Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

Biomorphs...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on February 1, 2018 at 5:30pm

Graphene-glass bimorphs can be used to fabricate numerous micron-scale 3-D structures. CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Topics: Biophysics, Chemistry Nanotechnology, Robotics

A team of physicists from Cornell University in the US has developed electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing robots the size of a human cell.

The robots – described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – are made from atomically thin layers of graphene and glass. Known as biomorphs, the tiny machines bend when exposed to stimuli including heat, chemical reactions or electricity. They can transform in a fraction of a second from two dimensional planes into complex three-dimensional forms such as tetrahedra and cubes.

Team member Paul McEuen says the biomorphs are designed as carriers for even smaller, but potentially very powerful, bits of photonic, electronic or chemical kit.

“We are trying to build what you might call an 'exoskeleton' for electronics,” he says. “Right now, you can make little computer chips that do a lot of information-processing, but they don't know how to move or cause something to bend.”

Super-strong cell-size origami robots are coming, Andrew Masterson, Cosmos Magazine

Theory from Turkish Prison...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 31, 2018 at 8:48am

Ali Kaya, Nature

Topics: African Americans, Civil Rights, Commentary, Cosmology, Martin Luther King

As we are juxtaposed between the celebration of Dr. King and the advent of African American History Month, post the (I did not watch) SOTU address from a president* that thinks "hole," not "house" was the insulting part of his epithet, it's healthy to be reminded this dark, fascistic and authoritarian march is global. The world is smaller with more people in it competing for resources, and there are those reptilian brains that wax nostalgic for an idyllic past that never was, but determined to take us all back there, wherever and whatever "there" is in their Gollum minds. It is also sobering to remind ourselves that democratic republics are both fragile and without proper care: fleeting. Dr. Kaya's courage should inspire us all.

Atlantic Journal Constitution: Letter From Birmingham Jail (cultural reference to post title).

Thousands of academics in Turkish universities stand accused of either having supported terrorism or the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016. Theoretical physicist Ali Kaya is one of them. He was arrested three months after the failed coup and held for more than a year before his trial took place. On 20 December, a court declared him guilty of being a member of a terrorist organization and sentenced him to six years of imprisonment — but released him early owing to the time he had already served in prison while awaiting trial. Kaya says that he is innocent and is appealing against the verdict. In the meantime, he has been suspended from his academic post, and he has yet to learn whether his university, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, plans to fire him or to await the outcome of the appeal.

Kaya says that while in prison, he kept his sanity by continuing his work on fundamental topics in cosmology. He wrote three research papers during his incarceration, on topics including inflation theory and cosmological perturbation theory. After his release, he posted the papers on the preprint server arXiv. Each contains a footnote that he dedicates to his friends in jail “who made my stay bearable at hell for 440 days between 7.10.2016 and 20.12.2017. I am also indebted to the colleagues who show support in these difficult times.”

Nature interviewed Kaya by Skype about his experiences.

What access did you have to research materials while in the prison?

Of course there was no Internet. Nothing digital — not even a pocket calculator — was allowed. No books could be brought in. Nothing in a foreign language was allowed in the jail. One of my students Google-translated some research papers for me into Turkish, but they were held back on suspicion that they included secret codes — presumably because they contained so many equations.

I worked up the research ideas I had already in my head before my arrest. Of course, it took much longer than it would have done if I had been at my computer. I had to start from basic formulae and derive things myself.

But time is something you have plenty of in prison. OK, I could not do ground-breaking work, but I think the papers I produced are solid, and I expect to get them published in good journals.

Science behind bars: How a Turkish physicist wrote research papers in prison, Alison Abbott, Nature

Nano Magnets and Light...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 30, 2018 at 6:07am

Minjeong Cha, an author of the research article, holds up a sample of the gel infused with chiromagnetic nanoparticles. Photo: Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering, Communications & Marketing.

Topics: Electromagnetism, Optical Physics, Nanotechnology

Magnetic nanoparticles with chiral distortions in their crystal lattice provide an unprecedented degree of control over circularly polarized light. The effect, which was demonstrated by the nanoparticles embedded in a transparent gel and exposed to a magnetic field, can be understood thanks to careful consideration of the magnetic field of the photons, in addition to the familiar electric field.

Where magnetism and chirality (a lack of mirror symmetry) overlap there are often intriguing discoveries. These two concepts are fundamental to the advancement of spintronics, chiral catalysis and magneto-optics. Much of the research in this field aims to enhance the interaction between electrons in matter and the (often ignored) magnetic field of a photon.

A recent and very successful example of such an attempt is the work from Nicholas Kotov and collaborators in the University of Michigan, USA, and the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. The researchers created a material comprised of magnetic nanoparticles (NPs) with a chiral or twisted crystal structure encased in a transparent gel. This chiromagnetic gel responds to circularly polarized light with a sensitivity 10 times greater than previously observed in similar non-magnetic composites.

Distorted nano-magnets for agile polarization control

Lauren Barr is a PhD student contributor to nanotechweb.org.

Rewind...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 29, 2018 at 5:00am

Image Source: Movie Pilot. Where's a benevolent Kryptonian when you need him?

