Whitney Clavin
PhysorgFri, 30 Mar 2007 08:22 UTC
The double sunset that Luke Skywalker gazed upon in the film "Star Wars" might not be a fantasy.
Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have observed that planetary systems - dusty disks of asteroids, comets and possibly planets - are at least as abundant in twin-star systems as they are in those, like our own, with only one star. Since more than half of all stars are twins, or binaries, the finding suggests the universe is packed with planets that have two suns. Sunsets on some of those worlds would resemble the ones on Luke Skywalker's planet, Tatooine, where two fiery balls dip below the horizon one by one.
Breaking up might have been hard to do when Neil Sedaka sang about it, but thanks to Sir Tim Berners Lee, it is now as easy for teenagers to break up with each other as it is for them to microwave a junk food sausage.
Yes, the latest thing to do is to break up with your beau on his or her MySpace page. It is a far cry from the heady days we at El Reg can remember, when people would break up with each other by text message. So cosy, so personal. So old hat.
A unique collaboration created by Harvard's Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC) has brought together astronomers, medical imaging specialists, and software engineers to adapt medical imaging software to create 3-D views of astronomical bodies.
"Once this technology is fully developed, we will be able to explore and visualize space in entirely new ways," said Alyssa Goodman, Director of the IIC and a Professor of Astronomy in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Goodman discussed results from the IIC's Astronomical Medicine Project, or AstroMed, last week at the IIC's Inaugural Symposium in Cambridge, Mass.
Anna Salleh
ABC NewsThu, 29 Mar 2007 23:56 UTC
The death of the dinosaurs was not the catalyst for modern mammalian evolution that many people think, a new study shows.
Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to "self regulate" or focus on the task at hand.
The measure for academic success for decades has been a person's intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called "executive functioning," which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills.
DNA testing carried out by University of Leicester geneticists and funded by The Wellcome Trust has thrown new light on the ancestry of one of the USA's most revered figures, the third President, Thomas Jefferson.
Almost 10 years ago, the University of Leicester team, led by Professor Mark Jobling, together with international collaborators, showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of the sons of Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson's.
The work was done using the Y chromosome, a male-specific part of our DNA that passes down from father to son. Jefferson carried a very unusual Y chromosome type, which helped to strengthen the evidence in the historical paternity case.
Jon Cartwright
PhysicsWebThu, 29 Mar 2007 07:42 UTC
Convinced the balls are always against you when you play the lottery? Then why not bet on radioactive decay in the "quantum lottery", a game invented by a university student in the UK.
Like it or loathe it (and Einstein famously loathed it), quantum processes such as radioactive decay are innately random. But in spite of its weirdness, over the past 80 years physicists have got to grips with the randomness to produce an ever-growing list of proven technology.
None can be so fun, however, as the "quantum lottery", a project devised by final-year physics student Jaspal Jutla at the University of Southampton. The idea is to invite non-scientists from all backgrounds, young and old, to take bets on the decay of a radioactive sample. Jutla hopes this will encourage participants to think about some of the philosophical aspects of quantum mechanics that have emerged over the years. "It's an area of physics that is extremely fascinating and has many unanswered questions," she told Physics Web. "It can also be fun because it urges the participant to use their imagination."
The US has lost its position as the world's primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.
Andrew Shields
PhysicsWebWed, 28 Mar 2007 08:44 UTC
Technology that exploits the strange rules of quantum mechanics to guarantee the security of encrypted messages is the first product of a new quantum-information industry to reach the market, as Andrew Shields and Zhiliang Yuan explain
As theories go, quantum mechanics has certainly been successful. Despite its many counterintuitive predictions, it has provided an accurate description of the atomic world for more than 80 years. It has also been an essential tool for designing today's computer chips and hard-disk drives, as well as the lasers used in the fibre-optic communications of the Internet. Now, however, the ability to manipulate the quantum states of individual subatomic particles is allowing us to exploit the strange properties of quantum theory much more directly in information technology.
Robert P Crease
PhysicsWebWed, 28 Mar 2007 08:39 UTC
Why is it that particular equations, formulas and expressions become icons, asks Robert P Crease.
When the 14-year-old Richard Feynman first encountered eiπ + 1 = 0, the future physics Nobel laureate wrote in big, bold letters in his diary that it was "the most remarkable formula in math". Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin claims that "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence". Meanwhile Paul Nahin - a retired US electrical engineer - says in his recent book, Dr Euler's Fabulous Formula, that the expression sets "the gold standard for mathematical beauty".
For some people this expression, named after the 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, even seems to have become an icon, having special significance apart from its mathematical context. It once even served as a piece of evidence in a criminal trial. In August 2003 an eco-terrorist assault on several car dealerships in the Los Angeles area resulted in millions of dollars worth of damage when a building was set alight and over 100 vehicles were destroyed or defaced. The vandalism included graffiti on the cars that read "gas guzzler" and "killer" - and, on one Mitsubishi Montero, eiπ + 1 = 0. Using this as a clue and later as evidence, the FBI arrested William Cottrell, a graduate student in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, who was later tried and convicted. Cottrell testified at his trial that "Everyone should know Euler's theorem".
