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The Martian...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 2, 2015 at 6:37am
Image Source: Link Below


Topics: Astronaut, Astronomy, Mars, NASA, Science Fiction, Space Exploration


The Martian is a geek's dream: blogging a story, self-publishing it and seeing your creation on the big screen! Kudos to Andy Weir. I look forward to his future creations and success.

Matt Damon has had a few rough days opening his mouth and inserting his foot quite deeply. To prop up his street creds post-Bourne Trilogy, Interstellar and embarrassing serial Tourette's syndrome, he kind of needs this distraction.


Seriously though: Mr. Weir got a lot of help with the science from other experts specializing outside of his area of Computer Science that perused his prose, correcting some plot lines. There are inevitably going to be random conspiracy provocateurs that ties this movie's release to who-knows-what, though I'm sure we'll be impressed by their chutzpah and hubris - the Jade Helm 15 hysteria comes to mind.

For humanity to even try a voyage to Mars, we're going to need [from the Astronomy article] "a surge" of interest beyond our social media distractions. Ironically, the things that are the core of our distractions - integrated circuits - were developed by industry and MIT for NASA to design a new guidance system and reduce rocket payloads. First the explorers are financed by governments; then the entrepreneurs and spin offs follow. This was during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, so the government in this case was the United States almost exclusively. As we venture forth into the "final frontier," we're going to need to cooperate beyond borders. When Apollo happened - and we actually saw a man on the moon - we started briefly (ever so briefly), seeing ourselves as a species, devoid of imagined boundaries, creeds and nationalities. It was during the sixties, near the end of the Civil Rights era; many of us reeling from the death of Dr. King. As a country; as humanity, we needed such a boost - and still do.

Astronomy: Behind the science of The Martian, Eric Betz
NPR: How 'The Martian' Became A Science Love Story, Geoff Brumfiel

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Fait Accompli...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 3, 2015 at 6:00am
Image source (sigh): here


Topics: Commentary, Fait Accompli, Politics


Thursday night I was at work, numb from the news of yet another shooting. I remember an essay I wrote titled "I'll be famous," a sentiment from the perpetrator of a mall shooting in Utah (apparently, a breakup with his girlfriend sparked it). I repent of blaming mental illness in this and related cases, the go-to knee jerk shtick of every pundit and schlock spouting psycho-babble on flat screens for ratings. I recall the graph I pulled from NASDAQ data on Smith and Wesson (the only publicly traded stock of a weapons manufacturer I could find), and correlated it to an apparent increase in value after every significant, newsworthy shooting. The president's remarks were emotional, genuine and probably a few outlets took him up on his challenge of comparing ten years worth of public shootings to terrorist attacks. My guess is a few affiliates, likely after their statisticians compiled the data, opted not to broadcast it as it went against their stated dogma.

I live in upstate New York, and visited Newtown, Connecticut Christmas Day in 2012 with my family - my wife, my daughter-in-law; my sons to pay our respects. The emotions we encountered were still raw and dour; variations of twenty-six angels erected as we slowly drove or walked through; the flowers and teddy bears fresh. Alex Jones suspected a "false flag operation," which supports he knows little to nothing of the term's origin by his overuse of it to everything of evidence he won't accept. Despite our current naval-gazing and "soul searching," I sadly have come to a dark conclusion:

When twenty children and six educators could be gunned down in their own school and our lawmakers did absolutely NOTHING, it was pretty much a wrap after that!

We...are...nothing...to them.

We are of no importance to elected officials that are behind metal detectors; bomb shelters and have their own armed congressional security - and equally impressive at their progeny's private schools; we are nothing to 47% of legislatures who are themselves millionaires or multimillionaires: how does a body like THAT raise taxes on THEMSELVES? We are especially gnats compared to pachyderms when we cannot write checks in the thousands of dollars to fund their next election to keep their jobs (with taxpayer subsidized health benefits and a really GOOD retirement) for 20, 30, 40, 50 years! In the case of the presidency, both major candidates must raise close to a BILLION dollars for a job that pays $400,000.00. Let that irony sink in.

