Physics Buzz

We often rely on shapes and patterns when navigating the world. Poison ivy or an innocent plant? A nasty rash or the imprint of the textured wall you were leaning against? Similarly, scientists often use shapes and patterns to interpret datasets. Do the points follow a straight line? Appear in clusters? On the street and in the lab, shapes help us organize information, interpret data, and even make predictions.

Originally published : Sep 30 2014 - 7:00pm, Inside Science News Service By : Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor ( Inside Science )-- More than 100 years ago, the playwright Oscar Wilde had one of his British characters say that England and America "have everything in common nowadays except, of course, language.” It turns out, according to linguists, he was almost right. But lately, the two languages are getting closer. Languages change over time -- some faster than others. Some reflect changes in the world around them, according to a new paper published by The Royal Society in London. There are universal and historical factors at work, and languages change at varying rates, the scientists found. The researchers used the Google Books Ngram corpus to monitor word and phrase usage in the past five centuries in eight languages. They drew from 8 million books – roughly 6 percent of all the books ever published, according to Google's own estimates. The books were scanned into a da

This week on the Physics Central Podcast, I interview acclaimed physics writer Jennifer Ouellette. Her latest book is called Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self . The book delves into various aspects of "self" including genetics, psychology, and neuroscience. But never fear—the book also features some awesome physics. Neuroscientists are using ideas like emergent properties and network theory to explain how things like wakefulness emerge out of the lump of cells we call our brain. Also, what does a unicorn with bunny ears have to do with self? Listen to the podcast to learn more. You can find more from Jennifer Ouellette on her website . Her Twitter account is a great place to find cool science stories from all over the web. Ouellette's first book, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats , is an expanded version of her "This Month in Physics History" column for APS News (APS is the parent organization of Physics Central).

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

Reddit 's front page of cat pictures and memes belies its diverse underbelly of subreddits — hundreds of thousands of link-sharing sites within the larger site that cater to interests ranging from movies to My Little Pony. The sheer amount of subreddits can be overwhelming, making it difficult for a casual browser to find and contribute to the subreddits that match their interests. Seeking a better way to navigate the massive link-sharing social network, computer science student Randal Olson (Mighigan State) and sociologist Zachary Neal (Michigan State) teamed up to map similarities among subreddits. Their research produced an interactive map called Redditviz detailing subreddits with overlapping participants. You can see a screenshot of the interactive map below. Image Credit: Randal Olson/Zachary Neal/RedditViz

Making small adjustments can improve an entire system's state Originally published: Jul 16 2013 - 1:00pm, Inside Science News Service By: Sophie Bushwick, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) -- From the World Wide Web to the electrical grid, networks are notoriously difficult to control. A disturbance to just one part of the system can spread quickly and affect the whole thing. But this problem is its own solution: by selectively damaging part of the network, we can bring the entire system to a better state. Image Credit: Andrew Imanaka via flickr Why is it so important to manipulate networks? These complex systems pervade our everyday lives, from telecommunications systems to the connected neurons that form memories in your brain. Unfortunately, nudging just a few nodes of a network can cause the entire system to malfunction. Take the electrical grid: A few downed power lines can trigger widespread blackouts. And it takes a lot of work and expensive materials to fix the broken

Last week, indie pop group The xx released their highly anticipated second album titled coexist . While the album has been available in stores, the band also streamed the album for free on their website — with a twist. Every time a fan shared the streaming album via Facebook, Twitter, or email, the band tracked the geographic locations of the sharer and new listener. After compiling the data, they created an interactive data visualization tool detailing the album's spread around the globe. While listening to the entire album, you can watch as golden streams dance across the map, showing which regions have been infected with the band's beats and rhythms. So where does physics come into play? Physics, especially statistical mechanics, has played a strong role in shaping the field of network theory that underlies this album release experiment. But maybe researchers could learn a thing or two from musicians like The xx. Experiments like this combined with social music players

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluefootedbooby/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 This news story from the BBC website almost sounds like a faux-academic fantasy written by Jose Luis Borges: physicists at Umea University in Sweden, using statistical analysis on the works of three classic authors, conclude that every author has a unique linguistic fingerprint. The BBC writes: The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue. This happens to be the same team whose insights into traffic jams we highlighted on the blog earlier this year. The team seems fond of using methods from physics to make observations on systems you wouldn't normally think of being in a physicists' realm, including fads and internet dating. This time they took the complete opuses of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D.H. Laurence to statistical task. The paper is free to view here. The BBC writes that the graph of the number of u

Why do some rumors spread like wildfire but burn out quickly, while others seem to smolder for years? According to recently published physics research, it's all in the different ways people handle information. Take the Web page of French champagne house Veuve Cliquot, for example. It features quite a cordial warning. "Dear websurfer, A promotional deal is currently on the Net regarding a free offer of a case of 6 bottles of Veuve Cliquot champagne. This is a hoax, totally beyond our control ... We strongly condemn the author of this hoax and hope that it will end." The warning refers to an email hoax that promised readers the case of champagne for forwarding the message, ostensibly as a reward for helping expand the company's email database. It's been circulating for more than four years. The disclaimer was added to the site over two years ago. In recent years, researchers who study networks have suggested that information spreads like a viral epidemic, movin