80beats » Physics & Math

The Engineer Who Has “Saved More Lives Than Any Single Person in the History of Aviation”

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:52:02 +0000

The number one cause of plane crashes used to be controlled flight into terrain (pdf), accidents where pilots unintentionally collide with an obstacle. A pilot unable to see through fog, for example, could fly straight into a mountain, crashing an otherwise perfectly functional plane. Such accidents killed over 9000 people—until aviation engineer Don Bateman’s crash-avoidance technology changed all that.

Bateman invented the original Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) in the 1970s. Using information from the altimeter. airspeed indicator, and other devices already standard in planes, the original GPWS warned pilots with increasing urgency—first “Caution—Terrain,” then “Pull up! Pull up!”—if the plane was due to crash. Bateman, now 79 years old, still works at Honeywell and he’s still perfecting the GPWS. The modern warning system integrates GPS locations of potential obstacles. In a profile of Bateman for the Seattle Times, Bob Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, says, “It’s accepted within the industry that Don Bateman has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation.”

Bateman traces his interest in improving flight safety to a horrific plane crash he witnessed as a 8-year-old boy growing up in Canada. He snuck out of school with ...

How Could the #1 Story of the Year Be Something That Might Not Even Be True?

Corey Powell — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:12:14 +0000

In the 2011 edition of our annual Top 100 Stories of the Year issue, DISCOVER chose the OPERA experiment’s announcement of neutrinos that apparently move faster than light as the #1 story. This raises the question of whether the top spot should go to a “discovery” that many researchers think is wrong.

After much heated debate, we landed on not one but two answers. First, there is the extraordinary nature of the experiment itself. Shooting shadowy neutrinos through 454 miles of rock and then collecting and precisely measuring them at the other end is a historic technical achievement, one that may turn up new physics even if this particular result does not hold up. Second, and more important, there is the inspiring nature of the claim. This is the most credible evidence in years that our basic understanding of space and time needs an overhaul. No physicist believes that relativity has all the answers and that humans now understand everything there is to know about how the universe works. Someday some experiment will lead to insights that eluded even Einstein. If the neutrino experiment does not achieve that, it certainly ...

How Stephen Hawking Has Survived to Age 70

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:04:36 +0000

Party hats out, everyone! Stephen Hawking turned 70 years old yesterday, 49 years after being told he had fewer than four left to live.

The Cambridge professor suffers from a motor neuron disease related to Lou Gehrig’s disease that has gradually taken from him his ability to move, feed himself, and speak, except through a synthesizer that he operates using a cheek muscle (unfortunately, his control of that muscle is also fading). But despite these handicaps, he has survived to an incredible ripe old age—the average for an Englishman is currently 77.2—and has continued his work as a cosmologist and physicist throughout. How has he managed to live so much longer than expected? Katherine Harmon at Scientific American asked neurologist Leo McClusky, who specializes in such diseases:

One thing that is highlighted by this man’s course is that this is an incredibly variable disorder in many ways. On average people live two to three years after diagnosis. But that means that half the people live longer, and there are people who live for a long, long time.

Life expectancy turns on two things: the motor neurons running the diaphragm—the breathing muscles. So the common ...

Two Diamonds Get Quantum Entangled, Physicists Report

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:17:11 +0000

Atoms are governed by the strange laws of quantum physics—they can communicate across long distances, teleport, and perform myriad other acts that sound straight out of science fiction. But although we’re made up of atoms, we can’t do any of that stuff. We’re governed by the laws of classical, or Newtonian, physics, where there’s no teleporting allowed.

How many atoms have to get together for classical physics to take over? Many physicists would dearly like to know, and, in an effort to suss out just when the change-over happens, have set up numerous experiments in which they watch for signs of quantum behavior in ever-larger objects, from molecules to nanoscale slivers of metal. But a paper published this week in Science takes the cake. Researchers report that they have observed entanglement in two three-millimeter-wide diamonds.

Entanglement is one of the stranger properties of quantum objects. Entangled items are intimately linked, so that whatever happens to one of them somehow (we don’t know how) affects the other. For a technical explanation of how the experiment worked, check out John Matson’s coverage at Scientific American, but, in essence, the researchers set the diamonds vibrating and then ...

What Did Australopithecines Sound Like? More “Duh” Than “Ugg”

Valerie Ross — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:31:10 +0000

Artist’s rendering of an Australopithecus afarensis

When archaeologists hear whispers of humanity’s past, it’s through the painstaking work of piecing together a story from artifacts and fossilized remains: The actual calls, grunts, and other sounds made by our evolutionary ancestors didn’t fossilize. But working backward from clues in ancient skeletons, Dutch researcher Bart de Boer has built plastic models of an early hominin‘s vocal tract—and, by running air through the models, recreated the sounds our ancestors may have made millions of years ago.

