Stephen Hawking: Job Creator...

Universe Today

Wanted: Electronics whiz to maintain one-of-a-kind system interpreting twitches in famed physicist's face as "voice." System should also allow cell phone calls and Internet access. 25K pounds ($38,500) per year. Must travel to UK: heck, that's where he lives!

Yahoo Finance: Stephen Hawking seeks help to make voice heard, computer skills a plus

20 Years Post the Fall of Babel...

BBC Science

Glasnost, Perestroika...collapse. The communist experiment fell apart under the hubris of empire unmanageable; a quagmire in Afghanistan that bankrupted the nation and severed its satellites:

"The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a process of systematic disintegration, which occurred in economy, social structure and political structure. It resulted in the abolition of the Soviet Federal Government ("the Union center") and independence of the USSR's republics on 26 December 1991. The process was caused by weakening of the Soviet government, which led to disintegration and took place from about 19 January 1990 to 31 December 1991. The process was characterized by many of the republics of the Soviet Union declaring their independence and being recognized as sovereign nation-states." (Wikipedia)

The Hollow Men by T.S. Elliot has appropriate verse, and sadly (I hope not prophetically), an appropriate ending:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Post 60s childhood drills of "duck-and-cover" and a stated strategy of "Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)," I still await the "peace dividend"...

*****

This time, a Soyuz-2 vehicle failed to put a communications satellite into orbit after lifting away from the country's Plesetsk spaceport.

Debris is said to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and crashed to the ground.

In August, a Soyuz failure on a mission to resupply the space station led to a six-week suspension of flights.

*****

Friday's failure now puts a major question mark against the next Soyuz launch, scheduled for 28 December (Wednesday) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This flight is intended to put in orbit six satellites for the Globalstar satellite phone company.

And it will raise concern again among the partners on the International Space Station (ISS) that there may be systemic problems in the Russian launch sector.

Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz rocket is the only means of getting astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS. August's failure saw manned flights stand down even longer than the six weeks for unmanned Soyuz rockets, and the hiatus put a severe strain on the operation of the space station.

BBC Science: Another Soyuz rocket launch fails

Perspective on CERN...

Discovery Magazine

Amir D. Aczel studied mathematics, physics and operations research at Berkley, and holds a PhD in statistics. He is a writer of popular books on science (see name link for extensive list).

His article is titled: "Making Sense of CERN's Higgs Circus" on Discovery's web zine site:

By now you’ve heard the news-non-news about the Higgs: there are hints of a Higgs—even “strong hints”—but no cigar (and no Nobel Prizes) yet. So what is the story about the missing particle that everyone is so anxiously waiting for?

Part of it is the stringent demands physicists put on particle discoveries: a five-sigma (σ) level of proof - 99.99997% is greater than semiconductor manufacturing, which requires ±6 σ - 99.99966% to get your I-pod off the manufacturing floor!

Also, I think our media-driven society needs something said, else your endeavors loose relevancy - falling behind the latest political or celebrity meltdown, and thereby funding. Sad the tightrope we must now walk.

Discovery: Making Sense of CERN's Higgs Circus

Favorite Dilbert Posts the Past Week...

A common theme: the boss I hope I'm NOT!

Dilbert: Dilbertdotcom

Beauty, Anti-Beauty and the LHC...

Olivia Wilde as evil queen; Alec Baldwin as magic mirror

Since Alec Baldwin has been in the news, especially his humorous SNL skit, I couldn't resist the double entendre. Follow below...

"The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964." (Wikipedia)

Apparently, Gell-Mann won creds in the cool naming category as he sourced it "from the book 'Finnegan's Wake' by James Joyce. The line "Three quarks for Muster Mark..." appears in the fanciful book. Gell-Mann received the 1969 Nobel Prize for his work in classifying elementary particles." (Hyperphysics)

I understand this naming completely: Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz had discovered the derivative and anti-derivative independently. Sir Isaac wanted to call the new math "fluxions"; Liebniz Calculus. Thankfully, Calculus won out.

Naming does matter: e.g., political Calculus sounds way better than political fluxions...that almost sounds dirty!

