Physics Buzz

San Jose, California was the place to be for science this week. The  American Association for the Advancement of Science  held its  annual meeting there, featuring talks and lectures and exhibits from across all fields of science. There was even ice cream.

Before visiting visiting one on Thursday, I had no idea that quantum physics labs are such a maze of lasers, mirrors, lenses and vacuum chambers. The Joint Quantum Institute is a cooperative venture between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to study the weirdness of quantum particles. Research in the field promises to totally revolutionize computing, but playing with particles smaller than an atom is fiendishly difficult and we have a long way to go. Some of the most cutting edged research in the world is going on at the lab, and I along with a couple of fellow science writers were lucky enough to get a tour of the facility.

Originally published : Apr 2 2014 - 4:00pm, Inside Science News Service By : Joel N. Shurkin, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- In most hurricanes the greatest damage is done not by the wind but from the storm surge, the mountain of water pushed by raging winds from the ocean to deluge the land. There is always a level of unpredictability when dealing with Mother Nature, but knowing where the water would go when a storm is bearing down on the coast would be useful, particularly in densely populated coastal cities such as New York, which maintains complex systems of houses, office buildings, sidewalks, basements, alleys, subway stations, and streets clogged with parked cars. Scientists at the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences at Gloucester Point, Va., reported they have a computer model that may do that, starting about 30 hours before the storm comes ashore. At least it worked in retrospect with the Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the East Coast i

When a country is in the midst of civil war, how does that country’s government use the Internet to its advantage? A group of scientists recently released the monitoring and filtering practices of the Syrian government during the early stages of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, and their results are not what you might expect. The story begins with a US based company, an international net activist group and a fluke of a find. Credit: Lalosmartz Last year, the non-profit organization Reporters Without Boarders identified a California-based company as one of the “corporate enemies of the Internet”. The company, called Blue Coat Systems, is a privately held company that specializes in Network Security. Part of what set Reporters Without Boarders off was a report in 2011 by a net activists group who call themselves Telecomix. The group stumbled upon evidence indicating that the Syrian government was using Blue Coat technology to help monitor and filter online searches from Syrian us

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and  the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo stuck a tiny camera inside a toy football to watch  the game from the ball's point of view . Image Credit: Kris Kitani   Imagine flying through the air at 50 miles an hour, swiftly dipping towards the ground, seeing the strained and determined expression on the wide receiver's face. "Wouldn't it be cool if we could watch sports from the ball's point of view? " asked Kris Kitani, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Kitani and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan are working on just that.  "It took a couple of tries — shredded balls and broken cameras — to find a good way to put the camera inside of the ball," said Kitani, "in the end, we cut a hole in the side of the ball and pushed the camera in." By embedding a camera inside of a f

Before last Friday, Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison. His crime was using MIT computers to illegally download large volumes of academic papers from the JSTOR digital library, intending to make them freely available to the public. Tragically, the 26-year-old web pioneer committed suicide last Friday, but no one knows all of the factors that triggered his suicide. Nonetheless, his death has invigorated and infuriated many in the open-access movement. On Sunday, the hacker group Anonymous posted messages on MIT's website, calling for more leniency in computer crime laws and a "guerrilla" open access push. Their claims and demands regarding open-access, in particular, over-simplify a complex topic.

It's wildfire season in the western U.S., and one fire in particular has taken the spotlight this week. Burning thousands of acres, the High Park Fire has already killed one woman and destroyed over 100 structures near Fort Collins, CO. Two summers ago, the Fourmile Canyon Fire became the most devastating wildfire in my home state of Colorado's history, generating $217 million in insurance claims. Shortly thereafter, I wrote an article for my school magazine about groups of physicists, IT specialists, and climate scientists who use computer models to predict and track wildfires. Although wildfire modeling has developed significantly over time, its roots still exert great influence thanks to the field's "father": Dick Rothermel. A view of the High Park Fire from space. Image Credit: NASA

Last night, millions of viewers watched as Phillip Phillips was crowned "American Idol's" winner for the show's 11th season. But hours before the announcement, computer scientists had already predicted he would win after looking at relevant Twitter posts, and they published their prediction online. A key factor missing from other analyses — the geographic location of the tweets — proved critical in making the final prediction. In addition to the final prediction, the researchers also successfully predicted many of the show's earlier eliminations — a more difficult task considering the greater number of contestants. Phillip Phillips, the 11th American Idol winner. Image Credit: Fox Television via ABC News.