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| Lecture from University of Oregon - "The Beginning of Time" |
The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.
Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiverse in which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.
Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.
The experiment is relatively straightforward. Metamaterials are usually hard to engineer because they are based on nanoscale structures. However, Smolyaninov and pals have instead exploited the self-assembling nature of cobalt nanoparticles suspended in kerosene.
Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime.
So light passing through behaves as if this region has one dimension of time, aligned with the nanocolumns, and two dimensions of space, perpendicular to the nanocolumns.
That creates a single Minkowski universe. The trick that Smolyaninov and pals have pulled off is to create a multiverse containing many Minkowski spacetimes.
Established in 1990 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Timbuktu Academy is an award-winning mentoring program for underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. The program's pre-college to graduate curricula includes the Undergraduate Research Program (URP), which provides students with the educational support they need to succeed in graduate school. Bagayoko, a solid-state physicist and native of Mali, named the academy after the medieval Malian city of Timbuktu, which was renowned for its scholarship.
In the beginning, Timbuktu Academy provided mentoring only for physics undergraduates and a handful of pre-college students, but with the help of additional funding from the Department of the Navy and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), in 1993 the academy added chemistry and engineering majors and 100 to 200 pre-college students. To date, the academy's URP has sent 74 students -- 47 in physics -- to science and engineering graduate programs throughout the country, including the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Moreover, 19 have earned M.S. degrees and 8 have earned Ph.D.s with many others nearing completion.
MySciNet: Timbuktu Academy: Mentoring Future Scientists
Site: Timbuktu Academy of Science and Technology
NASA: Beyond Earth
Stewart entered Southern four years ago to enormous fanfare. He was under a microscope as his classmates learned of the student on campus who was too young to get a driver’s license and actually too young to live on campus alone.
He had offers from colleges across the country. Who didn’t want a child prodigy on their campus? But, it would have been difficult for his parents to send him across the country at such a young age.
Instead, he enrolled at Southern where he was familiar with the campus, where he had taken high school-level courses at the school’s famous Timbuktu Academy, and more importantly, he would only be a 10-minute drive from campus.
But with all of the local media tracing his first steps on campus, Stewart was an unwilling celebrity. He just wanted to get down to doing his schoolwork and getting to fit in with his classmates. “The attention I got died down pretty quickly,” he said.
He traces his love for academics to the dinosaur books his father bought him as a young child. Later, as a toddler, Stewart said he began watching scientific documentaries where his interest in herpetology, entomology and paleontology grew. “I was pretty much interested in all the sciences,” he said.
Now, barely an adult, Stewart has set his sights on a career in biological and physical engineering. He spent last summer doing research at North Carolina State University, where he worked on developing self-cleaning, anti-glare glass coated with anti-reflective material and designed to repel oils and water.
After continuing his research in a post-grad program next summer, Stewart said he will start graduate school at one of a number of colleges that have shown interest.
His mother, Ava Stewart, isn’t surprised by her son’s success.
“His father and I could tell early on that he wanted information. There was an intensity in his focus. He started reading when he was three,” she said.
Southern University: Polite Stewart, Jr. to receive physics degree at 18 years old
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| Mock-up of Rembrandt's "An old man in military costume" with a portrait painted underneath the final work. Photo: Andrea Sartorius, © J. Paul Getty Trust (free for editorial use if credit is given) |
Franklin McCain: double major, Chemistry/Biology
Ezell Blair Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan): Sociology
Joseph Alfred McNeil: Engineering Physics; US Air Force Veteran (I am proudly both)
David Richmond: Business Administration and Accounting
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Found in Letters of Sir Isaac Newton
Site: February One Documentary
North Carolina Museum of History: The Greensboro Four
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| The single-photon detector is characterized by five convincing factors: 91% detection efficiency; direct integration on chip; counting rates on a Gigahertz scale; high timing resolution and negligible dark counting rates. Source: KIT/CFN. |
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology:
Quantum Communication: Each Photon Counts, Press Release
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| Courtesy of Wallentin et al |
Nature:
Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures, David Biello
Across a wide terrain of both era, genre and just out and out adventure, comes these stories of heroines and villains, bold swordsmen, and horrors of the Dark Realms. The Leopard's Moon anthology is ripe with these juicy bits of derring do, determination, and being deadly to the last fatal drop! Arisen on Amazon.com, CreateSpace ebooks, and Tah Dah! Over the peaks of the Kindle range!
