Is Particle Physics About to Crack Wide Open? It’s December 15, 2015, and an auditorium in Geneva is packed with physicists. The air is filled with tension and excitement because everybody knows that something important is about to be announced. The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has recently restarted operations at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory experiment, and the first new results from two enormous, complex detectors known as ATLAS and CMS are being presented.
This announcement has been organized hastily because both detectors have picked up something completely unexpected. Rumors have been circulating for days about what it might be, but nobody knows for sure what is really going on, and the speculations are wild. The CMS spokesperson takes the stage first, giving a presentation with no surprises until the very end, when two plots appear showing the energies—theoretical and actual—carried by a flood of particles emerging from head-on collisions between protons traveling at nearly the speed of light.
Why so much science research is flawed – and what to do about it. Brett Ryder By Sonia van Gilder Cooke LISTENING to When I’m Sixty-Four by The Beatles can make you younger. This miraculous effect, dubbed “chronological rejuvenation”, was revealed in the journal Psychological Science in 2011. It wasn’t a hoax, but you’d be right to be suspicious. The aim was to show how easy it is to generate statistical evidence for pretty much anything, simply by picking and choosing methods and data in ways that researchers do every day. The paper caused a stir among psychologists, and has become the most cited in the journal’s history. In fact, the problem extends far beyond psychology – dubious results are alarmingly common in many fields of science. Science is often thought ... Plastic fantastic: The quest to create the smartest materials. Andrew Brookes/Getty IT IS so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it, even when it is right in front of our eyes.
We use it to wrap food, make toys, build cars – and yes, these days even the contact lenses and “glasses” that enhance our vision are made from it. We are talking about plastics, of course – materials that, through their seemingly limitless morphing of forms and function, have shaped the past century. But here’s a secret. Despite the panopoly of plastics we produce, we are still rank amateurs compared with the machinery that churns out very similar stuff right under our noses – throughout our bodies, to be precise. Learn to replicate nature’s material-weaving tricks, as we are just beginning to do, and we would usher in a whole different gamut of materials that will shape the next century.
What we call a plastic a chemist will probably know as a polymer. Vary the chemical identity of ... A new kind of logic: How to upgrade the way we think. IT IS not obvious what connects a falling apple and the rising sun. It took a genius to realise these two effects are the product of a single hidden cause, one that also explains the stars’ positions and the fact that our feet are firmly planted on the ground – the invisible pull of gravity. That genius was Isaac Newton, a man gifted with “the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it”, in the words of economist John Maynard Keynes.
We could use a few of his stamp now more than ever. While Newton’s successors stutter as they try to find further unifying laws of the cosmos, the world at large grapples with problems on unprecedented scales – economic instability, poverty and disease, climate change. Finding solutions means doing what Newton did with gravity: asking the right questions, teasing out causes and effects, and so building an intellectual framework to explain the puzzle.
For most of us, Thinking 1.0 is taxing enough. Free will is dead, let’s bury it. I wish people would stop insisting they have free will. It’s terribly annoying. Insisting that free will exists is bad science, like insisting that horoscopes tell you something about the future – it’s not compatible with our knowledge about nature. According to our best present understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, everything that happens in our universe is due to only four different forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear force. These forces have been extremely well studied, and they don’t leave any room for free will. There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way. These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions.
If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will. Why too much evidence can be a bad thing. (Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made. In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea, which they call the "paradox of unanimity.
" "If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. Unlikely agreement Wide implications. Want a computer that never crashes? Don't let bugs freak it out.
THE screens stopped working at 3.27 pm. Suddenly, flight controllers found themselves working blind, unable to access key information on the dozens of aircraft in the sky above them. Planes awaiting take-off were grounded and inbound aircraft diverted to other countries. More than 100 flights were cancelled and tens of thousands of passengers were affected. By taking the software out of the loop, and falling back on fail-safe procedures, flight controllers skillfully avoided disaster. But this glitch in the computer system of the UK’s National Air Traffic Services on 12 December 2014 could have been far worse. Software bugs have plagued us since we started to code. In just the past few years, for example, software errors have made Toyota, Land Rover and Ford recall more than a million cars between them for safety reasons. What to do? Warmest ever superconductor works at Antarctic temperatures.
Superconductors can do cool things (Image: David Parker/IMI/Univ. of Birmingham High TC Consortium/Science Photo Library) Superconductors have just reached a new high. A material has been shown to transmit electricity with no resistance at the highest temperatures ever: the chilly conditions you might experience in Antarctica. Mikhail Eremets at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany and his colleagues used a diamond anvil to squeeze a tiny quantity of hydrogen sulphide to almost 1.6 million times atmospheric pressure. Although hydrogen sulphide is most familiar as a toxic colourless gas with a smell of rotten eggs, when it is chilled and held at high pressure it transforms into a metal. They’re not sure why it works, but it could have to do with the material’s hydrogen ions, which help electrons form so-called Cooper pairs – a configuration that lets current travel more swiftly. Eremets hopes the new record will be beaten. One gene may drive leap from single cell to multicellular life - life - 22 June 2015.
