Hot and Cold, All at Once

New research slated for publication in Physical Review B shows that “cold spots” can be localized within a molecule, leaving single atoms with temperatures near absolute zero, while other parts of the molecule rest around a comparatively balmy 100 Kelvin.


Read the rest of the post . . .

What Can a Blob-eating Game Teach Us About Biblical Plagues?

Swarming behavior has always fascinated physicists, biologists, and behavioral scientists alike—as well as anyone who’s seen a sky-darkening flock of starlings twist into its mesmerizing shapes. It’s hard not to wonder how such elegantly concerted behavior arises on the fly, or how on earth the birds keep from running into one another. But birds aren’t the only things that swarm like this, and while the idea of The Birds acting as a collective is scary enough to merit a Hitchcock film, this might just be a psychological sublimation of the instinctive fear of a very real and far-more-threatening swarm: Locusts. Now, research from the University of Bath gives us some understanding of how this swarming behavior happens in insects, and how we might disrupt it.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Ask a Physicist: FTL Communication With a Very Long Stick

Amy from Hull, England asks:

"Imagine a tube structure stretching a large distance (say a light year) encasing a row of ballbearings that are lined up inside the full length of the tube. If I push one more ballbearing in from one end, would a ballbearing at the far end instantaneously drop out? Or for millions of years until the information is transferred would there be more ball bearings than the tube would normally fit? Or would it simply take me millions of years to push an extra ballbearing in the tube?"

Read the rest of the post . . .

Two by Two

For close to a decade now, two of the hottest buzzwords in technology have been “Quantum Computing”—the promise of storing a information by manipulating the spin of a single electron, and the associated prospect of harnessing quantum entanglement for faster computation has captured the imaginations of physicists and computer scientists alike. As exciting as the theoretical possibilities are, much of the nitty-gritty work of constructing a functional quantum computer has yet to be done.

Read the rest of the post . . .