Featured Posts - BLOGS - Blacksciencefictionsociety

Teaching Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 19, 2017 at 7:02am

Image Source: Link below

Topics: Economy, Education, Jobs, STEM

I've taught physics at the college level as well as high school. I've taught special needs students as well as students acquiring their HSE (high school equivalency, the replacement of the GED).

There's a nostalgia of the "good old days" that like all with the distance of time, we mis-remember things because as students, we typically didn't understand the pedagogy of the times. Our nostalgic recollections do have the absence of distracting technologies like the ubiquitous contronym, "smart phones."

I've found using a method called “mind mapping” a good warm up. For example, when teaching about “work,” I put the word on the board and asked my HSE class what it meant. What I got:

Now of course, the trick is to get the five in the class to Work = Force x Distance, Power = Work/Time and Simple Machines. That takes a certain amount of patience. One student I recall "didn't want to be there." The other four did good work, and we had a humorous back-and-forth on "The Flash" and what I've termed "cartoon physics." Since speed was their thing, I explained what it meant when The Flash made a sonic boom; that it had nothing to do with the speed of light and how VAST that difference actually is. As work goes, we were all "pumped" at the end of the hour.

Hence, the article in Physics Today grabbed me. To continue teaching and propagating an understanding of physics as well as science, we're going to be a little creative, answer questions on cartoon physics and steer them back on the rails... to their own futures.

Physics is the most exciting endeavor I can imagine. That is why I want to become a physicist and join what Richard Feynman called “the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”¹ Now, after my second year of undergraduate studies in astrophysics at University College London (UCL), I want to comment on some of the vicissitudes I have experienced while being taught physics. The basic courses of my first two years were disappointing. They didn’t really give me the opportunity to join that greatest adventure. Most of my lecturers followed traditional teaching approaches based heavily on solving standard problems and learning by rote, with no hint of free inquiry or discussion. They seemed to be convinced that we would understand physics through that method. I was not enthusiastic.

Physics Today: How to teach me physics: Tradition is not always a virtue, Ricardo Heras

Electron Beams...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 18, 2017 at 6:23am

Figure 1: Using the Pegasus facility at UCLA, Maxson and colleagues [1] have compressed electron pulses to below 10 fs in duration. In this facility, a relatively long electron pulse (green) produced by an electron source (not shown) enters a specially designed linear accelerator (copper, left), whose electromagnetic fields act to compress the pulse several meters downstream from the accelerator. Here, the pulse can be made so short (below 10 fs) that it would “outrun” all atomic motion in molecules (blue) and materials. In an electron diffraction or microscopy experiment with pulses like this, atoms are effectively frozen in place during an exposure (yellow). [Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker]

Topics: Electromagnetism, High Energy Physics, Modern Physics, Particle Physics

When you read the term “electron beam,” what comes to mind? If you are a physicist or have a background in physics, it may be the great J. J. Thomson—discoverer of the electron—followed by a vision of an old television or oscilloscope powered by cathode-ray tubes. Very twentieth-century stuff. If this is your view, a new study by Jared Maxson at the Pegasus radiation facility at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues [1] should help make clear how electron beams are one of the primary enablers of twenty-first-century science. Ultrashort electron-beam pulses—less than 10 fs long in this case—are enabling forms of atomic-level dynamic imaging that were previously restricted to the realm of thought experiments [2].

It is difficult to overemphasize the impact that electron beams have had on scientific developments over the last century, or the impact they are expected to have over the next century. While electron beams are currently out of favor in high-energy physics, because of the move from electron-positron colliders to hadron colliders at CERN, Fermilab, and other laboratories, they are central to other areas of science. For example, when we want to perform detailed examinations of the structure of molecules and materials, electron beams are at the forefront. Transmission electron microscopes and scanning electron microscopes are remarkably efficient instruments for generating and measuring an enormous range of signals that reveal the structure of materials. These signals come from both the elastic and inelastic interaction of electron beams with materials, and modern materials science is unthinkable without these instruments. When operated at cryogenic temperatures, these same instruments enable 3D reconstructions of proteins, viruses, organelles, and even whole cells [3]. Complementary work can also be performed using synchrotron light sources or free-electron lasers [4], which produce x-ray and infrared beams that are themselves generated from pulsed relativistic electron beams circulating in storage rings or linear accelerators. The size of the facilities that host these instruments, and the properties and limitations of the instruments as sources of x-ray and infrared radiation, are largely determined by the properties of such electron beams.

APS Physics Viewpoint: Electron Pulses Made Faster Than Atomic MotionsBradley Siwick, Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry, Center for the Physics of Materials, McGill University, 801 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0B8, Canada

DDR...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 17, 2017 at 5:31am

Image Source: Quora

Topics: Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Semiconductor Technology

Info link: Double Data Rate, Wikipedia

The new, higher-speed DDR4 DRAM generation gained significant marketshare in 2016, representing 45% of total DRAM sales. Previously, DDR3 DRAM, including low-power versions used in tablets, smartphones, and notebook PCs, accounted for 84% of total DRAM sales in 2014 and 76% in 2015, but in 2016, DDR4 price premiums evaporated and prices fell to nearly the same ASP as DDR3 DRAMs. A growing number of microprocessors, like Intel’s newest 14nm x86 Core processors, now contain DDR4 controllers and interfaces. As a result, IC Insights expects DDR4 to become the dominant DRAM generation in 2017 with 58% marketshare versus 39% for DDR3.

The Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) officially launched the fourth generation of DDR in 2012. In 2014, DDR4 memories first began appearing on the market in DRAM modules for powerful servers and a small number of high-end desktop computers, which had souped-up motherboards or the “extreme” versions of Intel’s 22nm Haswell-E processors for high-performance gaming software and PC enthusiasts, but volume sales remained low until 2015, when data centers and Internet companies began loading up servers with the new-generation memories to increase performance and lower power consumption. In 2016, DDR4 memories quickly spread into more data center servers, mainframes, and high-end PCs, accounting for about 45% of total DRAM sales versus 20% in 2015. In 2017, DDR4 will move into more notebook PCs, high-end tablets, and smartphones and is expected to hold a 58% share of DRAM sales.

