Walking the halls of one of the world’s great art museums, it’s easy to regard familiar classic paintings as eternal and unchanging. But this is not the case. Paintings are a mix not only of color but of chemistry—and chemistry changes. In some of Vincent van Gogh’s works, the striking, sunny yellows have faded and turned brownish, robbing the Dutch master’s art of some of its trademark intensity. So a European team of scientists decided to find out exactly what was happening on those canvases.
Using sophisticated X-ray machines, they discovered the chemical reaction to blame — one never before observed in paint. Ironically, van Gogh’s decision to use a lighter shade of yellow paint mixed with white is responsible for the unintended darkening, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Analytical Chemistry. [Los Angeles Times]
Vincent loved yellow. In particular, he loved chrome yellow, a 19th century invention that shone brighter than previously available hues of paint. Art preservationists have known that the lead-based paint fades under intense sunlight, so they’ve done what they can to keep van Goghs and similar works out of intense light. What’s curious about his paintings, however, is that some yellows have faded while others have not.
No, you can’t see a black hole. What you might be able to see, though, is the way in which relativity predicts a spinning black hole will bend space, time, and light around it. Scientists say in a new study in Nature Physics that they are closer than ever to being able to see this effect in faraway black holes from our vantage point here on Earth.
Galaxies probably have spinning, supermassive black holes at their center, and spinning black holes possess two types of angular momentum, study coauthor Bo Thide explains. There’s spin angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it spins on its axis, and there’s orbital angular momentum, which is analogous to what the Earth creates as it orbits the sun. Thidé says that the second effect—orbital angular momentum—distorts light in a way that scientists who know what to look for might be able to see it from here.
“Around a spinning black hole, space and time behave in such an odd way; space becomes time, time becomes space, and the whole space-time is actually dragged around the black hole, becomes twisted around the black hole,” Professor Thidé explained. “If you have radiation source… it will then sense this twisting of spacetime itself. The light ray may think that ‘I’m propagating in a straight line’, but if you look at it from the outside, you see it’s propagating along a spiral line. That’s relativity for you.” [BBC News]
Google extends its tendrils into new arenas so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. This week the giant tech company is creating digital art museums, challenging the hackers of the world, letting you play doctor on your tablet, and messing around with fractals.
Google Art Project
Going to an art museum: Sure, it’s a great way to improve your cultural cachet, but it also makes your feet hurt. Fortunately for couch potato art lovers (or those of us who can’t fly all over the world on a whim), Google is bringing some of the world’s greatest museums to you through Art Project, which takes Street View technology into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum, and others.
The level of detail offered up by up to 14 billion pixels is pretty jaw-dropping. Take “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the Younger at the National Gallery in London. It would be easy to ignore the sheet of music that sits on a table in the painting. But with the Google Art Project’s magnification, users can see that the sheet music actually has real music painted onto it. The user can zoom-in and see the individual notes and words with pin-sharp clarity. [Wall Street Journal]
For now just one painting from each of the participating museums is captured in such detail. More could come, and the project’s founder is also seeking a way to capture three-dimensional art, like sculpture.
A Chrome Challenge
For the first time, Google is taking its Chrome browser to Pwn2Own, a competition in which hackers try to break into the major Internet browsers including Firefox and Internet Explorer. And the company is making things a little more interesting, kicking in an additional $20,000 of prize money into the pool.
Forget about fancy metamaterials that can make microscopic objects invisible–researchers at two different universities have independently shown that larger objects can be rendered invisible using a mineral that’s both naturally occurring and common: calcite.
This latest step in physicists’ ongoingquest to create an invisibility cloak come from an MIT lab, with a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and a University of Birmingham lab, whose paper just came out in Nature Communications. Both teams explained that they used calcite to make objects that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye invisible.
“By using natural crystals for the first time, rather than artificial metamaterials, we have been able to scale up the size of the cloak and can hide larger objects, thousands of times bigger than the wavelength of the light,” said Shuang Zhang, the University of Birmingham physicist who led the research…. “This is a huge step forward as, for the first time, the cloaking area is rendered at a size that is big enough for the observer to ‘see’ the invisible object with the naked eye.” [BBC]
The researchers constructed their cloaks from two glued-together calcite crystals, which have a convenient optical property called birefringence–that means they can bend a ray of light in two different directions. Then they placed the objects to be concealed in a notch beneath the crystals.
