How to Walk Safely Coffee in Hand

(I am just so glad that the scientists have addressed this ever so critical issue. )

Science Reveals How Not to Spill Your Coffee When Walking

Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 11 May 2012 Time: 01:02 PM ET

 

how to keep from spilling
CREDIT: H.C. Mayer and R. Krechetnikov

Ever wondered why it’s so hard to walk with a cup of coffee without spilling? It just so happens that the human stride has almost exactly the right frequency to drive the natural oscillations of coffee, when the fluid is in a typically sized coffee mug. New research shows that the properties of mugs, legs and liquid conspire to cause spills, most often at some point between your seventh and tenth step.

So says a pair of fluid physicists at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). They investigated the science of sloshing in a new study published in the journal Physical Review Letters E, and calculated the natural frequency at which coffee sloshes back and forth when held in mugs of a variety of sizes, from a dainty espresso cup to a cappuccino behemoth. They found that a normal human gait moves at nearly the same frequency, so each step amplifies the coffee’s heave-ho motion. Stumbling or changing pace — common occurrences when you’re low on caffeine — make matters worse by causing chaos in your cup, increasing the chance of a splash over the rim.

But now, there’s hope. By modeling the fluid and walking dynamics of the situation, and comparing the math with some real-world walking-with-coffee experiments, the UCSB scientists have uncovered a few tips for bleary-eyed coffee cup carriers.

“Of course, there are ways to control coffee spilling,” study co-author Rouslan Krechetnikov told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Coffee drinkers often attempt to walk quickly with their cups, as if they might manage to reach their destination before their sloshing java waves reach a critical height. This method is scientifically flawed. It turns out that the faster you walk, the closer your gait comes to the natural sloshing frequency of coffee. To avoid driving the oscillations that lead to a spillage, walk slowly. [Why Does Room-Temperature Coffee Taste So Bad?]

Secondly, watch your cup, not your feet. The researchers found that when study participants focused on their cups, the average number of steps they took before spilling coffee increased greatly. Krechetnikov and his graduate student Hans Mayer, the primary author of the study, suggested two explanations for this result: First, focusing on one’s cup tends to engender slower walking, and second, it dampens the noise, or chaotic sloshing, in the cup. Whether focused carrying decreases the amount of noise because we perform “targeted suppression,” automatically counteracting the sloshing of the liquid with small flicks of our wrists, or because we simply hold the cup more steadily when we’re looking at it, the researchers could not say.

Third, accelerate gradually. If you take off suddenly, a huge coffee wave will build up almost instantly, and it will crash over the rim after just a few steps.

But the best way to prevent coffee spilling might be to find an unusual cup. According to Krechetnikov, ideas from liquid sloshing engineering studies, which historically were done to stabilize fuel tanks inside missiles, indicate three possibilities for spill-free cup designs: “a flexible container to act as a sloshing absorber in suppressing liquid oscillations, a series of annular ring baffles arranged around the inner wall of the container to achieve sloshing suppression, or a different shape cup.”

from:    http://www.livescience.com/20246-coffee-spill-walking.html

Quantum Entanglement May Jump Time

Weird! Quantum Entanglement Can Reach into the Past

Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 30 April 2012 Time: 09:42 AM ET
Wackyphysics-banner
Scientists have entangled particles in such a way that a future decision can affect the past states of the particles.
Scientists have entangled particles in such a way that a future decision can affect the past states of the particles.
CREDIT: Jon Heras, Equinox Graphics Ltd.

Spooky quantum entanglement just got spookier.

Entanglement is a weird statewhere two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they’ve been measured and may no longer even exist.

If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it’s a bit “radical,” in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.

“Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured,” write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.

Essentially, the scientists showed that future actions may influence past events, at least when it comes to the messy, mind-bending world of quantum physics.

In the quantum world, things behave differently than they do in the real, macroscopic world we can see and touch around us. In fact, when quantum entanglement was first predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein expressed his distaste for the idea, calling it “spooky action at a distance.”

The researchers, taking entanglement a step further than ever before, started with two sets of light particles, called photons.

The basic setup goes like this:

Both pairs of photons are entangled, so that the two particles in the first set are entangled with each other, and the two particles in the second set are entangled with each other. Then, one photon from each pair is sent to a person named Victor. Of the two particles that are left behind, one goes to Bob, and the other goes to Alice.

But now, Victor has control over Alice and Bob’s particles. If he decides to entangle the two photons he has, then Alice and Bob’s photons, each entangled with one of Victor’s, also become entangled with each other. And Victor can choose to take this action at any time, even after Bob and Alice may have measured, changed or destroyed their photons.

“The fantastic new thing is that this decision to entangle two photons can be done at a much later time,” said research co-author Anton Zeilinger, also of the University of Vienna. “They may no longer exist.”