Solid State Technology:DDR4 set to account for largest share of DRAM market by architecture

Equiangular Geometry...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 13, 2017 at 6:18am

Igor Balla for Quanta Magazine

Topics: Geometry, Mathematics, STEM, Research

Imagine a set of many lines as in a dream. The lines intersect at a point and radiate outward. There’s something perfect about the way they’re spaced that you can’t quite put your finger on. You start counting them, but before you can finish you wake up with a question hanging on the fringe of your mind: Just how many were there?

For at least 70 years, mathematicians have been trying to answer a question like that one. The sets of lines they’re interested in share a basic feature: Any two lines from the set intersect to form the same angle. Such sets of lines are called “equiangular.” Mathematicians want to know just how big those sets can get as you move past the 3-D space of our everyday experience and into higher dimensions.

Equiangular lines are much more than a curiosity — they’re an almost elemental way to think about geometry. Maximal constructions of equiangular lines often align perfectly with the vertices of highly symmetric shapes, which make them a way to discover the existence of those shapes in the first place. In addition, radiating equiangular lines would pass through the surface of a surrounding sphere at equidistant points. This property makes the lines important for so-called spherical codes, which have important applications in applied mathematics and computer science.

Last spring a team of mathematicians found the maximum number of equiangular lines possible in any dimension, given certain conditions. They proved that that number is much smaller than previous best estimates. Benny Sudakov, a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and one of the lead authors, credits the breakthrough to the wide range of mathematical techniques he and his coauthors were able to apply to the problem.

“It’s like when you’re cooking something, we suddenly found we had the right ingredients,” said Sudakov.

Quanta Magazine: A New Path to Equal-Angle Lines, Kevin Hartnett

Abracadabra...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 12, 2017 at 5:51am

Figure 1: Scheme of the setup used by Jennewein and co-workers [1]. A pump laser generates a three-photon entangled state through a cascade of frequency conversion processes in a nonlinear crystal. The oscillations in the rate of three-photon coincidence measured by the detectors provide the signature of genuine three-photon interference.

Topics: Applied Physics, Optical Physics, Photonics, Quantum Mechanics

Quantum interference effects lie at the heart of technologies that promise radically new capabilities for sensors, secure communications, and computing. Most existing experiments and applications rely on one photon interfering with itself, or two photons interfering with each other. However, the interference of a larger number of particles leads to a richer variety of phenomena, and may enable more sophisticated applications. Now, two independent groups, the first led by Thomas Jennewein at the University of Waterloo, in Canada [1], the second by Ian Walmsley at the University of Oxford, in the UK [2], have been able to isolate and observe, for the first time, “genuine” interference between three photons, that is, an effect deriving from the quantum interference of three photons that does not originate from two-photon or single-photon interference. The two studies provide new tools for controlling multiphoton interference, which may help researchers design new fundamental tests of quantum mechanics, quantum-communication protocols, and powerful quantum simulators.

The quintessential example of multiphoton quantum interference is the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, first observed in 1987. In an HOM experiment [3], two independent photons coming from different directions impinge on a 50:50 beam splitter. If the two incoming photons are distinguishable, the outgoing photons will split equally between the two exit ports of the splitter. However, if the two photons are identical and arrive simultaneously, the quantum-mechanical wave functions will interfere, and the two photons will always exit through the same port, even though each of them has an equal probability of exiting through both ports.

APS Physics Viewpoint: Photonic Hat TrickRobert Sewell, The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Av. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 3, 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), SpainApril 10, 2017• Physics 10, 38

Small Particles, Big Science...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 11, 2017 at 5:54am

More than 950 researchers from 30 countries have joined DUNE. Collaborators are developing new technologies for DUNE’s particle detectors, giant instruments that will help capture the notoriously elusive neutrino.

Topics: Astrophysics, Modern Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Collaborators are developing new technologies for DUNE’s two particle detectors, giant instruments that will help capture the experiment’s notoriously elusive quarry, the neutrino. With DUNE, which is expected to be up and running in the mid-2020s, scientists plan to get a better grip on the neutrino’s subtleties to settle the question of, for instance, why there’s more matter than antimatter in our universe — in other words, how the stars planets and life as we know it were able to form. Also on the DUNE agenda are studies that could bolster certain theories of the unification of all fundamental forces and, with the help of neutrinos born in supernovae, provide a look into the birth of a black hole.

It’s a tall order that will take a global village to fill, and researchers worldwide are currently building or signing up to build the experiment, taking advantage of DUNE’s broad scientific and geographic scope.

“We’re a country that does a lot of theoretical physics but not a lot of experimental physics, because it’s not so cheap to have a particle physics experiment here,” said Brazilian DUNE collaborator Ana Amelia Machado, a collaborating scientist at the University of Campinas and a professor at the Federal University of ABC in the ABC region of Brazil. “So we participate in big collaborations like DUNE, which is attractive because it brings together theorists and experimentalists.”

Machado is currently working on a device named Arapuca, which she describes as a photon catcher that could detect particle phenomena that DUNE is interested in, such as supernova neutrino interactions. She’s also working to connect more Latin American universities with DUNE, such as the University Antonio Nariño.

On the opposite side of the world, scientists and engineers from India are working on upgrading the high-intensity proton accelerator at Fermilab, which will provide the world’s most intense neutrino beam to the DUNE experiment. Building on the past collaborations with other Fermilab experiments, the Indian scientists are also proposing to build the near detector for the DUNE experiment. Not only are India’s contributions important for DUNE’s success, they’re also potential seeds for India’s own future particle physics programs.

Fermilab: The Global Reach of DUNE, Leah Hesla

#P4TC: ProtoDUNE, March 15, 2017

Spin Squeezing...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 10, 2017 at 5:33am

Illustration of a gas of 500,000 atoms in an optical trap. (Courtesy: Onur Hosten)

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

Bell correlations – a hallmark of an entangled quantum system – have been spotted in an ensemble of 500,000 rubidium-87 atoms. The atoms were prepared in spin-squeezed states by physicists at Stanford University in the US and the correlations measured to a whopping statistical significance of 124σ.