Non-human primates have an organ called an air sac, a large cavity that connects to the vocal tract. The air sac links onto an extension on the hyoid bone known as the hyoid bulla. Modern humans have neither an air sac nor an extension on the hyoid bone. But Australopithecus afarensis—a hominin species that roamed Africa approximately 3.9 million to 2.9 million years ago—had a hyoid bulla, the fossil record shows, meaning it’s highly likely it had an air sac, too.

Using plastic tubing, de Boer built models of the human vocal tract both without an air sac, like modern humans, and with one, like A. afarensis would have had. ...

Low-Tech Vikings May Have Used Mineral With Funky Optics to Reach New World

Douglas Main — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:40:59 +0000

What’s the news: Viking legend has it that sailors could hold up crystal sunstones to the sky to help them find their way. Turns out the legend could be true. In a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers found that a type of crystal called an Icelandic spar commonly found in that country could accurately reveal the position of the sun in cloudy or near-dark conditions. How Vikings Got Around:

Researchers have long wondered and argued about how the Vikings were able to successfully navigate their way around the Northern Hemisphere in the late eighth to 11th centuries, hundreds of years before the magnetic compass reached Europe around 1300. Besides the direction of the wind, waves, and swell, the only way to navigate during the day away from shore is by knowing the sun’s direction. But that’s not so easy on a foggy or stormy day, or during the long twilight of Northern summers. Historians have speculated that, due to their optical properties, crystals of calcite (a common form of calcium carbonate) could have been used to ...

Acoustical Archaeologists Solve the Mystery of the Doge’s Stereo System

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:25:02 +0000

Saint Mark’s basilica was where many Venetian polyphonic works had their debut performances, but the reverb presented a puzzle for historians.

Ah, the Renaissance—lots of deep thinkers, gorgeous art, busty maidens, fried dough on a stick (if Ren faires are to be believed), and the liveliest music this side of the Middle Ages. But when you compare the elaborate, up-tempo harmonies of late Renaissance polyphony to the churches where they would have been performed, a serious discrepancy pops up. Giant Renaissance churches like Saint Mark’s basilica and the Redentore, both in Venice, have way too long of a reverberation time for those tunes to sound good. It takes a full 7 seconds for a note to fade after it’s played or sung, and that means that songs, especially fast ones, blend into a giant muddy mess.

A physicist and a music technologist, who presented their work at the American Acoustical Society on Monday, wondered if the churches, when packed full of people and hung with heavy draperies during holy festivals, might have sounded much better than they do today. Working with architectural historians, they calculated the chairs, drapery, and audience members’ ability to ...

NASA to Develop Dust-Grabbing Tractor Beams for Future Missions

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:04:37 +0000

Put ‘er here, R2.

Fans of intergalactic exploration both real and fictional, rejoice: Future NASA missions may incorporate tractor beams, lasers that can pick up objects at a distance. “We’re caught in a tractor beam and it’s pulling us in!” is a long way off, but NASA has just awarded a team of scientists $100,000 to explore three different methods of trapping objects with laser light and reeling them in.

Dust, rather than Corellian light freighters, are the objects in question: the hope is to use tractor beam tech to collect atmospheric particles or grab dust from a planet’s surface without resorting to using a drill, as the Mars rovers have. And indeed, one of the three methods—optical tweezers—has been used by biologists for decades to hold microscopic particles, including viruses and bacteria, in place for experiments.

The challenge will be developing techniques that will work in all the different environments that an exploratory craft might explore. Optical tweezers won’t work in the vacuum of space, for example, but could be useful on a planet with an atmosphere. The other techniques, which use solenoid beams and Bessel beams, could work ...

New Study: Fukushima Released Twice as Much Radiation as Official Estimate Claimed

Valerie Ross — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:56:07 +0000

The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant this spring may have released twice as much radiation into the atmosphere as the Japanese government estimated, a new preliminary study says. While the government estimates relied mostly on data from monitoring stations in Japan, the European research team behind the new report looked at radioactivity data from stations scattered across the globe. This wider approach factored in the large amounts of radioactivity that were carried out over the Pacific Ocean, which the official tallies didn’t.

Overall, the team says, the disaster released about 36,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, more than twice the 15,000 terabecquerels Japanese authorities estimated—and approximately 42% as much radioactivity as Chernobyl.

The researchers also found that the release of cesium declined sharply when workers started spraying water into the pools holding spent fuel rods at the plant—suggesting that, contrary to the official account, the spent fuel rods had been emitting radiation, and spraying them earlier might have mitigated the fallout.

Image: iStockPhoto

Superconductors + Flux Tubes = Levitating Frozen Puck

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:21:27 +0000

When you freeze a chunk of sapphire coated in yttrium barium copper oxide, what do you get? A puck that can whiz around a magnetic track like a hovercraft. When the oxide gets very cold, it becomes a superconductor and actively repels magnets, with the result that when it’s placed over a large enough magnet, it levitates.

As the Tel Aviv University team behind this video explains, despite the puck’s aversion to magnetic fields, the thinness of the oxide layer on it means that the field does manage to penetrate it a little. But only in tiny columns called flux tubes. The puck doesn’t like having those flux tubes moved around in it, which happens whenever it moves. And in order to minimize the shifting of the flux tubes, it…floats. It’s a phenomenon called quantum locking.

