Light Bends Matter, Surprising Scientists

After 72 hours of exposure to ambient light, strands of nanoparticles twisted and bunched together. Credit: Nicholas Kotov

From Live Science:

Light can twist matter, according to a new study that observed ribbons of nanoparticles twisting in response to light.

Scientists knew matter can cause light to bend – prisms and glasses prove this easily enough. But the reverse phenomenon was not shown to occur until recently.

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Fake Dark Matter Could Show What Real Stuff Is Like

Can you see it yet? (Image: NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA)

From New Scientist:

The key to understanding dark matter is in our grasp – we've got something here on Earth that works just the same way.

Dark matter is hypothetical, invisible stuff that cosmologists invoke to explain why the universe appears to contain much less matter than their calculations say it should, and some think that it is made up of hypothetical particles called axions. Even though we haven't yet found a genuine axion, however, materials called topological insulators can be used to mimic them, say Shoucheng Zhang and colleagues at Stanford University, California. Magnetic fluctuations in the materials produce a field just like an axion field, his team found.

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Heat: A Visual Tour of What's Hot

From Cool Infographics:

Our friend, Jess Bachman from WallStats.com, created Heat: A Visual Tour of What’s Hot or Not in the Universe for Rasmussen College. This fun infographic lines up real-life examples across the entire scale of temperature.

I really like this one, its fun. Basically it a huge ordered list of temperatures. Sometimes it just helps to see everything all in one go, to add some perspective. Also there are cool factoids and such scattered about. To support my work please digg it and tweet it or otherwise spread the good word! Thanks y’all.

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Quest Aims To Create Bigger Atoms And New Kinds Of Matter

Heavy elements like atomic number 118 were created by smashing calcium-48 ions into americium-243 target atoms, shown in this illustration. Credit: Thomas Tegge, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

From Live Science:

A quest is underway to create larger and larger atoms with more protons and neutrons than ever before.

By building these super-heavy elements, scientists are not just creating new kinds of matter – they are probing the subatomic world and learning about the mysterious forces that hold atoms together.

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Exotic Antimatter Detected at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: Heaviest Known Antinucleus Heralds New Frontier In Physics

The diagram above is known as the 3-D chart of the nuclides. The familiar Periodic Table arranges the elements according to their atomic number, Z, which determines the chemical properties of each element. Physicists are also concerned with the N axis, which gives the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The third axis represents strangeness, S, which is zero for all naturally occurring matter, but could be non-zero in the core of collapsed stars. Antinuclei lie at negative Z and N in the above chart, and the newly discovered antinucleus (magenta) now extends the 3-D chart into the new region of strange antimatter. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2010) — An international team of scientists studying high-energy collisions of gold ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has published evidence of the most massive antinucleus discovered to date.

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A Measure For The Multiverse

Touching the multiverse (Image: Eoin Ryan)

From The New Scientist:

WHEN cosmologist George Ellis turned 70 last year, his friends held a party to celebrate. There were speeches and drinks and canapés aplenty to honour the theorist from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on general relativity. But there the similarity to most parties ends.

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What Happens At Absolute Zero?

The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest natural object known in the universe, seen here by the Hubble Space Telescope (Image: ESA/NASA)

From The New Scientist:

The curious things that happen at low temperatures keep on throwing up surprises. Last week, scientists reported that molecules in an ultra-cold gas can chemically react at distances up to 100 times greater than they can at room temperature.

In experiments closer to room temperature, chemical reactions tend to slow down as the temperature decreases. But scientists found that molecules at frigid temperatures just a few hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero (−273.15°C or 0 kelvin) can still exchange atoms, forging new chemical bonds in the process, thanks to weird quantum effects that extend their reach at low temperatures.

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Particle May Be Leading Candidate For Mysterious Dark Matter

Closeup of a CDMS detector, made of crystal germanium.
(Credit: DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Physicists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive.

A 9-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise -- meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue.

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In Brookhaven Collider, Scientists Briefly Break A Law Of Nature

HOT A computer rendition of 4-trillion-degree Celsius quark-gluon plasma created in a demonstration of what scientists suspect shaped cosmic history. Brookhaven National Laboratory

From The New York Times:

Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.

The blow was delivered in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where, since 2000, physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.

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The Hottest Science Experiment On The Planet

Brookhaven National Laboratory

From Discover Magazine:

In a Long Island lab, gold particles collide to form a subatomic stew far hotter than the sun.