Such an experiment had first been predicted by physicist Asher Peres in 2000, but had not been realized until now.

“The way you entangle them is to send them onto a half-silvered mirror,” Zeilinger told LiveScience. “It reflects half of the photons, and transmits half. If you send two photons, one to the right and one to the left, then each of the two photons have forgotten where they come from. They lose their identities and become entangled.”

Zeilinger said the technique could one day be used to communicate between superfast quantum computers, which rely on entanglement to store information. Such a machine has not yet been created, but experiments like this are a step toward that goal, the researchers say.

“The idea is to create two particle pairs, send one to one computer, the other to another,” Zeilinger said.”Then if these two photons are entangled, the computers could use them to exchange information.”

from:    http://www.livescience.com/19975-spooky-quantum-entanglement.html

 

Documentary on Zero Point Energy

From: http://www.wanttoknow.info/060630newenergyvideodocumentary

 

An inspiring video on new energy available for free viewing on Google Video is the best documentary available on new energy sources which can powerfully transform our world. The award-winning documentary, Free Energy—The Race to Zero Point, provides a thorough, professional examination of the leading theories and practical inventions that tap into zero point energy—now acknowledged by quantum physicists to exist in all space as a potential source of infinite and accessible electromagnetic energy. Respected engineers and scientists explain in understandable terms how amazing new energy technologies and inventions can go beyond alternative energy to solve the energy crisis on our planet.

To view this inspiring new energy documentary free online (110 minutes), click here.

By illuminating the historical contributions of the many visionaries pioneering the new energy field, this engaging documentary will transform the way you think about science and energy. Working models of a variety of engines which—by tapping the zero point field—produce more energy than they consume are both explained and demonstrated by numerous creative inventors. Any one of these inventions could resolve the energy and oil crisis if only given the proper attention and funding, yet certain vested interests stand to lose billions of dollars should they succeed. How far will they go to suppress these breakthrough technologies?

Latest on Search for Higgs Boson

Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs boson

March 7, 2012

Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs bosonEnlargeObserved and expected exclusion limits for a Standard Model Higgs boson at the 95-percent confidence level for the combined CDF and DZero analyses. The limits are expressed as multiples of the SM prediction for test masses chosen every 5 GeV/c2 in the range of 100 to 200 GeV/c2. The points are joined by straight lines for better readability. The yellow and green bands indicate the 68- and 95-percent probability regions, in the absence of a signal.The difference between the observed and expected limits around 124 GeV could be explained by the presense of a Higgs boson whose mass would lie between 115 to 135 GeV. The CDF and DZero data exclude a Higgs boson between 147 and 179 GeV/c2 at the 95-percent confidence level.

(PhysOrg.com) — New measurements announced today by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered. After analyzing the full data set from the Tevatron accelerator, which completed its last run in September 2011, the two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.  

Physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a  with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV. In this range, the new result has a probability of being due to a statistical fluctuation at level of significance known among scientists as 2.2 sigma. This new result also excludes the possibility of the Higgs having a mass in the range from 147 to 179 GeV.

Physicists claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be due to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 in 740, or three sigmas. A discovery is claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.

This result sits well within the stringent constraints established by earlier direct and indirect measurements made by CERN’s , the Tevatron, and other accelerators, which place the mass of the Higgs boson within the range of 115 to 127 GeV. These findings are also consistent with the December 2011 announcement of excesses seen in that range by LHC experiments, which searched for the Higgs in different decay patterns. None of the hints announced so far from the Tevatron or LHC experiments, however, are strong enough to claim evidence for the Higgs boson.

“The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson,” said Jim Siegrist, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent  in the quest to understand the building blocks of nature.”

Physicists from the CDF and DZero experiments made the announcement at the annual conference on Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories known as Rencontres de Moriond in Italy. This is the latest result in a decade-long search by teams of physicists at the Tevatron.

“I am thrilled with the pace of progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson. CDF and DZero scientists from around the world have pulled out all the stops to reach this very nice and important contribution to the Higgs boson search,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. “The two collaborations independently combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments to arrive at this exciting result.”

Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways. Just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using different combinations of coins, the Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles. Discovering the Higgs boson relies on observing a statistically significant excess of the particles into which the Higgs decays and those particles must have corresponding kinematic properties that allow for the mass of the Higgs to be reconstructed.

“There is still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists,” said Dmitri Denisov, DZero co-spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. “Based on these exciting hints, we are working as quickly as possible to further improve our analysis methods and squeeze the last ounce out of Tevatron data.”

Only high-energy particle colliders such as the Tevatron and LHC can recreate the energy conditions found in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. According to the , the theory that explains and predicts how nature’s building blocks behave and interact with each other, the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles.

