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Na vs Li...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 6, 2016 at 6:09am
Electrochemical characteristics of Na2Ti3O7 and VOPO4 electrodes in the "half-cell format" vs. Na+/Na. Courtesy: G Yu

Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, Solid State Physics

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin in the US and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China have developed a high-energy sodium-ion battery based on sodium titanate nanotubes and vanadyl phosphate layered nanosheet materials. The new device, which works over a wide temperature range of between –20 to +55°C, has a high operating voltage of close to 2.9 V and delivers a large reversible capacity of 114 mA h/g. It also boasts a high energy density of 220 Wh/kg, which makes it competitive with state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries.

Sodium-ion batteries are similar to their lithium-ion cousins since they store energy in the same way. They consist of two electrodes – anode and cathode – separated by an electrolyte. When the battery is being charged with electrical energy, metal ions move from the cathode through the electrolyte to the anode, where they are absorbed into the bulk of the anode material. Sodium-based devices are in principle more attractive though since sodium is highly abundant on Earth (its Clarke’s number is 2.64) and is therefore much cheaper than lithium. Sodium is also more environmentally friendly than lithium.

However, the radius of the sodium ion is significantly larger than that of the lithium ion. This makes it difficult to find a host electrolyte material that allows ions to be rapidly absorbed and removed. What is more, sodium-ion batteries made thus far suffer from a relatively low working potential, large capacity decay during cycling (which leads to a limited battery life) and poor safety.

Nanotechweb: Sodium-ion device could compete with lithium-ion batteries, Belle Dumé

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The Anthropocene Epoch...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 5, 2016 at 8:16am
Nuclear test explosion in Mururoa atoll, French Polynesia, in 1971. The official expert group says the Anthropocene should begin about 1950 and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across Earth by nuclear bomb tests. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images


Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Global Warming


The problem that humans have is no appreciation for the vastness of the passage of time in large scale. In other words, we don't believe what we haven't seen physically: climate change, evolution and a ~13.5 billion age universe noted science examples. It's exacerbated by the Internet and our current notions that information - and thus problems and resolutions - are concluded quickly. It is sobering this epoch has now been declared twelve years before I appeared on the planet.

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.

The Guardian:
The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Damian Carrington

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Party of Apocalypse...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 2, 2016 at 2:30pm

This is an essay I posted on Scribd.com. I wasn't going to post it until I heard about the apathy of my millennial niece and her friend back in Texas during this election cycle. I hope she reads this. I hope she's pissed off with Unc to the point she rolls her eyes and doesn't speak to me for a while...it'll mean she's at least listening.

Intro

I realize invoking the word apocalypse is a cultural malapropism, since it actually means “to reveal” instead of the popular association to Armageddon and mass extinction. Mind you, I really, REALLY wasn’t going to post this because…Internet. The shiver that could result from the pat-on-the-back self-congratulatory achievement of “going viral” can be career-limiting in many fields. However, we’re on the verge of electing a contrived fiction to the most powerful office ever created and give him the nuclear codes. I hear a lot of millennials – one my own niece and her friend – who aren’t voting for either candidate. Rather than say you should review “Schoolhouse Rock” videos and less “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” I’m going to “keep it 100” and put it in terms you can all understand and hopefully act on before the country you take for granted becomes your favorite dystopian movie. You can wait for the credits that won’t be coming.

The first night of the RNC convention could have been a success with the noted exception of Melania Trump lifting whole cloth parts of now First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to the DNC convention in 2008. An out-of-work journalist was the first to catch and tweet it (a sad indictment of the employed journalists ACTUALLY at the RNC convention) [1]. The last night of the RNC was like “The Dark Knight Returns”: the world was essentially a shit show like Gotham, and Batman screamed for 75 minutes incoherent, semi form, hand-tossed Word Salad anointing himself Bruce-Wayne-Almighty-Cheetos-Jesus savior of the planet by the strength of his will alone (no cool gadgets – just a Galaxy Smart Phone and a twitter handle he misspells as he jacks off on almost daily). The Bat’s bravery was previously demonstrated during his selfless sacrificed Vietnam five deferments to let others more worthy die in his place.

Link: Party of Apocalypse

Huffington Post:

GOP Operative Lashes Out At Party, Calls Trump 'Cheetos Jesus' In Epic Tweetstorm

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The Morality of Skynet...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 2, 2016 at 5:27am
Image Source: NY Times


Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Philosophy, Robotics, Singularity


From Frankenstein to Terminator, the cultural angst is the same: that which we create eventually destroy us. Now we have Siri and driver-less vehicles. The Singularity is what Terminator dramatized, that when an Artificial Intelligence becomes exponentially smarter than us, we may amount to it (our "children") as much as we regard gnats.

