Adam Norwood

Tag: physics

  • Observation of an Antimatter Hypernucleus
    Visit the source: www.sciencemag.org

    Nuclear collisions recreate conditions in the universe microsecondsafter the Big Bang. […] We report the observation of antihypertritons — comprised of an antiproton, antineutron, and antilambda hyperon — produced by colliding gold nuclei at high energy. The production and properties of antinuclei, and nuclei containing strange quarks, have implications spanning nuclear/particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.

    My layman’s understanding of this is that it’s a significant find, if verified. Basically they’ve created a particle that is neither matter nor antimatter, but lies just off the plane of strangeness (“strange” as in the quark), and might be the kind of thing only found at the cores of collapsed stars. The Register’s easy-to-read writeup has a good suggestion that this “negative strangeness” they talk about should be dubbed “hyper-boringness”.

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  • Nanothermal Trumpets
    Visit the source: www.nature.com

    Converting heat energy directly into sound using tiny electrical conductors is a 100-year-old idea for an alternative to the mechanical voice coil wire + moving diaphragm design of traditional speakers, but new research recently submitted to Applied Physics Letters demonstrates a new, actually feasible approach to making these speakers-on-a-chip. Still way too quiet and underpowered for use as a loudspeaker, but might have some novel applications in the near future as research progresses.

    I like the name given to the 100 year old invention, though: the thermophone.

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  • Artifical Auroras

    There’s lots of conspiracy theory nutjobs talking about the HAARP research project lately (even Hugo Chavez is throwing his hat in), so the allegations of death-ray and mind control weapons tinges this science news a bit, but there’s something kind of beautiful about being able to generate your own version of the aurora borealis:

    Artificial auroras can be created using an array of high-frequency transmitters. Researchers have previously done this by pumping a 3.6-megawatt beam of radio waves into the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere a few hundred kilometres above Earth’s surface. The beam was powerful enough to break electrons free of their parent atoms, creating an artificial aurora similar to that of the Northern Lights.

    It’s certainly an unusual way to leave your mark on the world, and I presume it’s harmless, given that we’re being constantly bombarded by the same kind of energy raining down from space (right?). Just so long as they aren’t cutting their way into heaven a la Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass, I guess…

    (Found in Nature, which cites research in Geophysical Research Letters, but I can’t find the cited article anywhere. Maybe it was pulled? Aha, a conspiracy!)

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  • From Maze Solving by Chemotactic Droplets in the

    From Maze Solving by Chemotactic Droplets in the Journal of the American Chemical Society:

    Droplets emitting surface-active chemicals exhibit chemotaxis toward low-pH regions. Such droplets are self-propelled and navigate through a complex maze to seek a source of acid placed at one of the maze’s exits. In doing so, the droplets find the shortest path through the maze.

    I don’t generally understand materials science (or even much chemistry, for that matter), and this I really don’t get. How do it know?

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  • NASA Titan moon-balloons to run on cloud fuel
    Visit the source: www.theregister.co.uk

    NASA plans to send a hot-air-balloon type probe to Saturn’s moon, the only other known body in our solar system to have liquid “seas” on the surface. In order to keep the balloon from crashing into any rocky outcroppings, the team at the JPL has designed an oxygen-burning “rapid buoyancy modulation system” that’s pretty clever:

    The lack of any free oxygen in the ice-moon’s air means that the patio gas oceans, clouds etc won’t normally catch fire. Thus NASA’s plan for Titanian hot-air ballooning would reverse the situation on Earth: Rather than burning a stream of patio-gas using oxygen in the air, the moon balloons will burn a stream of oxygen using methane from the surrounding clouds.

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  • A biological quarter-wave retarder with excellent achromaticity in the visible wavelength region
    Visit the source: www.nature.com

    A paper in Nature Photonics describing the waveplate mechanism found in the eye of mantis shrimp (stomatopods). These amazing critters can see hyperspectral color ranging from the infrared to the ultraviolet, can perceive different planes of circular polarized light, and have eyes that operate and dart about (saccade) independently. This paper is basically demonstrating that man-made material science has a lot to learn if we want to catch up with nature’s technology.

    Personal side question: what are these shrimp on the lookout for that’s led to such a sophisticated eye??

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  • Transformation optics as misdirection

    From Nature, Optics: All Smoke and Metamaterials (subscription might be required, actual research publication available from the American Physical Society):

    Seeing is believing — a naive assumption in the case of an illusion device proposed by Lai and colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and described1 in Physical Review Letters. The new device has the power to ‘act at a distance’ and therefore covertly alter an object’s appearance such that it has no apparent physical connection to the light scattered by the object — although this becomes increasingly difficult to achieve the farther the illusion device is from the object. Lai and colleagues1 outline a mathematical formalism proving that it is theoretically possible to grab the rays of light emitted by a given object and to reconstruct them so that they seem to come from a completely different object.

    Using metamaterials with refractive indexes less than zero to disguise the origin or content of reflected light. Not sure that I entirely understand this idea, but it’s sort of like the fabled “cloaking device”, except that instead of rendering an object invisible it actually renders it as a different object. Things will be weird fifty years from now.

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  • Étienne-Jules Marey
    Visit the source: en.wikipedia.org

    Pioneer of medical instruments, photography, and cinema. Took some very interesting early photographs in his research of animal locomotion and physionomy, which led to his successor Muybridge’s famous collections of plates.

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