So, as much as I agree with the president's statements, I am both a rationalist and realist. Like the mythical Chris Kringle, I no longer believe in jolly old elves sliding down chimneys; nor unicorns; Bigfoot; UFOs or Loch Ness Monsters. There are however, monsters, and I'm not talking the "lone wolf"/individual psychopath trooped out to steer the conversation toward a faux angst about "mental health"...it is US.

Like Texas textbooks, we can classify Africans as "workers" as if they willingly boarded the "Good Ship Jesus" to the New World seeking opportunity: the word "slave" or slavery appears at least 21 times in the official articles of secession, just not in these textbooks. We can say "all men are created equal," ignoring 3/5th a person; lynchings, castrations, burning crosses; burning people at stakes (usually after lynchings and castrations); voter suppression, poll taxes and personhood conferred to corporations not by Citizen's United, but the 14th Amendment during Robber Baron days. We can say "remember the Alamo," and forget the entire state that legally CAN'T secede used to be the territory of Mexico. We can dismiss the thousands of Asians that built the railroads for those barons, losing their lives and the Japanese Americans like George Takei's family (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek) interned on suspicion based on their appearance. We can call it "western expansion" and "Manifest Destiny" and completely ignore the indigenous people whose land was taken; populations wiped out, "Trail of Tears" in Oklahoma, and their only compensation thus far has been "reservations." We can bury recent history under a dark carpet - Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; was not affiliated with Al Qaeda, but we invaded it anyway and stayed for longer than WWII, after two tax cuts for the wealthy; an unfunded Medicare Part D, and loosened financial regulations that caused our economy to go into free fall before the 2008 elections. Hell, if we can ignore all that, climate change denial is a snap!

If "corporations are people," then America is a psychopath. It at least explains a lot regarding our current political morass and ineptitude, and maybe that it's always been.

The last paragraph of Tim Kreider's superb essay in The Week, May 29, 2014 brings it home with a punch. I invite you to read it in its entirety:

If we're not going to do anything again, I'd just like to make one request: given that we've all agreed, if only by our passive acquiescence, not to keep this from happening, can we please quit pretending to care? Let's just skip the histrionics this time: no pro forma shock, condolence photo ops, somber speeches, flags at half-mast, meaningless noises from liberals about legislation, meaningless counter-noises from the NRA about armed guards in elementary schools. Why bother going through the motions of soul-searching when we know very well there's nothing to search? If we can't be brave we might at least be honest: when we see the familiar helicopter shots of ambulances outside a school, the clusters of classmates hugging, the sobbing parents being led away, the makeshift shrines of candles and plush toys, instead of looking stricken or covering our mouths or saying "Oh my God" or "How horrible," let's just all look each other in the eye and say: "Shit happens." Jeb cleaned it up.

If that is to be all our fates, let that be our epitaphs without further pretense, or delay!
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Charlotte's Web...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 1, 2015 at 6:09am
Figure 3. A snapshot from a cosmological simulation shows relatively cool gas flowing into two rotating protogalactic disks (magenta) from filaments (gray-green) of the cosmic web. Hot ionized gas at temperatures greater than 106 K is shown in red. (Courtesy of Philip Hopkins/Caltech.)


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Big Bang, Cosmology, Early Universe


A strand of the web appears to be conducting gas into the protogalaxy.

The clumpy universe we see today can be traced back to quantum fluctuations during the period of inflation, just after the Big Bang. Cosmologists think that as the universe cooled, the fluctuations seeded emerging matter that then collapsed into giant walls, and within those walls it collapsed further into filaments separated by great voids. The network of filaments, dubbed the cosmic web, is revealed—if indirectly—by astronomical surveys that show galaxies strung across the presumed filaments, with bigger galaxies and galaxy clusters at nodes where filaments intersect.

Direct observation of the filaments themselves is difficult because their constituents, mostly dark matter and cold gas, are either invisible or too faint. But with help from a quasar 10 billion light-years from Earth, Christopher Martin of Caltech and his colleagues have been able to take a close look at a strand of the cosmic web.1 The astronomers trained the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope on the neighborhood of quasar QSO UM287 and observed, illuminated by the quasar’s intense UV radiation, a cosmic-web filament attached to a rotating, actively forming galaxy.