No alien tech or magic required.

We do wonder, though, if the levitating puck has ever met the levitating frog, pictured below. Or his buddy, the levitating (heavily sedated) mouse.

Will Data-Crunching Give Obama an Edge?

Valerie Ross — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:10:26 +0000

As the 2012 presidential race ramps up, campaigns are courting voters not only at the traditional county fairs and town hall meetings, but online—and generating, in the process, an enormous amount of data about who potential voters are and what they want. At CNN.com, Micah Sifry—an expert on the intersection of technology and politics—delves in the Obama team’s extensive efforts to mine and manage the data in a way that could help them better interact with voters and home in on important issues. He writes:

Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers — number of calls made, number of doors knocked—and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.

No Republican candidates, however, seem to have similar systems in place to help them manage and ...

The House From Pixar’s Up!…in Real Life

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:00:28 +0000

Finally! After teasers released in March whetted our appetites, this maker’s dream is now airing: This week National Geographic’s DIY show “How Hard Can It Be?”, the team satisfies your hunger to see Carl Fredricksen’s balloon-propelled house in the flesh—using around 300 technicolor weather balloons and a lightweight cottage that the team was still stapling together just hours before it rose into the sky, to bob along at 10,000 feet. You can’t not root for this spunky bunch (even though this first video ends in a cliffhanger):

Luckily, with a bit of searching on the NatGeo site, you can find the clincher:

When they launched the balloon a few months ago, Wired did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the physics involved here. Though Wired didn’t address this, we suspect that one reason they couldn’t use party balloons is that the pressure from balloons on the outside of the cluster pushing in on the ones in the center would cause them to burst. What do you think?

Odds on Nobel Laureates? You Bet.

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:05:53 +0000

It’s the first week of October and everyone’s abuzz with the announcements of the Nobels, especially after today’s announcement of the Prize in Medicine, when Ralph Steinman became the first posthumous Laureate since 1961. As the Nobel Committee is notoriously close-lipped, some folks come up with their own shortlists; Thomson-Reuters releases a list every year, though many in the science writing community have pointed out its low success rate. But informal pools abound. Here are our favorite sites listing odds and taking bets on the Prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, and economics:

For the Prize in Economics, to be awarded Monday, October 10, the Harvard Department of Economics has set up a betting pool here. You pay a dollar for each name you submit, and if you choose one of the winners, you get a cut of the pot. For the Prize in Chemistry, to be awarded Wednesday, October 5, check out Paul Bracher at ChemBark’s thorough post with detailed odds, and Derek Lowe’s picks at In the Pipeline. For the Prize in Literature, to be awarded Thursday, October 6, the British betting site Ladbrokes has odds here. For all of ...

Gamma Rays Could Soon Reveal a Lost Da Vinci Masterpiece—If Funding Comes Through

Valerie Ross — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:15:49 +0000

The Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy

What’s the News: The walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, the centuries-old seat of Florentine government, have doubtless housed many secrets over the years. Now, a physicist, a photographer, and a researcher who uses advanced technology to analyze art are teaming up to reveal one secret that may still linger there: a long-lost mural by Leonardo da Vinci, thought to be hidden behind a more recent fresco. The team plans to use specially designed cameras, based on nuclear physics, to peer behind the fresco and determine whether the da Vinci is actually there—and if so, to take a picture of it.

What’s the Context:

Leonardo began the mural, called “The Battle of Anghiari,” in the early 1500s. While copies and historical mentions of it survive, the painting itself has not been seen for centuries. Maurizio Seracini—an engineer by training who uses technology to examine, image, and analyze art and artifacts—has been searching for “The Battle of Anghiari” since the 1970s. He’s come to suspect it lies behind a later fresco, “The Battle of Marciano” by Giorgio Vasari, in the Palazzo Vecchio’s enormous council hall. This newer work, Seracini believes, was painted on ...

Cyborg Beetles’ Neural Implants Could Suck Power From Bugs’ Wing Beats

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:03:41 +0000

These spiral generators scavenge power when the beetle beats its wings.

What’s the News: Building tiny fly-like robots—for spying, search and rescue, and so on—has a long history in robotics. But some researchers, citing the challenge of building agile, dynamic machines at that scale, have turned to Mother Nature instead and made living beetles into cyborgs, controlling their flight via neural implants.

Finding a power source that’s light enough for these beetles to port around has been difficult, but now, a team of roboticists have found that harvesting power from their beating wings could be a way to make these ‘borgs go battery-less.

How the Heck:

The researchers mounted piezolectric generators, which produce power when they’re bent or compressed, on the thoraxes of green june beetles near where the wings attach. Trying out two different shapes, spiral and beam-like, with two different designs each, they were able to harvest about 45 µW of power from each beetle, and demonstrated that the closer they got to the base of the beetles’ wings, the more they could scavenge. Right near the base, they could increase their power output to 115 µW. They estimate that if the generator can be hooked ...

