Scientists Make Objects "Invisible" With a Tricky Optical Illusion. Upsalite, 'Impossible' Material Believed To Have Many Uses, Created In Swedish Lab. It doesn’t look like much, but scientists from Sweden’s Uppsala University are calling a newly created form of magnesium carbonate an “impossible” material. Dubbed upsalite, the highly porous material sets new records for surface area and water adsorption, according to a written statement issued by the university. It is expected to have all sorts of applications, from controlling moisture in processes used by the electronics and pharmaceutical industries to sopping up toxins in the aftermath of chemical and oil spills. “In contrast to what has been claimed for more than 100 years in the scientific literature, we have found that amorphous magnesium carbonate can be made in a very simple, low-temperature process," study co-author Johan Goméz de la Torre, a researcher in the university’s nanotechnology and functional materials division, said in the statement.
The researchers succeeded in making upsalite in 2011 by bubbling carbon dioxide through an alcohol-containing suspension. To Avoid the Multiverse, Physicists Propose a Symmetry of Scales. Though galaxies look larger than atoms and elephants appear to outweigh ants, some physicists have begun to suspect that size differences are illusory. Perhaps the fundamental description of the universe does not include the concepts of “mass” and “length,” implying that at its core, nature lacks a sense of scale. This little-explored idea, known as scale symmetry, constitutes a radical departure from long-standing assumptions about how elementary particles acquire their properties.
But it has recently emerged as a common theme of numerous talks and papers by respected particle physicists. With their field stuck at a nasty impasse, the researchers have returned to the master equations that describe the known particles and their interactions, and are asking: What happens when you erase the terms in the equations having to do with mass and length? Nature, at the deepest level, may not differentiate between scales.
The new scale symmetry approach rewrites the beginning of that story. Apparent breakthrough in nuclear fusion silenced by shutdown. The preamplifiers of the National Ignition Facility are the first step in increasing the energy of laser beams as they make their way toward the target chamber. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Scientists have come one step closer to harnessing the power of the sun. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have passed a milestone in achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion -- but you won't hear about it from the researchers. The NIF team has been furloughed as a result of the U.S. government shutdown, which began on Oct. 1, and is not releasing updates to the press. According to the BBC, a research experiment conducted in late September succeeded in releasing more energy through a fusion reaction than it absorbed by the fuel going in.
NIF is the first research facility in the world to achieve this goal. NIF's method for achieving fusion involves sending 192 laser beams through a 1,500-meter journey that increases its energy output by a factor of more than a quadrillion. Mind-Bending Video Shows Liquid Boiling, Freezing At Same Time. NEXT: Amazing Sea Creatures A red lionfish (Pterois volitans) swims in the aquarium of the Schonbrunn zoo in the gardens of the Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna on October 16, 2012. The red lionfish is a venomous coral reef fish. ALEXANDER KLEIN/AFP/Getty Images A California sea lion and a walrus kiss each other during a show at the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise aquarium-amusement park complex in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye) A two-day-old female white whale swims with her mother at the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise aquarium-amusement park complex in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, Saturday, June 30, 2012.
(AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye) A seahorse swims in an aquarium in the zoo of Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012. De la entropía. Posiblemente pocas ideas científicas tan fundamentales tengan más expresiones diferentes que la segunda ley de la termodinámica. Una que no suele emplearse demasiado pero que encierra en una sola frase su esencia se debe a Ludwig Boltzmann que, parafraseando a Josiah Willard Gibbs, dijo: “La imposibilidad de una disminución no compensada de la entropía parece estar reducida a una improbabilidad”. Y es que el concepto de entropía está en el centro de la termodinámica, y en el de la evolución del universo.
El origen del concepto de entropía tiene está en una paradoja planteada por William Thomson (más tarde lord Kelvin) en 1847: la energía no puede crearse ni destruirse, sin embargo la energía térmica pierde su capacidad de realizar trabajo (por ejemplo, levantar un peso) cuando se la transfiere de un cuerpo caliente a uno frío. En 1852 Thomson sugirió que en un proceso como la conducción del calor la energía no se pierde sino que se “disipa” o deja de estar disponible. Scientists Discover New Shape When Playing With Rubber Bands. What do you yet when you cross a rubber band with an octopus? A whole new shape, it turns out, with perversions. The Harvard researchers who made the discovery were seeking to make springs. They glued two strips of uneven length together and stretched them out while clipped at each end with strings thin enough that the strips could rotate freely. As the force stretching the strips out decreased the strips started to wind up like a telephone cord (ask someone over 30).
While the new shape resembles a double helix the team noticed it had what they call perversions (see image above). Technically it is a hemihelix, a sort of helix that shifts from spiraling in a clockwise direction to an anticlockwise one, or vice versa. A change in direction is called a perversion. What was unexpected was that the bands developed not just one perversion, but as many as eleven.
Helices and hemihelices are common in nature. And the octopus? Sticky tape X-rays: by Nature Video. The Incredible Physics of Ants | ScienceTake |The New York Times. MIT discovers a new state of matter, a new kind of magnetism. Researchers at MIT have discovered a new state of matter with a new kind of magnetism. This new state, called a quantum spin liquid (QSL), could lead to significant advances in data storage.