Topics: Existentialism, Nuclear Power, Politics, Star Trek

One of the premises of Star Trek is we'll overcome our technological infancy, our myriad differences with one another, and somewhat Pollyannish: nuclear war. That we'll survive - in the spirit of the Drake Equation - not just long enough to communicate, but to become a space-faring species.

Some of that optimism has a limit: a 280-character limit.

The president* can launch a thermonuclear first strike or counterstrike presently without any consultation with Congress. A relic of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, speed and efficiency was encouraged when we had more rational actors in possession of the nuclear football. It takes about 5 minutes for ICBMs; 15 minutes for submarine launched missiles to be deployed once the order is given. In the event of negative findings from the Mueller investigation, he could literally have "nothing to lose." There are no calling these "dogs of war" back once they're off-the-porch.

The world moved closer to an existential catastrophe this year as the threat of nuclear warfare escalated, bringing the symbolic Doomsday Clock two minutes away from midnight, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said Thursday.

The move of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes away from midnight, the symbolic time at which the planet meets a world-ending disaster, represents a 30-second jump from last year. It is the closest the planet has been to midnight since 1953 when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were testing hydrogen bombs.

“To call the world’s nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger and its immediacy,” said Rachel Bronson, president of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Nuclear 'Doomsday Clock' Is the Closest to Midnight It's Been Since the Cold War, TIME

The High Cost of Sacred Cows...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 26, 2018 at 5:30am

Sacred Cow Disease - JKS Talent Network

Topics: Civics, Commentary, Existentialism, Politics, Research, STEM

As a species, most of what we have come to know as science and develop its different branches as well as engineering comes from our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Africa or Pangaea, dependent on the state of our sphere's geological evolution.

I'm an anomaly as a graduate student. I'm "non-traditional" in that I started this program on my 55th birthday (my children are adult men). I'm an African American having majored in physics and again majoring in a STEM field (Nanoengineering), which is interesting in a place LIKE America.

America: Where it's important to "debate" the efficacy of creationism vs. evolution; whether the universe is 6,000 or 13.8 billion (at least as far as our telescopes can currently see) years old. Where Bill Nye the Science Guy can have a public "debate" with Ken Ham of the morbidly performing (monetarily) Creation Museum. Where the COSMOS reboot can have online trolls and will likely have them again in March. Where anti-vaccine advocates finally got a president* that will let them affect the CDC notion of herd immunity and might kick off the next pandemic, courtesy of the USA.

AS RESEARCH FOR his latest novel, The Quantum Spy, Washington Post reporter David Ignatius spoke with some of the world’s leading experts on quantum computing, which led him to believe that we may see a working quantum computer in the next five years.

“Initially what I would hear back from technologists was, ‘it’s fascinating if it works,’ and I hear more now ‘fascinating when it works,'” Ignatius says in Episode 291 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “There’s a sense that these problems probably can be solved.”

The downside is that a quantum computer would be the cyber warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb, which means the US government is often reluctant to let foreign scientists work on the most promising research. It’s a system that can slow down progress due the lack of ‘smart Americans,’ as one character in the book puts it.

“The number of American citizens who can do very high-end research who also can easily get security clearances is limited,” Ignatius says. “The ability of our schools to produce American students at a world-class level, that’s an important national challenge.” [1]

...lack of 'smart Americans'...ouch!

I'm a product of Sputnik scaring the bejesus out of America and a slew of money was put in public education...fast, to catch us up with the Russians (you know, back-in-the-day when we weren't colluding with them to topple our federal republic). The country invested in education from a republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and continued through successive administrations regardless of party affiliation, the ONE thing at the time we could all agree on as a country.

Now, stupidity is a virtue. To be too smart is a liability, especially if you're female, a minority or other-than white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP). It's the equivalent of barring slaves from reading the Bible (the whole "setting the captives free" thing), and some actively discouraging their fellows from the dangers of learning. And just for icing on the cake, the previous year's Doomsday estimate of two one half minutes has been moved up by 30 seconds: it is now two minutes to midnight. As a former high school nerd that used to be terrorized by the football athletes and the Barbie-perfect cheerleaders, it appears the "beautiful people" have won, dangerously dumb as they are.

It also appears fear - a great motivator sales agents, especially in the home security industry use to the HILT - has triumphed. Part of the attraction to Creationism, Intelligent Design and "Alternative Facts" is that actual facts shake strongly held beliefs that humans tend to challenge to right their cognitive dissonance. It never occurs that the text of several cultures was limited by the technology of the times. For example, "cattle on a thousand hills" is a specific reference to enormous size, usually associated with wealth. The etymology of the word "million" did not enter the lexicon until circa the 14th Century. From the link at Etymology online: "The ancient Greeks had no name for a number greater than ten thousand, the Romans for none higher than a hundred thousand. "A million" in Latin would have been decies centena milia, literally "ten hundred thousand." To say to an ancient culture: "King David was a millionaire and his son Solomon was a billionaire" would have had no meaning to the audience at that time.