1. D. C. Martin et al., Nature 524, 192 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14616

Physics Today:
Astronomers observe a nascent galaxy stuck to the cosmic web, Sung Chang

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The Trouble With Time Travel

Posted by Tonya R. Moore on September 30, 2015 at 5:58am

Time travel is what we call the notion of moving from one point in time to another, by means other than simply existing throughout the passage of time. If my present self were to somehow physically visit the past or the future, I would have achieved time travel.

Popular science suggests that time travel should be possible in some way, shape or form but the truth is, humans know too little about time itself to claim with much confidence that time travel is either possible or impossible.

We have a general idea of how time behaves, based on how we perceive events unfolding in the universe around us. We can clearly distinguish between points in time. We distinguish things that have happened (the past) from things that are happening (the present) and we can speculate about or anticipate the future–things that have not happened yet. Our understanding of what time is depends upon the manner in which we experience the passage of time.

What if everything we think we know about time is wrong?

Scholars once assumed all time is linear (flows in on direction: past to present to future) and an inflexible constant, based upon the way we observe events unfolding in the universe around us and the effects that the progression of time has on our minds, bodies and environment.

Learning more about our cosmic neighborhood and the way celestial bodies interact with each other has lead academics to believe that time is not so simplistic in nature. Now, mathematicians and physicists have come to regard time as more of a fluid and complex entity.

In his article “IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?” Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York explains how Albert Einstein’s Relativity Theory led him to reject the notion of past, present and future as anything more than illusions invented to satisfy the human mind.

Instead, he suggested that what we call time is something like a river with currents that slow or speed up depending on velocity and proximity to certain celestial bodies. Kurt Gödel had also previously suggested this theory, further stating that this “river” would be populated by “whirlpools” that bend time into a sort of circle and traveling along the curve of this circle would ultimately make going backward in time possible.

The notion of traveling backwards in time presents a very popular set of problems though. The Grandfather Paradox, for example, presents the following question: if I were to travel back in time and change my own past in a way that would cause my present self to not have ever been born, how could I have ever existed to travel back in time in the first place? Not to mention, if humans in the future will achieve the capability to travel back in time, where are all the time travelers?

Quantum Physics presents an elegant solution to the above problems via Multiverse Theory which says there may be multiple universes existing in parallel. So, there would be a universe for every single possible event and outcome—a universe for everything that has ever happened and will happen, and universes for everything else that ever could have happened and might happen in the future.

In this case, some multiverse denizen travels back into the past and changes the future. History as we know it continues as we’ve always known it but the time traveler has shifted to a new timeline and now exists in a universe in which a time traveler journeyed to the past and committed whatever act created that universe’s particular outcome of that event.

If anything, these clashing arguments serve to drive home the point that what we know of the universe is extremely limited. We can only interpret the function of a universal mechanism such as time based on our limited understanding and capabilities. Our current knowledge of quantum physics and cosmology only allows us to theorize that time travel might be achievable.

Whether or not humans have the wherewithal to accomplish it someday is something that will have to be left to the imagination, for the time being. Sadly, most time travel stories hit that wall of causality and wind up detouring to that sad, sad place where TV tropes go to die.

As a speculative fiction writer, I WANT to believe in the possibility. As a sci-fi fan, I long to read a truly interesting time travel story that chucks out all the old cliches and gives voice to a truly entertaining, yet plausible tale. Is there a writer out there who can satisfy this desire?

Dare I try? Dare you?

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Wearing Well...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 30, 2015 at 8:34am
The world’s first stretchable and conformable thin-film transistor (TFT) driven LED display laminated into textiles developed by Holst Centre, imec and CSMT.


Topics: Consumer Electronics, Humor, Materials Science, Metamaterials, Thin Films


Okay, I've got a wearable device on my wrist that's synced to my smart phone. I often forget to put it on. I input my mass; it monitors the steps I take per day (goal of 10,000) and how long and how "deep" my sleep was. I'm often disappointed.

I could see this catching on with the young initially. As with Facebook and all other social media platforms, they'll exit as soon as the "oldsters" start wearing their favorite duds. Youngsters really should calm down...you're sounding like us.