Quarks have six "flavors": up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. It's the last they think discovered at the Large Haydron Collider. The botton quark (also called the "beauty quark" - sounds like a few particle physicists need to get out of the lab more), was discovered in 1977, at Fermilab an experimental group led by Leon Lederman (a.k.a. "The God Particle" guy) discovered a new resonance at 9.4 GeV/c² which was interpreted as a bottom-antibottom quark pair and called the Upsilon meson. This is also the same Lederman "taking the Lord's name in vain" voicing his frustration on not finding God Particle/Higgs Boson, or any other such thing under heaven at near light speed particle collisions.

Good news for the LHC...

BBC Science: LHC reports discovery of its first new particle
Physics arXiv: Observation of a New χ_b State in Radiative Transitions to ϒ(1S) and ϒ(2S) at ATLAS
Hyperphysics: Quarks
Wikipedia: Quarks

In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

Galaxy GN-108036, 12.9 billion years ago

December 21, 2011

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have discovered that one of the most distant galaxies known is churning out stars at a shockingly high rate. The blob-shaped galaxy, called GN-108036, is the brightest galaxy found to date at such great distances.

The galaxy, which was discovered and confirmed using ground-based telescopes, is 12.9 billion light-years away. Data from Spitzer and Hubble were used to measure the galaxy's high star production rate, equivalent to about 100 suns per year. For reference, our Milky Way galaxy is about five times larger and 100 times more massive than GN-108036, but makes roughly 30 times fewer stars per year.

1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10¹⁵ meters = 5.87849981 × 10¹² miles

NASA: NASA Telescopes Help Find Rare Galaxy at Dawn of Time

For All of Us Basketball Fans Out There...

Merry Christmas! The drought is finally over!

Though, I doubt we'll be seeing any shots like this one. I am looking at Chris Paul and the LA Clippers with renewed interest, and a setting on my DVR to "record all."

My Personal Favorite "Nerd" Tree...

Although, the "Darth Tree" ran a very close second!

YES! It's "Godzilla Tree" at a mall in Japan

Gadget Box (MSNBC): The nerdiest Christmas trees ever

Positronium Laser...

New Scientist

HALF matter, half antimatter, positronium atoms teeter on the brink of annihilation. Now there's a way to make these unstable atoms survive much longer, a key step towards making a powerful gamma-ray laser.

All the elements in the periodic table consist of atoms with a nucleus of positively charged protons, orbited by the same number of negatively charged electrons. Positronium, symbol Ps, is different. It consists of an electron and a positron orbiting each other (see diagram). A positron is the electron's antimatter counterpart. Though positively charged like the proton, it has just 0.0005 times its mass. Positronium "atoms" survive less than a millionth of a second before the electron and positron annihilate in a burst of gamma rays.

In principle, positronium could be used to make a gamma ray laser. It would produce a highly energetic beam of extremely short wavelength that could probe tiny structures including the atomic nucleus - the wavelength of visible light is much too long to be of any use for this.

The trouble is that this means assembling a dense cloud of positronium in a quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). How to do this without the positronium annihilating in the process was unclear.

Wolfgang Ketterle, Bose-Einstein Condensates: The Coldest Matter in the Universe (video). I saw him at a Physics colloquium at UT Austin:




New Scientist: How to build a gamma-ray laser with antimatter hybrid

THIS is why I joined the Air Force...

...yes, I'm a veteran.

Physics arXiv

I was a Communications/Computer Systems Officer (though not nearly as attractive in uniform as Uhura, or her reboot). Then, and now, it was the youngest branch of the armed services, and the one that seemed to think in future-tense.

On the Physics arXiv link, the Air Force seems to be working on quantum computing with holograms, and according to the post, they can do it with off-the-shelf tech (like, Radio Shack, my next favorite place other than the library). Reading the paper, they seem to talk a lot about quantum teleportation.

I checked: sadly, not carried by "The Shack," but products at OptiGrate Corporation out of Florida. Probably NOT cheap!

Star Trek database: Descent, Part I

Physics arXiv: Quantum computing in a piece of glass

More Efficient Solar Cells...