At the LHC, the “God Particle” is Running Out of Places to Hide

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:12:47 +0000

After several years of nail-biting delays and breakdowns, the Large Hadron Collider, one of the few science experiments to become a household name, got underway in March of 2010. The search for the Higgs boson, the elusive “God particle” that would resolve several problems in the Standard Model of particle physics, was front-page news.

But in the last 18 months, as the LHC has scanned through various energies, the Higgs has not showed itself. And at a conference in Mumbai on August 22, CERN scientists revealed news that set the physics community humming: in the energies so far explored, there’s a 95% probability that the Higgs doesn’t exist. Amir Azcel, writing in a guest blog at Scientific American, explains these numbers, considers the tumult in particle physics that will occur should the Higgs prove no more than theoretical, and asks whether Stephen Hawking has just won his infamous bet against the Higgs:

A few years ago, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was widely reported in the press to have placed a provocative public bet that the LHC (along with all particle accelerators that preceded it) would never find the Higgs boson, ...

Why Do Coffee Rings Form? Because the Grounds are Round

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:00:31 +0000

Those dark rings in the bottom of your cup arise from fundamental physics.

What’s the News: Some of the most mundane things in life—drinking through a straw, for instance, or washing your hands with soap—are the results of some really neat physics. Today, scientists are adding another item to that list: The ring that forms around a drying drop of coffee. A team at University of Pennsylvania has discovered that that brown ring is a result of the shape of the particles floating in your coffee—and if you squash them out a little, the coffee ring disappears.

How the Heck:

The ring forms from particles moving towards the edge of the drop as it dries. The drop’s edge is firmly stuck to the surface of, say, your desk, and as the water evaporates, the fluid that’s left moves outwards from the center, flattening the drop and taking the particles with it. Now, zoom in on the surface of the drop. The particles of bean in your coffee, like many particles in nature, are spherical. This means they don’t bend the drop’s surface very much, so, drawn by capillary action, they can easily flee down the drop ...

Eyes on the Radioactive Wind, Scientists in California Study the Fukushima Meltdown

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:37:33 +0000

Clean-up teams at Fukushima struggled to control the melting fuel rods.

What’s the News: After the disastrous March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world waited, mostly in vain, for details about the events that led to meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Since then, scientists across the Pacific in California have been watching the dials of instruments that detect radioactive molecules, to see what might come across on the winds.

This week, scientists at Scripps published their readings of radioactive sulfur collected in the atmosphere in San Diego after the meltdown. These allowed them to extrapolate backwards to learn roughly how many neutrons were shed by the melting cores as workers desperately doused them in sea water, helping scientists understand the damage undergone by the cores and demonstrating the kind of remote science that may be required to help understand the events that led to meltdown.

How the Heck:

The scientists were looking for sulfur-35, a form of sulfur that’s created when chloride ions, plentiful in sea water, are hit by neutrons produced during radioactive decay. One of the researchers told ScienceNOW that she’d read that after underwater nuclear tests ...

Metamaterial Mesh Could Erase a Sub’s Tell-Tale Wake

Valerie Ross — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:57:42 +0000

What’s the News: Scientists have already bent light to make invisibility cloaks and manipulated sound to hide underwater objects from sonar. Now, researchers have come up with a preliminary design for a mesh shield that would let submarines stealthily maneuver through the seas without leaving any wake, they report in a study published online last week.

How the Heck:

When something moves through water, it pulls water along with it, creating drag, and leaves a turbulent wake behind it, where more water rushes in to fill the newly vacated space. To get an object to glide through water wake-free, the researchers propose coating it in a porous mesh of man-made metamaterial. Tiny pumps scattered throughout the mesh would help push water through with variable amounts of force. “The goal is make it so the water passing through the porous material leaves the cloak at the same speed as the water surrounding by the vessel,” Yaroslav Urzhumov, one of the researchers, said in a press release. “In this way, the water outside the hull would appear to be still, relative to the vessel.” The mesh would also reduce ...

Newsflash: Gravity is Now a Little Weaker; Mass of Proton a Bit Smaller

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:25:40 +0000

Whip out that red pen and make just a few…little…tweaks…

The physical world should feel a little more comfy now: Gravity is a little bit less than it was last Thursday. And the electromagnetic force? A smidge stronger.

Every four years, the National Institute of Standards and Technology posts internationally determined adjustments to the official values of such natural constants to reflect more accurate measurements made possible by advancing technology. This week, in the latest update, the radius of a proton, the speed of light, the Planck constant, and many, many others have received facelifts that will decrease uncertainty in physics measurements. But this update will also affect units much closer to home: In October, the General Conference on Weights and Measures will vote on a measure to base the definition of a kilogram on the values of such natural constants, instead of the 130-year-old slug of platinum and iridium that currently holds the title.

For the time being, the current upgrade will likely trickle down to we armchair physicists once Google Calculator, the search giant’s handy-dandy constant provider, starts using the new numbers. Judging from its current value for the Planck ...