“Without something like the Higgs boson giving fundamental particles mass, the whole world around us would be very different from what we see today,” said Giovanni Punzi, CDF co-spokesperson and physicist at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, or INFN, in Pisa, Italy. “Physicists have known for a long time that the Higgs or something like it must exist, and we are eager to finally pin this phenomenon down and start learning more about it.”

If a Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles before even the world’s best detectors and fastest computers can snap a picture of it. To find the Higgs boson, physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal.

The experiments at the Tevatron and the LHC offer a complementary search strategy for the Higgs boson. The Tevatron was a proton/anti-proton collider, with a maximum center of mass energy of 2 TeV, whereas the LHC is a proton/proton collider that will ultimately reach 14 TeV. Because the two accelerators collide different pairs of particles at different energies and produce different types of backgrounds, the search strategies are different. At the Tevatron, for example, the most powerful method is to search the CDF and DZero datasets to look for a Higgs boson that decays into a pair of bottom quarks if the Higgs boson mass is approximately 115-130 GeV. It is crucial to observe the Higgs boson in several types of decay modes because the Standard Model predicts different branching ratios for different decay modes. If these ratios are observed, then this is experimental confirmation of both the Standard Model and the Higgs.

“The search for the Higgs boson by the Tevatron and LHC experiments is like two people taking a picture of a park from different vantage points,” said Gregorio Bernardi, DZero co-spokesperson at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory of the High Energies, or LPNHE, in Paris . “One picture may show a child that is blocked from the other’s view by a tree. Both pictures may show the child but only one can resolve the child’s features. You need to combine both viewpoints to get a true picture of who is in the park. At this point both pictures are fuzzy and we think maybe they show someone in the park. Eventually the LHC with future data samples will be able to give us a sharp picture of what is there. The Tevatron by further improving its analyses will also sharpen the picture which is emerging today.”

This new updated analysis uses 10 inverse femtobarns of data from both CDF and DZero, the full data set collected from 10 years of the Tevatron’s collider program. Ten inverse femtobarns of data represents about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions. Data analysis will continue at both experiments.

“This result represents years of work from hundreds of scientists around the world,” said Rob Roser,  co-spokesperson and physicist at Fermilab. “But we are not done yet – together with our LHC colleagues, we expect 2012 to be the year we know whether the Higgs exists or not, and assuming it is discovered, we will have first indications that it behaves as predicted by the Standard Model.”

Check out the source for more information and a video:    http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-tevatron-latest-results-higgs-boson.html

 

 

 

 

 

Uncertain about the Uncertainty Principle — Read On

Wacky Physics: New Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle

Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 21 February 2012 Time: 10:34 AM ET
An atom consists of a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons orbiting around.
The uncertainty principle posits, for instance, that if you make a measurement to find out the exact position of an electron around an atom, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it’s moving.
CREDIT: Dreamstime

One of the most often quoted, yet least understood, tenets of physics is the uncertainty principle.

Formulated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the rule states that the more precisely you measure a particle’s position, the less precisely you will be able to determine its momentum, and vice versa.

The principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there’s a limit to how well we can ever really understand the universe.

While the subtleties of the uncertainty principle are often lost on nonphysicists, it turns out the idea is frequently misunderstood by experts, too. But a recent experiment shed new light on the maxim and led to a novel formula describing how the uncertainty principle really works.

Perplexing logic

The uncertainty principle only applies in the quantum mechanical realm of the very small, on scales of subatomic particles. Its logic is perplexing to the human mind, which is acclimated to the macroscopic world, where measurements are only limited by the quality of our instruments.

But in the microscopic world, there truly is a limit to how much information we can ever glean about an object.

For example, if you make a measurement to find out exactly where an electron is, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it’s moving. Or you might choose to determine an electron’s momentum fairly precisely, but then you will have only a vague idea of its location.

Heisenberg originally explained the limitation using a thought experiment. Imagine shining light at a moving electron. When a photon, or particle of light, hits the electron, it will bounce back and record its position, yet in the process of doing so, it has given the electron a kick, thereby changing its speed.

The wavelength of the light determines how precisely the measurement can be made. The smallest wavelength of light, called gamma-ray light, can make the most precise measurements, but it also carries the most energy, so an impacting gamma-ray photon will deliver a stronger kick to the electron, thereby disturbing its momentum the most.

Though not imparting as much disruption to the electron’s momentum, a longer wavelength of light wouldn’t allow as precise a measurement.

Marbles and billiard balls

“In the early days of quantum mechanics, people interpreted the uncertainty relation in terms of such back-reactions of the measurement process,” said physicist Georg Sulyok of the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics in Austria. “But this explanation is not 100 percent correct.”

