Physics Buzz

Designing things like LEDs and transistors has, for a long time, been an arduous process of trial and error, but that could be changing soon, thanks in part to a technique developed by physicists at SUNY-Buffalo.

Last night, I sat down to dinner and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (I prefer the original series, but there’s only so many times you can watch Kirk & Co. fight the space-nazis before it starts to get old.) I picked one in the first season, called “Home Soil”, where Picard and his crew beam down to a desert world that’s being adapted to support life, only to discover that there’s already a strange form of intelligent life living in the subsurface water table. Terraforming an already-inhabited planet violates the Federation’s “prime directive”, creating all sorts of drama for the episode, but we’re not here today to focus on the moral quandaries of xenobiology. Rather, the episode contains some tidbits that sound at first like technobabble plot-spackle, but upon closer examination make you start to wonder if someone in the writers’ room had access to a time machine.

Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics hosts the world’s largest collection of glass photographic plates, and thanks to the efforts of DASCH — which stands for Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard — all of the information they contain will soon be at your fingertips. We caught up with Principal Investigator Dr. Josh Grindlay to find out how the digitization project works and what they hope to accomplish by making all of the data available to the public.

A team of physicists from Cornell has shown that rapid, repeated measurements can freeze matter in place, in a paper recently accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters. The phenomenon, called the quantum Zeno effect (after the Greek philosopher famous for posing tricky questions about arrows and tortoises), limits the quantum tunneling ordinarily exhibited by confined particles.

In an attempt to unravel how matter and antimatter differ—and why we seem to have more of one than the other in our universe—scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have been studying the production and decay of particles called B mesons. Baryons, (from the greek barus , meaning heavy) such as protons and neutrons, each contain three valence quarks, but mesons (as in meso , or middle) are two-quark systems—one quark and one antiquark. They’re much less stable, contain equal amounts matter and antimatter, and tend to decay quickly into other particles, so they’re a promising tool for trying to ferret out the decay asymmetries that might have led to the state of the universe as we know it today. B mesons in particular are so-named because they contain a “bottom” antiquark, also known as a “beauty” antiquark, leading to the LHCb experiment’s name. However, as so often happens, the result the LHCb researchers found was not the one they were looking for.

In 1956, the French adventurer and SCUBA inventor Jacques Cousteau published a book called The Silent World about Earth’s oceans. Cousteau’s book is widely credited with giving rise to a new awareness of the seas’ beauty and fragility. "He picked a bad title," said Arthur Popper , professor emeritus in biology at the University of Maryland in College Park. The oceans are not silent. In fact, they are louder than ever. And that, scientists believe, is a problem.

What happens when several thousand distinguished physicists, researchers, and students descend on the nation’s gambling capital for a conference? The answer is "a bad week for the casino"—but you'd never guess why.

The year was 1859 and, nearly six decades after the creation of Volta's battery, humans were really starting to get the hang of this electricity thing. Alternating current and low-loss power transmission lines were still a long way off, but the foundations of a communication infrastructure had emerged as telegraph cables began to crisscross the globe.

A lot of people disagree with my characterization of NASA's use of the word "microgravity" in lieu of "free fall" as a hoax. The chief objection seems to be that I am being pedantic. Well, here's what I have to say to people calling me "pedantic" -- Here are a few more (not at all pedantic) reasons why "microgravity" sucks and and "free fall" rules.

The black hole: the inner boundary of the known universe, the point of no return. This is the region in the vicinity of a gravitational singularity which, once entered, cannot be left. Or can it?

Like sailors putting a finger to the wind, migrating moths check the atmospheric conditions around them and adjust their headings accordingly, a new study finds. They do it by sensing turbulence, which helps them determine whether the wind is blowing them off course.

In a recent think piece from Drexel University's The Smart Set, author Michael Lund boldly proclaims that it's time for western academia to throw in the towel on a decades-long failed experiment: "hard" social science.

Yes, astronauts landed on the moon. But that doesn't mean NASA has been completely honest. Free fall aboard NASA's vomit comet, where gravity is anything but micro. Starting in the 1970's, for some reason I have yet to discover, NASA started lying to us about the basic physics of space flight -- that is, they invented the word microgravity. OK, maybe they didn't invent it. I'm not sure if it's possible to figure out exactly who coined the term. Still, some time in the late seventies or early eighties, NASA (and a lot of other scientists) enthusiastically embraced the the idea of microgravity. The problem is, NASA is using it wrong - and I believe that's a very bad thing.

In 2010, physicist and educator Michael Hartl published something he called The Tau Manifesto , a piece of writing that makes a surprisingly controversial assertion: pi is wrong.

A few weeks ago, we put up a "Fermi problem Friday" post about the odds of being struck by lightning. That post was met with some criticism in the comments section, so it's currently down while we revise it to reflect our readers' concerns. But last Friday, we made a discovery here at PhysicsCentral headquarters: your odds of getting zapped go up exponentially if your boss brings her old Van de Graaff generator to work!

I recently moved to the DC area in the middle of the summer where, on a bad day, being outdoors is a lot like being inside a rice cooker; sometimes I wish I could stop sweating, because evaporative cooling doesn’t really work when the air is already practically saturated with moisture. As such, the dehumidifier has become my new best friend. This miracle of modern technology that keeps the mildew out of my apartment works by blowing air over a refrigerated mesh of wires, where the water condenses and falls into a bucket, sometimes at the surprising rate of a few liters per day.

About 3.4 billion light-years away, in the general direction of the constellation Draco, lies one of the heaviest singular objects in the known universe. Designated H1821+643, it has roughly 30 billion times the mass of the sun, with an event horizon that could swallow our solar system—28 times over.

A lot of things, it turns out. But the one you'd probably least expect? Waste from a non-nuclear power plant, by a factor of 100 . Would we feel different about fossil fuels if this  warning were mandatory on coal-fired power plants?  Image courtesy Torsten Henning, Public Domain On Wednesday, we published a  Physics+  article about radiation, written in memory of the bombing of Hiroshima, 70 years prior. While the author did a fantastic job in describing the state of the art on low-dose radiation research, I was troubled by a line where he cited "widespread deployment of nuclear power" along with medical scans and air travel as a potential contributor to chronic low-dose radiation. I took issue with the line because, counterintuitive as it might be, widespread deployment of nuclear power is acting to  decrease  the radiation burden of the average individual. To understand how, we'll need a smidge of radiation biophysics knowledge, along with a touch of nuclea

By now you've probably seen the latest video of Lexus' hoverboard technology , a two-minute spot produced as part of their "Amazing in Motion" advertising campaign. The board itself is incredibly cool—literally—the technology relies on superconductors, cooled using liquid nitrogen to somewhere below -200°C, and as a result it emits a trail of futuristic-looking fog (actually condensing water vapor) wherever it goes. Unfortunately, the video, which shows a number of skateboarders trying out their favorite sport sans wheels , is more than a little misleading.

I was living in Indiana back in June when I got a surprise lesson in optics, simply by looking out my window to see the golden-orange glow of sunset bathing our lawn. That’s odd , I thought to myself, seems like the day just flew by . I checked my watch; it was 3 P.M. I blinked hard, wondering to myself what could be going on. I checked my phone; still 3 P.M. I stepped outside for a better look around. There was no mistaking it; this was the kind of color scheme I was used to seeing an hour or two before the last light of the day, but the sun was hanging stubbornly far above the horizon, at its usual 3 o’clock position.