Nuclear Decay Beneath Your Feet Accounts for Half of Earth’s Heat Output

Joseph Castro — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:01:07 +0000

Atoms sometimes release alpha particles during radioactive decay.

What’s the News: An international team of researchers has completed the most precise measurement of the Earth’s radioactivity to date. By analyzing subatomic particles streaming out of the interior of the planet, the geologists and physicists discovered that the radioactive decay of several elements generates roughly half of the Earth’s total heat output. Their results were published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience.

What’s the Context:

Radioactive decay is a natural process where an unstable atom loses energy by emitting particles (thus decaying into smaller atoms). Radioactive decay can sometimes release neutrinos: tiny, electrically neutral, and nearly massless elementary particles that pass through most normal matter with little to no interaction. Because of their ability to phase through matter mostly unaffected, these ghostlike particles are very hard to detect. Like all other particles, neutrinos have anti-siblings, called antineutrinos. A proton can sometimes capture an antineutrino, which then splits into a neutron plus a positron (an anti-electron). That positron will annihilate when it hits an electron, releasing energy that can be detected with very sensitive instruments, such as the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) deep in ...

Study: Conventional Understanding of Static Electricity Is Wrong

Joseph Castro — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:51:46 +0000

What’s the News: In high school physics classes, students are often taught that static electricity develops when electrons detach from the surface of one object and jump to another, causing a difference in charge. Since opposite charges attract, the two objects are drawn to one another (like your hair to a balloon). But new research published in the journal Science shows that static electricity is caused by more than just the exchange of individual electrons, and instead involves the transfer of bigger (yet still tiny) clumps of material.

How the Heck:

Scientists conventionally believed that static electricity required friction between two different non-metals, which would tug at their electrons with different amounts of force. But last year, a group of researchers at Northwestern University found that two sheets of the same polymer, like Teflon, can generate static electricity, also called contact electrification (pdf). After the discovery, some of the researchers, including chemist Bartosz Grzybowski, wanted to understand how it all worked. Grzybowski ...

Researchers Build a Living Laser

Valerie Ross — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 18:40:03 +0000

What’s the News: Scientists have developed the first biological laser, made from a single living cell. This “living laser,” described in a new study in Nature Photonics, could one day lead to better medical imaging and light-based treatments for cancer or other diseases.

How the Heck:

Lasers typically have several parts: a material called a gain medium, which amplifies light; an energy source to “pump” the gain medium, exciting its atoms and enabling it to emit more powerful light; and mirrors, which direct the light into a coherent beam. To start, the researchers modified cells derived from a human kidney to manufacture green fluorescent protein, or GFP, a molecule that glows green when exposed to blue light. This glowing cell served as the laser’s gain medium. The researchers then nestled the cell between two mirrors, which were close enough together to form a cell-sized cavity, and shone pulses of blue light—the energy source—onto the cell through a microscope. Blue light would simply make the cell glow, under normal conditions. In this mirrored cavity, however, the photons bounced around, exciting more GFP molecules. This meant the cell could amplify the light—eventually emitting a green ...

Two New Elements Join the Periodic Table

Veronique Greenwood — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:30:57 +0000

116 and 114 can now officially be filled in.

What’s the News: On Wednesday, two new elements were officially welcomed to the periodic table.

The newcomers are elements 114 and 116, and they’ve just passed a three-year deliberation by the Joint Working Party on Discovery of Elements, a team of chemists and other scientists who sort through the evidence behind claims of newly discovered elements. These two don’t have official names yet, and for now they are going by the placeholders ununquadium and ununhexium, which refer to the number of protons in their nuclei.

How the Heck:

Discovering elements these days means smashing nuclei together at incredible speed and waiting to see what the shattered remnants reassemble themselves into. The team that discovered 114 and 116 has been putting together a case for their discovery since 2004, when collaborating groups at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California started ramming calcium nuclei (20 protons) into curium nuclei (96 protons) to see what would happen (answer: element 116). 116 decayed almost immediately into two protons and 114, which they also made from scratch ...

Hauling Out the Quantum Frigidaire: Can Quantum Mechanics Suck the Heat From Computing?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:46:38 +0000

What’s the News: Anyone who has had their thighs baked by a laptop knows that computing releases heat. And it’s more than a common-sense maxim: physicists have shown that heat released by information processing is bound by a physical law, where a bit of information processed must cause a corresponding rise in temperature. But could quantum mechanics allow computations that actually cool computers down? In a recent Nature paper, researchers describe how this paradox is possible.

How the Heck:

In this paper, the team describes how, using the quantum mechanical property of entanglement, an observer can actually drain heat from a system while deleting information. How, you say? It all comes down to a question of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system is always increasing or remaining the same, but never decreasing. And the way we usually experience it, entropy is heat. Landauer’s Principle, which arises from the second law, links heat and information processing: any irreversible computation, the principle says, is going to add entropy to the universe. But if a computation is reversible—if a 1 or 0 is deleted while its state is ...