Sulyok worked with a research team, led by physicists Masanao Ozawa of Japan’s Nagoya University and Yuji Hasegawa of Vienna University of Technology in Austria, to calculate and experimentally demonstrate how much of the uncertainty principle is due to the effects of measurement, and how much is simply due to the basic quantum uncertainty of all particles.

In quantum mechanics, particles can’t be thought of as marbles or billiard balls — tiny, physically distinct objects that travel along a straight course from point A to point B. Instead, particles can behave like waves, and can only be described in terms of the probability that they are at point A or point B or somewhere in between.

This is also true of a particle’s other properties, such as its momentum, energy and spin.

This probabilistic nature of particles means there will always be imprecision in any quantum measurement, no matter how little that measurement disturbs the system it is measuring.

“This has nothing to do with error or disturbances due to a measurement process, but is a basic fundamental property that every quantum mechanical particle has,” Sulyok told LiveScience. “In order to describe the basic uncertainty together with measurement errors and disturbances, both particle and measurement device in a successive measurement have to be treated in the framework of quantum theory.”

Calculating the uncertainty

To test how much this fundamental property contributes to the overall uncertainty, the researchers devised an experimental setup to measure the spin of a neutron in two perpendicular directions. These quantities are related, just as position and momentum are, so that the more precise a measurement is made of one, the less precise a measurement can be made of the other.

The physicists used magnetic fields to manipulate and measure the neutrons’ spin, and conducted a series of measurements where they systematically changed the parameters of the measuring device.

“You have this basic uncertainty, and then by measuring you add an additional uncertainty,” Sulyok said. “But with an apparatus performing two successive measurements, you can identify the different contributions.”

Using their data, the physicists were able to calculate just how the different types of uncertainty add together and influence each other. Their new formula doesn’t change the conclusion of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but it does tweak the reasoning behind it.

“The explanation that Heisenberg gave is very intuitive,” Sulyok said. “On a popular science level it is hardly ever distinguished at all, and sometimes it’s even not correctly explained in university textbooks. The quantum-mechanically correct calculation reinforced by our experimental data is a valuable step in achieving a more consistent view on the uncertainty principle.”

The results of the study were published in January 2012 in the journal Nature Physics.

from:

Perplexing logic

The uncertainty principle only applies in the quantum mechanical realm of the very small, on scales of subatomic particles. Its logic is perplexing to the human mind, which is acclimated to the macroscopic world, where measurements are only limited by the quality of our instruments.

But in the microscopic world, there truly is a limit to how much information we can ever glean about an object.

For example, if you make a measurement to find out exactly where an electron is, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it’s moving. Or you might choose to determine an electron’s momentum fairly precisely, but then you will have only a vague idea of its location.  [Graphic: Nature’s Tiniest Particles Explained]

Heisenberg originally explained the limitation using a thought experiment. Imagine shining light at a moving electron. When a photon, or particle of light, hits the electron, it will bounce back and record its position, yet in the process of doing so, it has given the electron a kick, thereby changing its speed.

The wavelength of the light determines how precisely the measurement can be made. The smallest wavelength of light, called gamma-ray light, can make the most precise measurements, but it also carries the most energy, so an impacting gamma-ray photon will deliver a stronger kick to the electron, thereby disturbing its momentum the most.

Though not imparting as much disruption to the electron’s momentum, a longer wavelength of light wouldn’t allow as precise a measurement.

Marbles and billiard balls

“In the early days of quantum mechanics, people interpreted the uncertainty relation in terms of such back-reactions of the measurement process,” said physicist Georg Sulyok of the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics in Austria. “But this explanation is not 100 percent correct.”

Sulyok worked with a research team, led by physicists Masanao Ozawa of Japan’s Nagoya University and Yuji Hasegawa of Vienna University of Technology in Austria, to calculate and experimentally demonstrate how much of the uncertainty principle is due to the effects of measurement, and how much is simply due to the basic quantum uncertainty of all particles.

In quantum mechanics, particles can’t be thought of as marbles or billiard balls — tiny, physically distinct objects that travel along a straight course from point A to point B. Instead, particles can behave like waves, and can only be described in terms of the probability that they are at point A or point B or somewhere in between.

This is also true of a particle’s other properties, such as its momentum, energy and spin.

This probabilistic nature of particles means there will always be imprecision in any quantum measurement, no matter how little that measurement disturbs the system it is measuring.

“This has nothing to do with error or disturbances due to a measurement process, but is a basic fundamental property that every quantum mechanical particle has,” Sulyok told LiveScience. “In order to describe the basic uncertainty together with measurement errors and disturbances, both particle and measurement device in a successive measurement have to be treated in the framework of quantum theory.”

