AstroPhysics: La profesora del millón de dólares

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

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

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

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

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?

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)

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)

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 ...

..."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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Jacob Seidelin

video – more than just a tag

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

 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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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:

1. utilize one or more levels of feedback;
2. exhibit emergent properties and self-organization; and
3. 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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.