Rocking the thermometer at 4 trillion degrees Celsius, a subatomic soup that might reflect the state of matter shortly after the Big Bang has set a new world record: It's the hottest substance ever created in a lab. The previous record, recorded at Sandia National Lab in 2006, was a balmy 2 billion degrees Celsius. The core of the sun burns at a chill 15 million degrees.

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General Relativity: In Pretty Good Shape

From Discovery Magazine:

If we celebrate provocative new experimental findings, we should also celebrate the careful null results (experiments that agree with existing theories) on which much of science is based. Back in October we pointed to a new analysis that used observations of gravitational lensing by large-scale structure to test Einstein’s general relativity on cosmological scales, with the intriguing result that it didn’t seem to fit. And the caveat that it probably would end up fitting once we understood things better, but it’s always important to follow up on these kinds of clues.

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Single Photons Observed At Seemingly Faster-Than-Light Speeds

At the boundaries between layers, the photon creates waves interfering with each other, affecting its transit time. (Credit: JQI)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Jan. 27, 2010) — Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer.

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Twisted Physics: Scientists Create Light Knots

By reflecting a laser beam from a specially designed hologram (shown here as the colored circle), physicists created knots of dark filaments (represented by the colored knot). Credit: Mark Dennis.

From Live Science:

Like your shoelaces or electrical cords, light can get twisted into knots. Now, scientists have used a computer-controlled hologram and theoretical physics to turn a light beam into pretzel-like shapes.

The twisted feat not only led to some pretty cool images, but the results have implications for future laser devices, the researchers say.

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Cracking The Majorana Code

From New Scientist:

A brilliant but fiercely eccentric Sicilian nuclear physicist writes a string of suicide notes, then disappears. He is never seen again. Yet he was carrying his passport and enough cash to start a new life.

Were the notes a clever decoy?

For decades, João Magueijo, a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, has been obsessed by the story behind Ettore Majorana's disappearance.

"He's been with me throughout my scientific career as a shadow I've never been able to shake off," Magueijo declares in the prologue to A Brilliant Darkness. And so, to lay the ghost to rest, he has conducted his own investigation.

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Chink Found In Armor Of Perfect Cloak

Changing courseNew research predicts the telltale radiation (orange) emitted by an electron as it moves along a trajectory (dotted line) through a perfect spherical cloak. Credit: B. Zhang and B.-I. Wu/PRL upcoming

From Science News:

Charged particles could reveal hidden object's location, new idea suggests.

Tiny charged particles could reveal the location of a perfect invisibility cloak. Such a cloak — which exists only in theory at the moment — would render an object invisible by gently deflecting photons around it. But charged particles wouldn’t be fooled: they would interact with the cloak in a telltale way, giving up the cloak’s location, researchers report in a paper to appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.

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With First Neutrino Events, Physicists Closer to Answering Why Only Matter in Universe

Arc-part tunnel for Neutrino Experimental Facility at the J-PARC accelerator laboratory in Tokai, Japan. (Credit: Courtesy of J-PARC.)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 27, 2009) — Physicists from the Japanese-led multi-national T2K neutrino collaboration have just announced that over the weekend they detected the first neutrino events generated by their newly built neutrino beam at the J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex) accelerator laboratory in Tokai, Japan.

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The 10 Weirdest Physics Facts, From Relativity To Quantum Physics

Albert Einstein, who pointed out that the faster you move,
the heavier you get Photo: AFP/GETTY

From The Telegraph:

People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.

Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box.

We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users.

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Will Probe's Upcoming Fly-By Unlock Exotic Physics?

The Rosetta probe will fly by Earth on Friday (Illustration: ESA/C. Carreau)

From New Scientist:

What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.

The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.

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Seven Questions That Keep Physicists Up At Night

From New Scientist:

It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"

The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.

While most panelists professed to sleep very soundly, here are seven key conundrums that emerged during the session, which can be viewed here.

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The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics

From The New Atlantis:

By the second quarter of the twentieth century, one of the world’s most revered figures was a long-haired, somewhat rumpled European refugee. His public persona combined a Gandhi-like saintliness with the awesome impression that his sleepy-looking, baggy eyes gazed not on the everyday world of ordinary mortals but into far vistas of space and time unseen by others. This suggestion of contact with transcendent reality was central to Albert Einstein’s charisma. It arose from his success in opening the door of human imagination to previously unknown concepts of time and space.

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