Metamaterials Could Help Wirelessly Charge Electronics by Making Space Disappear

Valerie Ross — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:03:36 +0000

What’s the News: Metamaterials could improve wireless power transfer, letting us one day charge our devices without the hassle of cords and wires, says a study published last week in Physical Review B. While wireless power transfer already works to for tiny amounts of energy, metamaterials could theoretically be used to safely and efficiently boost the technique to handle more power, such as microwaves and lasers.

How the Heck:

Using current techniques, the amount of energy needed to charge personal electronics could, if transmitted wirelessly, burn up whatever’s in its way—up to and including the device it’s supposed to charge. What’s more, energy tends to dissipate through open space, making this sort of power transfer extremely inefficient. But the researchers calculated that certain metamaterials—specifically, ones with effectively negative index of refraction—could transmit the needed power without frying anything. The metamaterials could be used to make a superlens that would stand between the power source and the device, essentially focusing the energy so it doesn’t scatter. According to their analyses, a hypothetical metamaterial array composed of thin copper-fiberglass loops, and

Parallel Lines Never Cross, Even in Remote Amazonia

Valerie Ross — Tue, 24 May 2011 19:20:36 +0000

What’s the News: Adults and school-age children may understand some basic principles of geometry even without formal math training at all, according to a study published online yesterday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thirty members of the Mundurucú, an indigenous Amazonian group, could intuitively grasp geometric concepts about angles, lines, and points, the researchers found.

How the Heck:

The researchers asked eight Mundurucú children ages 7 to 13 and twenty-two Mundurucú adults to answer 21 questions about the geometry of a plane or a sphere, such as “Can a line be made to cross two other parallel-looking lines?” They also had the participants estimate angles that would complete an unfinished triangle, using their hands or a measuring tool. The Mundurucú children and adults performed far better than would be expected by chance, if they were randomly answering “yes” or “no” to the questions. They answered 90% of questions about planar geometry—an imaginary, totally flat world—correctly, and 70% of questions about a spherical world correctly. When estimating angles, their answers tended to be within about 5 degrees of the correct answer. In fact, the Mundurucú did about as well as French ...

Snake Venom, With Ketchup-Like Viscosity, Oozes Into Prey

Valerie Ross — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:08:50 +0000

What’s the News: Most poisonous snakes don’t inject their prey with venom; instead, they bite the prey and venom insidiously trickles down a groove on their fangs into the wound. A new study in Physical Review Letters investigated the physics behind how venom travels down the grooves: It turns out that snake venom has unusual viscosity properties that keep it cohering together until it’s time to flow down the fangs and into the snake’s soon-to-be-snack—the same properties that account for how ketchup seems stuck in the bottle, then flows freely onto your fries.

How the Heck:

The researchers found that snake venom, like ketchup, is a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning that its viscosity depends on how fast it’s moving. Before the snake’s fangs make contact, the venom sticks together pretty well, rather than coming down the tooth in a constant trickle. Once the fangs sink in, however, and the venom starts dripping down the groove, it flows freely. What starts the venom flowing, ...

Miniature Balloon Ear Buds Take A Beating So Your Ear Drum Won’t

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:57:00 +0000

What’s the News: A new type of ear bud hacks the ear’s reflexes, reducing its natural damping so you don’t have turn the volume up so high to get your jam on. It also cuts down on all that unsightly “leathering” on your eardrum…

How the Heck:

Your ear doesn’t cope well with having an ear bud shoved into it. To defend itself against loud noises, it automatically tenses muscles around it to dampen sound. But with Def Leppard pouring in and a little rubber stopper keeping it from pouring out, the ear clenches down even more. And as you crank up the volume to compensate, the sound ricochets through the ear canal and the membrane of the eardrum rattles like a dead leaf, eventually sustaining lasting damage in the form of leathery calluses. New balloon-like ear buds, designed by Asius Technologies and presented at the Audio Engineering Society meeting on May 14th, address this problem by sacrificing themselves instead of the eardrum, an Asius researcher told Sound and Vision. Rather than reflecting the sound around the canal, Asius says, the buds’ thin membranes absorb the rebound and deflect it into the canal’s walls, where it can ...

City Lights Reveals Economic Activity—But Don’t Give Up Ledgers Just Yet

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:41:15 +0000

Not so helpful after all.

What’s the News: City lights are more than a pretty sight from the air—they’re also a good way to tell how a country’s economy is doing, some economists say. Over the past decade, deducing a country’s gross domestic product from how much it glows in nighttime satellite images, a factor called luminosity, has become quite the econ fad. But as clever as it sounds, luminosity isn’t as helpful as you’d think, a new study says. Only in countries that are such a disaster that gathering reliable statistics is impossible is the glow a better approximation of GDP than you’d get with traditional measures.

How the Heck:

GDP, which is generally used as a measure of a nation’s standard of living, is calculated by factoring in spending by consumers and governments, investments in industry, and the values of imports and exports made by a country. If you’ve had a good year, your GDP should be high—and so, say advocates of luminosity, should be your country’s glow. But any calculation of GDP is going to involve some error—records of government spending might have been lost in a war, a large black market could throw off ...