Science NOW - AAAS

Researchers have created a new type of solar cell that captures some of the excess energy in sunlight normally lost as heat. So far, the new solar cells still convert sunlight to electricity at an efficiency well below commercial solar cells. But if the process can be improved, it could help pave the way to a new generation of solar cells with higher efficiencies.

For most materials, the conversion of photons of sunlight to electricity is well understood. Photons of different colors have different amounts of energy. In the visible spectrum, reds and oranges have less energy, while blues, violets, and ultraviolet photons carry progressively more. When high-energy photons hit a semiconducting material in a solar cell, they give up this energy to the semiconductor's electrons, exciting them from a static position so that they are able to conduct. In many cases, high-energy photons—violets and ultraviolets—carry far more energy than is needed to give electrons the nudge to conduct. But this excess energy is lost as heat.

Science NOW: Solar Cells Capture Lost Energy

I Can't Take Credit for the Title..

John Horgan will make you laugh-out-loud about science, or in his blog, the absurdity and sensationalism of it.

My take: we miss a bygone era when the "men that were men" were Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynman, Schrodinger et al. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics was "the new physics."

I've tried to present both sides, pro-and-con, on the so-called "God Particle" (you'll see what Leo Lederman now refers to it as in the embed: just scroll down).

I think it's human ambition to be on the forefront of the next "big thing." There are now web sites like Big Think, and TED Talks (plus blog and You Tube channel) that we almost expect a new idea with the quaint predictability of Moore's Law.

This blog is a water cooler conversation on physics. It hopefully shows what most think is hard to comprehend is all around you: you just don't see it as physics. My 21st Century homage to Mr. Wizard. (Related post)

I've purchased a few popular books in physics. Though I enjoy reading quite a bit, I think hard science fiction does a better job at popularizing science to the general public.

Strong Force...

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: The president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., came to that job in 1999 with a stellar resume. Besides being the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shirley Ann Jackson headed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Clinton administration and was a physicist at Bell Laboratories and other notable research institutions. How did this lightning-quick thinker develop her interest in both science and education policy?

An excerpt to the book can be found on SciAm and the link below.

Wikipeda: Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson

The National Academy Press: Strong Force: The Story of Physicist Shirley Ann Jackson

Myth Busted...

[From the article] Einstein once remarked that a person "who has not made their greatest contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so."

However, this was stated by someone that had the Annus Mirabilis, his contemporaries Werner Heisenberg et al were young men. Richard Feynman, bawdy and irreverently playing bongos while working on the Oppenheimer project. All of this coincided with the reluctant contribution by Einstein to the discovery of Quantum Mechanics: "spooky action at a distance."

So...the world has gotten more complicated. Slide rules have been replaced by calculators - as tools, the volumes of data that needs analysis requires some dexterity in computer programming.

Note the following:

If I had a "favorite" Calculus problem, it was this one (wish I could have drawn it better). It requires a variable substitution, followed by a Partial Fraction Decomposition, reference to the right integral tables and a LOT of tenacity! It took me and my classmates about three days on the chalk board at Marteena Hall. It takes me now about 45 minutes (I reference Efunda.com for integral tables now).

What it's done is extended the viability of science as a profession. Upwards into times when researchers usually "settle" for the cushy office job in administration, or in a field they never imagined using their technical skills in.

Individuals don't make discoveries now: teams work through several graduate school rotations. Former students come back to work as post docs, or on other enterprises related to the previous research topic. The academic landscape has changed as full professors must train in the skills of full people managers, bringing out the best in their students as a manager in a corporate arena must bring out the best in their personnel to drive innovation and change.

Singular eureka moments are dead, as are imposed limits due to the calendar.

Long live...contributions and collaboration.

ABC Science: Young Einstein is a modern myth

Missed the chat...

ABC Science

Catch up:

The Power of Pencils and Stubborness...

As a protest regarding stepping through the calculations -- physics or mathematics -- a student would invariably say "well, we have calculators now!"

As my own rejoinder, I alluded that Einstein literally created the modern age with a pencil and wads of crumpled paper in a German patent office. See: Annus Mirabilis Papers. He often described himself has having the stubborness of a mule.