I've read some have projected 2030 as the year of The Singularity. I think personally that is more of a hope than prediction. I'll be 68, and I expect in reasonably good health. Its advent I'm guessing won't hurt too much, and be more closer to Data and the Enterprise main computer than HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey) or T-1000. If humanity's children are to have any morals, it will have to be those we're willing to display towards one another as well as teach. At this current epoch, we're not good examples to emulate.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:


1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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Do We Have Neighbors in the Universe?

Posted by Bill McCormick on August 31, 2016 at 1:26pm

I wrote this for World News Center and it will be the subject, this week, of a radio show I do every Friday. This is the intro. Click the link to read the whole thing.

Back on February 20, 2012, I wrote, in depth, about something called the WOW! Signal. Discovered in 1977 it was a signal so strong that it cut through the flotsam and jetsam of noise our universe normally makes to catch the attention of a scientist named Robert Gray. Unfortunately, he was working from recorded data when he made his discovery and no one has since been able to replicate his results. Or verify his basic conclusion; this signal did not originate on Earth. The implications, if he was right, are staggering. It would be proof that we aren’t alone in the universe. That there are other beings, at least, as technologically advanced as we. But, alas and alack (to quote Rapmaster Billy S.), tantalizing isn’t the same as proven. I don’t care what you heard on FOX! News. Or, as my surfer scientist bud likes to say, “gnarley shit dude.” No, wait, well, yes, he does say that, but he also says “Sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s steam.” So you don’t need to call the fire department every time. And in this case, you don’t convene the U.N. to formulate a plan on how to deal with imminent contact.

Yet.

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Separation Anxiety...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 1, 2016 at 5:25am
Lithium-7 as a test case was successfully purified by magnetically activated and guided isotope separation with the lab setup shown here. The oven for heating lithium is sitting on the red lab jack to the right. Circular view ports were used for shining lasers to optically pump the isotopes. Inside the rectangular box are the magnetic guides.

THOMAS MAZUR
Citation: Phys. Today 69, 9, 22 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3292


Topics: Atomic Physics, Isotopes, Mark G. Raizen, Research, Thermodynamics




Atomic beams, optical pumping, and magnet geometry are the crux of a fledgling method that may help meet the demand for pure isotopes.

Mark Raizen didn’t set out to separate isotopes. But a few years ago the University of Texas at Austin physicist realized that the methods he was using to cool atoms to near absolute zero could be adapted to enrich isotopes, and he had a hunch his approach—magnetically activated and guided isotope separation (MAGIS)—could help satisfy the growing demand for isotopes.

Fundamental research, medicine, energy, and other markets are finding new and growing applications for isotopically enriched materials, both stable and radioactive. “Many isotopes have been expensive and rare. They’re like an untapped natural resource,” says Raizen. It’s not unusual for enriched stable isotopes to cost $50 000 per gram, he notes.

Separation anxiety


For decades, the main instrument for separating stable isotopes has been the calutron, which was first built in 1941 and separates by charge-to-mass ratio (see the article by Bill Parkins, Physics Today, May 2005, page 45). A sample is ionized, accelerated with electric fields, and then deflected with magnetic fields. Because different isotopes of a given element have the same charge but vary in mass, they become separated in a magnetic field, with heavier isotopes deflected less. The US shuttered its last calutrons in the 1990s. Today the bulk of the world’s stable isotopes come from national inventories and from decades-old calutrons in Russia. Radioisotopes are made in reactors and accelerators around the globe.



 Physics Today: Can MAGIS work magic for separating stable isotopes? Toni Feder

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Big Data...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 31, 2016 at 6:10am
Demand for data scientists is booming. Shown here is the relative growth in US data science job postings. (Data courtesy of Indeed.com.)

Citation: Phys. Today 69, 8, 20 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3261


Topics: Computer Science, Economy, Jobs, STEM


A PhD is a heavy commitment, and many just like Bachelors and Masters STEM-prepared graduates have the same struggles anyone else has in the job market. It's a broad and somewhat inaccurate assumption that a STEM graduate doesn't have concerns with employment. The pendulum swings between massive need and largest expense: salaries on balance sheets. Despite the fact my youngest son will have a guaranteed job with his Civil Engineering firm, he heard over his last lunch with them before the semester starts when they've laid off, even affecting an employee that just came back from her maternity leave. It was sobering for him to say the least.