I received this email and thought it would be of interest to some of you! It is a call that takes place this afternoon!
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produced 6 major studio films (including The Book Of
Eli starring Denzel Washington) and many more.
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| An artist's concept showing a trapped anithydrogen atom being released after 1000 seconds. The new proposal allows for such trapped antimatter to be laser cooled and then studied. (Courtesy: Chukman So/CERN) |
Physics World: Lasers could chill antihydrogen
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| a) Spatial images of the photocurrent amplitude and phase as a function of gate voltage. The photocurrent in the graphene channel switches sign twice from negative to positive and back to negative. b) Photocurrent amplitude (red) and phase (blue) in the centre of the graphene channel as a function of gate voltage. Courtesy: Nature Photonics |
I was thinking the other day of the effects typing consistently in comparison to writing and transferring to electronics. This as I realized, even though I am left handed, on the computer some fine tuned things are dobe with my right hand. With this thought came realization that I miss writing. My left hand expresses differently than using both hands to type letter. I enjoy creating, shaping letters to look the way I want them to look. I also enjoy finding the perfect font. The enjoyment is not even, they are acknowledged. The personal touch of a pen can not be compared. At all. Should we be paying attention to how slowly we are conforming into writing similarly with individual thoughts? Hmmm
Still thinking about that.
It is often a world of searching, connecting, searching more and moving on for me. An artist for life, photography, and poetry were my pathways in NYC during younger years. Later poetry stayed, with photography popping it's head up from time to time. Throughout it all, science fiction was a backbone of entertainment and independent thought, stimulating my brain...thankfully. Clockwork Orange was major, the colors and the mentality combined... incredible. Shibumi, (novel), Octavia Butler -everything- with "Wild Seed" at the top of the list.
Then one day I wrote a book, Small Town Planet Earth. A scifi, mystical novel that gives an example of living life without being guided by fear, with good guys and bad guys & a little life magic. Completion was a unexpected, wonderful feeling. Time went on.
New Mac entered my life, and of course I had to write, SOMETHING.....sitting at my laptop...I..waited.....until, words began to come. Fast forward to present day...five successful performance reads later. Starting in Atlanta, to D.C. to NY...tweaking from feedback to where we are now....finally, my play, with an excellent cast, "Colored Lives" is coming to the stage.
This is a light scifi story...writer speaking to her ancestor about her play. Actor's lives become entwined within the performance. The magic is in the merging; the easy conquest over apparent issues. The magic of love. The magic of the written word is profound. Thoughts.....
Science Daily: Chameleon pulsar dramatically changes the way it shines
The day of battle arrived like a storm everyone knew was coming but could not avoid. Annan and his Squad mates climbed into their ITSVs, powered up systems as they had been trained, and joined over 375 other ITSVs that were waiting in a part of the vessel called Launch Bay.
Nestled in the firm embrace of his cockpit chair, Annan stared out of his window, taking in the wall-to-wall grayness of the Launch Bay. He tried to empty his head of any and everything not related to the upcoming combat. Nervousness clawed at him as it always did before a battle. But this time, his trepidation was amplified by a dread-filled sense of the unknown. Annan tried to shake off the feeling.
The floor beneath the machines retracted swiftly, and with heart-stopping suddenness, the ITSVs were yanked out into a black void.
Annan’s first reaction, had he been allowed to give in to it, was panic. Being in this perpetual vastness called space should have paralyzed him with terror. Indeed, as he dropped toward the planet below, a fright like none he had ever before felt smothered him in a cruel grip. He shouldn’t have been able to function, yet while he quailed internally, outwardly, his body remained calm.