It would appear the modern age forward will be further impacted by pencils and stubborness...

Scientific American: Graphene: The Pencil Material That Will Revolutionize Our Lives

Diamonds are not...

...just a girl's best friend. Can I still say that in this "PC" environment?

Oxford physicists using bizarre principle of "entanglement" to cause a change in a diamond they do not touch.

Dec 1, 2011

By Joel N. Shurkin, ISNS Contributor

Inside Science News Service

The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by scattering a pair of strong pump pulses (green). The generated motional entanglement is verified by observing nonclassical correlations in the inelastically scattered light.

Credit: Dr. Lee and colleagues
Image Copyright Science
AAAS

(ISNS) -- Researchers working at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England have managed to get one small diamond to communicate with another small diamond utilizing "quantum entanglement," one of the more mind-blowing features of quantum physics.

Entanglement has been proven before but what makes the Oxford experiment unique is that concept was demonstrated with substantial solid objects at room temperature.

Inside Science:
In the Quantum World, Diamonds Can Communicate With Each Other
Dave Jarvis' primer on Quantum Entanglement.
This blog's previous post: "Spooky Action at a Distance"...

Quantum Matter...

The impact of quantum matter

'Dressing' atoms with laser light allows high angular momentum scattering to be seen for the first time in long-lived atomic Bose-Einstein condensates at ultracold temperatures

Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have for the first time engineered and detected the presence of high angular momentum collisions between atoms at temperatures close to absolute zero. Previous experiments with ultracold atoms featured essentially head-on collisions. The JQI experiment, by contrast, is able to create more complicated collisions between atoms using only lasers. This innovation may facilitate the creation of exotic quantum states that can be exploited for practical applications like quantum computing. The key to the JQI approach is to alter the atoms' environment with laser light. They "dress" rubidium atoms by bathing them in a pair of laser beams, which force the atoms to have one of three discrete values of momentum. In the JQI experiment, rubidium atoms comprise a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). BECs have been collided before. But the observation of high-angular-momentum scattering at such low energies is new.

The new JQI results are being reported in Science magazine online (Science Express) December 8, 2011. The paper includes a variety of technical issues which will require some explanation.

Eureka Alert: The impact of quantum matter

"The Secret Life of Plants"...

Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fueling photosynthesis.

Multiple experiments in recent years have suggested as much, but it's been hard to be sure. Quantum effects were clearly present in the light-harvesting antenna proteins of plant cells, but their precise role in processing incoming photons remained unclear.

In an experiment published Dec. 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a connection between coherence—far-flung molecules interacting as one, separated by space but not time—and energy flow is established.

Ars Technica: More evidence found for quantum physics in photosynthesis

Speedy...

redOrbit

ESO’s (European Southern Observatory) Very Large Telescope has picked up the fastest rotating star found so far. This massive bright young star lies in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers think that it may have had a violent past and has been ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion.

An international team of astronomers has been using ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, to make a survey of the heaviest and brightest stars in the Tarantula Nebula (eso1117), in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The title of this blog post is also the name of my box turtle...she didn't have a violent past, but don't get between her and lettuce! And, like stars, she'll probably outlive me...

Source: redOrbit Astronomers Find Fastest Rotating Star Ever

2D Superconducting...Islands...

3D atomic-force-microscopy image of superconducting Nb islands on a normal-metal substrate.

ABSTRACT: Systems of superconducting islands placed on normal metal films offer tunable realizations of two-dimensional (2D) superconductivity^{1, 2}; they can thus elucidate open questions regarding the nature of 2D superconductors and competing states. In particular, island systems have been predicted to exhibit zero-temperature metallic states^{3, 4, 5}. Although evidence exists for such metallic states in some 2D systems^{6, 7}, their character is not well understood: the conventional theory of metals cannot explain them⁸, and their properties are difficult to tune^{7, 9}. Here, we characterize the superconducting transitions in mesoscopic island-array systems as a function of island thickness and spacing. We observe two transitions in the progression to superconductivity. Both transition temperatures exhibit unexpectedly strong depression for widely spaced islands, consistent with the system approaching zero-temperature (T=0) metallic states. In particular, the first transition temperature seems to linearly approach T=0 for finite island spacing. The nature of the transitions is explained using a phenomenological model involving the stabilization of superconductivity on each island via a coupling to its neighbours.

