New Polymer Coating Heals Itself With 1 Minute of UV Exposure | 80beats. Bubbles exhibit weird sandy behaviour - physics-math - 30 April 2011. A SQUIRT of bubbles can act like a liquid or a solid depending on its density - a feat thought unique to grainy materials such as sand. Pour sand, seeds or powder down a chute and they can flow like a liquid. But if the grains are packed so that they fill 64 per cent or more of the chute, they jam up and behave like a solid. The grains are thought to start moving with their neighbours, forming temporary "necklaces" that resist flow, although it is unclear why the transition occurs at this point. To investigate whether bubbles behave in a similar way, Rémi Lespiat and his colleagues at the University of Paris-East in France squirted nitrogen gas into a chamber of water and monitored the resulting bubbles' passage through a tube.
At low densities, the bubbles flowed. "It's surprising that they get the same figure," says Randall Kamien at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. More From New Scientist Deepest point in the ocean is teeming with life (New Scientist) More from the web. UK scientists invent artificial petrol - Business News. Boffins at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford have invented an ‘artificial’ petrol, which costs just 90 pence per gallon and could run in existing cars. Motorists could even be able to drive for 300 to 400 miles before needing to fill up. The breakthrough comes as average UK fuel prices have hit a record high. The new hydrogen-based fuel produces no greenhouse gases and could be available in as little as three years.
Professor Stephen Bennington, the project’s lead scientist, said: “In some senses, hydrogen is the perfect fuel. It has three times more energy than petrol per unit of weight, and when it burns, it produces nothing but water. “Our new hydrogen storage materials offer real potential for running cars, planes and other vehicles that currently use hydrocarbons.” How is it made? It says: "Storing hydrogen up to now has required either high-pressure storage cylinders at up to 700 times atmospheric pressure or super-cooled liquids at -253 degree Celsius.
Nation & World | Quake sped up Earth's rotation. Originally published March 11, 2011 at 8:41 PM | Page modified March 11, 2011 at 9:12 PM The earthquake that struck Friday off the coast of Japan was so strong it moved the island of Honshu 8 feet to the east and sped up the Earth's rotation by 1.6 microseconds, making the day just a little shorter, scientists said.
By The Associated Press and Bloomberg News LOS ANGELES — The earthquake that struck Friday off the coast of Japan was so strong it moved the island of Honshu 8 feet to the east and sped up the Earth's rotation by 1.6 microseconds, making the day just a little shorter, scientists said. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second. A preliminary study by the Italian Institute of Geology and Volcanology indicate the quake may have shifted the Earth's rotation axis by 3.937 inches, said Antonio Piersanti, researcher of the Rome-based institute, in an e-mailed statement Friday. Earthquakes can involve shifting rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. Gravity's bias for left may be writ in the sky - space - 05 March 2011. IS GRAVITY left-handed? An answer could provide a clue to a long-sought theory of quantum gravity - and might be within our grasp by 2013. General relativity describes gravity's actions at large scales.
For tiny scales however, a theory of quantum gravity, incorporating quantum mechanics, is needed. But first physicists need to understand gravitons, hypothetical quantum particles that mediate the gravitational force. These likely come in left and right-handed varieties: in the former, the particle's spin would be aligned with the direction of its motion; in the latter, the spin would be the opposite. General relativity does not distinguish between right and left, so you might expect gravity to be transmitted by both varieties. The pair calculate that if gravity depended on just left or right-handed gravitons, that would have skewed the polarisation pattern in an obvious way. More From New Scientist How air conditioning overwhelmed its hothead haters (New Scientist) Promoted Stories. Brian Greene on string theory.
Scientist amazingly survives zapping by particle accelerator. In comic books, if you get zapped by a particle accelerator, you're turned into a superhero. But if you get zapped by one in the real world, you die, right? That's the way it's supposed to work out, but a Russian researcher stuck his head into a running particle accelerator and, amazingly, lived! Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, a scientist working on the Soviet particle accelerator the synchrotron U-70 at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, leaned over a piece of equipment in 1978 and accidentally stuck his head through part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through.
He felt no pain, but saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns. " Based on the amount of radiation Bugorski absorbed, he should have died. According to Today I Found Out: Shortly after this happened, Bugorski's left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. (via Boing Boing) Elementary Particle Explorer. Welcome to the Elementary Particle Explorer, designed by Garrett Lisi and Troy Gardner. Every known elementary particle is identified by its charges with respect to the electromagnetic, weak, strong, and gravitational forces. Electrons have electric charge -1, up quarks 2/3, down quarks -1/3, and neutrinos 0, with antiparticles having opposite electric charges. In the Standard Model, as you are about to see, these electric charges are a combination of the particles' hypercharge, Y, and weak charge, W. The Elementary Particle Explorer (EPE) allows you to rotate in charge space (by dragging the image), showing the charges of all known particles.