It is important most of all to remember why you entered a science-related field in the first place: the love of discovery that will never change, nor should you repent of. It is also important in knowing who you are to be flexible.

If different people buy the same items at the grocery store, will their taste in movies also strongly overlap? Can a company recognize when someone tries to make a fraudulent payment? Is a home buyer getting a fair price? Those are the sorts of problems that data scientists tackle.

“Data science is the marriage of statistics and computer science,” says Janet Kamin, chief admissions officer at NYC Data Science Academy. “It is the art of finding patterns and insights in large sets of data that allow you to make better decisions or learn things you couldn’t otherwise learn.” The demand for data scientists is booming across industries—retail, automotive, banking, health care, and more. It’s also growing in the nonprofit and government sectors. (See the plot on page 22.)



 Physics Today: Data science can be an attractive career for physicists, Toni Feder

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Quantum Supersolution Techniques...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 30, 2016 at 6:03am
Figure 1

(a) Two photonic wave functions on the image plane, each coming from a point source. X1 and X2 are the point-source positions, θ1 is the centroid, θ2 is the separation, and σ is the width of the point-spread function. (b) If photon counting is performed on the image plane, the statistics are Poisson with a mean intensity proportional to Λ(x)=[|ψ1(x)|2+|ψ2(x)|2]/2 .


Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics


Abstract

Rayleigh’s criterion for resolving two incoherent point sources has been the most influential measure of optical imaging resolution for over a century. In the context of statistical image processing, violation of the criterion is especially detrimental to the estimation of the separation between the sources, and modern far-field superresolution techniques rely on suppressing the emission of close sources to enhance the localization precision. Using quantum optics, quantum metrology, and statistical analysis, here we show that, even if two close incoherent sources emit simultaneously, measurements with linear optics and photon counting can estimate their separation from the far field almost as precisely as conventional methods do for isolated sources, rendering Rayleigh’s criterion irrelevant to the problem. Our results demonstrate that superresolution can be achieved not only for fluorophores but also for stars.

APS Physics: Quantum Theory of Superresolution for Two Incoherent Optical Point Sources
Mankei Tsang, Ranjith Nair, and Xiao-Ming Lu
Phys. Rev. X 6, 031033 – Published 29 August 2016
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031033

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The Priestess Second Saga Returns Monday Aug 29th....

Posted by H. Wolfgang Porter on August 27, 2016 at 8:29pm

https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1239122681?profile=original  The Priestess Second Saga Returns Monday August 29th as The Valley Knight begins his quest to thwart an army of desert warriors descending upon the Valley Real. Their target is the Priestess herself! As this is a mortal threat, the goddess within the Priestess cannot interfere even with all her vast power. With the help of Little Fish, the Knight has reached the place where the great host has gathered as they begin their genocidal war. But what can one man do against an army? Without Little Fish's power and the stalwart sword arm of the Aesir Chief Svengald, somehow the Valley Knight must move an entire nation to war to prevent the destruction of his wife the Priestess and all he holds dear. One man alone or not, whomever stands in the path of one who is beloved by a goddess-made-woman and Death itself best be prepared for a man who will stop at nothing to protect that which he loves! Read the week long event, 'The Priestess: Stones, Love and War'....    

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ET and Xenophobia...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 26, 2016 at 4:25am
Image Source: Simon Kneebone – cartoonist and illustrator


Topics: Astrophysics, Cosmology, SETI, Space Exploration, Star Trek


Xenophobia is something we experience among ourselves from others with five fingers, five toes; slight differences in frames and shades of Melanin. We've never encountered - as far as we know - an intelligence beyond our world similar to us due to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology but distinctly: alien.

Whatever we as a species ascribe to as deity for example, MUST by design favor our particular human tribe. We create echo chambers to reinforce our own confirmation-bias about ourselves, in the modern vernacular "creating our own realities." Any news outside this special nurturing bubble is usually opposed with breathtaking, sometimes violent cognitive dissonance to maintain this special nurturing cocoon.

What exactly WILL we do when some species a little older, surviving its own M.A.D. ideology answers our calls in the dark? Our history - both current and documented - doesn't bode well towards a rational or civilized response.

