Rogue antimatter found in thunderclouds. Eric Meola/Corbis Lightning is only the most visible product of clouds’ intense electric fields. When Joseph Dwyer’s aeroplane took a wrong turn into a thundercloud, the mistake paid off: the atmospheric physicist flew not only through a frightening storm but also into an unexpected — and mysterious — haze of antimatter. Although powerful storms have been known to produce positrons — the antimatter versions of electrons — the antimatter observed by Dwyer and his team cannot be explained by any known processes, they say.
“This was so strange that we sat on this observation for several years,” says Dwyer, who is at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The flight took place six years ago, but the team is only now reporting the result (J. A key feature of antimatter is that when a particle of it makes contact with its ordinary-matter counterpart, both are instantly transformed into other particles in a process known as annihilation.
Scientists slow the speed of light. 22 January 2015Last updated at 20:28 ET By Kenneth Macdonald BBC Scotland Science Correspondent Photons were shown to reach the "finishing line" at different times A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light. They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons' shape - and slowed them to less than light speed. The photons remained travelling at the lower speed even when they returned to free space. The experiment is likely to alter how science looks at light. The collaborators - from Glasgow and Heriot-Watt universities - are members of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance.
The speed of light is regarded as an absolute. Light propagates more slowly when passing through materials like water or glass but goes back to its higher velocity as soon as it returns to free space again. Or at least it did until now. Photon race Then they raced them in pairs. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Peloton. Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists | Science. Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months. The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory. But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.
"We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light," said Steven Rose at Imperial. "If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter. " The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. Speed of light not so constant after all. Light doesn’t always travel at the speed of light. A new experiment reveals that focusing or manipulating the structure of light pulses reduces their speed, even in vacuum conditions.
A paper reporting the research, posted online at arXiv.org and accepted for publication, describes hard experimental evidence that the speed of light, one of the most important constants in physics, should be thought of as a limit rather than an invariable rate for light zipping through a vacuum. “It’s very impressive work,” says Robert Boyd, an optical physicist at the University of Rochester in New York. “It’s the sort of thing that’s so obvious, you wonder why you didn’t think of it first.” Researchers led by optical physicist Miles Padgett at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the effect by racing photons that were identical except for their structure. The structured light consistently arrived a tad late. The researchers produced pairs of photons and sent them on different paths toward a detector. Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time? For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept.
The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice. This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview.
The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality. The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. Magical Measurements Some physicists now disagree. Addicting Info – The U.S. Navy Just Announced The End Of Big Oil And No One Noticed. Surf’s up! The Navy appears to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy independence – turning seawater into fuel: After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel. …The new fuel is initially expected to cost around $3 to $6 per gallon, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has already flown a model aircraft on it. Curiously, this doesn’t seem to be making much of a splash (no pun intended) on the evening news. This technology is in its infancy and it’s already this cheap?
I expect the GOP to go ballistic over this and try to legislate it out of existence. There are two other aspects to this story that have not been brought up yet: 1. If we pull out massive amounts of CO2, even if we burn it again, not all of it will make it back into the water. 2. And if we “leak” the technology? Why this is not a huge major story mystifies me. Research reveals the real cause of death for some starburst galaxies. Like hedonistic rock stars that live by the "better to burn out than to fade away" credo, certain galaxies flame out in a blaze of glory. Astronomers have struggled to grasp why these young "starburst" galaxies—ones that are very rapidly forming new stars from cold molecular hydrogen gas up to 100 times faster than our own Milky Way—would shut down their prodigious star formation to join a category scientists call "red and dead.
" Starburst galaxies typically result from the merger or close encounter of two separate galaxies. Previous research had revealed spouts of gas shooting outward from such galaxies at up to 2 million miles per hour. But astronomers lacked direct evidence of what expelled the gas, the fundamental ingredient for crafting new stars. "To form stars you need dense gas," said Gregory Rudnick, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. Rudnick and his fellow researchers analyzed 12 merging galaxies as the curtain fell on their star making. Molecules in a fluid not randomly arranged. FOM PhD researcher Matthijs Panman and his colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have demonstrated that molecules in liquid alcohol are not randomly oriented with respect to each other.
The angle between the oxygen-hydrogen bonds of two neighbouring alcohol molecules is usually about 120 degrees. This discovery refutes the commonly held idea that molecules in a liquid are randomly arranged. The researchers published their work on 12 November 2014 in Physical Review Letters. In school we learn that molecules in a liquid are randomly arranged.
But is that completely correct? Light and vibrations The FOM researchers, working at the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences in Amsterdam and in collaboration with the Amsterdam Center for Multiscale Modeling, devised an experiment to observe the local ordering. The light used is polarised, which means that the electric field of the light has a fixed direction. 120 degrees Explore further: Directly visualizing hydrogen bonds. Engineers efficiently 'mix' light at the nanoscale. The race to make computer components smaller and faster and use less power is pushing the limits of the properties of electrons in a material. Photonic systems could eventually replace electronic ones, but the fundamentals of computation, mixing two inputs into a single output, currently require too much space and power when done with light.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have engineered a nanowire system that could pave the way for this ability, combining two light waves to produce a third with a different frequency and using an optical cavity to amplify the intensity of the output to a usable level. The study was led by Ritesh Agarwal, professor of materials science and engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Ming-Liang Ren, a post-doctoral researcher in his lab. Other members of the Agarwal lab, Wenjing Liu, Carlos O.
