New research shows that a class of materials being eyed for the next generation of computers behaves asymmetrically at the sub-atomic level. This research is a key step toward understanding the topological insulators that may have the potential to be the building blocks of a super-fast quantum computer that could run on almost no electricity. Full article ... More
The fact that we have matter in the Universe means there have to be laws of physics that aren’t in our Standard Model, and neutrinos are one place they might be. Prof Dave Wark, of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Oxford University. Source: BBC More
Matthew R. Francis – Writer of science, blogger of physics and astronomy, director of CosmoAcademy, writes: “Physicists are serial offenders when it comes to cross-disciplinary meddling. Whether it’s a theoretical cosmologist claiming to solve consciousness or a professor smugly claiming all other sciences are “soft”, physicists are too ... More
It started with a bang, and has been expanding ever since. For nearly a century, this has been the standard view of the Universe. Now one cosmologist is proposing a radically different interpretation of events — in which the Universe is not expanding at all. In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server1, Christof Wetterich, a theoretical physicist at ... More
“There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy and upward of 100 billion galaxies in our universe. So the existence of a planet similar to Earth somewhere, is, in my mind a certainty…” Prof. Sara Seager, astrophysicist, planetary scientist at MIT. Full article here. More
Slow motion reveals so many things we actually don’t -can’t- see with our own eyes. Have you ever watched a water droplet bounce in ultra-slow-motion? You’d be surprised! strainoff, who made this video, explains: ‘Near the end of this clilp, you can see waves entering from the lower right. I think these are reflections of a low ... More
I’m not saying it, CERN is: Higgs within reach – Our understanding of the universe is about to change… Scientists may have found the so-called Goddamn particle, eventually. Or at least what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson, which is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s. But scientists ... More
Last month, David Galbraith updated his article published in July 2010, and in which he was investigating the location where the web was invented: “One of the more interesting consequences of the details below, that hasn’t been picked up anywhere, is that technically the web was invented in France, not Switzerland”. Great news but ... More