Calculating the uncertainty

To test how much this fundamental property contributes to the overall uncertainty, the researchers devised an experimental setup to measure the spin of a neutron in two perpendicular directions. These quantities are related, just as position and momentum are, so that the more precise a measurement is made of one, the less precise a measurement can be made of the other.

The physicists used magnetic fields to manipulate and measure the neutrons’ spin, and conducted a series of measurements where they systematically changed the parameters of the measuring device.

“You have this basic uncertainty, and then by measuring you add an additional uncertainty,” Sulyok said. “But with an apparatus performing two successive measurements, you can identify the different contributions.”

Using their data, the physicists were able to calculate just how the different types of uncertainty add together and influence each other. Their new formula doesn’t change the conclusion of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but it does tweak the reasoning behind it.

“The explanation that Heisenberg gave is very intuitive,” Sulyok said. “On a popular science level it is hardly ever distinguished at all, and sometimes it’s even not correctly explained in university textbooks. The quantum-mechanically correct calculation reinforced by our experimental data is a valuable step in achieving a more consistent view on the uncertainty principle.”

The results of the study were published in January 2012 in the journal Nature Physics.

 

February Fireballs

The Fireballs of February

Feb. 22, 2012:  In the middle of the night on February 13th, something disturbed the animal population of rural Portal, Georgia. Cows started mooing anxiously and local dogs howled at the sky. The cause of the commotion was a rock from space.

“At 1:43 AM Eastern, I witnessed an amazing fireball,” reports Portal resident Henry Strickland. “It was very large and lit up half the sky as it fragmented. The event set dogs barking and upset cattle, which began to make excited sounds. I regret I didn’t have a camera; it lasted nearly 6 seconds.”

Strickland witnessed one of the unusual “Fireballs of February.”

February Fireballs (splash, 558 px)

A fireball over north Georgia recorded on Feb. 13th by a NASA all-sky camera in Walker Co., GA. [video]

“This month, some big space rocks have been hitting Earth’s atmosphere,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “There have been five or six notable fireballs that might have dropped meteorites around the United States.”

It’s not the number of fireballs that has researchers puzzled. So far, fireball counts in February 2012 are about normal. Instead, it’s the appearance and trajectory of the fireballs that sets them apart.

“These fireballs are particularly slow and penetrating,” explains meteor expert Peter Brown, a physics professor at the University of Western Ontario. “They hit the top of the atmosphere moving slower than 15 km/s, decelerate rapidly, and make it to within 50 km of Earth’s surface.”

The action began on the evening of February 1st when a fireball over central Texas wowed thousands of onlookers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“It was brighter and long-lasting than anything I’ve seen before,” reports eye-witness Daryn Morran. “The fireball took about 8 seconds to cross the sky. I could see the fireball start to slow down; then it exploded like a firecracker artillery shell into several pieces, flickered a few more times and then slowly burned out.” Another observer in Coppell, Texas, reported a loud double boom as “the object broke into two major chunks with many smaller pieces.”

The fireball was bright enough to be seen on NASA cameras located in New Mexico more than 500 miles away. “It was about as bright as the full Moon,” says Cooke. Based on the NASA imagery and other observations, Cooke estimates that the object was 1 to 2 meters in diameter.

So far in February, NASA’s All-Sky Fireball Network has photographed about a half a dozen bright meteors that belong to this oddball category. They range in size from basketballs to buses, and all share the same slow entry speed and deep atmospheric penetration. Cooke has analyzed their orbits and come to a surprising conclusion:

February Fireballs (meteorcam, 200px)

This camera is part of NASA’s All-Sky Fireball Network. [more]

“They all hail from the asteroid belt—but not from a single location in the asteroid belt,” he says. “There is no common source for these fireballs, which is puzzling.”

This isn’t the first time sky watchers have noticed odd fireballs in February. In fact, the “Fireballs of February” are a bit of a legend in meteor circles.

Brown explains: “Back in the 1960s and 70s, amateur astronomers noticed an increase in the number of bright, sound-producing deep-penetrating fireballs during the month of February. The numbers seemed significant, especially when you consider that there are few people outside at night in winter. Follow-up studies in the late 1980s suggested no big increase in the rate of February fireballs. Nevertheless, we’ve always wondered if something was going on.”

Indeed, a 1990 study by astronomer Ian Holliday suggests that the ‘February Fireballs’ are real. He analyzed photographic records of about a thousand fireballs from the 1970s and 80s and found evidence for a fireball stream intersecting Earth’s orbit in February. He also found signs of fireball streams in late summer and fall. The results are controversial, however. Even Halliday recognized some big statistical uncertainties in his results.

