Archive for the ‘physics’ category: Page 245
Sep 18, 2018
Incredible strength of ‘nuclear pasta’ revealed in new simulations
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, physics
Researchers from Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology say the new simulations could help us better understand major astrophysical phenomena, such as gravitational waves.
‘The strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysics problems, but isn’t well understood,’ says Matthew Caplan, a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University.
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Sep 15, 2018
Roadmap of technological singularity
Posted by Steve Nichols in categories: physics, robotics/AI, singularity
https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/
Recently, we might often have heard of the term “technological singularity” with the hypothesis that accelerating progress in technological inventions will cause a runaway effect that will make ordinary humans someday be overtaken by artificial intelligence.
The term seems to be appeared very contemporary to this technology era but in fact, thought about singularity has a long philosophical history.
Sep 12, 2018
European science funders ban grantees from publishing in paywalled journals
Posted by Derick Lee in categories: business, physics, science
The move means grantees from these 11 funders—which include the national funding agencies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France as well as Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics—will have to forgo publishing in thousands of journals, including high-profile ones such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The Lancet, unless those journals change their business model. “We think this could create a tipping point,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe, the Brussels-based association of science organizations that helped coordinate the plan. “Really the idea was to make a big, decisive step—not to come up with another statement or an expression of intent.”
Bold move is intended to trigger open-access tipping point.
Sep 6, 2018
Scientist Passed Over for Nobel Wins $3M, Donates It
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, physics
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a PhD student at Cambridge University some five decades ago when she made an astronomical discovery while reviewing data from a radio telescope: faint, repeating pulses of radio waves.
These signals came to be known as pulsars, a type of neutron star described by Scientific American as “a city-sized collapsed core of a massive sun that is made of degenerate matter and throws off lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.” The discovery was a leap forward: It pointed to the existence of black holes, provided evidence for gravitational waves, and much more.
It also yielded a 1974 Nobel Prize—but not for Bell Burnell. Instead, the prize went to Antony Hewish, Bell Burnell’s PhD supervisor, the Guardian reports.
Continue reading “Scientist Passed Over for Nobel Wins $3M, Donates It” »
Sep 6, 2018
The Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: mathematics, physics, space
The nineteenth-century discovery of numbers called “quaternions” gave mathematicians a way to describe rotations in space, forever changing physics and math.
Sep 5, 2018
Jet Of Material From Neutron Star Collision Appears To Eclipse Light Speed
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, physics
When two neutron stars collided in August of 2017, the resulting black hole emitted a jet of cosmic material at extremely high speed.
As reported by the Inquisitr in June 2018, the collision of two neutron stars in the cosmic event known as GW170817, perceived by humans in August of last year, appears to have created a black hole. It also appears to have created a jet of superfast material, detected and measured by a collection of National Science Foundation radio telescopes, and the results of those measurements seemed to show the jet moving at nearly four times the speed of light, an impossibility in our current understanding of the laws of physics.
In observations less than half a year apart, the jet seemed to cover a distance greater than two light years. Since a light year is defined as the distance light can travel through a vacuum in a year, that would indicate that the jet was hurtling toward Earth at nearly four times the speed of light, according to Space.com.
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Sep 4, 2018
“Where are they?”: SETI and modern science fiction
Posted by Sidney Clouston in categories: alien life, physics
Rather, they looked like whirlpools in space-time. In the universe, every part of space flowed, churned, trembled between madness and horror like fiery flames that emitted only frost. The Sun and the planets and all substance and existence seemed to be only hallucinations produced by the turbulence of space-time.
Aug 31, 2018
This Is A Sailboat And Those Are Sails
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: energy, physics
We are undeniably using up what little remains of Earth’s petroleum, and because of that, it’s getting expensive. To reduce fuel costs, shipping companies are turning back to sailboats. Yes, seriously. Sailboats. But they don’t look like any sails you’ve seen before.
You know sails – most of the time big rectangle things, sometimes big triangle things, almost always (but not always-always) made out of cloth. But while those things in the top gif don’t look like your normal sails, that’s what they are. They just don’t work like any sail you’ve ever seen before.
Most sails you’ve seen rely on the wind directly acting against them to provide propulsion. But these new types of sails, known as “rotor sails” rely on a physics principle called the Magnus Effect. Here, I’ll let the people with delightfully thick Finnish accents from Norsepower, the company that makes them, explain it:
Aug 30, 2018
Physicists Just Made the Most Precise Measurement Ever of Gravity’s Strength
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: physics, space
Gravity might feel strong if you drop a bowling ball on your feet, but is in fact the weakest force. Compare it to electromagnetism: the pull of all the Earth’s gravity can’t stop you from picking up a paperclip with a refrigerator magnet. That weakness makes gravity incredibly difficult to measure.
A team of scientists in China are reporting that they have now performed the most precise measurement of gravity’s strength yet by measuring G, the Newtonian or universal gravitational constant. G relates the gravitational attraction between two objects to their masses and the distance between them. The new measurement is important both for high-powered atomic clocks as well as the study of the universe, earth science, or any kind of science that relies on gravity in some way.