“We have produced atomic metallic hydrogen in the laboratory at high pressure and low temperature,” say Harvard scientists Isaac Silvera and Ranga Dias in a new article that appears today in the AAAS journal Science. This straightforward comment could mean the end of an 80-year quest...and the start of an energy revolution.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Friday, January 27, 2017
Metallic Hydrogen at Last?
Posted by
Positron
at
1/27/2017 03:39:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: hydrogen, materials science, metallic hydrogen
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Unlocking the Mysteries of Sandy "Megaripples"
Sandy beaches are often patterned with sunburned visitors, brightly colored towels, and poorly constructed sand castles. However, the wind can create much more intriguing patterns in sand, from tiny ripples to towering dunes.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/26/2017 02:02:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: chaos, materials science, sand
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
More Bang for Your Bit: Scientists Break Quantum Computing Record
Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have broken the efficiency record for data transfer. Using a quantum communication process known as superdense coding, they squeezed through an average 1.67 bits of data per qubit. Qubits, which is short for "quantum bits," are units of data that utilize quantum properties to store information.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/24/2017 02:01:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: quantum computing, quantum mechanics
Friday, January 20, 2017
On the Front Line of Movie Making
With a new camera system, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis can capture 100 billion frames per second in a single shot. This record-breaking design won’t improve the quality of your YouTube uploads (even very high speed video cameras only record a few thousand frames per second)—but it could improve your health.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/20/2017 02:46:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: light and optics
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Scientists Make One Extremely Cold Drum
I’m on my second Minnesota winter and it’s cold. On really cold days, your eyelashes can freeze and baby wipes become a useless block of ice if you leave them in the car. It’s pretty extreme, in my mind. All of this is put in perspective though, by new research published in Nature last week. A team of scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) cooled a tiny aluminum drum down to a temperature so cold that most scientists thought it was unreachable.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/18/2017 02:02:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: lasers, light and optics, thermodynamics and heat
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Putting “Life” in Order with Acoustical Tweezers Designed for Widespread Use
Whether you’re pulling out a splinter of wood or an eyebrow hair, tweezers are the go-to tool. For these and many other situations that involve moving an object too small to grasp with human hands, a $1.49 pair of metal tweezers is good enough. However, moving an object too small to see requires a much more complicated and expensive kind of tweezers.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/12/2017 02:12:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: acoustical trapping, acoustical tweezers, compression waves and sound, ultrasound
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Step Aside, WIMPs!
It seems the search for particles of dark matter has come up short once again, leading some scientists to question whether we should be looking for particles at all. Two of the world's most massive detector projects—China's PandaX-II collaboration and the US's LUX group—have ended up empty-handed in their search for weakly interacting massive particles (or WIMPs), long considered one of the most plausible explanations for our galaxy's surprising rotational behavior.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/11/2017 02:42:00 PM
2
comments
Labels: dark matter, space and The Universe, WIMPs
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Mysterious Radio Signals: The Sequel
Less than two months, ago we brought you the mysterious tale of fast radio bursts (FRBs), bright flashes of radio waves that last for just fractions of a second and most likely come from outside of our galaxy, but which we know little else about. Last week, the sequel to that story was released. In a press conference at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, coordinated with a cover story in the journal Nature, astronomers announced that they had identified the origin of an FRB for the first time: a small, faint, dwarf galaxy more than 2.5 billion light years away. Companion papers have also been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters (here, here, and here).
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/10/2017 02:00:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: fast radio bursts, light and optics, space and The Universe
Monday, January 09, 2017
How Tiny Swimmers Put the “Super” in Superfluid
For Superman and Supergirl, it’s alien DNA. For Spiderman, it’s the bite. For Iron Man, it’s the suit. But for some “superfluids,” it’s the tiny, self-propelled swimmers that are the source of their power.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/09/2017 02:03:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: materials science, superfluid
Friday, January 06, 2017
Part-time Pulsars: Another Milky Way Mystery
If you’re a Physics Buzz regular, you’ve read about radio pulsars before (most recently here). A pulsar forms when a massive star explodes and its outer layers are blown away. The inside core contracts, resulting in an extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron star. Pulsars have the strongest known magnetic fields in the universe, and beams of charged particles spew out from their magnetic poles. Like a lighthouse signal sweeping across the water, we detect pulsars by very regular radio pulses sweeping across the Earth. Currently, astronomers have detected about 2500 radio pulsars in our galaxy.
Read the rest of the post . . .
Posted by
Positron
at
1/06/2017 02:00:00 PM
0
comments
Labels: space and The Universe