In quantum mechanics, entangled particles have much stronger correlations than are allowed in classical physics – a property that can be exploited in quantum technologies including cryptography. In 1964 the physicist John Bell famously calculated an upper limit on how strong these correlations could be if they were caused by classical physics alone – what has become known as Bell's inequality. Correlations stronger than this limit, Bell reasoned, could occur only if the particles are entangled.

In this latest work, Onur Hosten, Mark Kasevich and colleagues have measured these strong Bell correlations in an ensemble of 500,000 cold rubidium-87 atoms that are trapped by laser light. The atoms are put into an entangled state using a process called spin squeezing. The uncertainty principle dictates that the uncertainty in a measurement of the z-component of the total spin of the system multiplied by the uncertainty in the y-component must be larger than a certain value. Reducing (or squeezing) the uncertainty of the z-component increases the uncertainty of x-component, putting the system into a spin-squeezed state.

Physics World: Bell correlations measured in 500,000 atoms, Hamish Johnston Related Link

Science Mag: Bell correlations in a Bose-Einstein condensateRoman Schmied1,^*, Jean-Daniel Bancal^2,4,*, Baptiste Allard^1,*, Matteo Fadel1, Valerio Scarani^2,3, Philipp Treutlein^1,†, Nicolas Sangouard^4,†

A Quicksand...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 7, 2017 at 5:13am

My t-shirt. You can order at Teezily.com/science-wetheppl (I get no commission).

Topics: Climate Change, Education, Environment, Global Warming, Politics, Scientific Method

I almost don't want to post anything about climate change because of trolls, but one cannot pick when a battle will begin. I like what Scientific American said (I apologize I couldn't find it for this post), that instead of talking about the heating of the globe, we should be discussing replacing those coalminers' jobs that aren't coming back and instead think of new avenues of employment; future instead of past jobs.

I wore a t-shirt, purchased for The March for Science (April 22): "We The People want evidence based SCIENCE," along with its associated symbols. That got me into a spirited conversation with a gentleman that obviously had deep religious convictions. I didn't think a shirt would spark a back-and-forth weeks before the march.

Some of the things I pointed out:

- A 6,000-year-old universe limits Deity ("How do scientists know how old the universe is?"). An ~ 13.6 billion year universe is far more expansive, and does show the limit of our technology - that's as far as our telescopes can see. I connected this to my next point.

- I reviewed with him the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, discovered accidentally by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964, resulting in the pair achieving the Nobel Prize in 1978. This is evidence of an expansion and colloquially coined as "The Big Bang."

- In 1979, the Nobel in Physics was won by Abdus Salam, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Steven Weinberg "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current." I've had the luck to meet Dr. Weinberg at a conference in Austin, Texas, and have a personal autographed copy of "The First Three Minutes," two of my life's greatest thrills. I mentioned them because Abdus Salam (deceased) was a devote Muslim; I'm betting Dr. Weinberg is at least an agnostic.

- I continued the discussion with the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment that measured the speed of light by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what was then Case School of Applied Science (now Case-Western Reserve). Before that, scientist thought of light as being carried along by the "luminiferous ether" (since waves were their thing back then). This led to the Nobel Prize in 1907. I believe - and, I told the gent - Michelson was a practicing Christian. They were the "shoulders of giants" opined by Sir Isaac Newton and the foundation for the Special Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein.

- That led to a discussion of The Scientific Method and Theory (versus the colloquialism "in theory"). Scientific theory has to be proven in experiment, or discarded. I explained that was the unifier in the scientific enterprise: Agnostics, Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims et al are welcome to the table of inquiry as long as one forms a null hypothesis; an aleph null hypothesis and after experiment and evaluation able to prove it, replicate it in controlled conditions elsewhere and stand up to peer review (and if it doesn't), be willing to throw it out like "luminiferous ether".

I'm kind of a "ringer" for discussions like this. Yeah, everything I said was a mouthful, but when people ask questions out of a sincere desire to KNOW, I answer as best I can. What I don't know, I try to point them in the right direction. Our encounter ended amicably and respectfully. I'm pretty sure we both enjoyed it.

There is a "disdain for expertise," and that phrase can lead to a plethora of search engine results. The current, rampant anti-intellectualism is as American-born as Eugenics, perverted by the Nazis and mentioned by the Executive Mansion's current resident in his bigoted, misogynistic, nationalistic, xenophobic campaign ("good genes," even included in a 90-second rambling mash). The disdain is exacerbated by technology, information "at our fingertips" has made us all experts on areas and subjects we have no passion to study or excel in, the equivalent to watching a few videos online and calling oneself a martial arts master.

To have a disdain for expertise, you must have a disdain for education and learning; The Scientific Method must be assaulted as probing could reveal inconvenient truths that could result in apostasy; heresy. Authoritarians in particular are famous for not liking anything that diverges from their carefully crafted narratives. If remote mind control weren't in the realm of science fiction, they would have nations of automatons.

From an article in New Scientist by Brian Owens:

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is facing a future in which its hands will be tied on making many policies if a new bill becomes law.

Last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill, the HONEST Act, that would prevent the EPA from basing any of its regulations on science that is not publicly accessible – not just journal articles themselves, but all of the underlying data, models and computer code.

“The HONEST Act requires EPA to base new regulations on sound science that is publicly available, and not hidden from the American people,” said Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chair of the House science committee, who sponsored the bill, in a statement. “The days of ‘trust me’ science are over.”

“Allowing EPA’s data to be independently reviewed promotes sound science that will restore confidence in the EPA decision-making process,” said Smith.

While this may sound like a laudable move towards increased transparency, it would actually hobble the agency’s ability to develop good, science-based public health regulations, says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.

“It’s couched in terms of transparency, but is actually one of several actions intended to bring regulations to a halt,” he says.

The reboot of COSMOS enjoyed high ratings and I'll assume high sales of DVDs (I bought the set), but only one season. There was a tremendous push back online from authoritarians that were threatened by information that countered their narrative.

