Physics Buzz

Fashion has a way of circling back to earlier times, although often with a twist. From bellbottoms to bootcut and stretch pants to leggings, styles often seem to move forward and backward simultaneously. In one aspect, however, we are always moving forward. With smartwatches that can alert you to an incoming call, dresses adorned with LEDs , and bracelet fitness trackers, the market for wearable technology seems to be expanding right along with our capabilities.

The “Hoverboard”: simultaneously one of the most popular and irritating gadgets to emerge in recent memory. From the misleading name (unlike other hoverboards we've encountered, they don’t even hover!) to their tendency to go up in flames, the meteoric emergence of hoverboards is a case study in the dynamics of fads…and patent infringement. But we’re not here today to talk about the sociological aspects of this goofy-looking invention—rather, we’re discussing the technical ones.

This year's Sci-Tech awards include improvements in appearances of trees and hairstyles for movies. Originally published:  Feb 5 2015 - 11:00am, Inside Science News Service By:  Emilie Lorditch, Editor ( Inside Science ) -- From a tree's exquisitely textured trunk, up to its diverging branches and finally, fluttering leaves, it can be easy to see the complex work that lies ahead for the movie artists and computer programmers tasked with recreating the intricacy and beauty of nature. This Saturday, scientists, engineers and artists will celebrate the recent advances in technology that create realistic worlds on screen from imaginary visions. DreamWorks Animation Foliage System "trees" in "How To Train Your Dragon." Image credit: Courtesy of DreamWorks Animations The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will hold its annual Scientific and Technical Achievement awards ceremony on February 7, at the Beverly Hills Hotel,

With the genre of science fiction, it can be fun to make comparisons between an imagined future and the current reality. A huge franchise in science fiction that seems rife for comparisons with modern technology is Star Trek.  There have been  various posts across the internet written about emerging technology inspired by Star Trek.  But what about the technology we currently have in widespread use that's equal to or better than what's aboard the starship  Enterprise ? Image Owner/Creator: Paramount Pictures. Posted by Jorg to Memory Alpha under fair use. The fast answer: we don't have a lot that's leaps and bounds above what either Star Trek: The Original Series or Star Trek: The Next Generation imagined, but there are a few things that stick out. The bulk of the information about technology from Star Trek in this post come from Star Trek: Star Fleet Technical Manual and Star Trek the Next Generation: Technical Manual .

Originally published: Aug 23 2013 - 11:15am, Inside Science News Service By: Joel N. Shurkin, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- In Shyamnath Gollakota’s dream world, every object can talk to every other object, which is particularly useful if you have misplaced your keys. Imagine that your keys dropped out of your pocket and fell between the cushions of a couch. You ask your cellphone to find them. The keys tell the couch where they are, and the couch relays the information to your cellphone. If you also have misplaced your cellphone, your computer will find them both. The transmitters for all this information are minuscule because they do not require outside power--no batteries, no wires plugged into a socket. They draw their power seemingly out of thin air. Researchers demonstrate how one payment card can transfer funds to another card by leveraging the existing wireless signals around them. Image credit: University of Washington The devices, developed by Gollakota a

Inside Science News Service Originally published : Jul 9 2013 - 2:45pm By: Peter Gwynne, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) -- A group of physicists and biologists has developed a nanotechnology-based technique that promises to increase the speed and sensitivity of diagnosing Lyme disease, a bacterial condition that infects more than 30,000 Americans each year. The method, still in the research stage, uses nanotubes – tiny threads of carbon barely visible to the human eye – attached to antibodies that react with particular proteins carried by the bacteria responsible for the disease. An illustration of a Lyme antibody attached to a carbon nanotube. Image Credit: The University of Pennsylvania "We're looking directly for the Lyme organisms," said physicist A. T. Charlie Johnson, who led the multidisciplinary group at the University of Pennsylvania with bacteriologist Dustin Brisson. "This could be very useful in detecting early-stage infection."

Technology fads have pervaded our culture in recent years, even if they are short-lived. Some technologies — such as smartphones, Facebook and Netflix — have endured. Other fads, however, have fallen into obscurity. Don't just take my word for it; go check how many MySpace friends you have left. Classrooms have tried to keep pace with our increasingly wired lifestyles, adopting what seems like the best technology to engage students. I remember when my high school statistics teacher complemented his lectures with an enormous touch screen TV to combat senioritis and waning interest in students. The touch screen presentations lasted no more than a week. But some tools may prove their staying power in the classroom. Earlier this year, two physics education researchers equipped high school physics classrooms with iPads, and they recently revealed their promising results online . Simply providing students with shiny iPads isn't enough, though; the key to engaging students is how

German Chancellor Angela Merkel retained her crown as the most powerful woman in the world this year, according to a Forbes list of the top 100 women from areas including business, politics, entertainment and technology. As a leader of Europe's largest economy amidst an ongoing debt crisis, Merkel's fifth appearance at the top of this list may come as no surprise. But many people do not know that Merkel holds a PhD in physics and conducted research in quantum chemistry. She eventually left the academic world for a career in politics, but her scientific roots remain intact as she makes important policy decisions concerning science. Merkel's not alone in this territory, however. Several other prominent women on this year's list have significant scientific backgrounds. Photo of Angela Merkel courtesy of Aleph via Wikimedia Commons .