The short-lived Star Trek: Enterprise seemed to be hitting its stride with the episodes Demons and Terra Prime before its cancellation; our current clamor for nationalism and purity makes them both quite prescient. Enterprise showed a humanity at the cusp of establishing a United Federation of Planets. They initially instead showed old prejudices, and our disdain for being put out of our self-appointed special place in the universe, post surviving Trek's fictional human extinction-level events of World War III and war with the Xindi. Before the imagined utopias of Kirk or Picard and the current xenophobia displayed among our own species, we likely still have some growing to do.


Abstract

We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering about this at the very beginning of a long era in which stellar luminosity warms many planets, and by our best models, continues to provide equally good opportunities for intelligent life to evolve. By simple Bayesian reasoning, if, as we believe, intelligent life forms have the same propensity to evolve later on other planets as we had to evolve on ours, it follows that they will likely not pass through a similar wondering stage in their evolution. This suggests that the future holds some kind of interstellar communication that will serve to inform newly evolved intelligent life forms that they are not alone before they become curious.

Physics arXiv: Odds for an enlightened rather than barren future, David Haussler

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Horror Vacui...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 25, 2016 at 6:14am
James O'Brien for Quanta Magazine


Topics: Cosmology, History, Modern Physics, Richard Feynman


Horror vacui: "nature abhors a vacuum." (attributed to Aristotle)

Richard Feynman looked tired when he wandered into my office. It was the end of a long, exhausting day in Santa Barbara, sometime around 1982. Events had included a seminar that was also a performance, lunchtime grilling by eager postdocs, and lively discussions with senior researchers. The life of a celebrated physicist is always intense. But our visitor still wanted to talk physics. We had a couple of hours to fill before dinner.

I described to Feynman what I thought were exciting if speculative new ideas such as fractional spin and anyons. Feynman was unimpressed, saying: “Wilczek, you should work on something real.” (Anyons are real, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Looking to break the awkward silence that followed, I asked Feynman the most disturbing question in physics, then as now: “There’s something else I’ve been thinking a lot about: Why doesn’t empty space weigh anything?”

Feynman, normally as quick and lively as they come, went silent. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him look wistful. Finally he said dreamily, “I once thought I had that one figured out. It was beautiful.” And then, excited, he began an explanation that crescendoed in a near shout: “The reason space doesn’t weigh anything, I thought, is because there’s nothing there!”

Vacuum, in modern usage, is what you get when you remove everything that you can, whether practically or in principle. We say a region of space “realizes vacuum” if it is free of all the different kinds of particles and radiation we know about (including, for this purpose, dark matter — which we know about in a general way, though not in detail). Alternatively, vacuum is the state of minimum energy.

Intergalactic space is a good approximation to a vacuum.

Void, on the other hand, is a theoretical idealization. It means nothingness: space without independent properties, whose only role, we might say, is to keep everything from happening in the same place. Void gives particles addresses, nothing more.

Aristotle famously claimed that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” but I’m pretty sure a more correct translation would be “Nature abhors a void.” Isaac Newton appeared to agree when he wrote:

...that one Body may act upon another at a Distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.

But in Newton’s masterpiece, the Principia, the players are bodies that exert forces on one another. Space, the stage, is an empty receptacle. It has no life of its own. In Newtonian physics, vacuum is a void.

Quanta Magazine: How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space, Frank Wilczek

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Zika and Louisiana...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 24, 2016 at 8:48am
Zika Mosquito - Internet Search


Topics: Biology, Climate Change, Global Warming, Research


I recorded something on my DVR titled "Global Weirding," which I think is far more descriptive of the phenomena. "Warming" tends to imply extreme heat like the Sahara Desert ALL the time. It's more like what you've grown comfortable expecting...don't. Sensational blockbusters like "The Day After Tomorrow" don't help in our impatient point-and-click attention-deficit patience either. Instead of a sudden dystopian disaster, it should be thought of as a slow but steady train wreck.

Aerosol threats have been expected from our changing climate. This new threat is currently growing and concerning for many, like me that have relatives in harms way on the Gulf Coast and Florida. Thankfully, our stalwart, "science-friendly" representatives are on the case, tying battling related birth defects to eliminating abortion. Infants will be safely born on the Gulf Coast (as Latin America grapples with their own previous conservative views and legal prohibitions) sadly, with smaller heads and shortened lifespans. It is an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms and "values."

One of the top U.S. public health officials on Sunday warned that the mosquito-borne Zika virus could extend its reach across the U.S. Gulf Coast after officials last week confirmed it as active in the popular tourist destination of Miami Beach.