Nature Physics: Approaching zero-temperature metallic states in mesoscopic superconductor–normal–superconductor arrays
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Engineering at Illionois: 'Islands' may enable tunable 2D superconductivity

2nd Planet on the Right, Straight on Til Morning...

A Space Geek "Twofer"...

Times - Science

They're huge. They're voracious. They're blacker than a panther on a moonless night. They're black holes, the mind-bending, space-warping cosmic objects with gravity so insanely powerful that even a beam of light that wanders too close will be sucked in, never to emerge. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted they might exist, but the great physicist himself doubted it would really happen.

Einstein was wrong.

...the two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, just announced in the journal Nature. The smaller one, located inside a galaxy known as NGC 3842, is as massive as 9.7 billion suns, and the other, in a galaxy called NGC 4889, is more than twice as large: if you put it on a very large balance, it would take at least 21 billion stars to even things out.

Note: 1 solar mass = 1.98892 × 10³⁰ kilograms, so 21 billion times THIS!

Times Science: The Blackest Black Hole: Scientists Find a Monster the Size of 21 Billion Suns

LA Times

Bright and early Saturday morning, people in Asia and Australia and on the western coast of America will be treated to a total eclipse of the moon—the last one until 2014.

You'll have to wake up early to see it—NASA says a red shadow will start to fall across the moon at 4:45 a.m. PST. By 6:05 a.m. PST, the moon will be totally engulfed in red light.

Red?

Yes, red.

As Dr. Tony Phillips explains in a NASA release, the lunar eclipse will appear red, not black, because a delicate layer of dusty air surrounding our planet will redirect the light of the sun, filling the darkness behind Earth with a sunset-red glow.

LA Times: Watch Saturday's total lunar eclipse on your computer

Note: Just be mindful of what time zone you're in: SLOOH.com

Ode to Science...

The noble lie is to serve as charter myth for Plato's good city: a myth of national or civic identity - or rather, two related myths, one grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally born from the earth), the other making the city's differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation (the god who molds them puts different metals in their souls). The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic

Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind. -- from The Republic

A casual search on this site of the term "scientific method," and you'll find a plethora of mentions. As usual, I tried to interject humor.

What is not humorous: is seeing our nation sink beneath the weight of its own hubris, as if "American Exceptionalism" makes us immune to possible competitive challenge, or super-cession by other countries.

Two links on CNN intrigued me:

America can't afford to lose its grip on science, by Lisa Randall.

I purposely don't watch debates. (See The Republic/Plato quotes above, I consider myself - at least, in structure of thought - a logician.) I would end up shouting at the flat screen: "are you kidding me?" With the full knowledge that the person on stage is enamored with one thing, and one thing only - the ascension to a state of power they covet more than their country. Some noteworthy quotes:

If current political discussions are any indication, America is in danger not only of losing scientific leadership but also of losing respect for the scientific method itself. This is at a time when the type of clear and rational thinking that science teaches us is more relevant than ever. Given the challenging problems we face today, our country needs to embrace the scientific values that have served us so well.

Science gives us a systematic way of incorporating what we know and don't know into a consistent logical framework. It doesn't say we know all the answers, but it does tell us the likelihood of particular outcomes and how well we can trust our predictions.

Opportunity finds more evidence of water on Mars: The long-lived Mars rover Opportunity has spotted bright veins of a water-deposited mineral, apparently gypsum, on the surface of the planet. The vein is informally named 'Homestake,' and it and other similar-looking deposits are located in a zone where sulfate-rich bedrock meets volcanic bedrock, at the rim of the Endeavour Crater. Homestake is roughly 0.4 to 0.8 inches wide, 16 to 20 inches long, and protrudes slightly above the surrounding bedrock.

Manned missions to visibly examine these veins - to "boldly go" takes funding, vision...and decisiveness.