There is a comforting narcissism in willful ignorance, but it is lethal to constitutional republics. The fall of Rome was a slow decline: military overreach, economic stagnation and an empire too massive and extensive to reasonably manage.

We are in a quicksand, and in the nature of the medium, we will discover our folly neck-deep and unable to extricate ourselves from its steady pull. Perhaps a few more t-shirt conversations - before and after the march with respectful dialog as my surprise encounter - might help and throw a lifeline to the republic.

PEEM...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 5, 2017 at 5:17am

Experimental set-up shows an array of graphene-capped liquids. The caps enable the liquids to be studied using an image technique that previously was restricted to studying solid surfaces. Credit: A. Strelkov/NIST

Topics: Graphene, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology

By capping liquids with graphene, an ultrathin sheet of pure carbon, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have revitalized and extended a powerful technique to image surfaces. The graphene lids enable researchers for the first time to easily and inexpensively image and analyze liquid interfaces and the surface of nanometer-scale objects immersed in liquids. The new capability has the potential to advance the development of batteries, highly charged capacitors for power-grid technology, and new catalysts such as those used in the chemical industry.

In the imaging technique, known as photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM), ultraviolet light or X-rays bombard a sample, stimulating the material to release electrons from a region at or just beneath its surface. Electric fields act as lenses, focusing the emitted electrons to create an image.

NIST: Graphene Lid Revitalizes Imaging Technique, Ben Stein

The Grey Area Project

Posted by B.W. Redwood on April 5, 2017 at 3:09pm

Hey Guys,

I have invited you to this note because I value your feedback and expertise. I am looking for conversation starting questions, constructive criticism, and overall editing feedback. This is a high-level rough summary of my Serial Novel... “The Grey Area.” I am super excited to FINALLY have my head wrapped around this particular segment of the industry. Even still, the end goal is to write a really insightful, in-depth, an engaging literary work of art chapter by chapter, and then convert those chapters in to screenplays/graphic novel scripts. The ultimate goal is to use this story as a platform to get in to the comic book industry.

Forewarning...This story is loosely based off of my own life. I was laid off from a cushy stay at home job at the end of 2015, but refused to ever go back to working for anyone besides myself. I started a concierge service called Blue Chip Management. I basically wanted to become a lifestyle manager for influential and eccentric individuals. I saw a lot of artists around me struggling to make ends meet, and I wanted to be the one to create a way to utilize all of our talents to make real money! But in the meanwhile, I had to survive...and used Detroit’s “informal economy” to make money. It got to a point where I was doing extremely well, but just a little too well, know what I mean? I began to fantasize about what if I pushed this idea to the limit. It really had some juice...even though I was still trying define exactly what it was. I was already operating in the grey area surviving, but did I want to live there? The answer was no...but I dreamt about how it could of went...then I wrote it down as a business plan.

I read the business plan, and said...you know what? This would be an awesome graphic novel story. So I threw a lil cyberpunk “sauce” on top of it...and voila...I had something...different. Please read the summary...leave questions...comments...

The Grey Area Elevator Pitch

A survival story about a young slick entrepreneur’s tumultuous, but rapid journey to becoming a self-made millionaire with only his road bike, elaborate schemes, eccentric network, and insatiable desire to dominate the informal economy in a city many view as a desolate dead end, Detroit, MI.

Summary

This is a story that takes place in modern day Detroit focused on a group of friends that have one thing in common…riding road bikes. Each of them have greater aspirations for life and are tired of living paycheck to paycheck. Each has great potential, and grandiose dreams to be much more than their meek existence they now walk in. It starts with Red and Black…the business minds of the crew. Black is a rehabilitated drug dealer, who changed his life for the better after having a kid. Red is the prodigal son of a successful business man looking to make a name for himself, and define his own path. Red and Black are always proposing ideas, but never executed anything together. Red was laid off from his cushy job one day, spiraling him into a world of uncertainty that haunted him day in and day out. Black was beginning to miss the thrill of the street life, but did not want to put his life on the line anymore. After being laid off, Red made up his mind that he would never be fired again, and began doing odd jobs and chores for others to make ends meet. Eventually, he built up a reputation to take on courier jobs on his bike, it was just enough for him. Nothing gave him more freedom than to be on his bike all day, living the life of complete freedom.

He built relationships over time, but it would all change once one of his longest held customers fell ill to cancer and had to undergo chemo therapy. They would always debate about the potential profits of the marijuana industry and how it would change Detroit for the good. Both would have the discussion over a joint, but once he fell ill this happened more frequently. Red recommended THC alternatives, which eventually puts the cancer into submission. He began to grow his own strain that Red helped him construct with the aid of Red’s Uncle. His client returned to work, and began to refer Red’s services to his high-profile colleagues to push his strain. Demand spikes a lot faster than Red or his client could imagine, and they needed to take it to the next level. Red never thought about selling drugs as a full-time occupation…but the upside would bring him more money than he could ever imagine. He takes the risk, and the business begins to boom. So, Red brings Black into the business.

Eventually business grows to a size that even Red and Black can no longer manage on their own. Black suggests bringing the rest of the bike crew on. Each member brings their own unique skills set that makes them an even stronger team. In this story, a business case for marijuana as a solution to Detroit’s plight will be a main point, but even still, as this team faces opposition from police, drug lords and basic societal pressures, they still strive to stick together. Their brotherhood is the focus, and how they position their skills to serve their greater overall vision. The reader will come to understand what it means to go against the grain to achieve a goal, and despite the lure of the street for the young black male, how they can use their brains to win. The Grey Area represents the passage between the known and unknown, the area between good and evil that all humans must face to get to what they want out of life. With Detroit, itself representing a place that is predominantly black in population, but owned by white the dollar. The Grey Area of the U.S., where the taboo of wealth and human rights are at odds with each other.

GERDA...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 6, 2017 at 5:59am

From Nature: “The inner walls of the water tank are covered by a reflecting foil improving the light detection. This permits the identification of cosmic muons.” Image: K. Freund, GERDA collaboration

Topics: Antimatter, Big Bang, Cosmology, Neutrinos, Particle Physics

You and me, we’re matter. Everyone you know is matter. Everything on Earth, spare a few particles, is matter. Most of the things in space are matter. But we don’t have convincing reasons why there should be so much more matter than antimatter. So where’s all the antimatter?