All together now: yeasts can evolve to form snowflake-like multicellular shapes (Image: Courtesy of Jennifer Pentz, Georgia Tech) The leap from single-celled life to multicellular creatures is easier than we ever thought. And it seems there's more than one way it can happen. The mutation of a single gene is enough to transform single-celled brewer's yeast into a "snowflake" that evolves as a multicellular organism. Similarly, single-celled algae quickly evolve into spherical multicellular organisms when faced with predators that eat single cells. These findings back the emerging idea that this leap in complexity isn't the giant evolutionary hurdle it was thought to be.
At some point after life first emerged, some cells came together to form the first multicellular organism. But no organism is known to have made that transition in the past 200 million years, so how and why it happened is hard to study. Special snowflake Bigger is better , through similar selection for rapid settling. This new $2.50 device extends disposable battery life by 800% A new device is set to give any disposable battery - from AAA to D - eight times its usual lifespan by keeping its voltage boosted to just above what most appliances consider 'dead'. Developed by US-based start-up, Batteroo, the so-called 'Batteriser' is a stainless steel sleeve that you can clip onto any battery, and because it’s just 0.1 mm thick, it can fit into any kind of device, including TV remotes, torches, bluetooth keyboards, and console controllers.
The idea behind the Batteriser is that a new alkaline battery will be able to generate 1.5 Volts for some time, but as soon as its voltage drops to 1.4 Volts or below, most devices write it off as dead. This means that when we’re throwing out what we think are spent batteries, we’re throwing out something that still has 80 percent of its energy left inside. And that’s where this new voltage booster technology comes into play. H/T: PCWorld. Quantum purity: How the big picture banishes weirdness - physics-math - 08 April 2015.
(Image: Julien Pacaud) WE HAVE become accustomed to the universe blowing our minds – perhaps too accustomed. Quantum weirdness – things like particles being in two places at once, or appearing to share a telepathic link – has been baffling us for more than a century now. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that nobody really understands the quantum world. Or as others have put it: if you think you understand it, then you definitely don't. But maybe we shouldn't be so defeatist. Need for speed: Why computers stopped getting faster - tech - 23 February 2015. (Image: Pierluigi Longo) Dizzily increasing PC power used to be a given. No longer – speeds stalled a decade ago and only a radical reboot of computing will accelerate things TEN years ago, computers stopped getting faster.
Stroking your sleek smartphone or latest laptop, this may seem a rather implausible statement. Surely there's no contest between it and a decade-old desktop? That's true – in a way. But even if computer chips weren't made of silicon, the comparison would be built on sand. You don't need to be the type who camps outside stores for the latest gizmo to be concerned. Exclusive: Jane Hawking tells her Theory of Everything - physics-math - 01 January 2015. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 Video: The Theory of Everything - Exclusive preview IT IS 1963, and we're at a student party in Oxford. A young man approaches a young woman. "I'm a cosmologist," he says. "What's that? " "It's religion for intelligent atheists. " You will have seen him on The Simpsons and Star Trek but you've never seen him like this.
This is the beginning of The Theory of Everything, the story of Hawking's exceptional life framed by the blossoming – and eventual withering – of romance with his first wife, then Jane Wilde. (Image: Focus Features/Photoshot) Straight away we are tipped off to the broad tone that the movie will take on their relationship: one of his godless cosmology, and of her more conventional Christianity. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are outstanding in the roles of Stephen and Jane. Jones plays the indomitable Jane with quiet restraint and subtlety. But no one had used quantum physics to examine what happens in black holes before Hawking. How to think about… Probability - physics-math - 15 December 2014. (Image: Shutterstock) Probability is one of those things we all get wrong... deeply wrong.
The good news is we're not the only ones, says John Haigh, a mathematician at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, and author of Probability: A very short introduction. "Many pure mathematicians claim that probability has many unreasonable answers. " Take the classic problem of a class of 25 schoolchildren. How likely is it that two of them share the same birthday? Or the celebrated Monty Hall problem, named after the former host of US television game show Let's Make a Deal. Asteroid soil could fertilise farms in space - space - 16 December 2014. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 We can now grow plants in microgravity – and crops grown in asteroid soil could sustain vast human populations off-planet IF YOU want to start a space farm, head for an asteroid. It seems there's enough fertiliser zipping around the solar system to grow veg for generations of space colonisers – and researchers are already beginning to grow viable, edible plants in space.