A great analogy by Joe Madison on Sirius XM used a petri dish to describe culture: when you place a bacterial sample in the petri, a culture usually grows, his point being whatever you encourage will eventually manifest. Again, when you deal in nonsense, you get it. I'd be greatly confused as a young person in public education now. WHAT exactly do you want me to study? based on what our culture currently values: actors, athletes, charlatan ministers fleecing their flocks with promises of spiritual "trickle-down" wealth; not doctors, scientists or engineers. The careers of the future necessarily involves hard, demonstrable FACTS. International industries will follow the brain power - away from us, thus other places will see a rise in their middle classes while ours struggles, stumbles and falters ever downward. The peddling of the alternative type [of facts] is undermining our trust in institutions like our intelligence services and our government. Anarchy only sounds noble, and it doesn't eventually work itself out to Nirvana. It's usually - by the evidence of historical, documented FACTS - a failed state.

"One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics," Zappa went on to explain. "Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what's in it...And so, if you don't know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don't know what's in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?" [2], [3]

[1] Why Aren’t There More Smart Americans? Stephen Voss, Wired "Geeks Guide to the Galaxy"

[2] "Notes From the Dangerous Kitchen," a review and a quote from Frank Zappa, Critics at Large

[3] America's Best Selling Pocket Constitution Book, Constitution Facts dot com

R2D2 Redo...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 25, 2018 at 9:08am

The image on the left shows the apparatus and the 3D image of a man. The trapping and illumination light emerges from the lens at the left of the man. The image on the right is a close-up of the 3D image of the man. (Courtesy: D E Smalley et al/Nature)

Topics: Holograms, Optical Physics, Science Fiction, Star Wars

A technique to create multi-coloured 3D images that can share space with physical objects has been developed by researchers in the US. The work is at an early stage, but it offers several potential advantages over currently available techniques for creating 3D images such as holography.

The technology used by the android R2D2 to project the 3D video footage of Princess Leia pleading "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: you're my only hope" into thin air was never explained in the film Star Wars. Scientists, however, have invented several technologies capable of producing the impression of 3D images. The best known, and most widely used is holography, in which a 2D surface sends light to the eye in such a way that the brain reconstructs this light as having come from a 3D object. Unfortunately, this optical illusion only works for a fairly narrow range of viewing angles: "Holograms and displays like them are based on 2D modulating surfaces that have to be looked at like a TV screen," explains Daniel Smalley of Brigham Young University in Utah, "You always have to be looking into the screen to see it."

In a volumetric display, however, the light originates from where your eye sees the image. Such displays have several advantages over holograms. As the image does not rely on an optical illusion, for example, it is unaffected by the viewing angle. "You can be lying flat on the ground and you can see what's coming up out of the display," says Smalley. Furthermore, it is (at least in principle) possible to wrap the image around the viewer or another physical object.

Display creates 3D images that can be viewed from many angles, Tim Wogan, Physics World

The First Black Holes...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 24, 2018 at 5:00am

Credit: Mark Ross

Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, Cosmology, General Relativity

How could the oldest black holes have grown so big so early in the universe?

Imagine the universe in its infancy. Most scientists think space and time originated with the big bang. From that hot and dense start the cosmos expanded and cooled, but it took a while for stars and galaxies to start dotting the sky. It was not until about 380,000 years after the big bang that atoms could hold together and fill the universe with mostly hydrogen gas. When the cosmos was a few hundred million years old, this gas coalesced into the earliest stars, which formed in clusters that clumped together into galaxies, the oldest of which appears 400 million years after the universe was born. To their surprise, scientists have found that another class of astronomical objects begins to appear at this point, too: quasars.

Quasars are extremely bright objects powered by gas falling onto supermassive black holes. They are some of the most luminous things in the universe, visible out to the farthest reaches of space. The most distant quasars are also the most ancient, and the oldest among them pose a mystery.

To be visible at such incredible distances, these quasars must be fueled by black holes containing about a billion times the mass of the sun. Yet conventional theories of black hole formation and growth suggest that a black hole big enough to power these quasars could not have formed in less than a billion years. In 2001, however, with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers began finding quasars that dated back earlier. The oldest and most distant quasar known, which was reported last December, existed just 690 million years after the big bang. In other words, it does not seem that there had been enough time in the history of the universe for quasars like this one to form.

Many astronomers think that the first black holes—seed black holes—are the remnants of the first stars, corpses left behind after the stars exploded into supernovae. Yet these stellar remnants should contain no more than a few hundred solar masses. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the black holes powering the first quasars grew from seeds this small.

To solve this quandary, a decade ago some colleagues and I proposed a way that seed black holes massive enough to explain the first quasars could have formed without the birth and death of stars. Instead these black hole seeds would have formed directly from gas. We call them direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs). In the right environments, direct-collapse black holes could have been born at 10⁴ or 10⁵ solar masses within a few hundred million years after the big bang. With this head start, they could have easily grown to 10⁹ or 10¹⁰ solar masses, thereby producing the ancient quasars that have puzzled astronomers for nearly two decades.

The question is whether this scenario actually happened. Luckily, when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launches in 2019, we should be able to find out.

The Puzzle of the First Black Holes, Priyamvada Natarajan, Scientific American

Life Imitating Art...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 23, 2018 at 8:56am

Mars fission power system concept in the Kilopower project is shown in this undated NASA handout photo released on January 9, 2018. Courtesy NASA/Handout via REUTERS

Topics: Mars, NASA, Nuclear Power, Planetary Science, Space Exploration

...or vice-versa. This was alluded to in the novel and movie The Martian.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface of Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA’s Kilopower project.

Months-long testing began in November at the energy department’s Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations.