Rising Sea of Humanity: UN Says Pop. Will Hit 10B by 2100—& Keep Going Up

Valerie Ross — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:30:05 +0000

What’s the News: The world’s population is projected to reach 7 billion this October and continue climbing, reaching 10.1 billion by the end of the 21st century, says an official United Nations report (PDF) released earlier this week. This is a significant departure from earlier projections that said the population would peak at just over 9 billion, then level off and even slightly decline.

How the Heck:

Projecting the world population is based on looking at fertility and mortality rates, and how they may be affected by government policies, available services, and behavior. Starting with a few possible fertility and mortality trajectories, researchers in the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs work out what those would mean for overall population. These projections differ from earlier ones because fertility rates in many developing countries—particularly in Africa—aren’t declining as quickly as demographers had thought they would. Nigeria, for instance, is currently the most populous country in ...

Have People Seen Quantum Entanglement With the Naked Eye? It’s Complicated

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:42:30 +0000

What’s the News: Quantum effects like entanglement and superposition are surpassingly strange, and also impossible for humans to see, occurring as they do at the level of subatomic particles. But now researchers have set up an experiment that makes the effects of quantum entanglement visible to the naked eye—at least in theory.

How the Heck:

A pair of entangled atoms are intimately and “spookily” linked—even if you move them miles apart, when you poke or prod one, the other will respond as well. Entanglement is usually detected with specialized instruments. But what if entanglement could be made to cause an effect on a scale that even humans could see? This is what University of Geneva researchers wondered when they read about work by an Italian team in which one of a pair of entangled photons was skillfully connected to thousands of other photons, a phenomenon called micro-macro entanglement. That many photons would be something even us giant humans could see. Team leader Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues set up an experiment similar to the Italian one, but instead of using a detector to see whether the photon had entangled the stream of photons and ...

Could Bacteria Communicate by Bouncing Electrons Around Their Chromosomes?

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 22:13:09 +0000

What’s the News: A group of physicists say they’ve found a way to account for the mysterious radio signals that may be emanating from colonies of E. coli—and it’s not because they’re trying to get our attention.

How the Heck:

While human chromosomes are long strings of DNA, bacterial chromosomes are loops. Free electrons travel from atom to atom around such a loop, and as they jump down from one discrete energy level to a lower one, they can emit photons, says a group of researchers, in a recent paper on the arXiv. The researchers calculate that the transition frequencies of these jumps would be 0.5, 1, and 1.5 kilohertz, about what was reported in an earlier study. In other words, the radio signals could be a result of the quantum nature of electrons and the structure of bacterial DNA.

What’s the Context:

It’s suspected that bacteria use waves of higher frequencies to communicate with each other and perform other functions, but radio signals aren’t usually discussed in this context. Radio signals being emitted by bacterial DNA were first observed during a bizarre episode two years ago in which Luc ...

Visual Virtual People: A Better Model for the Behavior of Crowds

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:37:17 +0000

A new model of crowd behavior uses simple visual rules.

What’s the News: When crowds go wrong, they go really wrong—more than 300 people died in a stampede in Cambodia last year during a festival, and hundreds more have been crushed to death in periodic disasters near the Muslim holy city of Mecca. A major flaw of computational models describing how people behave in crowds is that they are often too simplistic or too specific to a situation to explain both normal and disastrous behavior. A new model manages to recreate both types of behavior, working from two basic visual rules: (1) each person will move in the least crowded direction in their line of sight, and (2) they will adjust their speed to maintain a safe distance from visible obstacles.

“This work is an extremely important step in pulling together our fragmented understanding,” says behavioral biologist Iain Couzin, who was not involved in the study (via ScienceNOW). “We’re now approaching a sort of unified understanding of human behavior in crowds.”

How the Heck:

The two simple rules, in combination with some basic physical laws, were enough for the model to ...

Fukushima and Chernobyl: Same Level on Disaster Scale; Very Different Disasters

Valerie Ross — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:01:44 +0000

What’s the News: Japan raised its assessment of the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to Level 7, “Major Accident,” the highest ranking on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is the only other nuclear accident to be ranked at Level 7. Both accidents were extremely severe, the two largest nuclear power accidents ever—but there are some big, important differences between them.

What’s Similar:

A Level 7 accident is a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures,” according to the IAEA. Both plants clearly meet these criteria: Fukushima will require an extensive clean-up effort, and the international community is still working to make the area near Chernobyl safe. The situation at Fukushima also qualifies as Level 7 by the numbers. Japanese officials estimate the reactors have released between 370,000 and ...