When I visited South Korea last year, I saw firsthand just how much the country valued education. South Korean students have longer school hours than their U.S. peers. Many receive tutoring most days of the week. College libraries in South Korea are littered with touch screens and electronic archives. Since the late 1970's, higher education in South Korea – especially in science and technology fields – has exploded. Although only 5 percent of young adults attended college in 1977, over 80 percent of students attend college today in South Korea. Higher education is not an option – it's an expectation of almost every student. That's why I was surprised and slightly troubled to hear that textbook publishers in South Korea will be removing references to evolution from their high school educational materials. Biologists in South Korea claim that no scientists were consulted before the decision was made, according to Nature News .

When the phone rang at 5:45 this morning, seventy-nine-year-old retired physicist George Smith didn't reach quite reach it in time to pick up. But the voice on the answering machine sounded suspiciously Swedish. Moments later, Smith watched online as the Nobel committee announced that he and his Bell Labs colleague Willard Boyle had won half the 2009 Nobel prize in physics for inventing the crucial technology underlying digital cameras, modern-day telescopes , and many medical imaging devices. In 1969, Smith and Boyle developed the charge-coupled device, or CCD, a semiconductor containing a 2-D array of capacitors that gain charge proportional to how much light hits them. By reading out the voltage from the edges of the array, the distribution of charge can be converted back into a digital picture. Not only is the technology found in every digital camera; in telescopes ranging from the Hubble Space Telescope to the gargantuan ground-based Gran Telescopo Canarias , CCDs are

In the search for alternative energy sources, scientists are moving to harness the natural motion of air and water everywhere. Take the promising field of piezoelectrics for example. When piezoelectric materials are jostled by something even as mild as a sound wave, they produce a small amount of electrical current. Experts think that with more development, they can use this energy to power hand held electronics without needing batteries. Research into this phenomenon has been charging full speed ahead. Scientists at the University of Houston recently found that the electrical sweet spot producing the most efficient charge occurs when a piezoelectric filament is about 21 nanometers long. To put that into perspective, if you lined up 4,000 of these filaments next to each other, it would be about the width of a human hair. The amount of power each filament produces isn't much, but since they're so small, a lot can be wired together inside a cell phone or laptop, no problem. P

The road to developing a perfect secret code has hit a small snag. Many experts believe that quantum mechanics is the key to completely secure communication. But a team of physicists now claims that it should be possible to in tercept the super-secret messages without anyone knowing. All you need is a properly tricked out 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 traveling 88 mph. Of course, a good old fashioned wormhole back in time works in a pinch. Todd Brun has come up with a way for eavesdroppers to listen in on quantum coded messages using time travel. Both traditional and quantum codes need the right translation key to decipher them. If the wrong key is used on a traditional code, the eavesdropper only has a garbled translation of the original message, and no one's the wiser. Using the wrong key on a quantum code actually changes the content of the original message. The very act of reading a message written with quantum particles, like an electrons or photons , changes its outcome. Likewise

In a former salt mine at the Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad New Mexico, all that matters is antimatter. In this deep underground cavern (pictured on bottom right) physicists are putting the finishing touches on a new particle detector, t he Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO) . In the spirit of Halloween, think of antimatter as matter's ghostly counterpart, a doppelganger with an equal but opposite charge. Every particle has its own antiparticle ghost-twin, for example the antiparticle of the negatively charged electron is the positively charged positron , all other properties (mass, spin, etc.) remain deceptively the same. But everyone learns at some point that the universe appears to be made entirely out of matter (lesson learned when I ran smack dab into a glass sliding door at the age of six). Which begs the question, if every bit of matter has an equal but opposite antimatter counterpart, why is there so more much matter around us? Where

A team of researchers at the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has figured out how to snatch information from your very fingertips , as long as those fingertips are pounding on a keyboard. It's eavesdropping taken to a whole new level using electromagnetic signals produced by every pressed key. By analyzing these signals, the researchers managed to reproduce what a target typed. Now I doubt any computer spy would be interested in Facebook posts- but computer login information and username/passwords for activities like online banking? Now that's much more interesting. The results of the study are troublesome to anyone concerned with protecting sensitive information. Since wired keyboards contain electronic components, they emit electromagnetic waves. By measuring the electromagnetic radiation emitted by each key pressed, the researchers were able to identify individual keystrokes like code is used to decipher a mess