Researchers from Holst Centre (set up by TNO and imec), imec and CMST, imec’s associated lab at Ghent University, have demonstrated the world’s first stretchable and conformable thin-film transistor (TFT) driven LED display laminated into textiles. This paves the way to wearable displays in clothing providing users with feedback.

Wearable devices such as healthcare monitors and activity trackers are now a part of everyday life for many people. Today’s wearables are separate devices that users must remember to wear. The next step forward will be to integrate these devices into our clothing. Doing so will make wearable devices less obtrusive and more comfortable, encouraging people to use them more regularly and, hence, increasing the quality of data collected. A key step towards realizing wearable devices in clothing is creating displays that can be integrated into textiles to allow interaction with the wearer.

Solid State Technology: Turning clothing into information displays

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Martian Water...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 29, 2015 at 6:16am

These dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks called recurring slope lineae flowing downhill on Mars are inferred to have been formed by contemporary flowing water. Recently, planetary scientists detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Hale crater, corroborating their original hypothesis that the streaks are indeed formed by liquid water. The blue color seen upslope of the dark streaks are thought not to be related to their formation, but instead are from the presence of the mineral pyroxene. The image is produced by draping an orthorectified (Infrared-Red-Blue/Green(IRB)) false color image (ESP_030570_1440) on a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of the same site produced by High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (University of Arizona). Vertical exaggeration is 1.5.

Credits: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Topics: Exoplanets, Humor, Mars, NASA, Space Exploration


If you do a search on this blog using Mars in the upper left-hand corner (next to the magnifying glass), you'll see a lot of posts on this site regarding past announcements from NASA regarding microbes, water and possible (previous) life on Mars.

Then there was this yesterday: the usual breathless, bloviating hyperbole from a rube that couldn't even pass ballroom dancing; that actually has a rapidly graying, dwindling audience listening to his slobbering drivel, spouting an even more warped conspiracy provocation (than usual). Mixing Oxycontin and Viagra: it's such a dangerous thing...

New findings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.

“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water -- albeit briny -- is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”

NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars
Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo

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Quantum Dot Photodetector...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 28, 2015 at 7:40am
Andrew Fidler of Los Alamos National Laboratory examines an ultrafast photodetector used to measure quantum-dot carrier multiplication in real time. Courtesy: V Klimov


Topics: Nanotechnology, Optics, Quantum Dots, Quantum Mechanics, Semiconductor Technology


Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US have developed the first ultrafast photodetector made from quantum dots that is capable of directly observing the extra electrons produced via “carrier multiplication” – the process by which multiple electrons are generated by a single photon. The result could help in the development of more efficient solar cells and new types of photo and radiation detectors.

When a conventional solar cell or photodetector absorbs a single photon, a single electron-hole pair (or exciton) is generated. However, in quantum dots (which are small pieces of semiconductor just several nanometres in size), electrons can efficiently interact with each other after they have absorbed light, generating multiple electrons from a single photon. This effect is known as carrier multiplication, and could help make cheaper and more efficient solar cells as well as new types of photodetectors.

Nanotechweb.org:
Ultrafast quantum-dot photodetector detects multiple electrons, Belle Dumé

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Guest Bloggers Wanted

Posted by Tonya R. Moore on September 25, 2015 at 11:34am

Calling all spec-fic writers and anime & manga bloggers:

My aim is to make my blog a great place to guest blog about anime, manga or your speculative fiction works, or just genres that you love. As for the specific topic or your post, that would be up to you. Write about what you like on your own terms. You can be as abstract or specific as you wish.

Policy

Your guest post must be genre-relevant. The themes of guest posts must be related to anime, manga/comics or speculative fiction in some way. I’d love to see people writing about awesome things like steampunk heroines, intergalactic travel, space opera, urban fantasy, horror, robots, aliens, monsters–you name it.

How to Submit a Request to Post

Send me a message with a brief introduction, your proposed topic and the date that you would like to post. You should expect a response from me within 3 days.

If you need to post to coincide with a book launch or other promo that you’re running on your own blog or website, do let me know so that we can schedule your guest post accordingly.

Questions or Suggestions?

Please post them in the comments below.