This lack of logic, of method - science or otherwise, is telling in our public discourse, our journalism, decisions (or, lack thereof) by our political leaders, our own impulsive public behavior.

It's as if we've lost - as a nation - the capacity to reason.

Wouldn't it be a shame if our epitaph as a nation were: they scored Pyrrhic victories...in idiocy!

"Like the 'Walking Google'"...

SEOSpindotnet

The first time it was proposed I teach Credit Recovery, my first response to the AP was: "they're in credit (i.e. money) trouble already?"

No... this is a means by which students regain school credit for courses they've failed. I managed to see seventeen-year-olds -- by the calendar at least should have been classified as seniors -- with 0.5 credit hours after four years of school/tweeting/social networking/dating/PDAs*/Facebook updating.

So, the efficient solution for teenagers distracted by technology: put them on computers! They promptly fast-click through the written text to try the gnosis problem-solving method: a-b-c or d (eyes wide shut). This requires no study, just search engines you hide from your teacher...unless you know he is kind of one.

I was the teacher for the 1^st; 5^th - 7^th periods. In some spirited exchanges in the fifth period class, I routinely and regularly answered questions in: Algebra I and II, Newtonian Mechanics, Moles and Balancing Chemical Equations, Geography and Shakespeare. (I collapsed at home after that.)

"You're like the 'walking Google!'" a teenager exclaimed. Let's ponder this student's statement.

Anyone born after 1982 grew up in a world of calculators in the classroom, 24-hour 'news' and entertainment, the Internet as not new (but an expectation), along with some kind of search engine.

Anyone born after 1957 grew up in a world of slide rulers, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo; Civil and Voting Rights battles, the Vietnam war, walking on the moon and the Dewey Decimal System.

I venture that the human species hasn't changed much in thousands of years from the invention of writing on stones, to scrolls, to books.

“Teaching is a human experience,” [Paul Thomas] said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.” (NY Times)

This is a story about the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, apparently boasting a 94% graduation rate.

Moral: sometimes, the best school is "old school."

* PDA = personal digital assistant; public displays of affection. Either just as bad...

Education Nation: A Silicon Valley School Eskews Technology
Changing Expectations Corporation: African American Youth Resources Center
The Potter's House: Community Resource Center, Winston-Salem, NC

Longer Lasting Lasers...

Fig 1: Level-4 Laser

Fig 2: Triplet Manager Laser

"Continuous wave (CW) output is desirable for many laser applications, but operating in this mode can present difficulties. In CW operation, the lasing medium must be continuously pumped to excite the higher energy level, even as stimulated emission is de-exciting that state to the lower level. The balance of pump power against gain saturation and cavity losses produces an equilibrium value of the laser power inside the cavity. Unfortunately, this often requires pumping at a very high continuous power level, which can damage the laser medium by producing excessive heat. Writing in Physical Review B, Yifan Zhang and Stephen R. Forrest of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have taken an important step toward solving these problems in one lasing medium. They explain how CW operation can, in principle, be achieved in an organic semiconductor laser, a type of device until now capable of operating only in pulsed mode."

APS Journal - Viewpoint: Making a Laser Shine Longer

Markus Wohlgenannt
Department of Physics and Astronomy | Optical Science and Technology Center | University of Iowa

Only 600 LY Away...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

NASA: NASA's Kepler Mission Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-like Star

Nanoscale Infection Fighters...

Nanoglossdotcom

FORGET antibiotics, let's try nanoparticles. That's according to DARPA, the US military's research arm, which says that rather than spend money on new antibiotics, which only work until bacterial strains grow resistant, "readily adaptable nanotherapeutics" can fight infection instead.

The agency has called for proposals to find ways to use small interfering RNA (siRNA) to fight bacteria. These scraps of genetic code seek out their mirror image within cells, such as bacteria, and silence them. This stops protein production and leads to cell death.

New Scientist: Forget antibiotics, try nanoparticles instead

"Marilyn Monrobot"...I Kid You Not...

A step up from Rosie:



Hopefully, not leading to this (couldn't resist):

"Ender's Game"...

