Voyager May Still Be Inside The Solar System

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA announced in September that the Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first man-made object to leave the solar system, although the group noted that the readings were different than what scientists expected. Now, some researchers reviewing the same data think that the space probe might not have crossed that border into interstellar space, but instead was inside a giant magnetic bubble within the bounds of the solar system, and may still be there.

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Didgeridoos, Yo-Yoes and ZZ Top Tunes in Space

Add “in space” to the end of any sentence and you create a completely different picture full of possibilities. For example, “drinking a glass of water” in space does not require the glass since you can simply suck a floating water blob out of the air.

Astronaut and chemical engineer Don Pettit has conducted a number of engaging experiments in space during his off-duty time aboard the International Space Station, which the American Physical Society has captured in our 14-video series Science off the Sphere.

Fans of Science off the Sphere are in luck. Today, APS released a bonus clip that includes never-before-shown footage of some of Pettit’s experiments, which show what everyday-life activities are like in space. From toying with a yo-yo to watching water dance to the bass vibrations of ZZ top tunes, Pettit offers an entertaining look at his spacey science hobbies that capture and inspire the imagination.



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Podcast: IceCube Neutrinos

This week on The Physics Central Podcast I'm talking about Bert, Ernie, Big Bird and Mr. Snuffaluffagus. No, not the muppets: the neutrinos!

In the November 22 issue of the journal Science, the IceCube neutrino experiment announced its detection of 28 very special neutrinos, which the collaboration members then named after characters from Sesame Street (apparently it's easier to remember names than numbers).  There are a lot of neutrinos in the world, but these 28 mean something very special to the astrophysics community. These are the highest energy neutrinos ever detected, and they may be associated with some of the most violent and awesome events in our universe, such as active galactic nuclei (a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the center), gamma ray bursts (the most instantaneously luminous events in the universe), a pulsar (a super-dense, super-magnetized rotating star), or perhaps some as-yet-unknown phenomenon.

Listen to this week's podcast to learn more about the Sesame Street neutrino gang.
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The World's Latest E-bike Begins with the now-available Copenhagen Wheel

Last month we blogged about how regenerative braking might be possible for electric bicycles. Using a crude estimation, we estimated that regenerative braking alone would have a difficult time re-charging the e-bike’s batteries enough to boost a cyclist to high speeds or up hill.

It looks like MIT in collaboration with the Cambridge-based startup Superpedestrian have solved the problem because today they announced that their latest product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is now available for pre-order. Since it was founded in late 2012, Superpedestrian has been working toward untangling the knots and finer details in order to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel – an MIT design that transforms regular bikes into e-bikes.



The Copenhagen Wheel has now joined the burgeoning e-bike market. What makes it unique, and might give it a competitive edge, is its versatility.

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Science Cheerleaders Help Send Microbes to Space

Originally published: Nov 14 2013 - 3:45pm, Inside Science TV
By: Marsha Lewis, ISTV Contributing Producer

In the air, on the ground, on every wall, every phone, virtually everything we touch, there lurks an invisible world of microbes. Now, a new project at the University of California-Davis will help scientists understand how microbes grow both on Earth and in space.


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Earthquakes Statistics Get Help from Forest-fire Models

Natural disasters like forest fires and earthquakes have more than just havoc-reeking, destructive natures in common, according to scientist Eduardo Jagla of the National Atomic Energy Commission in Argentina. In a paper to appear in the APS journal, Physical Review Letters, Jagla found that a statistical model describing the behavior of forest fires could be used to characterize the decay rate of earthquakes.

The number of earthquakes that can occur in a given region over a period of time follows a surprisingly simple logarithmic scale expressed by the Gutenberg-Richter Law. The law takes into account the magnitude of an earthquake, the seismicity rate of the region in question and a constant, called the b-value. Although the b-value hovers around one (give or take 0.5) for most regions, scientists do not fully understand why one is the magic number.

The b-value satisfies observational experiments that follow the GR law, but its origin remains unknown. Jagla proposed that aftershocks are, in part, the reason behind the b-value. This conclusion emerged when Jagla discovered that he could obtain the appropriate b-value by applying the GR model to a scenario of a forest fire spreading from tree to tree.

Credit: Eduardo Jagla who describes: "The attached figure can be interpreted in two different ways: each black pixel can represent a tree in a forest, or intensity of gray can represent the local stress of a tectonic fault."

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Dancing Droplets

The American Physical Society's annual Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting is well underway in Pittsburgh this week, and it's showcasing a slew of gorgeous videos contending for prizes in the Gallery of Fluid Motion.

We've featured a few of these videos in the past few weeks, and we've got another beautiful example today. Today's video covers the spontaneous motion of dyed liquid droplets as they interact with one another.

Surface tension causes the droplets to dance, kiss, and stride along flat glass surfaces. In the video, researchers Nate J Cira and Manu Prakash (Stanford) show off just what surface tension can do: it can sort different liquids automatically, cause droplets to chase one another in a circle, and much more. Check it out!


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New Evidence Supports Asteroid Origin Of Martian Moon

Study uses reflected light to compare chemical makeup of moon and other asteroids.

Phobos, with Mars in the background. jihemD via wikimedia commons, rights

New research suggests that Mars' larger moon, Phobos, is likely an errant asteroid trapped by the planet's gravitational pull. Astronomers matched the chemical makeup of Phobos' surface to a meteorite that struck Canada, concluding that the Martian moon likely started out as a carbon-rich, "D-type" asteroid that drifted too close to the red planet.


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Benford's Law: Can it Negate Cheating?

Imagine that you begin your day at an auction, purchasing a myriad of equipment for your laboratory. You then spend the afternoon recording data on the radioactive half-life of uranium, and you end the evening by looking at your tax return. The prices you paid for the auction items, the values comprising your research data and the depressing numbers on your tax return all follow a pattern called Benford’s law.

Benford’s law describes the frequency of leading digits. Lower numbers such as one or two appear as the first digit more often than higher numbers, and the fall-off frequency follows a logarithmic scale. Meaning that more than 50 percent of the prices you paid for the auction items will likely begin with the number one, two or three. Research indicates that the same rule applies to large samples of numbers describing radioactive half-lives, tax returns, statistical physics distributions, geological stream-flow rates and more.

Credit: Alberto G.

Numerous numerical datasets follow Benford’s law. A team of scientists at Trent University and Brock University in Ontario, Canada specialize in multiple-choice test assessment. They began to wonder if Benford’s Law could be used to gain an unfair advantage during undergraduate test taking, specifically in physics. Could Benford’s law offer students the next best strategy to “When in doubt, choose C”?

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Podcast: Gauss's Missing Brain

Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, died in 1855. His brain has been resting at the University of Gottingen for the last 150 years—but under the wrong label.

A mix-up that appears to have taken place in the 1860's put Gauss's brain the wrong jar. It wasn't until this year, when scientists from the Max Planck institute were taking fMRI images of the brain for archival purposes, that neuroscientist Renate Schweizer noticed something was amiss. To most people, human brains all look the same. But Schweizer knows one brain from the next, and she realized this couldn't be the brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss—because she'd seen this brain before.

Listen to the podcast to learn how Schweizer identified the impostor brain, and where they found the real one.
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