A team of European scientists have taken a major step in understanding this conundrum, using a house-sized detector called the Germanium Detector Array, or GERDA, buried inside a mountain in Grand Sasso, Italy. GERDA’s scientists are looking for a strange behavior in radioactive atoms, called “neutrinoless double beta decay” (I’ll get to that in a second). Some versions of the rules of particle physics says this behavior could help explain where all the antimatter went. But for now, the experiment is reporting some important results: it works.

“A discovery of [neutrinoless double beta] decay would have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of particle physics and cosmology,” the researchers write in the paper, published today in the journal Nature. It’s important that we understand why there is more matter than antimatter today. The Big Bang probably should have created equal amounts... but it didn't.

Neutrinos, they’re weird. Scientists don’t know how much they weigh, but even at the upper limit of what we guess their mass is, they’re many times lighter than electrons. They’re also really common—for example, the sun sending almost a hundred billion of them per square centimeter of your body every second. They don’t interact via electromagnetism, though, so they don’t harm us in any way. If they were their own antiparticle, what scientists call “Majorana particles,” they should annihilate one another. Most extensions of our main theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model, say this is true.

That’s what GERDA is looking for. They’re watching 35.6 kilograms of a special form of germanium, the shiny semiconducting metal, sitting inside a vat of liquid argon inside a bigger vat of water, waiting however long it takes for it to experience a neutrinoless double beta decay. No, they haven’t found any evidence of the process yet. But their experiment works really, really well—there’s no background noise, which is an incredible feat. Otherwise, we might see a false signal. And there’s radiation that could set off the detector everywhere, from the sun to the air we breathe.

Gizmodo:Scientists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Where All the Antimatter Has GoneRyan F. Mandelbaum

Micro-Gami...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 4, 2017 at 5:33am

Image Source: Origami Resource Center

Topics: Graphene, Nanotechnology, NEMS, Robotics

Thirty years ago, a professor in Japan folded an origami crane smaller than a pinhead. Peering through a microscope, he used a sewing needle to carefully crimp the paper.

Now researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have gone one step further, creating origami about the size of a red blood cell. Too small for human hands, their origami folds itself. This new take on an old tradition is made not from paper, but from sheets of glass and carbon only a few atoms thick.

“It’s the world’s thinnest origami … comparable in size to a biological microorganism,” said Marc Miskin, a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of applied physicist Itai Cohen at Cornell. He described the new research in a March 14 talk at an American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans.

The simple shapes formed by the micro-gami, such as cubes and pyramids, lack the grace and sophistication of a bird. But they could be a step toward miniature machines that fold themselves up into packages small enough to be injected into the body.

Inside Science: World's Thinnest Origami Could Build Microscopic MachinesDevin Powell

No Fooling...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 3, 2017 at 6:22am

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Comets, NASA

A comet whose identity took nearly 100 years to pin down is making its closest approach to Earth today (April 1), just in time for April Fools' Day, but this is no cosmic prank. It is the comet's closest Earth encounter in more than 50 years, and maybe more than a century, NASA officials said.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák is named after its three discoverers —Horace Tuttle, Michael Giacobini and L'ubor Kresák — who tracked the comet separately over nearly a century.

Tuttle first spotted the comet in 1858, when 41P was first identified as a sun-orbiting (or periodic) comet, NASA officials wrote, citing the Cometagraphy website by Gary Kronk. But the length of the comet's orbit was unknown at the time. Comet 41P was rediscovered in 1907 by Giacobini, but still not tied to the object seen by Tuttle in 1858.

Another astronomer, Andrew Crommelin, later linked the two observations by Tuttle and Giacobini and predicted Comet 41P would return in 1928 and 1934, but the object went unseen, according to Cometography. It wasn't until 1951, when Kresák spotted the comet and linked it with the earlier observations, that Comet 41P identity was officially pinned down.

Space.com: April Fools' Comet Passes by Earth, Took Nearly a Century to IdentifyTariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor

The Shattering...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 31, 2017 at 7:30am

Image Source: wiseGEEK

Topics: Civics, Existentialism, History, Politics

From FBI.gov:

COINTELPRO The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.

The John Birch Society (TIME):

Had his story ended when he retired as a candy-maker, Robert Welch Jr. might have made his mark on history as the father of the Sugar Daddy, Sugar Babies and Junior Mints. But Welch, whose shrewd leadership helped grow his brother’s Massachusetts candy business a hundred-fold from 1935 to 1956, shifted his aim from caramels to communists.

On this day, Dec. 9, in 1958, Welch — then retired from the candy business — founded the ultraconservative John Birch Society along with 11 like-minded “Americanists,” as they referred to themselves. Their goal was to expose and eradicate the growing leftist threat in America, which they believed to be 40 to 60 percent communist-controlled, according to a 1961 TIME report. Members of the John Birch Society saw communists wherever they looked, from the Oval Office of Dwight Eisenhower (“A conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” per Welch) to the Bay of Pigs (“a theatrical performance jointly sponsored by Castro and ‘his friends in the U.S. Government’ in order to strengthen the communist hold on Cuba,” as paraphrased in TIME).

The "growing leftist threat"...

COINTELPRO was the government version of John Birch. Though the write up eludes to other groups the FBI had under surveillance, it was felt by African American communities the most, specifically the Black Panther Party; the Nation of Islam; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, etc. The approval of the Communist Manifesto by the likes of Huey Newton and the unrest in the streets likely gave J. Edgar Hoover much alarm. It couldn't have been the treatment of American citizens by their fellow citizens and de facto/de jure Jim Crow laws against them. It was easy to wrap surveillance in the flag and patriotism to hide the racist overtones of the act.

The "growing leftist threat"...

If the Birch philosophy sounds familiar, it's because one of its ardent members was the famous Koch Brother's father, Frank Koch, an MIT oil engineer. He infamously built oil refineries for Nazi Germany and did a considerable amount of business with the Russians.

