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Quantum entanglement can be too much of a good thing

Iris Monica Vargas
Science News
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:50 UTC
An overdose of the spooky connection can break down quantum computing systems, researchers find.

Physicists have long thought that quantum entanglement, a mysterious link between separated particles that Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," would allow quantum computers to solve certain hard math problems much faster than ordinary computers. But now it seems that entanglement can also be a nuisance.

Instead of speeding up the process, too much entanglement can break down the entire system, researchers report in a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters.
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Roman finds at park-and-ride site


British Broadcasting Corporation
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:42 UTC
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© BBCA number of Roman burials were uncovered during the dig
Excavation of a proposed park-and-ride site in Taunton has revealed one of the largest prehistoric roundhouses in Britain and a number of Roman burials.

The house dates from the Iron Age (400-100 BC) and was constructed from wooden posts with a thatched roof and had a diameter of 17m (56ft)
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Greek fisherman nets 2,200-year-old bronze statue


Newsobserver.com
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:30 UTC
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© AP In this handout photo provided by the Greek Ministry of Culture on Monday, March 23, 2009, the torso and raised right arm of a 2,200-year-old statue are seen after it was raised in a fisherman's nets. The ministry said the find, dating to the late 2nd century B.C. was part of an equestrian statue of an armed man wearing a breastplate and carrying a sheathed sword. It was accidentally found last week in the eastern Aegean Sea between the islands of Kos and Kalymnos.
Athens, Greece -- A Greek fisherman must have been expecting a monster of a catch when he brought up his nets in the Aegean Sea last week.

Instead, Greek authorities say his haul was a section of a 2,200-year-old bronze statue of a horseman.
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Flashback Fastest-ever flashgun captures image of light wave

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:27 UTC
However hard you stare, you would still miss it. Researchers have found a way to generate the shortest-ever flash of light - 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long.

Such flashes have already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse too short to be "photographed" before.

The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.


The trigger pulses fired at the neon cloud are themselves only 2.5 femtoseconds, billionths of a millionth of a second, long, says team member Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
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Sun

Massive young star explodes 'before its time'

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:35 UTC
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© A Gal-Yam/Weizmann Institute of Science/D Leonard/San Diego State UniversityArchival images suggest that a 2005 supernova was caused by the explosion of a luminous blue variable, a bright young star that is not expected to explode

A massive young star seems to have exploded before its time, new Hubble Space Telescope images reveal. The star, the heftiest to have been linked to a supernova explosion, could challenge models of when stellar furnaces end their lives. Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the Sun end their lives in dramatic explosions when the nuclear furnaces at their cores run out of fuel and collapse into neutron stars or black holes.

Hundreds of supernovae are seen each year, but astronomers have only identified a handful of the stars responsible for the dramatic blasts. To do so, they must dig through archived images to identify the doomed stars before the explosions, checking again years after the blasts to confirm their disappearance. Now a team led by Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has found one of these supernova 'progenitors' that seems to be a true outlier. The star, which once sat in the galaxy NGC 266, some 200 million light years away, briefly brightened the sky in a 2005 explosion before disappearing entirely.
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Shuttle and space station dodge debris

Robert Block
Los Angeles Times
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:13 UTC
A piece of space junk is approaching their orbit, so the shuttle powers the space station out of the way. Ten days ago, another piece of junk menaced the station.

Orlando, Florida -- With his ship still docked at the International Space Station, shuttle commander Lee Archambault fired up Discovery's steering jets Sunday to move the linked craft into a new position that will reduce their chances of colliding with a piece of space junk.
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Drought Reveals Iraqi Archaeological Treasures

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
National Public Radio
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:14 UTC
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© Ali Abbas for NPRAncient buildings have emerged from the river bed in Iraq's western Anbar province as the Euphrates River dries up. For the first time, archaeologists are able to access sites that had been flooded by Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s
Iraq is suffering one of the worst droughts in decades. While this is bad news for farmers, it is good news for archaeologists in the country.

The receding waters of the Euphrates River have revealed ancient archaeological sites, some of which were unknown until now.

For Ratib Ali al-Kubaisi, the director of Anbar province's Antiquities Department, the drought has opened up a whole new land of opportunity.
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Archives shed light on Darwin's student days

Peter Griffiths
Reuters
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:05 UTC
London - With someone to polish his shoes, make his bed and stoke the fire in his spacious rooms, Charles Darwin enjoyed the sort of pampered university life that today's debt-laden British students can only dream about.

Two hundred years after his birth, academics have uncovered new details of his comfortable existence at the University of Cambridge before he embarked on the grueling five-year voyage that would transform science's view of the world.
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Science controversy: Hippos more whale than pig


All News Web
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:45 UTC
Hippos
© Unknown
Two scientists are challenging the accepted theory that the Hippo is more closely related to the pig than it is to the whale. According to Jessica Theodor, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary, and her colleague Jonathan Geisler, associate professor at Georgia Southern University the hippo's closest relatives are the whales. The scientists suggest that this may explain the hippopotamus's love of water.
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Syringe

Lab Creates an 'All-It-Can-Eat' Mouse

Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times
Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:02 UTC
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A UC Berkeley team finds that knocking out a key gene, DNA-PK, prevents weight gain from carbs.

Imagine you've bellied up to the all-you-can-eat pasta bar in Berkeley, only to meet one of the mice from Hei Sook Sul's Nutritional Science and Toxicology Lab.

If you come here often, you know that loading up on carbohydrates is going to make you pretty chubby. But you notice that your fellow diner -- the mouse -- is pretty slim.
How does he do it?
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