A key hurdle for any long-term colony on the surface of a planet or moon, as opposed to NASA’s six short lunar surface visits from 1969 to 1972, is possessing a power source strong enough to sustain a base but small and light enough to allow for transport through space.

“Mars is a very difficult environment for power systems, with less sunlight than Earth or the moon, very cold nighttime temperatures, very interesting dust storms that can last weeks and months that engulf the entire planet,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of NASA‘s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

U.S. tests nuclear power system to sustain astronauts on Mars, Will Dunham, Reuters Science

Nanosensors...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 22, 2018 at 10:32pm

Semiconductor nanorods will help monitor neural activities in the future. Courtesy: Y Kuo and S Sasaki / University of California, Los Angeles

Topics: Biology, Modern Physics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology

Researchers in the US have developed nanosensors that can be directly inserted into a cell’s lipid membrane and be used to measure membrane potential. The devices, which are based on inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles, could potentially record action potentials from multiple neurons as well as electrical signals on the nanoscale – for example, across just one synapse.

Thanks to recent advances in inorganic colloidal synthesis, researchers can now make functional semiconductor nanoparticles whose size, shape and composition can be precisely controlled. Such nanoparticles can be used in applications as diverse as optoelectronics, biological imaging, sensing, catalysis and energy harvesting.

These nanomaterials can also be combined with biological cells to make highly sophisticated hybrid nanomaterials that outperform their purely biological counterparts. Until now, however, incorporating these particles into cell membranes has proved difficult. This is because they are often too big and have surface properties that can lead to non-specific binding on cell membranes. What is more, inserting nanoparticles into membrane bilayers is further complicated by the fact that their surfaces need to be functionalized so that the particles are inserted in the correct orientation.

Semiconductor nanosensor measures membrane potential, Belle Dumé, Nanotechweb.org

Falling...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 19, 2018 at 6:30am

Creativity-Onliine.com: Super Bowl Ad

Topics: Commentary, Existentialism, Politics

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tomorrow...is the anniversary of what would be known first as "the carnage" after his inauguration speech, then accented with "alternative news" as truth itself was made malleable, "fake news" as he attacked the fourth estate; feverish, septuagenarian bowel movement tweets (at least he's regular) and "covfefe."

“Welcome to the dawn of a new, unified Republican government,” said a beaming Paul Ryan, just over a week after Donald Trump’s improbable 2016 win delivered control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives to the GOP for the first time in over a decade. Eyebrows arched in an expression composed of equal parts glee and incredulity, the House speaker allowed himself a brief moment of public self-reflection. “It feels really good to say that, actually.” [1]

One year later...we're deep in the throws of an investigation on Russian interference in our elections, two indictments (more coming) and two confessions from a former national security advisor with ties to Russia and Turkey and a drunk, blabbing campaign aid. The stock market looks GREAT, likely artificially propped up by supporters of the president* that want it (and him) to at least look good before the next bottom falls out. 1929...1987...2008...we've been here before. We're hours as of this posting from a government shutdown...a shutdown after a year of "unified republican government." We're now here because of a mythical "wall" that Mexico isn't going to pay for.

One year later, that unified Republican government is on the verge of imploding. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been unable to pass a regular appropriations bill for 2018, relying instead on a series of continuing resolutions since September to keep the government’s doors open for a few weeks at a time. Now, however, both parties' appetite for these stopgaps has disappeared. Barring a last-minute breakthrough, on Friday at midnight, a government controlled by the same political party will shut itself down for the first time in modern American history. [1]

McClatchy News now reports the FBI is looking into links between the NRA and the Kremlin. [2] From the changing of the Republican platform, the daily violation of the Emoluments Clause; money laundering to his dubious dealings with mobsters and oligarchs, the NRA funneling Russian oligarch rubbles to the Kremlin's preferred candidate and the United States of America is looking a lot more like a criminal enterprise in a Dystopia rather than a federal republic.

The NRA and the KKK have a shared history:

Within months of the surrender at Appomattox, recalcitrant white racists committed to the reestablishment of white supremacy determined to take those guns away from blacks. States in the South passed the Black Codes, which barred the freedmen from possessing guns. Racists quickly learned, however, why gun control is not always as effective as planned: You can draw up any law you like, but people don’t necessarily comply. To enforce these laws, racists began to form posses that would go out at night in large groups, generally wearing disguises, and terrorize black homes, seizing every gun they could find. These groups took different names depending on locale: the Black Cavalry in Alabama, the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Knights of the Rising Sun in Texas. In time, they all came to be known by the moniker of one such posse begun in Pulaski, Tennessee after the war: the Ku Klux Klan. [3]

Racism and white supremacy has been our national shame. What we have buried and ignored, others beyond our shores have exploited to their advantage. It is quite American, like Facebook and social media, Putin the puppet master used our divisions to storm the breech of our republic. Apparently, Forbes magazine is a tool of sadism and masochism. The "golfer-in-chief" is going to Mar-a-Largo at a current count of 91 trips as a new Rome burns. The shutdown is looming, "United States" officially is an oxymoron and "they (the Russians) are laughing...at us."