These charges correspond to the geometry of Lie groups, and unified models of particle physics correspond to how the Lie groups of the Standard Model and gravity embed in larger Lie groups, up to the largest simple exceptional Lie group, E8. Science of LIGO. Large Hadron Collider - How does it work? Incriminating booze tests face fresh scrutiny - health - 10 February 2011. Fail an alcohol test and you could lose your job. But confidence is draining from the blood and urine tests that are supposed to show conclusively whether someone has been drinking – and the US government has decided it's time to take another look at them. Typically, the body destroys alcohol within 6 hours, so the tests are designed to pick up tiny amounts of substances such as ethyl glucuronide (EtG) and ethyl sulphate (EtS) that are formed exclusively from the breakdown of alcohol. These remain detectable in urine for almost a week. But the tests can return a positive result in people who haven't drunk any alcohol but have been exposed to minute quantities of it in alcohol-based hand-wipes and mouthwashes, alcohol-free wine, and even foods such as bananas and sauerkraut.
In the US, several legal cases are under way in which doctors, nurses and other professionals who were being monitored for abstinence but tested positive are protesting their innocence. Inappropriate action. Vacuum has friction after all - space - 11 February 2011. A BALL spinning in a vacuum should never slow down, since no outside forces are acting on it. At least that's what Newton would have said. But what if the vacuum itself creates a type of friction that puts the brakes on spinning objects? The effect, which might soon be detectable, could act on interstellar dust grains. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle says we can never be sure that an apparent vacuum is truly empty. Now, Alejandro Manjavacas and F. So over time, a spinning object will gradually slow down, even if equal numbers of virtual photons bombard it from all sides.
The strength of the effect depends on the object's make-up and size. The rate of deceleration also depends on temperature, since the hotter it is the more virtual photons pop in and out of existence, producing the friction. Could this effect be tested in the lab? How to float above a vacuum Houdini would be proud. More From New Scientist Lip-reading computers unlock with a word (New Scientist) How to create temperatures below absolute zero - physics-math - 01 December 2010. ABSOLUTE zero sounds like an unbreachable limit beyond which it is impossible to explore. In fact there is a weird realm of negative temperatures that not only exists in theory, but has also proved accessible in practice.
An improved way of getting there, outlined last week, could reveal new states of matter. Temperature is defined by how the addition or removal of energy affects the amount of disorder, or entropy, in a system. For systems at familiar, positive temperatures, adding energy increases disorder: heating up an ice crystal makes it melt into a more disordered liquid, for example. Negative-temperature systems have the opposite behaviour. Creating negative-temperature systems to see what other "bizarro world" properties they might have is tricky. This has already been done in experiments in which atomic nuclei were placed in a magnetic field, where they act like tiny bar magnets and line up with the field. More From New Scientist Promoted Stories What is 64-Bit Mobile Computing?
'Lightfoil' soars on a stream of photons - physics-math - 06 December 2010. Light has been used to generate aerodynamic-like lift for the first time. The technique, which takes advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when moving from one medium to another, could be used to create solar-sail spacecraft that could steer using light itself. Photons create pressure when they bounce off objects. Solar sail prototypes are made highly reflective to maximise this push, but the effect does not allow the sails to be easily steered. "It's well known you can use a light source to push on something, but the steering mechanisms are still up for grabs," says Grover Swartzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
He says future sails could be manoeuvred if the photons did not just rebound off the material's surface but passed through it. As they entered and exited the sail, the photons would change direction by an amount dictated by the shape of the material's surface and its so-called refractive index. Asymmetrical shape More From New Scientist. Higgs hunt may delay LHC's planned shutdown - physics-math - 13 December 2010. Physicists are considering delaying a planned shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider by a year to keep hot on the trail of the elusive Higgs particle.
Located near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is the most powerful particle smasher ever built, designed to produce collisions at energies up to 14 trillion electron volts (TeV). It was built to look for the Higgs particle, which is thought to endow other subatomic particles, such as electrons, with mass. But the LHC's ramp-up to full energy has been slower than expected. An accident in September 2008 postponed the start of operations by more than a year, and to avoid further damage, its managers have been running it at just 7 TeV, half of its design energy.
The plan has been to collect data at this energy until the end of 2011, then shut down the collider for 15 months to make fixes needed to reach 14 TeV. Now the LHC's managers are considering delaying the shutdown by a year, to the end of 2012. Rival collider More From New Scientist. Less is more when measuring fragile atomic bonds - physics-math - 15 December 2010. IF YOU want to look at individual atoms, it helps to have a powerful microscope. But for delicate situations such as a lone atom on the edge of a sheet of carbon atoms, a high-energy beam can disturb the bonds that hold such atoms in place, making them difficult to study. Now, for the first time, a low-energy beam has been used to count these bonds. In the past, beams of high-energy electrons have been used to probe individual atoms. For example, such an electron beam was used to identify single atoms of so-called "rare earth" elements that were trapped inside buckyballs, round cages made of carbon atoms.
