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Einstein

Can fractals make sense of the quantum world?

Mark Buchanan
New Scientist
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:10 UTC
Image
© fishmonk / stock.xchng
Fractals like this one exhibited by the Romanesco cauliflower could help explain the wackiness of quantum theory.
Quantum theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don't exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances.

Einstein thought this was all a bit much, believing it to be evidence of major problems with the theory, as many critics still suspect today. Quantum enthusiasts point to the theory's extraordinary success in explaining the behaviour of atoms, electrons and other quantum systems. They insist we have to accept the theory as it is, however strange it may seem.

But what if there were a way to reconcile these two opposing views, by showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?

If you listen to physicist Tim Palmer, it begins to sound plausible. What has been missing, he argues, are some key ideas from an area of science that most quantum physicists have ignored: the science of fractals, those intricate patterns found in everything from fractured surfaces to oceanic flows (see What is a fractal? ).
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Meteor

Incoming? Subsurface ice on Mars exposed by recent impacts

Kelly Beatty, The Woodlands, SkyandTelescope.com
New Scientist
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:02 UTC
Image
© Data: Shane Byrne; base map: MOLA team
A map of mid-northern plains on Mars shows five sites where craters have excavated ice from a shallow subsurface layer.
Impacts are the most ubiquitous geologic features in our solar system. Roughly 1600 named craters (and countless lesser pits) scar the Moon's ancient surfaces. On Earth, where wind and water continually wear down the land, the census of confirmed impact craters stands at just 176.

Mars, a mixed bag of ancient and modern terrains, lies somewhere in between. Over the years spacecraft have glimpsed ever-finer features in the Martian landscape. These days, the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) can pick out objects only 0.3 metres in size; the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express is no slouch either, with a ground resolution of 2 metres.

So HiRISE researchers were elated, but not particularly surprised, to discover some small, freshly gouged craters in images taken in 2008. Seen at five sites over a latitude range of 43° to 56° north, the excavations are typically 3 to 6 metres across and a third to two-thirds of a metre deep. One cluster must have appeared sometime between June and August, and a somewhat larger pit showed up between January and September.
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Question

Space smells funny: Discovery crew


The Times of India
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:11 UTC
Washington- The space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven have safely returned to Earth. But the one thing pilots can't get out their noses is space's "weird" smell.

"One thing I've heard people say before, but it wasn't so obvious, was the smell right when you open up that hatch," Live Science quoted Discovery pilot Dominic Antonelli, as saying after a March 21 spacewalk.

"Space definitely has a smell that's different than anything else," Antonelli added.

Koichi Wakata, part of Discovery crew claimed he too could smell the odd odor that wafted in from outside ISS.

According to ex-NASA astronaut Thomas Jones, a veteran of three spacewalks, the odor could stem from atomic oxygen that clings to spacesuit fabric. Jones added the smell is similar to burnt gunpowder.
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Telescope

Giant ice flows bolster case for volcanoes on Titan


New Scientist
Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:02 UTC
Image
© USGS/JPL/NASA
Investigators suspect the domed feature detailed above is an ice volcano, or cryovolcano, seen in infrared light through the hazy atmosphere on Saturn's moon Titan.
Slushy water from a hidden ocean may be pooling onto the icy surface of Saturn's moon Titan.

Titan's exterior, where the temperature is around -180 °C, is thought to be mostly water-ice, but it may be a different story deep down. Variations in the moon's rate of rotation suggest an ocean could lurk below.

An area of Titan called Hotei Arcus appears to fluctuate in brightness on timescales of several months, and in 2005 Robert Nelson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues, suggested this might be the result of "cryovolcanic" eruptions of water from below. Others argued that the flickers were caused by the moon's hazy atmosphere.
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Telescope

Unusual Stellar Progenitor to a Supernova Uncovered


Imperial Valley News/Space Telescope Science Institute
Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:05 UTC
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has identified a star that was one million times brighter than the sun before it exploded as a supernova in 2005. According to current theories of stellar evolution, the star should not have self-destructed so early in its life.

