Physics Week in Review: August 1, 2015
Macrophotograph of water droplets.
Credit: Ivelina Blagoeva.
You've never seen water droplets the way they're featured in these macro photos, which turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. "Photographer Ivelina Blagoeva has enlightened us with her water droplet photography by snapping them with different backgrounds such as branches, flowers and even spider webs, to bring out beautiful colour."
Photoacoustic Imaging: A Scientist Deploys Light And Sound To Reveal The Living Brain. "It's research that really pushes the limits of our understanding of how to image in space and time."
Folding graphene like origami may allow us to wear sensors in our skin.
Making Pig Fat Into a Laser. Yes, This Pork Rind Really Emits Laser Light. Researchers have created self-contained cellular biolasers.
How a Virginia physicist can predict the Tour de France’s outcome from 4,000 miles away.
Dark Pion Particles May Explain Universe's Invisible Matter.
W bosons remain left-handed. A new result from the LHCb collaboration weakens previous hints at the existence of a new type of W boson. Related: The LHC Keeps Bruising 'Difficult To Kill' Theory of Supersymmetry. "New data from ultra high-speed proton collisions at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) showed an exotic particle dubbed the "beauty quark" behaves as predicted by the Standard Model, said a paper in the journal Nature Physics."
How Insects' Legs Can Improve Man-Made Materials: lessons from the biomechanics of locusts, bees, stick insects, and cockroaches.
Why This 14-Year-Old Kid Built A Nuclear Reactor. In his quest to better the world,Taylor Wilson captured the interest of Homeland Security and ended up with radioactive pants.
The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation. Computers can translate French and prove mathematical theorems. But can they make deep conceptual insights into the way the world works?
Our universe could be just one small piece of a bubbling multiverse. "Human history has been a journey toward insignificance."
Let’s Analyze the Physics of New Horizons’ Mission to Pluto. Related: New Horizons data shows Pluto’s atmosphere, surface features. Scientists now suspect Pluto's atmosphere is collapsing and Cthulhu Regio has glaciers.
The Science of Dust, and How It Inspired Picasso’s Art. "We’re constantly moving dust from one place to another, only to have it replaced by more dust — entropy always wins."
Well, I'm glad THAT's settled. Science Finally Understands How Cereal Gets Soggy, and reveals a weird tough state in the process.
Le sigh. Here we go again. New Experiments Make That ‘Impossible’ Engine Look a Little More Possible -- emphasis on "little." Per Motherboard: "Tajmar and his team say that all they’ve done with this latest paper is show that more tests are called for, if only to weed out further possible false positives. They close by pointing out that, even in the worst case scenario, the tests might help develop better ways of shielding thrust readings from magnetic fields." Or, to put it more clearly: No, German Scientists Have Not Confirmed the “Impossible” EMDrive. We repeat: The EM Drive Will Not Lead To Warp Travel Any Time Soon. "Just remember, if there’s no peer-reviewed research saying how it works (there isn’t) or experimental evidence of it producing high thrust (again, nope), then take everything with a hefty pinch of salt." Related: Here's why scientists haven't invented an impossible space engine – despite what you may have read. As Richard Easther concludes, "Sadly, it seems that the device NASA really needs is a bullshit detector. And if they built one and shared it with the world's journalists we would really have something to celebrate." But at least one scientist thinks the EM Drive Is Getting The Appropriate Level Of Attention From The Science Community. "It's not a perpetual motion machine, doesn't deserve to be dismissed out of hand. But it's far too soon to justify huge research programs into it, even if it is a real effect. We just have to be patient and see how the experiment develops."
How to Use a Black Hole's Spin to Harvest Energy By hurling matter towards it. Related: A Simple Way To Retrieve Info You Lost In A Black Hole -- assuming you only toss in one qubit at a time. Also: Kurzgesagt Gives Two Explanations for What Would Happen if a Person Had a Coin-Sized Black Hole in Their Pocket:
One Higgs is the loneliest number. Physicists discovered one type of Higgs boson in 2012. Now they’re looking for more.
The Physics of Some Seriously Awesome MythBusters Stunts.
Here's What the Data on Your Hard Drive Looks Like, thanks to magnetic force microscopy. "As tech devices are relentlessly miniaturized, it gets increasingly difficult to manipulate and predict material properties."
Professor Brian Kernighan remembers How It Felt to Work at Bell Labs in the 1960s.
A Programming Language For Robot Swarms. When it comes to robotic flocks, do you control each machine individually or the entire swarm overall? A new programming language allows both. Related: The KQED Series 'Deep Look' Explores the Capability of Harvard's Swarm of 1,024 Autonomous Kilobots.
Cell Phones and Radiation. Berkeley's Silly, And Harmful, Pandering to Fear.
Paranormal (AC)tivity, or Vic Tandy and the Haunting by Infrasound. "The haunting began, he later discovered, when a new fan was installed in the air handling system at one end of the lab; several times a second, a wave of air pressure would sweep through the room and reflect off the back wall, colliding with the next wave of air pressure at the room’s center. The new fan had been powering a standing wave of infrasound, which peaked in intensity at the center of the room..."
How Far Can the Human Eye See a Candle Flame? Answers on the Web vary from a few thousand meters to 48 kilometers. Now a pair of physicists have carried out an experiment to find out.
