The world has gone crazy over metamaterials because they can be used to build invisibility cloaks, as you all saw last week. There’s usually some drawback the media coverage never tells you which means that we ain’t going to see no Harry Potter-type invisibility cloaks any time soon.
This week, a few pals have gone […]
Magnetic cloaking
Published in October 16th, 2007
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Quamputing with atoms and photons
Published in October 15th, 2007
What kinda stuff is best at hosting ghostly bits of quantum information? It’s an important question because we can’t tell what the next generation of quantum computers will be like until we know what they going to be made of.
Photons are one option because they can store qubits for relatively long periods […]
Bits ‘n’ pieces
Published in October 15th, 2007
The best of the rest from the physics preprint server
How Ultra Slow Light Falls Under Gravity
The Nature of Time and Causality on Physics: Review Paper
Protein Folding: an Introduction for the Under 5s
Quantum Control Landscapes: Review Paper
Why the Pioneer Anomaly is Evidence of a 5th Force
How to build a boron nanotube
To the Moon in millimeters
Published in October 15th, 2007
This looks impressive:
“The Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation has achieved one-millimeter range precision to the moon”
So c’mon fellas: how many millimeters is it?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.0890: APOLLO: the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation: Instrument Description and First Detections
Watching other Earths
Published in October 15th, 2007
One of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of science was carried out in 1993 when the NASA spacecraft Galileo flew past Earth on its way to Jupiter. Carl Sagan and pals analysed the data and concluded after much head scratchin that life on Earth was a distinct possibility.
That was a dry run for […]
First laser built from an artificial atom
Published in October 15th, 2007
Strike a light, artificial atoms are exciting critters to be playingg around with right now. Get this: some nanobods at the NEC Nano Electronics Research Laboratories in Tskuba, Japan, have gone and built a laser out of one. Yep, a single artificial atom that produces laser light.
Here’s what’s goin on. In real atoms, electrons are […]
Why our time dimension is about to become space-like
Published in October 15th, 2007
It don’t get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it.
The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us is […]
Why the Phoenix lander could miss life on Mars
Published in October 15th, 2007
What a balls up. When NASA sent Viking to look for life on Mars more than 30 years ago, the one experiment that could identify lil green bugs came up trumps: it produced an overwhelmingly positive result. That’s when the trouble started. Another experiment had found no evidence for organic molecules so, with the […]
Bag o’ nuts
Published in October 15th, 2007
The also-ran preprints from the physics server this week
Doughnuts and Metamaterials
How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics
A Review of Dark Energy Theories
The Grenoble Town Hall and Why we Wish it would Crumble
Fluctuation Theory: how Irreversibility emerges from Reversible dynamics
A New Interpretation of Bell’s inequality
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