QSLs also exhibit a quantum phenomenon called long-range entanglement, which could lead to new types of communications systems, and more. Generally, when we talk about magnetism’s role in the realm of technology, there are just two types: Ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. Ferromagnetism has been known about for centuries, and is the underlying force behind your compass’s spinning needle or the permanent bar magnets you played with at school. In ferromagnets, the spin (i.e. charge) of every electron is aligned in the same direction, causing two distinct poles. In the case of quantum spin liquids, the material is a solid crystal — but the internal magnetic state is constantly in flux.
The existence of QSLs has been theorized since 1987, but until now no one has succeeded in actually finding one. String Theory - The Physics of String-Bending and Other Electric Guitar Techniques. Electric guitar playing is ubiquitous in practically all modern music genres. In the hands of an experienced player, electric guitars can sound as expressive and distinct as a human voice. Unlike other more quantised instruments where pitch is a discrete function, guitarists can incorporate micro-tonality and, as a result, vibrato and sting-bending are idiosyncratic hallmarks of a player. Similarly, a wide variety of techniques unique to the electric guitar have emerged.
While the mechano-acoustics of stringed instruments and vibrating strings are well studied, there has been comparatively little work dedicated to the underlying physics of unique electric guitar techniques and strings, nor the mechanical factors influencing vibrato, string-bending, fretting force and whammy-bar dynamics. In this work, models for these processes are derived and the implications for guitar and string design discussed. Figures Editor: Dante R. Copyright: © 2014 David Robert Grimes. Introduction (1)where . .
Sticky tape X-rays: by Nature Video. The 9 kinds of physics seminar | Many Worlds Theory. October 3, 2013 by Matthew Rave As a public service, I hereby present my findings on physics seminars in convenient graph form. In each case, you will see the Understanding of an Audience Member (assumed to be a run-of-the-mill PhD physicist) graphed as a function of Time Elapsed during the seminar. All talks are normalized to be of length 1 hour, although this might not be the case in reality. The “Typical” starts innocently enough: there are a few slides introducing the topic, and the speaker will talk clearly and generally about a field of physics you’re not really familiar with. Somewhere around the 15 minute mark, though, the wheels will come off the bus. Without you realizing it, the speaker will have crossed an invisible threshold and you will lose the thread entirely.
Your understanding by the end of the talk will rarely ever recover past 10%. The “Ideal” is what physicists strive for in a seminar talk. The “Unprepared Theorist” is a talk to avoid if you can. Like this: Google Street View goes underground at LHC. Visitors all over the world can now explore CERN’s massive detectors and 1200 meters of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel with Google Street View—a Google product that links a series of panoramic photos into a virtual tour. In 2011, members of Google’s Zurich team joined forces with CERN and spent two full weeks photographing the subterranean experiments and portions of the LHC, as well as the interiors of surface buildings at the laboratory.
Compiling the imagery and coordinating the GPS locations took an additional two years, according to CERN photographer Max Brice. “Every 3 meters, they took a six-sided panorama of the tunnel,” Brice says. “Then we had to figure out the coordinates of every image. “I don’t think people realize how much of CERN is underground,” Brice says. The images will also help people visiting CERN navigate the lab, which stretches between Switzerland and France. Puzzling Measurement of "Big G" Gravitational Constant Ignites Debate [Slide Show] Gravity, one of the constants of life, not to mention physics, is less than constant when it comes to being measured. Various experiments over the years have come up with perplexingly different values for the strength of the force of gravity, and the latest calculation just adds to the confusion.
The results of a painstaking 10-year experiment to calculate the value of “big G,” the universal gravitational constant, were published this month—and they’re incompatible with the official value of G, which itself comes from a weighted average of various other measurements that are mostly mutually incompatible and diverge by more than 10 times their estimated uncertainties. The gravitational constant “is one of these things we should know,” says Terry Quinn at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sévres, France, who led the team behind the latest calculation.
“It’s embarrassing to have a fundamental constant that we cannot measure how strong it is.” Testing For Arsenic in Drinking Water Without Sampling Wells? - Water Works. Photo courtesy of Science. That would be wonderful, as an estimated 140 million people worldwide consume groundwater containing unsafe levels of arsenic. There just simply aren’t enough resources to test the hundreds of thousands of wells, many in developing countries and rural areas, which could be harboring this toxic substance.
Arsenic is a naturally occurring element. Long-term chronic exposure to it — primarily through drinking water — has been linked to skin discoloration, loss of feeling in hands and feet, and cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set the standard for arsenic in drinking water in this country at 10 parts per billion (less than a drop in an Olympic-size swimming pool), but in many regions around the world people are exposed to much higher levels.
(Read more about arsenic in water and food in the next issue of Discover magazine, in which Deborah Blum investigates the health effects of consuming trace amounts. “It is an enormous task,” adds Johnson. Blog - physicsworld.com. By Michael Bishop, who is the IOP’s press officer (Courtesy: EJP) The designer of London’s Walkie Talkie skyscraper has come under scrutiny this week as reports of flaming bicycle seats and melting cars have resulted in a temporary scaffold being erected at street level to block the intense reflection of the Sun’s rays as they beat off the curved building. One thing you can’t say is that nobody saw this coming. In a study published last summer in the European Journal of Physics (EJP), two researchers from Germany performed a number of experiments that gave an in-depth explanation of why some skyscrapers have these undesired effects. In addition to a number of computer simulations that investigated the reflecting effects of a building’s height, width and curvature, as well as the angle and position of the Sun, the researchers also performed experiments on a scale model (right) of the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas.