Physics Buzz

"I love physics with all my heart ...  It is a kind of personal love, as one has for  a person to whom one is grateful for many things." - Lise Meitner, 1915  On February 11th 1939 Austrian physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch published a one page note in Nature describing the impossible: the splitting of a uranium atom into two lighter elements, barium and krypton. They coined this process " fission " as an analogue to biological fission process of cell division and ignited immediate interest in nuclear physics labs around the world. But the discovery came at exactly the wrong time for Meitner, and her primary role in both the experimental and theoretical discovery of nuclear fission would never be properly awarded.

Greetings, podcast listeners! This week's Physics Central Podcast is a short story I heard about at the APS March Meeting that just wrapped up in Denver, Colorado. A physicist at Cornell University is studying bull sperm, and is looking at a phase transition that the sperm undergo. Basically, in a relaxed fluid, the sperm are disorganized: they all point in different directions. But when the flow of the fluid is turned up to a certain "critical flow rate" the sperm spontaneously point upstream. This type of order/disorder transition is a physics specialty: learn about the transition, look for commonalities with other systems that also undergo transitions, learn something new about bull sperm. Listen to the podcast to hear more!

A precious resource has been returned to thousands of physicists attending this year’s APS March Meeting. Yesterday marked the start of one of the largest physics conferences in the world, but the security settings on arXiv did not know this. The arXiv is an online repository for preprints of scientific papers covering studies in mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics and quantitative finance. When over 9,000 scientists using the meeting’s complementary WiFi tried accessing their trusty scientific paper repository, the arXiv’s security turned on and denied them access. Luckily, developer of arXiv, Paul Ginsparg, was notified of the problem and earlier this morning scientists at Cornell University lifted the block. One of the ways that websites identify hacking attacks is when a large number of requests from a single Internet Protocol (IP) address attempt to access the site over a short period of time. Such was the case on Monday, March 3

This week on the podcast we're talking about the annual Physics Sing-Along, which takes place every year at the APS March Meeting. Go listen to it ! Some of us are still recovering from the awesome intensity of the APS March Meeting, where we learned about such things as the physics of mosh pits ; a new device to keep your moonshine safe ; and a language map of New York City , constructed using data from Twitter. Walter Smith and 95 Blues Berry Way at the 2013 Physics Sing-Along L to R: Eugene Borovikov, Walter Smith, Victor Yakovenko and Sergey Yershov If you've ever attended the meeting you know it's a whirlwind of amazing new physics, but it can also be mentally exhausting. Packing new information into your brain 8 hours a day for 5 straight days requires stamina, and it's important to take a break and unwind. And what better way to do that than by singing? And if you can sing about physics, well that's all the better!   Which brings me to one of