A-M-E-R-I-C-A (move the I to the front)

I-A-M-E-R-C-A (move the E to the end)

I-A-M-R-C-A-E (switch the C and A positions)

I-A-M-R-A-C-E [4]

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man he won't notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." President Lyndon B. Johnson with Bill Moyers on a tour of the south. [5]

[1] Paul Ryan's Unified Republican Government Is Coming Apart at the Seams, Jay Willis, GQ

[2] FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump, Peter Stone, Greg Gordon, McClatchy News

[3] Gun Control Is “Racist”? The NRA Would Know, Adam Winkler, New Republic

[4] The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, Dr. Francis Cress Welsing

[5] "Lowest white man" related links:

Did LBJ Advocate: 'Convince the Lowest White Man He's Better Than the Best Colored Man'? Snopes

The Lowest White Man, Charles M. Blow, New York Times

How LBJ Foresaw the Election of Donald Trump, Derek Beres, Big Think

Combing for Earths...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 18, 2018 at 7:07am

An example of the spectrum from two laser frequency combs, with their evenly spaced emission lines. (Courtesy: ESO).

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Exoplanets, Optics, Space Exploration

A new type of laser frequency comb (LFC) has been developed by scientists in Europe. The prototype device could lead to improvements in how scientists search for Earth-like exoplanets, measure the expansion of the Universe and test the fundamental constants of nature.

LFCs produce spectral lines of light with evenly spaced frequencies and have a wide range of applications in metrology and spectroscopy. The new LFC was developed by Tobias Herr of the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology, Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory and colleagues. It uses a laser-driven microresonator on a silicon-nitride chip that produces 24 GHz pulses for use in calibrating near-infrared spectrometers. This gives it an advantage over traditional LFCs, which operate at frequencies below 10 GHz and create a line spacing that is too small for astronomical spectroscopy.

The pulses are produced by way of a phenomenon known as temporal dissipative Kerr-cavity solitons (DKSs), which involves trapping ultra-short pulses of light in a circular, micron-sized microresonator. Each time the DKS pulse passes the microresonator’s input-output coupler, some of the pulse is siphoned away and directed towards the spectrometer, producing a series of spectral lines that, in the prototype, are each precisely 24 GHz apart. These lines form a spectral comb and act as a precise calibration tool for the spectrometer.

One popular method of detecting exoplanets is the radial velocity technique. This involves measuring a star’s subtle motion that is caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. These motions are often no faster than walking pace and require highly accurate spectroscopic measurements of the Doppler shift in the star’s light as it moves. The size of the Doppler shift and the period at which it occurs can tell astronomers both the mass and the distance from the star of the planet. The greater the mass of the star, or the less massive or more distant the planet, the smaller the Doppler shift.

Optical ‘astrocomb’ could boost searches for Earth-like planets, Keith Cooper, Physics World

BEC in the Blink of an Eye...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 17, 2018 at 5:26am

Credit: NIST

Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics

It’s been more than two decades since Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell created the first Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), confirming the counterintuitive prediction that a macroscopic population of atoms can pile into a single quantum ground state if cooled below some critical temperature. In all those years, the recipe for creating the condensates has hardly changed: Laser Doppler cooling chills the cloud of atoms as close to the critical temperature as possible; when that technique can go no further, evaporative cooling does the rest. But the evaporative cooling step is inefficient. It works by jettisoning most of a cloud’s atoms in order to cool the remaining few—a relatively slow process that can take a minute or more. Now MIT researchers led by Vladan Vuletić have come up with an alternative approach that allows them to create BECs in a fraction of the time.

Bose–Einstein condensation in the blink of an eye, Ashley G. Smart, Physics Today

Starship GPS...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 16, 2018 at 2:32pm

Pulsars spin rapidly while emitting powerful beams of radiation.Credit: Dana Berry/NASA

Topics: Astrophysics, Instrumentation, International Space Station, NASA, Space Exploration

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland

From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space. Spacecraft could triangulate their location, in a sort of celestial Global Positioning System (GPS), using clockwork-like signals from distant dead stars.

Last November, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) spent a day and a half looking at a handful of pulsars — rapidly spinning stellar remnants that give off beams of powerful radiation as they rotate. By measuring tiny changes in the arrival time of the pulses, NICER could pinpoint its location to within 5 kilometres.

It is the first demonstration in space of the long-sought technology known as pulsar navigation. One day, the method could help spacecraft steer themselves without regular instructions from Earth.

NASA test proves pulsars can function as a celestial GPS, Alexandra Witze, Nature

The Beloved Community...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 15, 2018 at 4:30pm

Image Source: AJC link below [1]

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Martin Luther King, Star Trek

Notwithstanding our national projected life expectancy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 89 years old today; Mrs. Coretta Scott King was two years his senior. This is also the 50th anniversary year of his assassination, as it had been pointed out ten years earlier on the election of the first and only African American president in the history of the republic. It is poignant we're post/after the obvious racist comments of a continent and diverse cultures of humanity by our current president* with absolutely no doubt that he, his followers and his political party are indeed racists.

Star Trek was born in this similar cauldron, and Dr. King was a great fan, especially for his young kids at the time. Civil Rights, Voting Rights, the Vietnam War; the ever-present "nuclear button." civil defense drills (not like the botched alert in Hawaii) and the Cold War exacerbated one's sense of whether or not "we were going to make it" as a species. It was especially powerful to African Americans like Dr. Mae Jemison, Dr. Ron McNair, my friends; me that could see a future that we could count on being more humane, civilized, just; SANE and survivable.