He sat composed and focused while his piloting computer guided his vehicle’s descent. Suddenly, the blackness of space blended into the swirling whites of cloud cover. The sprawling surface rushed at him with breakneck fury, air friction shaking his craft, wrapping the forward section in a thermal blanket. He should have been pissing in the one-piece garment he wore. Instead, a crucial part of him remained strangely tranquil.
It must have been the liquid the Gray Armor healer squirted into his arm. The healer said the liquid would help humans keep their wits in the tumult of battle.
An expanding ball of light and smoke consumed the ITSV flying in front of Annan. A second craft to his left fragmented to superheated splinters when a shaft of brilliance pierced it like a sword thrusting through flesh. The sky blazed with those blinding shafts. The liquid was obviously working. Otherwise, Annan and the other humans would have been unable to cope with the frenetic pace of this type of warfare.
Large, diamond-shaped craft brushed past the ITSVs, scarlet iridescence flickering from their top and bottom mounted ejectors. Wherever those beams struck, enemy defensive positions went up in shrouds of fire. The preponderance of ground-to-air flak lessened as the Conglomerate fighters cleared the way for ITSVs to land.
When Annan’s vehicle set down on a soft grassy plain, the computer granted him manual control. ITSVs dropped around him, until all except the two destroyed in flight were present and accounted for. Annan surveyed the plain, noting with fascination the gold coloring of the tall feather-fringed grass.
Low winds brushed the field and the swaying of the grass presented the illusion of a golden ocean. The sky was amber, bright and clear…clearer than the crispest blue skies of home. The Asante commander would have taken a moment to digest his surroundings, acclimate himself to the fact that he was on another world. On a different occasion, he would have absorbed the sights and sounds of this strange and captivating milieu. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the occasion and Annan had to reconcile himself to the grim possibility that this tranquil valley might become his grave.
Annan’s front view screen scanned the distance for threats. A ridge rose twenty miles ahead. One second, the ridge was barren. The next, it came alive. Thousands of forms poured over the slope, spilling onto the flat plain.
“Here they come,” Kofu’s voice whispered over the Squad channel.
Annan silently concurred. The Gray Armors had briefed the humans on the enemy they would be facing. The humans were shown pictures. But the visuals displayed on Annan’s screen did little to capture the full horror of the live horde stampeding across the plain.
The Gray Armors called these things Otruls…their cyborg variants to be exact.
Annan had no idea why they were fighting these creatures. All he knew was that he had to kill them before they killed him.
They were huge, lumbering, two-legged beasts fashioned from an unholy fusion of flesh and metal. Their metal legs operated like the hind legs of horses. Most of their wide man-like torsos were encased in mottled green metal, as were their bulky forearms and sections of their broad shoulders. The fleshy parts were covered with wavy patches of bluish hair, sprouting out of olive colored skin. Their faces were flat and blocky with severely overlapping ridges almost completely obscuring the dark smoldering pits of their eyes. They had no visible noses. Where noses should have been were marked by moist slits that quivered with exertion. Their wide snarling mouths were filled with metal teeth that glazed razor sharpness. They were armed with wide-barreled projectile-firing tubes, along with an intimidating assortment of blunt and edged weapons. A single blow from one of those bludgeoning weapons would surely have quashed a man as easily as a rock mulching a berry.
The computer ordered Annan to stand his ground, wait for the Otruls to come within terminal range of the ejectors.
Every human had obviously received the same instructions from his or her computer. The ITSVs assembled in a wide formation extending like a chain across the rolling grassland.
A string of calculations which Annan could not comprehend formulated on his status screen. Of course, it wasn’t Annan’s place to know what those flashing glyphs meant. His only function, as the Gray Armors repeatedly insisted, was to obey the computer.
Discharge ejectors, the computer commanded.