The Nazis... the Russians...

It was "American" to oppose godless communism. It was easy for the right to demonize the left as unpatriotic, out-of-touch and not fluent in the deified "free market."

The reclusive billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer has been known to fund right wing groups in this country (Steve Bannon) and overseas (Nigel Farage). Like many of the self-made billionaires he's likely a fan of Ayn Rand and her apotheosis of selfishness in "Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," lauded by Congressman Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, Speaker Paul Ryan and President Ronald Reagan. It's funny how an avowed enemy of religion as a sickness can be so praised by those who put the Ten Commandments, godly masculinity and "family values" on high pedestals.

During the 1960's, COINTELPRO was concerned that foreign powers were infiltrating us and destabilizing our republic in the various Civil Rights organizations. They, along with the John Birch Society, were decidedly anti-communist, such that the Republican Party made this stance a litmus test for two generations. At that time, foreign Russian interference would have been called the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or the Committee for State Security). If they were infiltrating Civil Rights organizations, it was a time and an environment ripe for manipulation.

Fast-forward 40 years: 1968 - 2008. Forty years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the country has gone through a massive experiment in forced busing that would eventually be objected to and eliminated. Cities would through economic opportunities and structured stratification re-segregate more so than 1968. The former Soviet Union would fall in that window in 1989. Then President George Bush (41) and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would opine on the "Peace Dividend." The previous Russian Politburo was their 1%. As I recall from Air Force ROTC class in college, they were the ones with the actual money while their populations starved. They had access to things like fashion, food, sex all the while pretending that the Politburo was "temporary" and eventually there would be pure Communism with no hierarchy, no stratification: no "income inequality" as we now call it. It never came. An attempt at reformation from the previous authoritarian communist regime - Democratization - would be attempted and fail. Some would say it was a weakness of Russian civil society, as in democratization usually entails a beneficial tug-of-war from above and below. If citizens aren't putting pressure on their leadership, that leadership will eventually go back to what they know well: ironclad, authoritarian control.

2008 saw the election of the country's first African American president, Barack Hussein Obama, for the first time in 232 years of the republic during a financial free fall compared quite literally to the Great Depression, a concern that furrowed his brow and eventually grayed his mane. A graduate of two elite schools, a Constitutional Scholar and community organizer, he "dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't'." His crowds were compared to rock concerts. We quickly spat out the bubblegum philosophy of a "post-racial" society. We had "grown up" Dr. Maya Angelou commented; poems were composed, t-shirts were made, tearful hymns were sung: we had finally "overcome."

President Obama's name was a source of angst to his legitimacy. Then the Tea Party arose, AstroTurf-fed by dark money - Koch, Mercer et al - as a faux grass movement, their bigotry was hidden - at least initially from their Tea Party selves - behind clever slogans and jingoism: "I want my country back!" The demographics was decidedly, predominately the only original creation of the American continent: "whiteness," and a few people of color comfortable in tokenism and able to maneuver within a religion of white supremacy, that itself masquerades as a faux evangelical Christianity.

The KGB became the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service). Some rumors that they would weaponize misinformation on a scale heretofore unseen. As the former KGB observed an opening in the Civil Rights unrest, the FSB noticed Birtherism, the bigotry, the calling out "YOU LIE" during a president's State of the Union; the praying Psalms 109:8 and callously calling themselves "Christians." They saw faux voter integrity ID laws designed to act as a 21st Century poll tax; they saw the slaughter of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, and countless others. Add to it the lack of any jurisprudence/convictions of their slayers (the noted exceptions in Davis and McBride): note also the rush to call them "thugs" and disappointed Kentucky fans "students." The clever bigotry giving way to blatant racism, our national pathology laid naked to any intelligence officers to manipulate. From the ascendancy of a rock star African American president, the situation demanded his precise antithesis as counterbalance.

It was simply a change in strategy: if COINTELPRO was correct (though biased), the infiltration was through some Civil Rights organizations. If our current intelligence is correct, the infiltration was through our obvious bigotry: it was designed to shatter our institutional norms, and internationally like democratic republics from within.

With fake news by bots and hackers, servers between Moscow and New York; backroom deals that may have been caught with (possible) FISA-warranted incidental communications monitoring, the Russians merely enacted in real-time cyber attacks the poignant observation President Lyndon Baines Johnson made on a trip to the south with journalist Bill Moyers:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

With Brexit proceeding in the UK, spurred broadly by bigotry, their next targets to destabilize western democracy are France and Germany, with the ultimate goals of dismantling NATO and the European Union. There would be in essence a "New World Order" - not of the conspiratorial kind - but under the same conditions when "IRA" stood for Irish Republican Army (not Individual Retirement Account): there were a lot of bombings, death and instability. Before the EU, European countries often warred among themselves. That can't be good for tourism, ...or world peace.

We have "given them the store" of white supremacist bigotry, and our republic. I'm concerned apathy, racism, stupidity and tribalism may well not allow us... to get it back.

Martian Tsunamis...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 28, 2017 at 8:39am

Image Source: BBC. Did early Mars have a vast northern ocean?

Topics: Mars, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration, Spaceflight

Scientists have located an impact crater linked to powerful tsunamis that swept across part of ancient Mars.

The team believe an asteroid triggered 150m-high waves when it plunged into an ocean thought to have existed on northern Mars three billion years ago.

Lomonosov crater in the planet's northern plains fits the bill as the source of tsunami deposits identified on the surface.

Details were outlined at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Although the idea has lost some of its currency in recent years, some scientists think an ocean might once have filled the vast lowland region that occupies the Red Planet's northerly latitudes.

Growing evidence that tsunami waves washed over the boundary between the southern highlands and northern lowlands help strengthen the hypothesis.

BBC Science: Impact crater linked to Martian tsunamis, Paul RinconNASA: Giant Tsunamis Battered the Coastlines of an Early Martian Ocean

Failure...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 29, 2017 at 8:13am

Credit: Getty Images

Topics: Education, Science, STEM, Research

I've failed quite often.