And yet, we're all here: the year is 2018, in a covfefe-Twitter-Twilight-Zone where a president* post Charlottesville praises tiki-torch Neo Nazis as "fine people" and little comment on activist Heather Heyer, who lost her life; comments on his "performance" as if still in reality television mode, and racially slurs an entire continent and diverse cultures. April Ryan point-blank called him out. After his empty comments about Dr. King in a staged photo op with black sycophants (among whom were sadly, the ever-sleepy Ben Carson and Isaac Newton Farris, Jr., Martin Luther King's nephew and his inept soft peddle of 45's racism); cowardly walked away as he did from a contentious visit to the UK that promised to be embarrassing for him. He's insulted Gold Star families (especially those of color), women, minorities, the Pope and NONE, not one nickname, belligerent bowel movement-inspired tweet or witty zinger for his pimp benefactor Vladimir Putin and his Wikileaks minions. The UN has called the president* racist. It's "unfortunate" and "unhelpful" to Speaker Ryan; as of the Friday after the slur, silence from Senate Majority Leader McConnell. A party that's facing demographic oblivion could (possibly) sell its political soul to a Russian devil for survival. They are slowly dying. They're not convincing enough youth, women, minorities et al to be politically viable in 10 years, let alone the midterms. Our current president*, along with his limited vocabulary, enabling weak party, diminished mental faculties probably finds the concept of adjusting for demographics as alien as they'd consider Dr. King.

He was the Manchurian/Kremlin candidate; he is the Manchurian president*.

To survive him, this summoned-from-the-pit xenophobia and reclaim what is left of our republic will take time. It will take rediscovering Dr. King's "Beloved Community."

Maybe... he was thinking about Star Trek.

“The Beloved Community” is a term that was first coined in the early days of the 20th Century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. However, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of goodwill all over the world.

For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty Utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict. [2]

*The usage of the asterisk (*) next to president* I borrow from and attribute to Charles P. Pierce, a writer for Esquire magazine and frequent media commentator on MSNBC. He's also author of the prescient book: "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free." And so, despite his and other authors' warnings to the contrary, our republic is at the stage-edge of this cliff...

[1] Photos: Martin Luther King statues around the country (and beyond), Pete Corson - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, [accessed] 12 January 2018

[2] The King Center: The King Philosophy, [accessed] 12 January 2018

Dunning-Kruger Epoch...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 12, 2018 at 9:30am

Image Source: Psychology Today link below

Topics: Civics, Commentary, Existentialism

Named for Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his then-grad student Justin Kruger, this is the observation that people who are ignorant or unskilled in a given domain tend to believe they are much more competent than they are.

Dunning and Kruger documented this effect in a number of quantitative contexts. Its first publication, in 1999, bore the memorable title, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The authors observed that you need skill and knowledge to judge how skilled and knowledgeable you are. A tone-deaf singer may be unable to distinguish her talent from that of the greatest stars. Why then shouldn't she believe she's their equal? Source: Psychology Today

I casually conducted an interesting thought experiment with my wife. I asked her the name of the gynecologist that delivered our youngest son. She recalled her. "How do you think she became an OB/GYN?" I asked. The obvious answer was going to college and making excellent grades, getting into grad school with impeccable MCAT scores, then after four years or so, graduating with an MD, residency and eventually her own practice. In other words, several YEARS of preparation, internship and study.

We don't think of politics in that light, and the advent of the Internet has taken our impatience with the governing process to Attention Deficit Disorder levels nationally. We "get the gist" of a subject in a few Internet searches, assuming that's all the expertise one would need. A librarian at my last high school in Manor, Texas tried mightily to instruct using Boolean logic search terms and strategies to narrow focus, rather than merely going with a single wild card term and taking the first links provided. It seemed for my class at least to fall on deaf ears. My generation (admittedly) and literally created the analog version of this need to get-to-the-answer: Cliff Notes, followed by Made Simple, Schaum's Outline, Research Education Associates Problem Solvers and the most recent incarnation "For Dummies" series'. These were and still are, supplement books we bought and READ as well as the hard, grinding work of rewriting notes, going to study groups and mastering the material. I'm not against Internet searches (I use them), but eventually you have the problem, in front of you or on paper you have to solve, either under the stress of a testing environment or a deadline. Sadly, the democratization of information has not produced wisdom.

The Constitution was crafted literally in the "horse and buggy" days, things were slow and the Founders - property/(reprehensible) slave owners - were steeped in learning and history, especially of Europe and the tendency to hide the corruption of royalty and the aristocracy, thereby empowering autocrats. "Checks and balances" were designed for a government not to get overarching, or not let any president become a demagogue or tyrant. A governing document created post the advent of electricity and Twitter would change overnight - several times several times - at the whim of "likes" or emojis. That is a republic foundation built on sifting, Silicon quicksand. We are currently at 2,000 lies, and apparently racially slurring nations of color is just as "presidential" as Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears.

Quoting the link from Psychology Today:

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Those who have the slightest bit of experience think they know it all. That's the peak at upper left. Then, with increasing experience, people realize how little they do know, how modest their skills are. Perceptions reach a minimum (center of chart), then slant upward again. Those at the level of genius recognize their talent, though tend to lack the supreme confidence of the ignoramus.