Asteroids are a hot topic with the 3 December launch of Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, which aims to return a sample from carbon-rich asteroid 1999 JU3. "Longer human missions will require the company of plants, in terms of providing both food and psychological comfort," says Bratislav Stankovic at the University of Information Science and Technology in Ohrid, Macedonia. Space farmers have had a tough row to hoe. "It appears to influence cell biochemistry," says Stankovic. Not only did the plants produce seeds, but 92 per cent then germinated successfully. No gravity required. Root intelligence: Plants can think, feel and learn - life - 03 December 2014. Root intelligence: Plants can think, feel and learn - life - 03 December 2014. Transformers: Humanity's next 1000 years - tech - 23 October 2014. Common Mythconceptions - World's Most Contagious Falsehoods.
Quantum control: How weird do you want it? - physics-math - 11 September 2014. Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time? | Science. When the internet dies, meet the meshnet that survives - 19 April 2014. Quantum death: How the cosmic speed limit got frozen - physics-math - 27 March 2014. Denisovans: The lost humans who shared our world - life - 03 April 2014. Online university courses can't change the world alone - opinion - 10 March 2014. Did Dark Matter Kill the Dinosaurs? Did dark matter kill the dinosaurs? Maybe… - space - 06 March 2014. Comportamento emergente. Artificial leaf jumps developmental hurdle. Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check - physics-math - 17 February 2014.
1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Earth Orbits the Sun. Yes, Really. ABC di uno studio (Guida per tutti, per comprendere l’informazione scientifica corretta) – Parte terza: Come si legge e interpreta uno studio scientifico? | Pro-Test Italia. Nanomotors move inside cells. Base rate fallacy. Natural sense of touch restored with bionic hand - tech - 05 February 2014.
MIT CityFARM at the MIT Media Lab. Why you can’t trust research: 3 problems with the quality of science. Beyond the Moore's Law: Nanocomputing using nanowire tiles. First plastic cell with working organelle - Radboud University. Spin: The quantum twist coming to a computer near you - physics-math - 13 January 2014. 42nd St paradox: Cull the best to make things better - physics-math - 16 January 2014. Google's Ranking System, OKR. Breaking relativity: Celestial signals defy Einstein - space - 02 January 2014. Scientists create artificial muscle thousand times stronger than normal ones. 2013 review: The year's biggest news at a glance - 18 December 2013. Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals | Science. Copenhagen Wheel Goes On Sale For $700. Engineering Forum: Tesla Debunked. Noise is the key to quantum computing - opinion - 20 November 2013.
Perfection is a myth, show 50,000 bacterial generations - life - 15 November 2013. Team grows large graphene crystals that have exceptional electrical properties. Waste away: Nuclear power's eternal problem - environment - 04 November 2013. The edge of reason: When logic fails us - physics-math - 04 November 2013. The edge of reason: When logic fails us - physics-math - 04 November 2013. Cosmic chemistry: Life's molecules are made in space - space - 21 October 2013. Reprogrammed bacterium speaks new language of life - life - 17 October 2013. Major silicon photonics breakthrough could allow for continued exponential growth in microprocessors. More than a feline: the true nature of cats - life - 17 September 2013. Meet the NASA scientist devising a starship warp drive - opinion - 19 August 2013.
How CERN’s Grid may place the power of the world’s computers in your hands. A New Carbon Supermaterial Is Stronger Than Graphene and Diamond. Coding for brain chips gives cognitive computing boost - tech - 09 August 2013. Daniele Mancinelli. Meshnet activists rebuilding the internet from scratch - tech - 08 August 2013. Not like us: Artificial minds we can't understand - tech - 08 August 2013. Quantum weirdness: The battle for the basis of reality - physics-math - 05 August 2013. Quantum weirdness: The battle for the basis of reality - physics-math - 05 August 2013. Plant bacteria breakthrough enables crops worldwide to take nitrogen from the air. Metamaterial Reveals Nature of Time and the Impossibility of Time Machines. Wormhole entanglement gives space-time the bends - 26 July 2013. Wormhole entanglement gives space-time the bends - 26 July 2013. Mathematicians think like machines for perfect proofs - physics-math - 25 June 2013.
Making memories: Practical quantum computing moves closer to reality. Space vs time: One has to go – but which? - physics-math - 17 June 2013. Our earliest primate cousin discovered in Asia - life - 05 June 2013. Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes. Quantum gravity takes singularity out of black holes - space - 29 May 2013. South Pole scopes: Witnessing the universe's birth - space - 28 May 2013. Out of Asia: Our surprising origins - life - 15 May 2013. How to Make/Build a Lifter or Ionocraft. A new dimension for 3-D protein structures. Silver nanoparticles provide clean water for $2 a year - health - 10 May 2013.
Researchers use Moore's Law to calculate that life began before Earth existed. The coming Golden Age of neurotech | TURING CHURCH. Scientists resurrect extinct frog that gives birth through its mouth. Neanderthals may have swapped social lives for big eyes - life - 13 March 2013. Evidence that comets could have seeded life on Earth. The brain-computer interface goes wireless. The great illusion of the self. A computer cosmos will never explain quantum physics - opinion - 15 February 2013.