Having explained string theory to the masses in his bestseller The Elegant Universe and untangled the fabric of the cosmos in The Fabric of the Cosmos, the superstar physicist returns this month with The Hidden Reality, an ode to multiverse theory.
By now, the 11-dimension string theory models of his earlier books … are looking downright commonsensical. “The Hidden Reality” moves on to increasingly speculative and exotic discussions of a bubble multiverse (“Think of the universe as a gigantic block of Swiss cheese. …”) a holographic one, a brane-world scenario (courtesy of string theory), computer-driven simulations, questions of how probability relates to infinity, and the Many Worlds view of quantum mechanics. “A frequent criticism of the Many Worlds approach is that it’s just too baroque to be true,” Mr. Greene writes. [The New York Times]
Multiverse theory—the idea that our universe and its Big Bang were just one of many—is a favorite theme of science fiction (and “Family Guy”), as it allows us to have parallel selves in parallel universes. Greene explains the real science behind the idea with one of his litany of analogies: a simple deck of cards.
If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat. Similarly, in an infinite expanse of space, particle arrangements must repeat too—there just aren’t enough different particle configurations to go around. And if the particles in a given region of space the size of ours are arranged identically to how they are arranged here, then reality in that region will be identical to reality here. Except that maybe we’d be seeing the Jets and the Bears in the Super Bowl. [Wall Street Journal]
Good news, solar sail enthusiasts: the NASA experimental spacecraft that was feared to be a dud sprang into life last week.
NanoSail-D was launched aboard a small satellite in December; once the satellite was in orbit the engineers back on Earth ordered the cargo door opened, and waited for NanoSail-D to pop out as planned. But the solar sail craft remained stubbornly inside the cargo bay. As weeks passed with no action, NASA’s hopes for the craft sunk.
But last Wednesday, NASA announced that NanoSail-D had spontaneously emerged.
“We knew that the door opened and it was possible that NanoSail-D could eject on its own,” Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Center, said in a press release. “What a pleasant surprise this morning when our flight operations team confirmed that NanoSail-D is now a free flyer.” [CNN]
Weapons-grade lasers still sound like the stuff of science fiction, but thanks to a major breakthrough by researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, the Navy has taken a big step toward making this bit of sci-fi real. With the Free Electron Laser (FEL) program, the Navy hopes to use laser beams to blast enemies out of the sea and sky, and for the first time, they’re starting to generate enough power to do so, with the newfound ability to create a megawatt-level laser beam.
“The injector performed as we predicted all along,” said Dr. Dinh Nguyen, senior project leader for the FEL program at the lab. “But until now, we didn’t have the evidence to support our models. We were so happy to see our design, fabrication and testing efforts finally come to fruition. We’re currently working to measure the properties of the continuous electron beams, and hope to set a world record for the average current of electrons.” [Office of Naval Research]
In life, most people try to avoid entanglement, be it with unsavory characters or alarmingly large balls of twine. In the quantum world, entanglement is a necessary step for the super-fast quantum computers of the future.
According to a study published by Nature today, physicists have successfully entangled 10 billion quantum bits, otherwise known qubits. But the most significant part of the research is where the entanglement happened–in silicon–because, given that most of modern-day computing is forged in the smithy of silicon technology, this means that researchers may have an easier time incorporating quantum computers into our current gadgets.
Quantum entanglement occurs when the quantum state of one particle is linked to the quantum state of another particle, so that you can’t measure one particle without also influencing the other. With this particular study, led by John Morton at the University of Oxford, UK, the researchers aligned the spins of electrons and phosphorus nuclei–that is, the particles were entangled.
Sometimes, distractions can be useful in themselves. That’s the message this week from the Planck space telescope, which has a mighty big mission: to take baby pictures of the universe. While it hasn’t yet accomplished that task, the preliminary disturbances that Planck scientists are now dealing with are yielding cosmic insights of their own.