NASA’s growing All-Sky Fireball Network could end up solving the mystery. Cooke and colleagues are adding cameras all the time, spreading the network’s coverage across North America for a dense, uninterrupted sampling of the night sky.

“The beauty of our smart multi-camera system,” notes Cooke, “is that it measures orbits almost instantly. We know right away when a fireball flurry is underway—and we can tell where the meteoroids came from.” This kind of instant data is almost unprecedented in meteor science, and promises new insights into the origin of February’s fireballs.

Meanwhile, the month isn’t over yet. “If the cows and dogs start raising a ruckus tonight,” advises Cooke, “go out and take a look.”

from:    http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22feb_februaryfireballs/

Time Cloak

Now You See It, Now You Didn’t: Researchers Cloak a Moment in Time

A laser beam passes through a “split-time lens” – a specially designed waveguide that bumps up the wavelength for a while then suddenly bumps it down. The signal then passes through a filter that slows down the higher-wavelength part of the signal, creating a gap in which the cloaked event takes place. A second filter works in the opposite way from the first, letting the lower wavelength catch up, and a final split-time lens brings the beam back to the original wavelength, leaving no trace of what happened during the gap. (Credit: Gaeta lab)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2012) — Think Harry Potter movie magic: Cornell researchers have demonstrated a “temporal cloak” — albeit on a very small scale — in the transport of information by a beam of light.

The trick is to create a gap in the beam of light, have the hidden event occur as the gap goes by and then stitch the beam back together. Alexander Gaeta, Cornell professor of applied and engineering physics, and colleagues report their work entitled “Demonstration of temporal cloaking,” in the journal Nature (Jan. 5, 2012.)

The researchers created what they call a time lens, which can manipulate and focus signals in time, analogous to the way a glass lens focuses light in space. They use a technique called four-wave mixing, in which two beams of light, a “signal” and a “pump,” are sent together through an optical fiber. The two beams interact and change the wavelength of the signal. To begin creating a time gap, the researchers first bump the wavelength of the signal up, then by flipping the wavelength of the pump beam, bump it down.

The beam then passes through another, very long, stretch of optical fiber. Light passing through a transparent material is slowed down just a bit, and how much it is slowed varies with the wavelength. So the lower wavelength pulls ahead of the higher, leaving a gap, like the hare pulling ahead of the tortoise. During the gap the experimenters introduced a brief flash of light at a still higher wavelength that would cause a glitch in the beam coming out the other end.

Then the split beam passes through more optical fiber with a different composition, engineered to slow lower wavelengths more than higher. The higher wavelength signal now catches up with the lower, closing the gap. The hare is plodding through mud, but the tortoise is good at that and catches up. Finally, another four-wave mixer brings both parts back to the original wavelength, and the beam emerges with no trace that there ever was a gap, and no evidence of the intruding signal.

None of this will let you steal the crown jewels without anyone noticing. The gap created in the experiment was 15 picoseconds long, and might be increased up to 10 nanoseconds, Gaeta said. But the technique could have applications in fiber-optic data transmission and data processing, he added. For example, it might allow inserting an emergency signal without interrupting the main data stream, or multitasking operations in a photonic computer, where light beams on a chip replace wires.

The experiment was inspired by a theoretical proposal for a space-time cloak or “history editor” published by Martin McCall, professor of physics at Imperial College in London, in the Journal of Optics in November 2010. “But his method required an optical response from a material that does not exist. Now we’ve done it in one spatial dimension. Extending it to two [that is, hiding a moment in an entire scene] is not out of the realm of possibility. All advances have to start from somewhere,” Gaeta says.

Funding for the research: The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and by the Cornell Center for Nanoscale Systems, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the New York State Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR).

from:    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120106111312.htm

Large Scale “Spooky Action at a Distance”

Two Diamonds Linked by Strange Quantum Entanglement

Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 01 December 2011 Time: 02:00 PM ET
Quantum entanglement is demonstrated in two macroscopic diamonds
The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by beaming laser light at them (green). The researchers verified this entanglement by studying the subsequent laser pulses beamed through the system.
CREDIT: Science/AAAS

Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale.

Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small.

But now physicists have succeeded in entangling two macroscopic diamonds, demonstrating that quantum mechanical effects are not limited to the microscopic scale.

“I think it’s an important step into a new regime of thinking about quantum phenomena,” physicist Ian Walmsley of England’s University of Oxford said.”That is, in this regime of the bigger world, room temperatures, ambient conditions. Although the phenomenon was expected to exist, actually being able to observe it in such a system we think is quite exciting.”

Another study recently used quantum entanglement to teleport bits of light from one place to another. And other researchers have succeeded in entangling macroscopic objects before, but they have generally been under special circumstances, prepared in special ways, and cooled to cryogenic temperatures. In the new achievement, the diamonds were large and not prepared in any special way, the researchers said.