Researchers Find “Fattest Schrodinger Cats Realized to Date”

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:38:15 +0000

What’s the News: On a quest to discover at what size the kooky quantum physics that governs atoms (teleporting!) gives way to the ho-hum classical physics that governs humans (no teleporting), scientists have shown that if conditions are right, a molecule of a record 430 atoms can be in two states at once, like Schrödinger’s infamous cat. For the last three decades, researchers have been watching progressively larger objects under special conditions to see how big of an item they can catch showing quantum behavior. This molecule, which was created by a team at University of Vienna and their collaborators for the experiment, is the largest on record.

How the Heck: The researchers shot a beam of molecules through a series of three sets of slits—an updated and modified version of the classic double-slit experiment—and measured exactly where the molecules arrived at the end of the beam. Graphs of where the molecules arrived show a fluctuating pattern indicating interference between the parts of the beam going through different slits. Since the molecules interfered with each other (not something well-behaved classical molecules do) that means they went through ...

“Sexy Math” Helps App Amp Up Car Services

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:16:58 +0000

What’s the News: Cool new apps come out every day, but not every app comes with its own car service. Starting in San Francisco, one company lets pedestrians hail a car using their iPhone or Android phone (or any old text-messaging clunker), providing a more expensive, yet faster alternative to cabs. To make this possible, computer scientists had to find a way to make driving routes as efficient as possible, which is actually quite complicated when you’re dealing with a city-ful of car-hailing people. As Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Wired, “It’s really fun, sexy math.”

What’s the Context:

The process is simple from the consumer’s point of view: You request a car by texting your address or by using Uber’s iPhone or Android app. Because Uber sends the nearest driver to your location to pick you up, your ride arrives within 5 to 10 minutes. Then you just hop into your car and get out at your destination, with no need of fumbling with money because Uber automatically charges your credit card. (You punch in your credit card information into the app before requesting a car.) From the computer scientist’s point ...

3 Creative Tools for Nuclear Cleanup: Algae, Rust, and Bacteria

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:49:51 +0000

In the future, nuclear clean-up workers may be getting help from some surprising sources. None of these three methods are in widespread use right now, but they show promise:

1) Algae

Scientists have discovered that a type of algae can precipitate strontium into crystals. This could lead to better nuclear clean-up techniques, potentially sequestering radioactive strontium-90 from tainted water into crystalline form, which is easier to contain. The algae, called C. moniliferum, collects strontium in sulfate-rich vacuoles, and because strontium and barium have low solubility in sulfate solutions, they precipitate out of solution as crystals.

What’s the Context: The danger of strontium-90 is that it is chemically similar to calcium, and so can be taken up into milk, bones, and other tissues. Nuclear waste and spills can contain significant amounts of strontium; C. moniliferum is especially helpful because it can precipitate strontium but leave calcium alone (calcium is different enough from barium that the bacteria doesn’t crystallize it).

Not So Fast: Scientists don’t yet know how well the algae can withstand radioactivity, which could potentially put a damper on this clean-up method. Now, the scientists ...

Study: Nuclear Fission Reactions May Have Continued After Fukushima’s Alleged Shutdown

Valerie Ross — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:50:10 +0000

Reactor 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, on March 24

What’s the News: A non-peer-reviewed study (pdf) publicized last week by radioactivity-detection expert Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress suggests that nuclear fission reactions continued at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station well after the plant’s operators had allegedly shut down the reactors there. The paper says there may be what are called “localized criticalities” have occurred in the plutonium and uranium left in the reactors—little pockets of fuel that have gone critical, propagating the nuclear chain reaction and generating potentially harmful radiation. The existence of criticalities is controversial: some researchers say there are certainly none; Dalnoki-Veress himself says it’s only a possibility.

How the Heck:

Over three days beginning March 13—two days after the earthquake and resulting tsunami—Tokyo Electric Power Company detected a neutron beam, a stream of radioactive particles that could be evidence of continued chain-reaction fission. The company observed the neutron beam 13 times, about a mile away from the reactors. The beam itself doesn’t pose a health risk, with radiation levels between 0.01 and 0.02 microsieverts per hour. (You’d get about as much radiation exposure from eating one-tenth to one-fifth of a banana.) After ...

Ingenious Geological Sleuthing Reveals the Shapes of Ancient Mountains

Valerie Ross — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:46:03 +0000

Fiordland National Park in New Zealand, the location of the study

What’s the News: Researchers have mapped out the detailed geological history of a 300-square-mile chunk of New Zealand, from 2.5 million years ago to the present day. The study showed how glaciers carved out the area’s distinctive valleys using a little-known technique called thermochronometry, which involves shooting proton beams onto rocks and making note of what happens—along with some impressive analytical skills.

How the Heck: Thermochronometry, as the name implies, is a way to measure both temperature and time. The general principle is that the deeper something is below the Earth’s surface, the warmer it is; thus, tracking a rock’s temperature over millions of years reveals how deep the rock was as it cooled.

This study used a particular version of the method called helium-4/helium-3 thermochronometry, first developed by a member of the research team in 2005. This technique lets you track the time and temperature for apatite, a mineral found in rocks like granite that solidify from liquid magma far beneath the surface. Two chemical elements in apatite—uranium and thorium—are radioactive. As they decay over millions of years, ...