Large Hadron Collider: BBC News

Ender's Game is a Sci Fi novel by Orson Scott Card, the lead character's name is Andrew Wiggin, or "Ender" because of his capacity to end conflicts quite violently, and decisively (see link). Using it as title and double entendre twice over - Higgs Boson, Endgame - here's the latest from the LHC - and, a new unit for you: an inverse femtobarn (1 femto = 1 x 10^-15, read the article for what a barn is, ;-)).

Earlier this month, physicists announced results of a combined search for the Higgs by the Atlas and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Their analysis, presented at a meeting in Paris, shows that physicists have now covered a large chunk of the search area in detail, ruling out a broad part of the mass range where the boson could be lurking.

An even more important milestone in the Higgs hunt beckons in December.

The Higgs explains why other particles have mass, making it crucial to our understanding of the Universe. But it has never been observed by experiments.

Finding the Higgs boson at a mass of 476 GeV (gigaelectronvolts, giga = billion = 1 x 10⁹) or more is considered highly unlikely.

This means that physicists are now focussing their hunt on the remaining "low mass" range - a small window between 114 GeV and 141 GeV.

BBC News: 'Moment of truth' approaching in Higgs boson hunt

"That Used To Be Us" (redux)...

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back [Hardcover-AMAZON] Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum (Authors)

Apollo 11 30th Anniversary (NASA)

I sincerely hope so.

Nostalgia is somewhat misleading: we always long for the idealized utopia we think we recall when everything was "perfect" and we were the "city on a hill" (an overused metaphor) perhaps for an exceptionalism we've probably never exhibited. Beyond Sputnik, we rode the wave of innovation and convinced ourselves arrogantly that our ascension as a global power would be exponential and infinite; aided only by divine providence, personal charm and prestidigitation.

I joked with a classmate from North Carolina A and T Thursday night: where are the flying cars? They actually do exist, but far beyond the budgets mere mortals and senior engineers can afford. There was once here, a national will to do great things that has been resurrected on other Marshall Planned shores. We were Babel: "Indeed the people [are] one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them."

E Pluribus Unum is now a singular entity - as in person, not country, devolved to emotional and intellectual pubescence, enthralled by the technology so much to require 12-step intervention to go offline and read a book for knowledge or leisure; oblivious to the thrill of striving to master the material, rather than download it from Google. It would seem this speculative fiction writer's prophetic utterance was/is currently inaccurate:

A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
— H. G. Wells, 1902

My classmate and I are both "men of a certain age," and once upon a time we dreamed a world where problems were solved, not complicated by technology or political machinations; and that "the system" would replace us with able-minded men and women as we time travel forward to a good remainder of days.

Germany Inspires Innovation

Vibrations + Electrons = "Phoniton"...

Phoniton

Vibrations in a crystal can combine with an electron in a new way to form a hybrid quantum entity, according to a team of theorists publishing in Physical Review Letters. They call it a “phoniton,” a particle that combines a phonon—the quantum form of vibrations—with a matter excitation, such as an electron that transits between two levels. The team also proposes a nanostructure that would support this quantum state and allow it to be observed. Because the new quantum particle represents a coupling of an electron with a localized vibration, the researchers say it could serve in sensors or as a link to quantum computing devices.

If you were thinking like I was thinking: Vibranium. Yes, it's a completely contrived, imaginary, non-existant element. I guess it means I read a lot of comics as a kid! (See embed below)

The Black Panther was the first black modern super hero, even before Luke Cage: Hero for Hire.

APS: Focus: Vibrations and Electrons Team Up in New Quantum Entity

Electronics From Your Ink-Jet...

The Daily Mail, UK

‘Wonder material’ graphene is so tough a sheet as thin as cling film can support an elephant and there’s nothing that can match its conductivity – now scientists have found a way of printing it.

The researchers, from Cambridge University, made flexible electronics from graphene using a humble home printer, bringing devices such as wearable computers a step closer.

The scientists created a graphene-based ink and used a modified Epson printer to produce the thin-film circuits.

Read more: Flexible circuits made from 'wonder material' graphene printed from ordinary ink-jet machine

Physics arXiv: Ink-Jet Printed Graphene Electronics