Inside the World's Quietest Room: "In a hole, on some bedrock a few miles outside central Zurich, there lived a spin-polarised scanning electron microscope. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole: it was a nanotech hole, and that means quiet. And electromagnetically shielded. And vibration-free. And cool."
Using math to make Guinness: "Let me tell you a story about William Sealy Gosset."
Where the Laws No Longer Hold: "Infinity is the frontier. Law breaks down." (Third in a finite series on infinities.)
Netflix Creating Tween Animated Series Featuring STEM-Skilled Spy Girls. "Project Mc² follows four super-smart and science-skilled girls as they are recruited to join the spy organization, NOV8 (“Innovate”), and work together to save the day. … ‘Project Mc²’ shows that Smart is the New Cool(TM) incorporating S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) in a fun way and depicting smart girls, that viewers can relate to, throughout the series."
Waves of Light, A Musical Tribute to the Science of Light From the Symphony of Science Series by Melodysheep.
These Artworks Were Made With Algorithms. "intelligence—in the very human way we understand it—is about more than ticking boxes. It requires a little bit of creativity."
"Soft materials meet hard science in Radical Elements, an exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences featuring 40 contemporary art quilts, each inspired by a different element from the periodic table." You can view the full collection at Studio Art Quilts.
Photographer Stephen Orlando Captures the Movement of Musicians Through Light Painting (above). Per Colossal: "By using carefully placed LED lights and a long exposure Orlando can track these movements through space, following arms and bows with light trails that extend out from the body and instrument."
Switching Places — The Ant Version. "A physical model can explain how a bunch of ants are able, with no visible leader (or highly-developed brains, for that matter) to drag that oversized cake crumb or leaf all the way across your floor to their nest."
Biomimicry for the win: Ants' Grooming Combs Could Hold the Key to Cleaning Nanogadgets. Related: How ants keep their antennae clean could have applications in nanotechnology.
Physicists close in on world's most sensitive resonators.
Arc Light: A Hidden Tesla Coil Wirelessly Powers This Lamp's Interchangeable Bulbs.
The Fibonacci Shelf Proves That Math Makes Great Furniture.
Interview with Millie Dresselhaus, the Queen of Carbon, A nanomaterials pioneer who built her own thesis equipment from WWII surplus.
The world’s best whiskey is being sent into space for the sake of science, but It Won't Get Astronauts Drunk. Related: Welcome to Booze Science, Wired's Drunkest Video Series Ever. Episode 1: "the amazing ways that ice can change a drink."
In Space, Fizzing Tablets Dissolve Into Bubbly, Liquid Spheres. Party like you've got heartburn on the International Space Station.
Asteroid Miners Can Learn a Lot From Philae’s Bumpy Landing. Related: This may be the last batch of science we get from Rosetta's Philae lander.
JPL's Edward Gonzales in the Career Spotlight: What I Do as a NASA Engineer.
Photo gallery of Fragile Apollo Artifacts in Need of Some Love.
Beautiful New Topographical Map Of Ceres Shows a Complex, Icy World.
Space: Not Just For Rocket Scientists Any More.
The New $100 Million Search For Life in the Cosmos. “I don’t think any of us are holding our breath for success.” Related: Making contact with alien worlds could make us care more about our own.
Seven Independent Pieces Of Evidence For Dark Matter.
Svetlana Savitskaya Became The First Woman To Walk In Space In 1984.
What You'd Hear If You Found Voyager's Golden Record In Deep Space.
This week in the Lego Optics Lab: Worm Drive Panoramic Mount.
Young Scientist Makes Jet Engines Leaner and Cleaner with Plasma.
Carbon nanotube speakers play music with heat. "The nanotubes are straw-like structures with walls only one carbon atom-thick and they can heat up and cool down up to 100,000 times each second. By comparison, a platinum sheet about 700 nanometers thick can only heat up and cool down about 16 times each second. The heating and cooling of the carbon nanotubes causes the adjacent air to expand and contract. That pushes air molecules around and creates sound waves."
Casinos and Con Men: The Hustler Origins of Wearable Computers.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketches of Mind-Bending Chess Problems.
"For Nabokov, the skill and ingenuity required for composing chess problems paralleled that required for great writing: 'The strain on the mind is formidable,” he wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory, 'the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness.” Puzzling out chess problems and solutions, he wrote, 'demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity.'"
"For Nabokov, the skill and ingenuity required for composing chess problems paralleled that required for great writing: 'The strain on the mind is formidable,” he wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory, 'the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness.” Puzzling out chess problems and solutions, he wrote, 'demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity.'"
All the science that goes into a single tattoo.
This is exactly how time flies, in one fascinating interactive. Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener used this theory to create a profoundly interesting interactive of life moving literally before your eyes. As you scroll through one’s lifetime, the years pass quicker and quicker. “Like many things, this will take some patience to get through,” Kiener writes. “But in the end it will be over faster than you thought or hoped it would be.”
The process of launching a nuclear missile (not for real!) is completely riveting.
A Unique Glowing Coat Made From a Beautiful Array of Fiber Optic Filaments. And here's An Incredible Glowing Dress That Is Covered in Fiber Optic Filaments.
This Beautiful Video Explains How Light's Been Harnessed For Communication:
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