“It’s big enough you can see it,” Walmsley told LiveScience of the diamonds.”They’re sitting on the table, out in plain view. The laboratory isn’t particularly cold or particularly hot, it’s just your everyday room.”

Walmsley, along with a team of physicists led by Oxford graduate student Ka Chung Lee, accomplished this feat by entangling the vibration of two diamond crystals. To do so, the researchers set up an apparatus to send a laser pulse at both diamonds simultaneously. Sometimes, the laser light changed color, to a lower frequency, after hitting the diamonds. That told the scientists it had lost a bit of energy.

Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there’s no input of outside energy), the researchers knew that the “lost” energy had been used in some way. In fact, the energy had been converted into vibrational motion for one of the diamonds (albeit motion that is too small to observe visually). However, the scientists had no way of knowing which diamond was vibrating.

Then, the researchers sent a second pulse of laser light through the now-vibrating system. This time, if the light emerged with a color of higher frequency, it meant it had gained the energy back by absorbing it from the diamond, stopping its vibration.

The scientists had set up two separate detectors to measure the laser light — one for each diamond.

If the two diamonds weren’t entangled, the researchers would expect each detector to register a changed laser beam about 50 percent of the time. It’s similar to tossing a coin, where random chance would lead to heads about half the time and tails the other half the time on average.

Instead, because the two diamonds were linked, they found that one detector measured the change every time, and the other detector never fired. The two diamonds, it seemed, were so connected they reacted as a single entity, rather than two individual objects.

The scientists report their results in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.

“Recent advances in quantum control techniques have allowed entanglement to be observed for physical systems with increasing complexity and separation distance,” University of Michigan physicist Luming Duan, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Science.”Lee et al. take an important step in this direction by demonstrating entanglement between oscillation patterns of atoms—phonon modes—of two diamond samples of millimeter size at room temperature, separated by a macroscopic distance of about 15 cm.”

In addition to furthering scientists’ understanding of entanglement, the research could help develop faster computers called photonic processors, relying on quantum effects, said Oxford physicist Michael Sprague, another team member on the project.

“The long-term goal is that if you can harness the power of quantum phenomena, you can potentially do things more efficiently than is currently possible,” Sprague said.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17264-quantum-entanglement-macroscopic-diamonds.html

Dancing Science Masters

Dancing to Epigenetics and Endocytosis

by John Bohannon on 14 October 2011, 4:08 PM
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Dancing scientists! Stephen Steiner of MIT made a dance based on his study of the chemistry of carbon nanotubes.
Credit: Stephen Steiner

Have you ever wondered what nanotube chemistry might look like as a dance? Or fruit fly sex? Or protein x-ray crystallography? Look no further. As part of the 2011 Dance Your Ph.D. contest, scientists who study those phenomena and more have converted their research into dance videos for your enjoyment and edification. And today the 16 finalists of this annual contest are revealed below.

A record 55 dances were created for this year’s contest, submitted by scientists around the globe, from the United States and Canada to Europe, India, and Australia. As the contest rules state, each dance must be based on the scientist’s own Ph.D. research thesis, and that scientist must participate in the dance. For many of the graduate students who danced, the research they depicted is still ongoing. For some of the older contestants, the project is a distant, perhaps harrowing memory from their early days in science. The dances are divided into four categories based on subject: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science. (The criteria for those categories are explained here.)

To select the four top dances in each category, the winners of the 2009 and 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. contests scored each of this year’s 55 dances on three criteria: scientific merit, artistic merit, and the creative marriage of both. Watching the dances was “immensely interesting,” says Anne Goldenberg, a sociologist at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada and one of the winners of last year’s contest. (Her Ph.D. dance was about people’s interaction in online wikis.) This year’s contest was flooded with high-quality dances, says Markita Landry, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and one of the 2009 winners. (She tangoed toatomic force microscopy.) “It was really hard to distinguish which were best,” she says.

Sex seems to be one of the dominant themes for this year’s contest. The finalists include a dance depicting fruit fly sex, by Cedric Tan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. And Emma Ware, a research assistant at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, created a dance around her research on pigeon courtship. And Hoda Eydgahi may not be doing research on sex, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) grad student’s research on the algorithmic modeling of biochemical networks made for a sexy MC Hammer dance.

The 16 finalists will now compete for a $500 prize in each category, as well as the ultimate prize: an additional $500 and a free trip to Belgium to be crowned the overall winner at TEDxBrussels on 22 November. Take a look at the dances below and choose your own favorites. The judging is under way by a group of scientists and artists whose identity will be revealed next week. The winners will be announced Thursday, 20 October, at 2 p.m. EDT.

