposals to combat global warming are "crazy" and will "destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family's annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year," the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. "High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health," the ads asserted.

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

2009-08-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person. “You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Organic food is no healthier, study finds

2009-07-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

Geologist Ian Plimer: Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites

2009-07-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him. Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic. Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

World's tiniest lamp spans quantum and classical physics

2009-07-17T16:07:00.000-07:00

The smallest ever incandescent lamp, made using a single carbon nanotube, has been created by physicists in the US. At 1.4 micrometres long and just 13 nanometres wide, the filament is invisible to the naked eye until it is switched on. Chris Regan's team at the University of California, Los Angeles attached a palladium and gold electrode to each end of the carbon nanotube, which spans a tiny hole in a silicon chip and is held in a vacuum. When electricity runs along the nanotube it heats up and begins to glow, releasing millions of photons every second, of which a few thousand reach the eye. "That makes the light relatively easy to see," says Regan. "Your eye is nearly single-photon sensitive." But it would make a poor reading lamp, he joke

Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence

2009-07-17T16:00:00.001-07:00

In 1971, Leon Chua had that feeling. A young electronics engineer with a penchant for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was fascinated by the fact that electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation. So like any diligent scientist, he set about trying to derive one. And he found something missing: a fourth basic circuit element besides the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. Chua dubbed it the "memristor". The only problem was that as far as Chua or anyone else could see, memristors did not actually exist.

Humor In The Workplace

2009-07-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

This is a sources sought notice and not a request for quotations. The purpose of this announcement is to seek qualified contractors with the capability to provide presentations for The Department of Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD), Management Meeting with experience in meeting the objectives as described herein.

The Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs...

A Brief Outline of the Development of the Theory of Relativity By Prof. A. Einstein

2009-07-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

There is something attractive in presenting the evolution of a sequence of ideas in as brief a form as possible, and yet with a completeness sufficient to preserve throughout the continuity of development. We shall endeavour to do this for the Theory of Relativity, and to show that the whole ascent is composed of small, almost self-evident steps of thought. The entire development starts off from, and is dominated by, the idea of Faraday and Maxwell, according to which all physical processes involve a continuity of action (as opposed to action at a distance), or, in the language of mathematics, they are expressed by partial differential equations. Maxwell succeeded in doing this for electro-magnetic processes in bodies at rest by means of the conception of the magnetic effect of the vacuum-displacement-current, together with the postulate of the identity of the nature of electro-dynamic fields produced by induction, and the electro-static field.

Electrons in graphene: an interacting fluid par excellence

2009-07-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ever since it was shown that graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms—could be isolated from graphite, it has occupied a center stage of condensed matter physics. The popularity of graphene is rooted in the unusual nature of its low-energy excitations: near the Fermi level, the electron energies scale linearly with their momenta. This means that the electrons can be described as massless fermions, though with a velocity of about 300 times less than the velocity of light. The linear dispersion relation also implies a vanishing density of single-particle states at the Fermi level, which should make the effects of the Coulomb interaction between electrons weak.

40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

2009-07-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

The importance of typography in design can’t be overestimated. The accuracy, precision and balance of geometric forms can give letters the elegance and sharpness they deserve. Besides, elegant fonts can help to convey the message in a more convenient way. In fact, while there are many excellent professional fonts (we’ve presented some of them in our article 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design) there are literally thousands of free low-quality fonts which you would never use for professional designs.

HTML 5 Won’t Be Ready Until 2022. Yes, 2022

2009-07-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

If you’re a web developer looking forward to the new tools in HTML 5, the next generation of the language that powers the web, we have some bad news for you — you’re going to waiting a while. Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 specification, recently outlined the time table for HTML 5 and, even assuming browser manufacturers embrace HTML 5 when it reaches the final draft stage, that puts HTML 5’s widespread adoption at 2012. Worse, the final proposed recommendation won’t be released until 2022.