Annan thumbed the weapons control, sending a particle blast into a cluster of Otruls. The beams stabbed through fifteen of them, rending flesh and metal. A torrent of particle fire erupted from the ITSVs.
Up With Chris Hayes: Is Football Responsible for Junior Seau's Death
Today a friend and I have been having a constant conversation about being a black creator, the label of "Black creator" and the stigma that black characters must have a level of authenticity to them in contrast to that we discuss whether or not white creators can write black characters with authenticity without offending their audience. Whether it is the African King in comics, the suave street soldier in the movies or the single but successful mother on TV. These characters all have a seal of black autheticity on them, but are they all we're relegated to and if not why is it all we relegate ourselves to?
Now I'm going to jump right into this topic and site a few characters from fiction who are Black but don't behave with what some would call black authenticity, the first is Idris Elba's portrayal of John Luther in the British Crime drama "Luther". Here is a hard-nosed, dog of war cop, whose wife is Indian and whose supporting cast with the exception of one person in season two is all white. He doesn't speak slang, or have a number of African masks in his house and isn't overtly what one would consider "Black" unless you consider him constantly having to work twice as hard to prove he's not insane or even correct in his assumptions. Now here is a strong black male actor, who was cast in a lead role, could we or should we consider this character a black character or a strong character that just so happens to be black? Like the title character of the animated movie/mini series Afro samurai, he is a black samurai who is just as stoic as Mushasi Miamoto or any of Kuroshawa's epics. His creator designed him after a basketball player, his build and movement art indicative of that, so does that make him black? Wesley Snipes' portrayal of the Blade the vampire hunter garnered some fame for the character and while no one would dare say that Mr. Snipes isn't a black actor, was the character he portrayed black? In the comics especially recently he doesn't seem to carry himself as a traditional black character even going as far to say , and I'm paraphrasing, "When you're alive for as long as I am color doesn't really matter." when asked by Luke Cage a man who some would consider the de facto black hero, "why he couldn't be happy that black heroes had teamed up." again I'm paraphrasing but you get the point. Now that leads me into the second part of this article, the matter of color. The above conversation between Blade and Cage has another layer beyond "Hey this is a team-up, let's have fun." and that is " Hey, we're black so start acting like it." Now we can talk about the notion of "acting black" until we are blue in the face, but I'll just point to a few characters created by people of color and we can weight in on whether they're authentically black or not. The first character I'd like to mention is Milestone comics' Virgil Ovid Hawkins AKA Static, Now some people are going to look at this and say "How are you going to argue that, there's no question that he's authentically black." If we examine the character however we maybe forced to reconsider our definition of what that is. Vigil is an unabashed nerd, a trivia buff and all around prankster with a love of science and comic books. His powers are of the electro-magnetic variety and he's damn good at using them, however they don't come from an African God or a Jail experiment gone wrong and while he is black he fights for, with and against people of many shades and ethnicities not to mention the fact that he's never shot anyone and when given the chance to throws the gun away. This is not to say that doesn't deal with situations that may at most times be attributed to black people, these are ones involving criminal behavior, which anyone as shown in his comic can be caught up in. Now back in my day any of the things that Virgil was into (and even still today) would get him labeled a geek, a lame or a nerd (back when the term was negative) couple that with the black nerd stigma and he'd could very possibly be outcast in both black and nerd culture (which as many of you know is often but not all the time homogenous). The second character I'd like to draw attention to, is one created by an associate of mine this character is known as Will Power. This is a character who is a traditional all American quarterback who happens to be black, however creator Vince white never attached the black quarterback stigma often attached to real world quarterbacks of African decent. What's more, white never once has the character or anyone else including his white girl friend, mentioned that he's black unless you count the fact that he attracts dark matter (I nod to Vince for this). Will power in short is a hero who happens to be black, he doesn't talk street but is there a certain something that we get from the character that would tell us he was black if we were told his story but didn't see any of the images? Does it matter whether or not we add a particular flavor to our characters and if we don't are we doing our people or ourselves a disservice? I leave you with these questions to ponder.