You can browse all 55 of this year’s dances. And here, sorted by name in alphabetical order, are the 16 finalists:

To see the videos, go to:    http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/dancing-to-epigenetics-and-endoc.html?ref=hp

The Field and Everything

The Field: The Reality of Things

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The following is excerpted from The Basic Code of the Universe: The Science of the Invisible in Physics, Medicine and Spirituality,published by Inner Traditions.

 

Mechanistic thought conceptualized solid particles moving in a vacuum. Then came field physics, and prevailing notions were shattered once again. In the mid-nineteenth century, Michael Faraday introduced the idea of a field as “a space around a source of electromagnetic energy.” Opposing the concept of “full and void” from atomism, Faraday suggested the idea of “matter and force diffused in space,” according to precise lines of force. His was a nonmaterial vision of physical phenomena! It is with Faraday that fields became defined as physical dimensions in zones of temporal space. In the following century, Einstein extended the field principle with the inclusion of gravity: the universe is thus considered held in a single gravitational field that curves in proximity to matter.

Of the four elements of Pannaria, the field is the least studied but the most interesting. Mass could be matter combined with energy, which is an expression of the field. In that case mass would be the formation through which the senses perceive the field, the reality that the “veil of Maya” hides, as some insightful sages of India, along with some Western philosophers, have put it. Plato contrasted the truth (alètheia) with fiction, opinion, illusion (doxa). The senses fall under the category of doxa, projection, the shadow of the alètheia. The senses enable us to perceive only impressions, while the truth of the universe is unknowable. “Nature loves to hide” (ϕύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ), writes Heraclitus of Ephesus.* But a philosopher must try to reach it somehow, because truth is very sublime.

Plato used the “myth of the cave,” in which he describes a scene of slaves chained in a cave, who are forced to watch a strange “film” of speaking shadows on a wall. They believe what they see is real until one slave escapes and discovers an unexpected world: what the prisoners think are people are only the shadows of statues of humans and animals being carried on the shoulders of real men and women passing by; the slaves were hearing only their voices.5 The freed slave met the other side of things. Centuries later, the neo-Platonist Giordano Bruno of the Renaissance wrote De Umbris Idearum (The Shadows of Ideas), and indeed Platonic thought has also been revalued by some quantum physicists. The physical bodies that we can touch, see, and hear are only the shadows in the cave. Their fields, though they elude our senses, are in fact the true reality of the bodies. A researcher has to leave the cave in order to explore the other side of things.

Every physical body can be seen as an event that is constantly changing on the world stage, and the director of the changes is precisely the field, which the ancient sages identified with fire, a great natural alchemist. The quantum field is everywhere. The particles are not corpuscular, but local condensations of the field. Solid? No. They are quanta, but they are packets of energy of the field’s vibrations. The protons are vibrations in the field of the protons, electrons in that of the electrons, and so on. It is revolutionary in the history of human thinking to imagine that the world is not built with solid bricks, but rather with vibration, energy. Matter is a particular vibration of its own field, which overturns everything so far studied in school.

Since our childhood we have wanted to humanize the world, and we imagine even the microscopic driving energies of life as solid objects. But things are not like that. The Italian doctor and physicist Massimo Corbucci writes that the atom is an abyss filled with electrons and the particles of the nucleus.6 The harder you search the abyss, the more you realize that mass itself does not exist. What exists is a game of attraction and repulsion (therefore a balance) between different polarities of charge, between “breathing emptiness.”

The field is pulsation in the emptiness, that is, vibrating emptiness, a pulsating vacuum. The particles that make up mass might actually be disturbances of the field, ripples in the vacuum. We are not far from the discourse of the strings. Now consider that the first description of matter, as being like “the crest of a wave, curling like the sea,” was written as early as the hermetic treatises of the second century C.E.! It is only these disturbances that are perceived by the senses, which then turn them into perceptions-visual, tactile, auditory-namely feelings from forms, bodies, heat, sound, light.

What appear to us as particles are probably field fluctuations, in which some of a field’s regions oppose one another (for example, the protons and the electrons). In physics’ “double slit” experiment, an electron sent toward a plate with two parallel slits close to each other passes through both simultaneously, suggesting that the electron is traveling more like a wave than a particle. Actually, an electron can be in either wave or particle form, a variation of field fluctuation.

During our journey, we will discover further that the fields of physical bodies have extraordinary properties, that they are “organized masses” and that to date nobody has been able to uncover what organizes them and how. The physical, chemical, and biological sciences continue to largely ignore these questions. In fact, the field may not only be the result of what happens to mass, but rather the director of what happens to mass. To begin to understand how this can be, we are aided by the concept of morphogenetic fields, which offer us insight into fields with organizing disposition.

to read more, go to:    http://www.realitysandwich.com/field_reality_things