World’s First Perpetual Motion Machine? | ASTOUNDE.com Can this machine operate forever? Since at least the 12th century, man has sought to create a perpetual motion machine; a device that would continue working indefinitely without any external source of energy. A large scientific contingent thinks such a device would violate the laws of thermodynamics, and is thus impossible. Could it be that as a race, we don’t fully understand the laws of physics and such a device may indeed be possible? Norwegian artist and mathematician Reidar Finsrud is an outside the box thinker that has devised a machine that he believes achieves true perpetual motion. The dream is that if we’re able to produce perpetual motion machines, that we’d have tapped into the holy grail of sustainability: an infinite energy source. A device that requires no input to run that could be affixed to a generator would harvest free energy to power whatever we so pleased. What are your thoughts? Source: Finsrud Comments comments
'Space Chronicles': Why Exploring Space Still Matters After decades of global dominance, America's space shuttle program ended last summer while countries like Russia, China and India continue to advance their programs. But astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of the new book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, says America's space program is at a critical moment. He thinks it's time for America to invest heavily in space exploration and research. "Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival," Tyson tells NPR's David Greene. He sees this "force of nature" firsthand when he goes to student classrooms. But spending for space programs isn't where Tyson would like it to be. "I think if you double [the budget], to a penny on the dollar, that's enough to take us in bold visions in a shorter time scale to Mars, visit asteroids, to study the status of all the planets," he says. Today, Mars is bone-dry; it once had running water.
Physicists Achieve Quantum Teleportation of Photon Over 25 Kilometers For the first time, a team of physicists have successfully teleported a quantum state of a photon to a crystal over 25 kilometers away through a fiber optic cable. This effectively showed that the photon’s quantum state, not its composition, is important to the teleportation process. The team was led by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva and the results were published in the journal Nature Photonics. The quantum state of the photon is able to preserve information under extreme conditions, including the difference between traveling as light or becoming stored in the crystal like matter. To test this and ensure what they were observing was actually happening, one photon was stored in a crystal while the other was sent along optical fiber, over a distance of 25 kilometers. The photon did not physically “teleport” as we are used to hearing about in science fiction, where someone’s body can moved from place to place in a matter of seconds.
Georges Lemaître Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, (French: [ʒɔʁʒə ləmɛtʁ] ( ); 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Université catholique de Louvain.[1] He was the first known academic to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.[2][3] He was also the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom or the "Cosmic Egg".[8] Biography[edit] According to the Big Bang theory, the universe emerged from an extremely dense and hot state (singularity). In 1925, on his return to Belgium, he became a part-time lecturer at the Université catholique de Louvain. Work[edit]
Hawking Radiation Recreated In A Laboratory A researcher claims to have produced a simulation of Hawking radiation, which if true will give physicists the chance to test one of Stephen Hawking's most significant predictions. In 1974, Hawking upended ideas about black holes with his theory that just outside the event horizon, particle-antiparticle pairs should appear as a result of the black hole's gravitational field. One of these would be drawn into the hole, but the other escape. Hawking's equations have won widespread support from physicists, and are a major contributor to his reputation. Now Professor Jeff Steinhauer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology claims to be getting close. The fluctuations occur in pairs, modelling the particle-antiparticle pairs appearing around a black hole. In Nature, Steinhauer reported, “the observation of Hawking radiation emitted by this black-hole analogue.” Cowen notes that it is still unclear how well Steinhauer's creation models a real black hole. Image CC BY-SA 2.5
New Study: Smart People More Likely to Use Drugs I have a feeling they won’t be mentioning this in DARE class. A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. The data come from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has been following thousands of people over decades. So much of what we’ve been told about drugs and drug users turns out to be the opposite of the truth, it’s amazing that the anti-drug fanatics are able to find any audience at all anymore. It ought to be intuitive that the curiosity which comes along with above-average intelligence would also be correlated with a heightened interest in experiencing altered states of consciousness.