The chart is almost a emoticon: a smile turned smirk.

I'm purposely avoiding the use of any names. As such, I do not think any celebrity - talk show host or reality star - should ascend to the role of president without academic preparation, judicious study and experience in jurisprudence as well as law.

Would anyone want an amateur performing an episiotomy on your wife, or "winging it" on Braxton Hicks contractions? No one can "Google" that!

Expertise...matters.

"The whole problem with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell

Mal Sur Jupiter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 11, 2018 at 7:57am

Cyclones swirl at Jupiter's south pole in this photo from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Credit: Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Topics: Jupiter, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Before NASA sent its Juno spacecraft to explore Jupiter, astronomers were "totally wrong" about much of what they thought they knew about the planet, the mission's principal investigator, Scott Bolton, said during a lecture here at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday (Jan. 9).

Juno, which launched in 2011 and is currently orbiting Jupiter, is not the first spacecraft to study the gas giant up close. NASA's Pioneer and Voyager missions flew by Jupiter in the 1970s, and the Galileo spacecraft later spent eight years orbiting the planet. Even before that, humans had been studying Jupiter with telescopes for hundreds of years.

By the time Juno launched, astronomers had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the new images and data it would collect at Jupiter — or so they thought.

"Our ideas were totally wrong about the interior structure, about the atmosphere, [and] even about the magnetosphere," Bolton said. Astronomers believed that Jupiter had either a very small and dense core, or perhaps no core at all. But data from Juno revealed that Jupiter has an enormous, "fuzzy" core that might be partially dissolved. This discrepancy between scientists' expectations and the data suggests that there's a lot we still don't know about giant gas planets, he explained.

'Totally Wrong' on Jupiter: What Scientists Gleaned from NASA's Juno Mission

Hanneke Weitering, Space.com

Escherichia coli Sonar...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 10, 2018 at 8:11pm

A genetically engineered E.coli. The small white structures are gas vesicles. ANUPAMA LAKSHMANAN/CALTECH

Topics: Biology, Genetics, Research

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology in the US have genetically engineered bacteria capable of sending sonar signals from deep within the human body.

The modified Escherichia coli contain genes from two other species of bacteria, enabling them to grow new internal structures called gas vesicles. The vesicles – used by some water-dwelling microbes to regulate buoyancy – can reflect ultrasound signals beamed in by medicos, revealing their precise location.

The GM E.coli, as reported in the journal Nature, potentially have many uses, including providing a signalling mechanism to allow doctors to determine whether certain drugs or other treatments are reaching optimum locations.

Researchers led by Mikhail Shapiro and Raymond Bourdeau started looking into the potential of bacteria as living soundboards more than six years ago. They were seeking solutions to a key problem in medical diagnosis: the depth and density of the human body is such that light-based imaging techniques are defeated at all but the shallowest insertions.

Ultrasound, they reasoned, is able to penetrate much more deeply. If it could be bounced off target bacteria, then precise locations could be identified and treatments modified in response to the data.

Scientists engineer sound-reflecting bacteria, Andrew Masterson, COSMOS Magazine

Spying Anthropocene...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 9, 2018 at 3:30pm

In Star Trek, the starship Enterprise encounters an alien Dyson Sphere. On Earth, NASA could detect one with its next-gen telescopes, astrobiologists suggest. CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Topics: Astrobiology, Astrophysics, Dyson Sphere, Exoplanets, NASA, SETI

Astrobiologists are calling on NASA to use what geologists are learning about a new era sometimes called the “Anthropocene” to help develop space missions for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not that astronomers can peer into the rock strata of alien worlds in the hope of finding traces of existing (or vanished) civilizations. What they can do is look for changes in planetary atmospheres — changes that Haqq-Misra and colleagues refer to as “techno-signatures” in a policy paper submitted to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Abstract

Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study of the anthropocene as a geological epoch, and its implication for the future of energy-intensive civilizations, is an emerging transdisciplinary field in which astrobiology can play a leading role. Habitability research of Earth, Mars, and exoplanets examines extreme cases relevant for understanding climate change as a planetary process. Energy-intensive civilizations will also face thermodynamic limits to growth, which provides an important constraint for estimating the longevity of human civilization and guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We recommend that missions concepts such as LUVOIR, HabEx, and OST be pursued in order to make significant progress toward understanding the future evolution of life on our planet and the possible evolution of technological, energy-intensive life elsewhere in the universe.

“If you saw a planet like Earth, around a yellow star and you saw methane and ozone and carbon dioxide, that’s a classic bio-signature,” Haqq-Misra says. “But if you see a planet like Mars, just a little outside the traditional habitable zone, where you’d expect it to be cold, but you observe CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and PFCs (perfluorocarbons) and exotic greenhouse gases that seem to be raising the [planet’s temperature], that would be pretty good evidence for terraforming — like us terraforming Mars.”

Techno-signatures might also take the form of infrared light that might represent heat loss from large-scale engineering projects, such as orbiting solar collectors or planetary sun shades designed to offset global warming.

Such things, Haqq-Misra says, might lie in the future of any technologically advanced civilization faced with the dual problems of population growth and increasing energy needs.