Probing atoms in other situations, however, may require more delicate methods. In principle, the energy spectra of electrons scattered off an edge atom can be used to count the bonds. Suenaga and Koshino took advantage of a new electron microscope that was capable of precisely resolving the spectra of scattered electrons, even if they were of relatively low energy.
More from the web. No black holes found at LHC – yet - physics-math - 17 December 2010. The Large Hadron Collider has not yet seen any of the microscopic black holes that inspired numerous scare stories in recent years. Many theorists actually hope the collider, based near Geneva, Switzerland, will create short-lived, miniature black holes. These would not pose a threat to Earth, but they would provide evidence for hypothetical extra dimensions that might lie beyond the 3D world we normally experience. If these dimensions exist, gravitons, the particles thought to transmit the force of gravity, could leak into them, providing a much-needed explanation for why gravity is much weaker than the other forces. At the high energies created inside the LHC, though, colliding protons could be affected even by gravitons in the extra dimensions, making gravity strong enough to create fleeting black holes.
So far, however, they have not emerged. Inside the LHC, black holes would produce an excess of high-energy particles at right angles to the proton beam. More From New Scientist. New Scientist Short Sharp Science Blog: Why the world WON'T end on September 10. Hurray for the European Court of Human Rights. It has rejected an emergency injunction to block the Large Hadron Collider from turning on on 10 September. It's the latest legal case brought against the LHC by scientists who fear that the world's largest particle accelerator will produce fearsome entities that could destroy the Earth. I'm thrilled that the ECHR has understood the science and has given the LHC the green light. Because let's get something straight: the world is not going to end on 10 September. Here's why. Next week physicists will attempt to send a beam of protons all the way round the LHC's 27-kilometre ring for the very first time. What they won't do is accelerate the beam to its design energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
Instead, a lone beam of protons will make its way round with just 450 gigelectronvolts of energy. Supposing this does happen, the collision energy will be a paltry 30 gigaelectronvolts (30 GeV). Really, I don't think so. Not convinced? Tree-like giant is largest molecule ever made - physics-math - 07 January 2011. Meet PG5, the largest stable synthetic molecule ever made. With a diameter of 10 nanometres and a mass equal to 200 million hydrogen atoms, this huge molecule festooned with tree-like appendages, paves the way to sophisticated structures capable of storing drugs within their folds, or bonding to a wide variety of different substances.
Complex macromolecules abound in nature and PG5 is about the same size as tobacco mosaic virus. But making such large molecules in the lab is tough, as they tend to fall apart while they are being made. "Synthetic chemistry so far was simply not capable of approaching the size range of such functional units," says Dieter Schlüter at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.
Previously, polystyrene was the largest stable synthetic molecule, at 40 million hydrogen masses. To create their molecular giant, Schlüter and his colleagues started with standard polymerisation, in which smaller molecules join up to form a long chain. Outrageous trick (YouTube) Thunderstorms caught making antimatter - physics-math - 11 January 2011. Car batteries run on relativity - physics-math - 14 January 2011. Atom counting helps kilogram watch its weight - physics-math - 25 January 2011.
First black hole for light created on Earth - physics-math - 14 October 2009. Light through a blocked hole? Plasmonics is the answer - physics-math - 11 February 2011. Black holes put new spin on light - physics-math - 13 February 2011. Atoms ripple in the periodic table of shapes - physics-math - 16 February 2011. Spin doctors: TV kills - health - 18 February 2011. Spin doctors: Die another day - health - 20 February 2011. Carbon buckyballs can turn to jelly - physics-math - 23 February 2011.
'Anti-laser' built for first time - physics-math - 17 February 2011. Illusion 'cloak' makes you see what's not there - tech - 24 February 2011. Science News: Nanoguitar. Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see. News ::: Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is Strongest Material. I, For One, Welcome Our New Computer Overlords. Thermodynamics - Cooling a cup of coffee with help of a spoon. The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World. The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World.
Human observation of dark energy may shorten the life span of the universe. Science Mysteries. Imitation black hole created on Earth using lasers and pure glass. What would happen if I drilled a tunnel through the center of th". Feather And Hammer Drop On Moon. Interesting Science Facts You Maybe Don't Know. 13 more things that don't make sense. Elegant Universe | A Sense of Scale. Scientists may have found a new state of matter.
Fluoroantimonic acid. Spontaneous Human Combustion. Aerogel: See-Through, Strong as Steel & Ligher than Air « Dornob. Pain gene common to flies, mice and humans, researchers discover. 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2010. Best ever image from a neodymium rare-earth magnet. Science's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries. Novel metamaterial vastly improves quality of ultrasound imaging. Researchers now able to stop, restart light. Xkcd • View topic - What is the hottest possible temperature? Absolute Zero | Absolute Hot. Is the Universe a Holographic Reality? Symmetry breaking ? Blog Archive ? Hogan?s holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe. 11 cheap gifts guaranteed to impress science geeks.