"This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising," says Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.

The doomed star, which is estimated to have had about 100 times our sun's mass, was not mature enough, according to theory, to have evolved a massive iron core of nuclear fusion ash. This is the prerequisite for a core implosion that triggers a supernova blast.

The finding appears today in the online version of Nature Magazine.
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Robot

The Living Robot: Uses Biological Brain

Joe Kloc
Seed Magazine
Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:26 UTC
Kevin Warwick's new robot behaves like a child. "Sometimes it does what you want it to, and sometimes it doesn't," he says. And while it may seem strange for a professor of cybernetics to be concerning himself with such an unreliable machine, Warwick's creation has something that even today's most sophisticated robots lack: a living brain.

Life for Warwick's robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. "It's an innate response of the neurons," says Warwick, "they try to link up and start communicating."

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
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Info

Rutgers University students discover 1.5 million year old footprints in Kenya

Mark Mueller
The Star-Ledger
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:14 UTC
Image
© AFP/Getty Images
The field of archaeology requires uncommon patience. Is that specimen so painstakingly coaxed from the hard earth animal or early human? Is it historically, significantly old or just old enough to be mildly interesting? The answers come slowly, sometimes in months, often in years.

So it was that New Jersey archaeologist David Braun tempered his excitement after he and other researchers, among them a Rutgers University professor and a group of Rutgers students, found what looked to be very unusual footprints in the ancient sediment of a riverbed in Kenya.

"We knew we might have something special, but we also kept thinking, 'OK, these could be from a baboon,'" Braun said.
      Read More...
Battery

Soon, mobiles could be recharged with wave of hand


Science Technology
Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:22 UTC
Image
Washington: Imagine charging your cell phone or iPod by waving your hand, or stretching your arm, or taking a stroll. Well, it could be a reality soon.

Scientists are mulling a technology which can convert mechanical energy from body movements or the flow of blood in the body into electric energy that may be utilised to power a broad range of electronic devices without batteries.

"This research will have a major impact on defence technology, environmental monitoring, biomedical sciences and even personal electronics," lead researcher Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology said.

In fact, the new "nanogenerator" could have countless applications, among them a way to run electronic devices used by the military when troops are far in the field.
      Read More...
Meteor

Comet Chemistry Explains Tunguska event


MIT Technology Review - arXiv Blog
Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:30 UTC
A better understanding of the chemistry of comets may finally explain the 1908 exposion over an isolated part of Russia.

Tunguska
© Unknown
On 30 June 1908, a bolide streaked across the skies above Lake Baikal near the border of Russia and Mongolia. Seconds later, a huge explosion above the taiga some 600 kilometres to the northeast flattened an area of forest the size of Luxembourg and went on to scorch trees for hundreds of kilometres around.

The detonation took place in a more or less uninhabited part of Russia called Tunguska but the explosion lit up skies across the northern hemisphere for three nights, interfered with the Earth's magnetic field and triggered strong seismic and acoustic waves that shook the entire planet.

Despite a century of study, many aspects of the Tunguska event are still unexplained. For example, the explosion released more energy than a thousand Hiroshima-type atom bombs and yet left no crater. A similar-sized object is thought to have hit North America some 12 000 years ago, triggering the megafaunal extinction and widespread cooling. And yet the Tunguska event seems to have left our climate intact.
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Info

Fresh proof of China being cradle of rice cultivation

Lin Shujuan
China Daily
Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:47 UTC
Image
© Daily China
In domesticated rice grains, the spikelet remains attached to the panicle, until it is threshed.
Several archaeologists, once split over when human beings turned from nut collectors into rice farmers, seem to have solved their differences after collaborating on a project using methodologies agreed upon by both parties.

Dorian Fuller from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, joined by Zheng Yunfei from Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Antiquity and Archaeology and a few other Chinese archaeologists, investigated rice remains at the Neolithic excavation site of Tianluoshan, part of the local Hemudu Neolithic Culture that goes back 7,000 years in Zhejing province.
      Read More...
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