Use new telescopes to scout for ET tech, astrobiologists tell NASA Richard A. Lovett, COSMOS Magazine

Two-Phased H2O...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 8, 2018 at 11:45am

Illustration showing fluctuations between regions of two different local structures of water. High density is shown as red and low density as blue. (Courtesy: Stockholm University)

Topics: Fluid Mechanics, Materials Science, Thermodynamics

Water could exist in two different liquid phases with different densities. That is the conclusion of researchers in Sweden, Japan and Korea, who have used ultrafast X-ray scattering to measure the properties of supercooled water droplets.

Despite being the most ubiquitous and important liquid on Earth, water is a deeply puzzling substance with physical properties that deviate significantly from those of an idealized liquid. Several theories have been advanced to account for some of water’s idiosyncrasies, but experimental data have been lacking.

Solid ice is the most stable phase of water below 0° C, but the liquid phase remains metastable at sub-zero temperatures. Under normal circumstances, impurities such as dust particles provide nuclei around which ice crystals can form, so freezing occurs quickly. In the laboratory, however, it is relatively easy to supercool liquid water to well below 0° C by removing impurities. As the temperature goes down further, however, molecular motion slows and, below around -40° C, water molecules begin to form crystals around one another, allowing even pure water to crystallize very rapidly.

Supercooled water could exist in two liquid phases, Tim Wogan, Physics World

Signifying Nothing...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on January 5, 2018 at 6:04am

"The Turtle and the Scorpion" tale

Topics: Civics, Commentary, Existentialism, Politics

Speech: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. Source: Poetry Foundation

Steve Bannon - before he became the president* whisperer, White House resident white supremacist Grand Poo-Bah and all-around jerk face (that always looks drunk when he's supposedly trying to be sober and serious), was an executive producer on "Seinfeld" - a comedy show literally about... nothing.

There was no particular theme to the show other than Jerry Seinfeld occasionally doing stand up, struggling at it but never going "poor." There was never any social commentary like other comedy shows - Good Times, The Jefferson's, Chico and the Man, All in the Family, Family Ties, Family Matters and most recently, Black-ish - would delve into. That would be WAY too serious. Because Bannon produced the show, it explains the lack of diversity in its cast and feature shots of New York City - one of the most diverse places in the world - with few people of color or other nationalities. Fans viewed Seinfeld's day-to-day experiences with his friends - especially Kramer - as a farcical escape from mundane reality. When the last show was broadcast, many in my office (at the time, Motorola) were depressed. I was not a fan, so I did not share in their angst on the disappearance of... nothing. Quora has a better summation.

Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" book dropped like a lead balloon from a Zeppelin with C4 strapped to it. The salacious charges most likely will be pushed back on by this administration and many proven false with respect to sourcing, but it's featured on Brietbart, and his 16 tweets didn't help (see "Related links"). The 20 revelations Newsweek summarizes you can peruse at your leisure. Numbers 3, 11, 13, 14 and 16 should give you pause:

3. Trump didn't want to win, and no one in his campaign thought he would win. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” former national security adviser Michael Flynn assured his friends about his decision to accept $45,000 for a speech in Russia.

11. As a candidate, Trump had no interest in learning about the Constitution, which he knew very little about. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment, before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,” said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign.

13. Trump didn't enjoy his own inauguration. "He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears," the book claims.

14. Trump reassured Melania that he would not win the election. On election night, when it became clear that he would win, "Melania was in tears—and not of joy."

16. Trump never reads. “He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn't read. He didn't really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate,” the book says.

He didn't want the job?

Could that be what this has been all about?

Speculation: I think it was really meant to be a long con. He'd be howling from the sidelines on Fox at the "Crooked Hillary Administration" as he talked their chief propagandists Hannity and O'Reilly to what would eventually be Trump TV, 24/7. Money is his god, and the con his altar. Being president* was an accident of our collective civics ineptitude and an antiquated electoral college designed to give southern, slave-owning states an equal footing with those damned, northern Yankees, which technically he is. But birtherism, Russian interference and bigotry at the first and only African American president; a little misogyny and self-loathing from the 53% of white women and hypocrisy from the 81% of "family values" white evangelicals that voted the p-grabber in, and we're at this epoch of a twitter feud between two infantile, bad hairdo, insane narcissists comparing the size of their nuclear button-schlongs.

Gripping his tiny own and howling conspiracy theories from the sidelines is so much more fun than the aforementioned conspiracy theorist having the nuclear codes.

The Olympic levels of obfuscation totaling 1,950 in 347 days (and counting); the roller coaster news cycles that focus on the next level of low from an obnoxious narcissist that underestimated the scope of the job he never wanted. A man who has dubious ties to organized crime and Russian oligarchs to cover for a lack of business acumen. A man that believes his own myths about himself, literally taking Karl Rove's "created realities" and making his own bubble/covfefe Twilight Zone. A president* whose not even intelligent enough to be Seinfeld: he's more like Kramer, gene-spliced with Archie Bunker in the Jeff Goldblum 80's remake of "The Fly."

He may yet "make America great again" if we survive this: by reminding us our federal republic is precious and without attention (or care), fleeting.

*The usage of the asterisk (*) next to president* I borrow from and attribute to Charles P. Pierce, a writer for Esquire magazine and frequent media commentator on MSNBC. He's also author of the prescient book: "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free." And so, despite his and other authors' warnings to the contrary, our republic is at the stage-edge of this cliff...