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This is cool. Go to Einstein@home and download the program. It uses your computer’s idle time to search for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector.
Einstein@home recently made its first discovery, a radio pulsar found in data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This was all done by volunteers allowing their computers to process data while not being used.
It doesn’t surprise me to see that Conservapedia has an article dedicated to ‘counterexamples’ to the theory of relativity. Number 9 is my favorite..
Stephen Hawking proposes that we build a time machine. It can’t be that hard.
I don’t know if he’s right or not, but Sam Harris is considering the argument that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science. He’s got a rather long post on the topic here.
Anyone who still doubts that evolution through adaptation is not an observable phenomenon simply hasn’t done enough observing.
It is always a good thing to be colder than the objects you are observing.
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Mary Pat’s cousin Chris Zaseck is going to be working on a graduate project at Purdue University involving the development of a fuel made of “nanoscale aluminum and water ice.” It looks like the tests have been successful so far. Yes, science rocks.
The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics.
My favorite: If the Sun were made of bananas, it would be just as hot.
Superconducting magnets in the [Large Hadron Collider] function at a temperature of 2 Kelvin — that’s two degrees above absolute zero. Maintaining this kind of cold requires the use of superfluid helium, which in turn allows the electrical current to pass through without encountering any resistance, Cern’s Christine Darve told PopSci.com. By sending the intense proton beams through what she calls a “moon vacuum,” scientists are able to reap 100 times more energy than through a normal magnet.
The first thing I should say, is that I’m not retiring. Under Cambridge University regulations, I will no longer be the Lucasian Professor, but I will have a new post as a Director of Research at Cambridge.
I will carry on with my scientific work, and my efforts to explain it to other people. I’m currently working on the quantum creation of the universe, and the rapid inflation in size that followed.
Despite having been unfortunate enough to get motor neurone disease at the age of 21, I have had a full and satisfying life. I have three wonderful children, and have been able to add to our understanding of the universe.
It has been a glorious time to be alive, and doing research in theoretical physics. Our picture of the universe, has changed a great deal in the last 40 years, and I’m happy if I have made a small contribution.
I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm. There’s nothing like the Eureka moment, of discovering something that no-one knew before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.
– Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking on his change of position
Scientists have perfected a better method for photographing single carbon nanotubes within a single molecule. Incredible.
Bacteria talk to each other with chemicals. They do so for a host of reasons, some of them hard to understand unless you are another bacterium (or a dedicated bacteriologist), but one of the most straightforward is demonstrated by Bacillus subtilis.
If B. subtilis individuals are growing in a food-poor area, they release chemicals into their surroundings. These essentially tell their neighbours: “There’s not much food here, so clear off or we’ll both starve.”
In response to these chemical messages, the other bacteria set themselves up further away, completely changing the shape of the colony.
– from the New Scientist article ‘Why microbes are smarter than you thought’.
On March 25, 2009, at a hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Rep. John Shimkus, R-Illinois, argued that global warming cannot possibly be true because the Bible has decreed that God alone decides when the earth will end. Shimkus is, of course, an elected official.
If this amuses you, then you’ll enjoy Shimkus’s argument made later in the hearing: Reducing CO2 emissions is bad because it will “Take away plant food.”
Let us celebrate the life of this extraordinary man. There is grandeur in his view of life, indeed. Here is the last paragraph of his book, The Origin of Species (1909 version):
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