When Parallel Worlds Collide . . . Quantum Mechanics Is Born Parallel universes – worlds where the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hit, or where Australia was colonised by the Portuguese – are a staple of science fiction. But are they real? In a radical paper published this week in Physical Review X, we (Dr Michael Hall and I from Griffith University and Dr Dirk-André Deckert from the University of California) propose not only that parallel universes are real, but that they are not quite parallel – they can “collide”. In our theory, the interaction between nearby worlds is the source of all of the bizarre features of quantum mechanics that are revealed by experiment. Many worlds in existing interpretations The existence of parallel worlds in quantum mechanics is not a new idea in itself – they are a feature of one of the leading interpretations of quantum mechanics, the 1957 “many worlds interpretation” (MWI). First, its formalism is extremely remote from everyday experience. Heads or tails? Many interacting worlds Implications and applications
Does Marijuana Make You Stupid? | Wired Science Marijuana is currently regulated by the United States government as a Schedule I drug, placing it in the same category as heroin, MDMA and LSD. This is largely due to the first condition of Schedule I drugs, which is that the substance “has a high potential for abuse.” The language in that clause is deliberately vague. Does abuse equal addiction? Probably not, since marijuana is not addictive like other Schedule I drugs. Rather, the case for marijuana “abuse” has always stemmed from its cognitive effects. That, at least, has been the collective stereotype for decades. The lower education levels of the pot smokers — and their greater likelihood of being male — had made it look like marijuana had significantly affected their intelligence. Once these population differences were corrected for, the long-term effects of marijuana use disappeared: The scientists found that “there were no significant between group differences.” cottage Swiss cake This answer is pretty obvious: cheese.
Researchers at Brown University shattered an electron wave function A team of physicists based at Brown University has succeeded in shattering a quantum wave function. That near-mythical representation of indeterminate reality, in which an unmeasured particle is able to occupy many states simultaneously, can be dissected into many parts. This dissection, which is described this week in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, has the potential to turn how we view the quantum world on its head. When we say some element of the quantum world occupies many states at once, what’s really being referred to is the element’s wave function. A wave function can be viewed as a space occupied simultaneously by many different possibilities or degrees of freedom. If a particle could be in position (x,y,z) in three-dimensional space, there are probabilities that it could specifically be at (x1,y1,z1) or (x2,y2,z2) and so forth, and this is represented in the wave function, which is all of these possibilities added together.
How to File a Patent for Your Invention - Creating, Patenting and Filing an Invention Media Platforms Design Team Lesson A: Fabrication Nation Inventors have traditionally turned their ideas into prototypes with plenty of sketches and endless iterations in wood, clay or metal. Computer-aided design (CAD) software allows rapid and highly precise blueprinting, computed numerical control (CNC) milling and routing equipment transfers that precision to the physical world, and 3D printers can create fully formed objects on demand. Plus, the cost of both hardware and software has fallen dramatically. Open-source invention organizations, such as NextFab Store and MakerBot, sell 3D desktop printers and kits through their websites, ranging from $750 to $4175. But if you don't want to own your own machine, look up local invention facilities such as TechShop, in Portland, Ore., and San Francisco; or NextFab Studio in Philadelphia. Lesson B: Patents Demystified Gaining a patent requires money, time and perseverance—and that's when everything goes smoothly. • Filing a patent yourself.
Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics Physicists reported this week the discovery of a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality. “This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work. The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. “The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and an author of the first of two papers detailing the new idea. Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time.
Ecstasy Kills Cancer It may sound like a hoax, but it’s true: Recent studies show that a modified form of ecstasy kills 100% of blood cancer cells. While patient application is still a long way away, in test tube studies, the modified ecstasy killed all of leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma cells (as reported by the BBC). Your doctor probably won’t be telling you to take two hits of ecstasy anytime soon, but this exciting discovery gives hope to those suffering with blood cancers and calls into question once again our country’s perilous relationship with drugs and the true reasoning behind the ongoing War on Drugs. Ecstasy, aka MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a designer club drug that the mainstream usually associates with all-night dance parties known as raves where young people dressed in neon fur suck on pacifiers and rub each other in waves of ecstatic pleasure. sources: LA Times image: tanjila
Quantum Effects in Biology | Controlled Quantum Dynamics Group Biologists do not take a quantum physics course during their studies because so far they were able to make sense of biological phenomena without using the counterintuitive laws of physics that govern the atomic scale. However, in recent years progress in experimental technology has revealed that quantum phenomena are relevant for fundamental biological processes such as photosynthesis, magneto-reception and olfaction. We have helped to initiate the development of this research field and are now working to discover how nature is harnessing quantum dynamics to optimize biological function. S.F. Environment assisted quantum bio-dynamics: It is remarkable that quantum phenomena can play a role in warm, wet and noisy biological systems. Environment assisted quantum bio-dynamics: Biological environments are not creating white noise but do actually possess considerable structure. J.M.
What the Ultra-Personalized Internet Is Hiding from You - Technology In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to google "BP." They're pretty similar—educated, white, left-leaning women who live in the Northeast. But the results they saw were quite different. One of my friends saw investment information about BP. Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results—the ones that the company's famous PageRank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. With Google personalized for everyone, the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. For a time, it seemed that the Internet was going to redemocratize society. And its not just Google. All of this personalization isn't just shaping what we buy. Want to stop your browser from tracking your clicks?