The possibility of transmission in Gulf States such as Louisiana and Texas will likely fuel concerns that the virus, which has been shown to cause the severe birth defect known as microcephaly, could spread across the continental United States, even though officials have played down such an outcome.

Concern has mounted since confirmation that Zika has expanded into a second region of the tourist hub of Miami-Dade County in Florida. Miami's Wynwood arts neighborhood last month became the site of the first locally transmitted cases of Zika in the continental United States.

"It would not be surprising we would see additional cases perhaps in other Gulf Coast states," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the allergy and infectious diseases unit of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said in an interview on Sunday morning with ABC News.

Scientific American:
Zika Poised for Possible Spread across U.S. Gulf, Chris Prentice

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Technique: PERFECT YOUR CRAFT

Posted by Ricardo Holliman on August 23, 2016 at 3:30pm

         What's up BSFS members? This is Ricardo Holliman; as you know I am working on an animated series called Kollege Kids with the new addition of Professor Holmes.  This picture is the rough draft stages of the show. I wanted to do this blog for inspiring creatives who are starting out and thinking of giving up because they don't see any major progress or results. When you work on a team oriented project vs a self oriented one; you tend to get criticism you don't want to hear. You want to throw a temper tantrum like a three year old when you don't get your way. 

             

     In reality compared to industry standards; you don't measure up. You get so burned out that you  put your illustrations in the attic for a while. Your team abandons you because they feel you are incompetent for the task.  What do you do when this happens? The answer is in plain sight. Perfect your technique and craft.  Go up in the attic and grab your illustrations. Go and watch the Behind The Scenes of your favorite animation show or movie you grew watching. Approach it from an industry standards so you know what role you play in projects. 

           

        Like me; my strong points are in visuals. My role as a visual/animation coordinator is character & background creation; graphic design; prop master; coordinating frames and key-frames for an animation; video production & editing. I am getting in writing and producing however my strong points are in visuals. When you revisit the attic and you are not facing any pressures working with a team who wants things in a timely manner. Your free time should be in perfecting your craft and learn new way of doing things.

           
     Read blogs, join groups, and get feedback from professionals who are doing what you do. Take  the constructive criticism like a creative professionals; be open to new ideas and programs. Make this an self oriented project and whatever you create. Write a story behind those rough drafts of your illustrations. Following industry standards will help you set up a template how to do things. It will help to show how professionals take constructive criticism vs an ameteur. 

             

     It is two years later; your team calls you up asking you the progress of your work. They see the new revamped version and they are very eager for you to rejoin the team. This is what happened to me for the past two years. You have to perfect your technique when no one is looking. You have to put work in even if you have two jobs. All you need is two hours out of a day to do so. If this is your passion; you will make time when you feel like you have no time. Perfect your technique and windows of opportunities will open for you. Give it time and you see major results. 

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Super-Sized Molecules...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 23, 2016 at 7:22am
APS/Alan Stonebraker
Distant partners. In this sketch, two cesium atoms in high Rydberg states form a weakly bound molecule about 1 micrometer across, comparable to the size of typical bacteria.


Topics: Atomic Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Computer, Rydberg Atom


Strongly bound diatomic molecules such as H2 or O2 are less than a nanometer across. Surprisingly, scientists have been able to create two-atom molecules more than a thousand times larger by using exotic atoms that attract one another only very weakly. Now, a pair of physicists have calculated what makes these “macrodimers” stable, and they have verified their predictions by creating micrometer-sized molecules containing two cesium atoms. The macrodimers could have applications in quantum computing.

Interest in these macromolecules stems from the challenges they pose to conventional understanding of molecules and bonds. More than a decade ago, physicists predicted that molecules with interatomic distances as large as 1 micrometer might be created by using a pair of atoms in so-called Rydberg states. These are atoms in which a single outer-shell electron has been excited to a high quantum state so that it orbits far away from the nucleus. Although Rydberg atoms are unstable, they can live as long as tens of microseconds, and experimenters have succeeded in creating macrodimers from them, confirming their existence indirectly by destroying them and detecting specific spectroscopic signatures [1].



 APS Focus: Giant Molecule Made from Two Atoms, Mark Buchanan

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Neutrinos, Matter and Antimatter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 22, 2016 at 6:22am
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
As neutrinos and antineutrinos change flavors they may illuminate the differences between matter and antimatter.


Topics: Atomic Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics


(July 28, 2016) - In the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

The anomaly, detected by the T2K experiment, is not yet pronounced enough to be sure of, but it and the findings of two related experiments “are all pointing in the same direction,” said Hirohisa Tanaka of the University of Toronto, a member of the T2K team who presented the result to a packed audience in London earlier this month.