The Mars Science Laboratory's (MSL) aeroshell resembles (almost too ironically) a UFO straight out of Hollywood. At 15 feet wide, it's also huge. In fact, its the largest aeroshell in the history of space exploration. Check out the intense virtual simulation above to view how the coolest part of the MSL, its novel "sky crane" works . Scientists designed the sky crane to control landing by slowing the spacecraft down to practically a halt right before it touches ground. Almost immediately afterward, the crane will detach itself and fly away. Scheduled to launch in the fall of 2009, the Mars Science Laboratory will support the Mars Exploration Program in collecting as much data as it can to help determine whether the planet was ever habitable and to continue searching for clues to Mars' past climate and geology.

Europe has been bitten by the fusion bug. With ITER currently under construction France, the EU is adding another mega-project to its fusion repertoire, HiPER ( HI gh P ower laser E nergy R esearch). Last week the current phase of HiPER was officiated as participating countries signed the necessary legal documents. Although there are just a few key players (The UK, France, and the Czech Republic) participation is global, involving 26 institutions from 10 countries, our own Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in CA among them. HiPER aims to demonstrate the feasibility of laser driven fusion. By now we've heard enough about the benefits of fusion energy that it has nearly become the poster child of clean, green power. And in many ways, it is. HiPER will use sea water as its main source of fuel while producing zero hazardous wastes (e.g. greenhouse gases and radioactive material). Laser fusion works conceptually the same way any atom fusing technology would, by fusing two h

This is Mercury like you've never seen her: the image to the left was snapped by the Wide Angle Camera of MESSENGER' S Dual Imaging System (MDIS) Instrument, at a distance of about 17,000 miles away from the planet. The particularly bright crater just south of the center of the image is the Kuiper crater (first viewed in the 1970s on the Mariner 10 mission, which imaged less than half of the planet). The terrain east of Kuiper, toward the edge of the planet, has never until now been imaged by a spacecraft. This is the first the missing portions of Mercury's surface, the portions that Mariner could not capture, have been imaged. The large pattern of rays extending from the Northern parts of the planet all the way to the southern parts make Mercury almost resemble a giant basketball. Adding to its accomplishments, MESSENGER recently set a record for accuracy on its recent flyby of Mercury's surface. The probe missed its intended distance by a mere 0.6 kilometers-the

For years, scientists have wanted to put a telescope on the moon. Its lack of atmosphere makes for a clear, cloudless view of the universe. However, the feasibility of lugging up tremendously heavy equipment into space and the economic cost of doing so are obstacles that have always accompanied the idea, until now. An international team of researchers may have found a way to build a large lunar observatory on the Moon, using liquid mirror telescopes made of ionic liquids , a special class of organic compounds. Traditionally, liquid mirror telescopes on Earth have used mercury for its ability to remain molten at room temperature and reflect a high percentage of light. Despite its good qualities, mercury is extremely dense or heavy, making it difficult to launch. Once on the moon, it would evaporate very quickly. Not to mention the price-mercury is very expensive. Ionic liquids have properties that solve these issues. Scientists often describe ionic liquids as " molten salts &q

Its been 400 years since the birth of the telescope - at least according to some scientists and historians. Nonetheless, the Netherlands is celebrating (aka conferencing) to mark 4 centuries of one of the most influential inventions ever. Based on several sources, it is believed that on October 2 1608, eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey, originally born in Germany, filed a patent application in Netherlands (or in Belgium, no one is certain) for a device he called a "kijiker" or looker. The story isn't without polemic. Some claim that Lipphershey's neighbor and fellow eyeglass maker Zacharias Janssen invented an instrument capable of viewing far-off objects up close. Despite the open questions, all of the potential inventors resided in the Netherlands so this year the Dutch are taking credit for the telescope. In 1609, Galileo Galilei set about improving the telescope and was eventually able to gaze at the stars and moons. His observations offered proof that the Sun a

I've never been a huge fan of elevators (I got stuck in one when I was about 7, and apparently still can't get over the trauma...), but the prospect of hopping into a carriage and gliding up to the stars is tantalizing. The idea is more than just sci-fi reverie; in a few weeks an international group of researchers, engineers, physicists and potential astronauts will gather in Japan to draw up a proposal and timeline for building the world's first space elevator ( an artist's impression of the platform of the proposed space elevator is shown above). According to the Times, the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA-I'd link, but the site is in Japanese) says the elevator would run on 22,000 mile long, flat, ribbon-like cables, and would cost about a trillion yen, or $9 billion. The Japanese say the price tag is fairly cheap-considering the amount of research and advances in materials science and engineering that the project requires, not to mention the planning and