I've received D's on Quantum Mechanics homework from an admired professor with the admonition "SEE THE ANSWER" in all caps as if shouting from the paper. I remember crying, largely out of frustration and out of the fact I truly had deep respect for the professor, who had talked me into majoring in physics in the first place (I was initially a math major). I also remember looking at the solutions in the Mezzanine of the library. I saw where my mistakes were. My next homework grade was a B- and my test score was an A. I passed Quantum with a high B overall.

Failure is a large part of the scientific enterprise. A story I heard years ago from a Thomas Edison experiment with a lab assistant (there had been an explosion):

Assistant: "When are you going to give up this crazy idea? This is the 9,999th time you've tried to invent this light bulb!"

Edison: "Yes. This is the 9,999th time we tried to invent the light bulb. But there's an explosive application that could prove useful later."

"Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater," Albert Einstein. I think he was referring to learning Tensor Calculus to describe the General Theory of Relativity.

Somehow we miss the fact that when Einstein was working at a patent office in Germany, he probably saw himself as a failure. He took a job because he'd made his then girlfriend pregnant. Being responsible, he took a job to support his new family. His "Miracle Year" was 1905 when he published four papers: The Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity and Mass-Energy Equivalence (E=mc²).

The competitive nature of western civilization doesn't allow or celebrate failure. Reality television, sporting contests, millennials awarded medals for "just showing up" at t-ball doesn't account for the many stutter steps if not downright stumbles a team makes to a championship. We celebrate the aftermath; the end result looking effortless and inevitable, the great discoveries often preceded by a lot of hard work and...failure.

Some of that failure is by design: peer review I've often stated can be brutal and demeaning. It can discourage anyone in the sciences to rethink if this is "what you really wanted to do with your life." A whole comic series was started by Jorge Cham (who has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering) quite literally on this angst.

There are sleepless nights, long experiments that take you through weekends (that everyone else outside seems to be enjoying). "Why am I doing it"? you may ask.

I tend to think of loud explosions and parents that didn't freak out (largely because I didn't die nor their house didn't burn down).

You throw yourself back into the lab, the chalkboard or the computer program...out of love.

People in the sciences are usually there because they love it: solving complex problems is almost meditative; spiritual in the satisfaction of not just solving problems, but birthing in many cases something that didn't previously exist. Someone in their past supported them despite their socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation and said four important words: "you can do it."

And to show our love of the area and the support from family and friends, many of us did.

**********

Four weeks into my first semester of college, my academic confidence was completely shredded. I had back-to-back tests in cell biology, chemistry, and calculus, and my time management skills weren’t quite there yet. I failed my calculus exam, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I had the intelligence or the ability to get a degree in science.

My story has a happy ending—at least to me. Through stress eating, meltdowns, and support from my professor and older students, I studied my way to an A-minus in that calculus class. But, even better: I learned how to fail, something I keep learning and relearning as I come to the end of my second semester in graduate school. It’s the fundamental underpinning of scientific resilience—failing repeatedly, and picking yourself up to try again.

It’s what I think is missing from many young Americans’ educational experiences, and, in part, why I think so many of us, as smart and creative and technically adept as we are, shy away from scientific research as our careers.

Learning resilience is fundamental to a successful career as a scientist. The experiments we try will fail many times before they work, whether as an undergraduate, a PhD student, or a postdoc gunning for a faculty position.

But actually overcoming failure is challenging. Many students who began science degrees with me switched to other majors the first time a project failed. One failure and they were gone.

This dropout situation has lasting implications for American science. The US has plenty of scientists, but fewer and fewer are being born in the US. These foreign-born scientists are welcome, as far as I’m concerned, but with all the recent changes in immigration and visa policy, it’s an uncertain future—large numbers of our scientists-in-training could be forced to leave after they finish graduate school or postdocs.

Without these scientists, American science will suffer.

Scientific American:One Reason Young People Don’t Go Into Science? We Don’t Fail Well, Sara Whitlock

ON SALE NOW!!! Classic Sci-Fi Film/Graphic Novel

Posted by Christopher Love on March 29, 2017 at 10:01pm

Be Like a Bullet...Be Unstoppable

PRESS RELEASE UPDATED: MAR 29, 2017 07:00 EDT

The Flying Bullet: Graphic Novel/Film---A Sci-Fi; Story going from the Cotton Field to Outer Space

Huntsville, Alabama, March 29, 2017 (Newswire.com) - Heroes Like Me Entertainment will release a graphic novel and film called THE FLYING BULLET. It is the tale of Tuskegee Airman, Lt. Curt Masters, who is kidnapped by aliens and has to fight for an Earth that doesn't fight for him. This project has been six years in the making.

Lt. Curt Masters, a Tuskegee Airman, is flying a combat mission over the skies of Nazi Germany in 1945. He encounters an alien craft. He engages the craft unsuccessfully. Soon, he is aboard the UFO and is charged with Obstruction of Galactic Operations. He and the people of earth are on trial for their survival. Can Curt Masters free himself from over a billion miles away? Will he ever return home? Or will he die at the hands of The Warlord. In this new universe, he meets Aliena-a Galactic Police officer, Sutter-a mysterious friend or foe and ARC, who is an android without a will of his own. Curt will learn that once you Look Forward you can Never Go Back. Written by Chris Love, this graphic novel offers new worlds and possibilities. A companion feature film has been adapted from this graphic novel.

This is not a Hollywood blockbuster, but a film by one person, Christopher Love. This film is an independent film made by a fan of sci-fi for fans of sci-fi. The characters in the film will be of african-american, asian and hispanic descent.

"During World War II, Black and White Lives, including First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt; petioned the government to allow Black Americans to fight and defend their country by training them to fly. All they asked in return was the opportunity to enjoy in the blessings of our great nation. This story is about one person who had to fight and defend the whole planet," says Chris Love.

This graphic novel/film is in the direct response to the lack of diversity in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

"We've waited for Hollywood to present stories of the future that has more than Caucasian characters in it. The Future is for everyone, but on the big screen I do not always see someone like me or my kids in that future. I'm doing this for them and other kids of color and diversity who deserves to see themselves on the big screen, tablet or phone to enjoy. Everyone deserves heroes that look like them," says Chris Love.

