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Large Hadron Collider sets record The New York Times Share    
The world's largest atom smasher set a record by crashing proton beams into each other at three times more energy than ever before. In a milestone in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider's ambitious bid to reveal details about theoretical particles and microforces, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, collided the beams and took measurements at a combined energy level of 7 trillion electron volts. More
Helium rain washing away neon on Jupiter The Los Angeles Times Share
It's raining on Jupiter. And probably on Saturn too. But it isn't raining rain, you know. It's raining ... helium. Yes, droplets of that inert gas that keeps the Goodyear blimp aloft and that powers the runaway house in the movie "Up" are falling like a soft rain from the upper atmosphere of the planet into the gas giant's high-pressure interior. In the process, they're washing away the neon that should also be in the upper atmosphere, researchers from UC Berkeley reported Monday in the online version of the journal Physical Review Letters. Read the associated APS Physics Viewpoint article. More High-tech cheating abounds, and professors bear some blame The Chronicle of Higher Education Share
A casual joke on Twitter recently let slip a dirty little secret of large science and engineering courses: Students routinely cheat on their homework, and professors often look the other way. "Grading homework is so fast when they all cheat and use the illegal solutions manual," quipped Douglas Breault Jr., a teaching assistant in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. After all, if every answer is correct, the grader is left with little to do beyond writing an A at the top of the page and circling it. Mr. Breault, a first-year graduate student, ended his tweet by saying, "The profs tell me to ignore it." Read the associated Physical Review article. More
Did Renaissance painters 'cheat' with optical aids? NewScientist Share
It is one of the most provocative suggestions in art history: did some Renaissance artists use lenses or mirrors to help them paint more accurately? Analysis of a 16th-century artwork dubbed a "Rosetta stone" for optical techniques suggests they did. More Can climate models predict global warming's direct effects in your city? Scientific American Share
Nobody lives in the global average climate. Nor are the massive grid cells favored by climate models run on today's supercomputers as useful as they could be for planning purposes, given that they can encompass 10,000 square kilometers. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments are teaming up to financially support the development of new computer models aimed at revealing the anticipated effects of climate change at the regional level. More
Bending gravity, researchers capture star-birthing region 10 billion light years away Popular Science Share
Using a little astrophysical magic and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment Telescope in northern Chile, astronomers at Durham University in England captured the best view yet of individual star nurseries in a galaxy a full 10 billion light-years from Earth. And all they had to do was bend a little light. More Scientists to levitate drops of liquid to study glass Live Science Share
Physicists are building a levitation chamber to suspend a drop of liquid in mid-air and watch its atoms as it cools into glass. The machine should help clarify the mystery of glass, which is a puzzling state where matter is more like a liquid than a solid. More
Revealed: why hot water freezes faster than cold NewScientist Share
Hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water - but why? This peculiar phenomenon has baffled scientists for generations, but now there is evidence that the effect may depend on random impurities in the water. More Babbage nanomachine promises low-energy computing NewScientist Share
Not only did Charles Babbage lay the foundations for the computer revolution, his designs for mechanical computers also provide a blueprint for energy efficiency. So say Raj Mohanty of Boston University and his colleagues, who have created a nanoscale mechanical logic gate that could form the basis of tiny mechanical computers. More |
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