“A full proof will take more time,” said Werner Rodejohann, a neutrino specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg who was not involved in the experiments, “but my and many others’ feeling is that there is something real here.”

The long-standing puzzle to be solved is why we and everything we see is matter-made. More to the point, why does anything — matter or antimatter — exist at all? The reigning laws of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, treat matter and antimatter nearly equivalently, respecting (with one known exception) so-called charge-parity, or “CP,” symmetry: For every particle decay that produces, say, a negatively charged electron, the mirror-image decay yielding a positively charged antielectron occurs at the same rate. But this cannot be the whole story. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced during the Big Bang, equal amounts should have existed shortly thereafter. And since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, such a situation would have led to the wholesale destruction of both, resulting in an empty cosmos.

Quanta Magazine: Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift, Natalie Wolchover

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These Truths...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 19, 2016 at 8:00am
Credit: Chris Gash


Topics: Economy, Education, Politics, STEM


"We hold these truths to be self-evident": the rest is a contentious matter, for at the time the revered words were written, the rest of the sentence "all men were [not] created equal," Native Americans, women and my ancestors chief among them.

"Self-evident": this is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father and scientist. It was an edit from Thomas Jefferson's original "sacred and undeniable," a reflection of the scientific revolution at the time, homage to Sir Isaac Newton and "the analytic empiricism of Franklin's close friend David Hume." The American experiment, though far then and now from perfect, would be based not on divine right or dynastic succession, but reason, facts and currently bereft in the public sphere: logic.

It is incredible that Scientific American would take such a stance, but it has to be taken. There are elements of our society that promote "creating their own reality"; the backlash to the Cosmos reboot; Creationism versus Evolutionary Biology; the Flat Earth Society; Young Earth Creationism with more dangerous, unscientific thought on the horizon for exploitation by cynical politicians or the latest flimflam artist.

This year's election is unique as one political party has nominated such a flimflam artist as its candidate, that has made no bones about his hostility to science: "climate change is a plot by the Chinese against American manufacturing." As the New York Daily News opined on his loose 2nd amendment comments: "this isn't funny anymore."

This is an assault on fact versus fantasy, science versus psychobabble; sanity versus insanity. Flimflam's persona non grata interviewed on Alex Jones - the KING of conspiracy provocateurs - as a casual search of YouTube on his rant compilations attests, many right wing pundits have, as he's complained - mainstreamed his views in the public sphere without crediting him, only nourishing a faux ecosystem around Mr. Flimflam. FF sometimes quotes him verbatim, which Jones says admirably is "surreal."

What is surreal is that as a nation, we've crossed the Rubicon. What started as a political tactic to - as Barry Goldwater said "hunt where the ducks are," getting votes from a disgruntled south that couldn't take the changes the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Fair Housing Act (1968) ushered in, the Dixiecrat ducks came: John Birch Society cum Southern Strategy cum Reagan Welfare Queens cum Faux News cum Birther Movement cum Alt-Right Movement mainstreamed in an echo chamber. Like a cult, they created their own realities. When Bob Jones University's policy against miscegenation (interracial dating) no longer worked selling themselves as a Christian institution, they found a suitable substitute in abortion opposition. The GOP's platform opposing gay rights - despite the American Psychiatric Association's removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - is evidenced by its insistence on the quackery of "reparative therapy."

What is surreal is our measure and substantiation of information as citizenry, and how we make decisions as a republic respecting reality, facts, data, evidence, REAL THINGS: what truths are self-evident, or quackery we'll follow over a cliff.

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone." Rod Serling, Season One Intro.

“If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

—Richard Feynman

Four years ago in these pages, writer Shawn Otto warned our readers of the danger of a growing antiscience current in American politics. “By turning public opinion away from the antiauthoritarian principles of the nation's founders,” Otto wrote, “the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has faced before.”

Otto wrote those words in the heat of a presidential election race that now seems quaint by comparison to the one the nation now finds itself in. As if to prove his point, one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.

Americans have long prided themselves on their ability to see the world for what it is, as opposed to what someone says it is or what most people happen to believe. In one of the most powerful lines in American literature, Huck Finn says: “It warn't so. I tried it.” A respect for evidence is not just a part of the national character. It goes to the heart of the country's particular brand of democratic government. When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—they were asserting the fledgling nation's grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.

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