Aspetti and Liaoxin Sun, contributed to the study. It was published in Nature Communications. Does dark magma lurk in deep Earth? (Phys.org) —A key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look deep into the lower mantle—a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface, just above the core. Data have suggested that deep, hot, fluid magma oceans of melted silicates, a major Earth material, may reside above the core-mantle boundary. Researchers including Carnegie's Alex Goncharov have found, using high-pressure experiments with a proxy material, that the deep Earth materials conduct far less heat under increasing pressure than previously thought. The finding suggests that pressure is more important than current thinking and it is in direct contrast to what is found with the most abundant heat-conducting substance in the vicinity.
The results indicate the presence of dense, dark magma heat traps that could affect the flow of heat across the core-mantle boundary revealing a different model of heat transport in this region. Explore further: Earth's lower mantle chemistry breakthrough. Xkcd. Phys.org - Photos du journal. Half of stars lurk outside galaxies. NASA ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO Team Collisions between galaxies can kick stars out into intergalactic space. Astronomers have spotted a faint cosmic glow, unseen until now, that may come from stars that float adrift between galaxies. The discovery suggests that as many as half of all stars in the Universe lurk outside galactic boundaries. “There might be people living out there, out in the middle of cold dark space, that don't have a Milky Way,” says Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The stars were probably tossed there when galaxies collided. A team led by astrophysicist Michael Zemcov, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, reports the discovery in the 7 November issue of Science1. The findings come from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER), which flew briefly into space in 2010 and 2012 aboard a sounding rocket. Dark matter may be massive: Theorists suggest the Standard Model may account for the stuff. The physics community has spent three decades searching for and finding no evidence that dark matter is made of tiny exotic particles. Case Western Reserve University theoretical physicists suggest researchers consider looking for candidates more in the ordinary realm and, well, more massive. Dark matter is unseen matter, that, combined with normal matter, could create the gravity that, among other things, prevents spinning galaxies from flying apart.
Physicists calculate that dark matter comprises 27 percent of the universe; normal matter 5 percent. Instead of WIMPS, weakly interacting massive particles, or axions, which are weakly interacting low-mass particles, dark matter may be made of macroscopic objects, anywhere from a few ounces to the size of a good asteroid, and probably as dense as a neutron star, or the nucleus of an atom, the researchers suggest. The Macros, as Starkman and Jacobs call them, would not only dwarf WIMPS and axions, but differ in an important way.
DNA Nanotech: The First Large DNA Crystals | Loony Labs. DNA is the stuff of life as we know it, but it is the potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams. A dream that been going on for 20 years now and was just realized. Scientists have tried to design large DNA crystals with precisely prescribed depth and complex features — a design quest just fulfilled as I mentioned above. The team built 32 DNA crystals with precisely-defined depth and an assortment of sophisticated three-dimensional (3D) features.
The team used their “DNA-brick self-assembly” method, which was first unveiled in 2012, when they created more than 100 3D complex nanostructures about the size of viruses. What happens in the Lab doesn't have to stay in the Lab: Like this: Related. Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe? The event horizon of a black hole — the point of no return for anything that falls in — is a spherical surface. In a higher-dimensional universe, a black hole could have a three-dimensional event horizon, which could spawn a whole new universe as it forms. It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.
The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. “For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. On the brane In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon.
Model discrepancy The picture has some problems, however. Fake Art Can Be Detected Because of Nuclear Bombs Detonated in 1945 | Broken Secrets. November 20, 2012 at 2:00 am Chad Upton By Chad Upton | Editor Art forgers have become experts at creating the types of paints and canvases used during popular and valuable art periods, to the point that art experts may not be able to distinguish a fake from the real thing. But, Dr Elena Basner, a long time art curator, worked with scientists to create a much better way to detect forged oil paintings. Prior to the first nuclear bomb detonation in July of 1945, isotopes such as strontium-90 and cesium-137 simply did not exist in nature.
Since those isotopes didn’t exist in nature prior to 1945, paintings created prior to 1945 could not contain them originally. 550 nuclear bombs were detonated from 1945 to 1963, when most nations agreed not to test nuclear weapons any longer. If someone is trying to pass a work that is dated prior to 1945, but it contains these isotopes, it is almost certainly a fake. Broken Secrets | Facebook | Twitter | Email | Kindle Like this: Like Loading... Physicists create lasers that switch on and off at world record speed.
Complex organic molecule found in interstellar space. Smallest-possible Diamonds Form Ultra-thin Nanothread. From light into matter, nothing seems to stop quantum teleportation. New species of electrons can lead to better computing. The sound of an atom has been captured. Entangled photons make a picture from a paradox. New metamaterial gives light a one-way ticket. Proteins 'ring like bells' Ten things you may not know about stars | Space. Is information physical? And what does that mean? The illusion of time : past, present and future all exist together - extended. Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram. Accidental Discovery Dramatically Improves Electrical Conductivity -
Astronomers reveal contents of mysterious black hole jets. Distant artificial atoms cooperate by sharing light, physicists show. Photons detected without damage. Single electrons make waves. Oldest galaxy known to humanity. Using heat to make magnets. A strange lonely planet found without a star. Light-activated electroactive molecule-based memory microcells. Coldest brown dwarfs blur lines between stars and planets. New Measurement of Gravitational Constant Comes Up Higher Than Expected - Wired Science. In search for dark matter components, physicists edge closer by watching radiation shifts.
'Groovy' hologram creates strange state of light at visible and invisible wavelengths. Mysterious magnetar boasts one of strongest magnetic fields in Universe. A new light wave. Scientists Make ‘Impossible Material’ … by Accident. Magnetisation controlled at picosecond intervals. Astronomers Find Ancient Star 'Methuselah' Which Appears To Be Older Than The Universe.