Orbiting the Sun roughly 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, the Planck space-based telescope is scanning the sky for ultra-cold objects. Its instruments are chilled to just a tenth of a degree above absolute zero and are designed to pick up the faint microwave afterglow from the Big Bang, which scientists hope can tell them about the earliest moments of the Universe. [Nature News]
Planck was launched in spring of 2009 by the European Space Agency, and it’s still gathering data to complete its chart of this cosmic microwave background (CMB); researchers hope the map will shed light on the young universe’s brief “inflationary” period when it expanded extremely rapidly. At the moment, however, Planck is busy detecting other sources of microwaves so that it can subtract this “foreground” radiation from its map of the background.
Since 1983, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab outside Chicago has been faithfully smashing particles and probing deeper into the mysteries of physics. But its time is nearly at an end.
The Large Hadron Collider—that big European underground ring you might have heard of—surpassed Tevatron in size and energy. The American collider’s operators had hoped to extend its life a few more years, especially with LHC still getting up to speed. But the money just wasn’t there, and so the announcement came yesterday that Tevatron would shut down in September.
In the fall, the Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel recommended that the Tevatron be funded to run for three years beyond the planned end in September of 2011, largely in order to provide additional information in the search for the Higgs boson. … But in a letter to day to the chair of HEPAP, the head of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, William Brinkman, wrote that “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging, and additional funding has not been identified. Therefore…operation of the Tevatron will end in FY2011, as originally scheduled.”
Conway’s lengthy eulogy for a particle accelerator is a great read, including plenty of the history of the rivalry between American physicists and the CERN physicists in Europe building their own huge smashers, leading up to the LHC.
At the heart of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole. And in some galaxies, the black hole is bigger and badder than usual. These raging overachievers, called active galactic nuclei, can be some of the brightest objects in space, sweeping up a huge amount of material from their local areas and emitting enough energy to outshine the galaxies around them. The question is, where do they get all the stuff to swallow? Not where scientists had expected, according to a new study.
An obvious answer—and the one that for years has seemed likeliest—is that these hyperactive black holes arise from the merger of galaxies. All the gas that comes together during a two-galaxy crash could feed a supermassive black hole, turning it from docile to brilliant. But there’s a problem.
“It’s totally intuitive,” said astrophysicist Knud Jahnke of the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, a coauthor of the new study. “But it was a gut-feeling idea. In court you would say there was some circumstantial evidence for it, but no proof.” Earlier studies looked only at galaxies with the brightest active nuclei, which could have biased their results, Jahnke said. They also didn’t compare active galaxies to those with quiet black holes. [Wired]
For a study coming out in the Astrophysical Journal, Jahnke and others tried to put the galaxy merger hypotheses through a true controlled test, and they found no solid evidence to back it up.
New sea creatures, humongous stars, and cockroach antibiotics: Those are just a few reader favorites from this year in science. As 2010 comes to a close, we bring you a dozen of the most popular 80beats posts of the year.
What we’re taught in school science classes is a streamlined version of a muddier and more complicated reality, and it’s no different with something as iconic as the periodic table of elements. This week the venerable chart’s overseers decided to fiddle with the atomic weights of 10 elements, changing their values from a single set number to a range of numbers, which is messier but more accurately resembles the messy real world.
The reason for the change is that atomic weights are not always as concrete as most general-chemistry students are taught, according to the University of Calgary, which made the announcement, and the snappily named International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry‘s Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights, which oversees such weighty matters. [CNET]
You know those black holes the Large Hadron Collider was going to make and kill us all? Well, not only are we still here, but the LHC doesn’t seem to be making black holes at all—their decay signature is markedly absent from the data collected so far.
While that is good for those of us who want to keep living (we jest—the hypothetical micro black holes posed no danger), it’s also helping physicists make up their minds about how many dimensions there are in our universe. The lack of black holes at the LHC nullifies some of the wackier versions of string theory which depend on multiple dimensions. (more…)
Last week the Navy took its best shot–and it was a doozy. The shot, fired on December 10th, broke the world record for the most powerful shot, as the 23-pound aluminum projectile rocketed out of the Navy’s electromagnetic railgun at a reported speed of Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound.
Today’s 33-megajoule shot–powerful enough to launch 33 Smart cars at 100 mph–means the Navy can fire projectiles at least 125 miles, keeping military personnel at a safe distance from their targets, according to the Office of Naval Research. [Popular Science]
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Forget about fancy 
The weights, they are a-changin’.