This is Mr. Love's first graphic novel and film. He has been writing for over 20 years. He is the Chief Creative Officer of Heroes Like Me Entertainment.

Mr. Love concludes by saying, "If you want something you never had, you must do something you never did."

The Flying Bullet can be found on Amazon.com. Go to heroeslikeme.com

Source: Heroes Like Me Entertainment

Lies and Automation...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 30, 2017 at 8:30am

Image Source: Mining.com link below

Topics: Alternative Energy, Economics, Jobs, Robotics

The times I've talked about automation: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and finally here. So it's not a new subject broached, hardly.

However the signature of repealing climate change rules merely to roll back your predecessor's executive order will benefit no one except the owners of the mines.

Robotics, not regulations is the reasons your mining jobs aren't coming back. A robot doesn't get sick, it doesn't have sick kids to stay home with; it doesn't require vacation/medical/dental/retirement benefits or get tired, however it will due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) wear down and eventually need repair. For that you need technicians, a specialty that can be awarded after two years study for an associates degree or military service in communications electronics or related military occupational specialty. So in this instance, a four year degree or higher is a bit of overcompensation and unnecessary from a cost-point concern, i.e. you could find yourself "overqualified" and not be hired due to the fact the potential employer is likely to think this is an interim assignment and you'll just find a better paying job when one opens.

We are ALL on a giant spaceship on an elliptical trajectory around the sun that takes approximately 365.25 days as we measure it, adjusted every fourth year with a "leap day" on which here in America we've parked our presidential election years. Due to the angle of incidence of ultraviolet light and our respective proximity on the globe, Melanin has rendered identifying pigmentation to different groups. We have no spare planets like it within the solar system or light years in human lifetimes. Learning to share within our respective sandbox is the only immediate surety for species survival in the near future.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been ambivalent and avoided discussing it to placate the electorate through another election cycle, our political thinking like our financial reduced to quarterly concerns, not existential ones. The best way to obfuscate is to punt about "clean coal" (an oxymoron), alternative energy (that will take considerable national will and government investment - e.g. the oil industry has literally been on government subsidies since the Bolshevik revolution), and of course demonize "the other" that doesn't look quite like your constituents in the first place (it tends to work "like a charm"; see ultraviolet and Melanin above).

That would take considerable synaptic activity, some long-range planning and a little less solipsism.

Brookings Institute

Increased automation guarantees a bleak outlook for Trump’s promises to coal miners,
Devashree Saha and Sifan Liu

Mining.com

Study shows 96% of some mining jobs can be automated,
Frik Els

New York Times

Coal Miners Hope Trump’s Order Will Help. But Few Are Counting on It,
Campbell Robertson
Policy Shift Helps Coal, but Other Forces May Limit Effect,
Clifford Krauss and Diane Cardwell
Planned Rollback of Climate Rules Unlikely to Achieve All Trump’s Goals,
Coral Davenport

CAL...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 27, 2017 at 9:36am

NASA will use CAL to better try to understand a highly misunderstood type of matter in space. Image Credit: NASA

Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, International Space Station, Materials Science, NASA, Thermodynamics

NASA has a goal of creating what they say will be the coldest place in the entire universe, as it will help them to understand a property of matter that isn't well-understood. The project has been in development for a number of years, but soon it will come to fruition.

In the near future, an ice chest-sized box that NASA is calling the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) will be shipped to the International Space Station aboard a supply rocket.

CAL will come equipped with the tools it needs to hyper-chill gas atoms to just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, which citing NASA, is about 100 million times colder than even the depths of outer space itself. It's worth noting that at absolute zero, atom activity reportedly freezes. The tools that will make this possible include a vacuum chamber, special lasers, and what NASA calls an “electromagnetic knife.” These tools will essentially slow the gas molecules that get trapped inside to a near-motionless state.

Since there is so much misunderstanding about how these kinds of hyper-chilled properties impact physics, this is a huge opportunity to fill a gap in mankind's expanding knowledge. The gasses that get chilled to these kinds of low temperatures really aren’t even gasses anymore – their atoms become arranged into a state of matter dubbed Bose-Einstein Condensate. This is a unique type of matter that we don’t fully understand yet. Scientists describe it as a type of “super fluid” that lacks any friction.

Lab Roots: NASA Aims to Create the Coldest Place in the Universe, Anthony Bouchard

Guest Authors Welcome at SpecFics.com

Posted by Tonya R. Moore on March 24, 2017 at 9:00am

Dust off those old specfic flashfics and short stories you’ve got lying around.

Spec Fics is now accepting submissions from Guest Authors who would like to showcase their overlooked works on our website. To that end, we are now accepting short works of fiction to be made available for free online reading.

We welcome speculative flash fiction and short stories. All sub-genres that fit under the umbrella of speculative fiction are welcome: scifi, horror, dark fantasy, steampunk—you name it.

For information on how to submit your story, here are the Submission Guidelines:

Submission Guidelines

Email your story as an attachment to tonyamoore@outlook.com.

Your story should be in RTF (Rich Text Format) or DOCX (Word) format. Be sure to include your name and email address in the story document.

Include the following information in the body of your email:

Name:

Short Bio:

Picture (Optional):

Website/Blog Url:

Previously blogged/published stories are welcome.

We do stipulate that your story must be your original work. Sorry, no Fan Fiction.

BLOGS

Featured Posts (3487)

Teaching Physics...

Electron Beams...

DDR...

Equiangular Geometry...

Abracadabra...

Small Particles, Big Science...

Spin Squeezing...

A Quicksand...

PEEM...

The Grey Area Project

GERDA...

Micro-Gami...

No Fooling...

The Shattering...

Martian Tsunamis...

Failure...

ON SALE NOW!!! Classic Sci-Fi Film/Graphic Novel

Be Like a Bullet...Be Unstoppable

Lies and Automation...

CAL...

Guest Authors Welcome at SpecFics.com

Note: this page contains paid content.