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Big $cience...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 25, 2015 at 7:04am
Public Domain - US Government & [2] below


Topics: CERN, Economy, Education, Jobs, Nuclear Fusion, Politics, Research, STEM


I recall before the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, there was supposed to be the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahatchie, Texas. It was there, we were supposed to discover the "God Particle," and cement American leadership in High Energy Particle Physics research. Though the 90's during the saw economic surpluses, low unemployment and a robust economy of legend, part of the belt tightening included base closures (Bergstrom Air Force Base, for one to the now International Airport in Austin) and sadly, the Super Collider. That unfortunate shortsightedness delayed the discovery of The Higgs Boson, and as Neil deGrasse Tyson observed, saw the exodus of that scientific discovery from the United States. My wife's cousin was an engineer on the project that when it ended, so did his employment at the time.

I am incredulous that we naively see America as #1, yet cede our technological leadership by shortsightedness, fruitless pursuit of pseudoscience and political expediency. Science is not decided in the deified "market"; it is typically not self-funded nor self-sustaining; the Moon Launches, Shuttle missions and ISS were not all crowd sourced on Kick Starter, nor will any future endeavors to the asteroid belt and Mars require only benevolent billionaires. Our current national investment is in soundbite phrasings; empty words spoken by leaders to "tickle the ears" of their constituents and ensure their reelection in the next cycle. There is a direct proportional correlation to technological proficiency; national wealth and prosperity. An American Super Collider would have paid for itself from the PhD researchers to engineers, cafeteria workers and janitors, taxpayers all. CERN gives tours, and likely inspire another generation of scientists and engineers; educators [and] politicians with scales fallen from their eyes, widened with wonder. That wonder and spin off prosperity could have been shared in what is now a cavernous crater to our impolitic actions, "deep in the heart of Texas."

In my story on advances in smaller-scale, privately funded fusion reactor projects last week (“Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality”), I stated that “Companies like Tri Alpha offer a path to fusion paved not with taxpayer dollars but with private-sector money—which ultimately is the only way to actually get something built.”

I considered that statement rather innocuous, but many readers disagreed, going so far as to call it “libertarian claptrap.” The advances I wrote about, said BarryG, “were EXACTLY only possible because they were very LITERALLY paved with taxpayer R&D.”

For the record, I didn’t say that only private-sector money is needed to bring new energy technologies, like fusion, to market; it’s undeniable that decades of taxpayer funding have been necessary to get the basic research to the point where companies like Tri Alpha and General Fusion can pursue newer approaches that could, plausibly, attract private sector investment. Both are essential; one will never work without the other. The key is defining the inflection point, at which the technology is mature enough and demand is robust enough to create a viable market that’s attractive to investors seeking a reasonable return. Any market dependent on long-term government support to sustain itself was never really a viable market in the first place. The trick is clearly defining “long-term.” [1]

If all had gone according to plan, the gargantuan U.S. high-energy physics project would have already found the Higgs particle, having solidly won the competition with its European competitor. Peter Higgs, in fact, might have collected his physics Nobel a few years earlier.

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) that would have graced the rolling prairies of Texas would have boasted energy 20 times larger than any accelerator ever constructed and might have been revealing whatever surprises that lay beyond the Higgs, allowing the U.S. to retain dominance in high-energy physics. Except the story didn’t play out according to script. Twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Congress officially killed the project, leaving behind more than vacant tunnel in the Texas earth. [2]

1. MIT Technology Review: Weighing the Cost of Big Science, Richard Martin
2. Scientific American: The Supercollider That Never Was, David Appell

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Squitches...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 24, 2015 at 7:34am
The metal–molecule–metal switching gap lowers the surface adhesion forces and allows nanoscale force control through compression of the molecular layer, while enabling formation of a few nanometer-thick gaps for sub-1 V operation. Courtesy of ACS Nano


Topics: Electrical Engineering, Nanotechnology, NEMS, Quantum Mechanics, Semiconductor Technology


The transistor – a switching element that defined technological progress through the 20th century – may be reaching its limits as demands for smaller devices continue. One alternative is the nanoelectromechanical (NEM) switch, but so far these have fallen short of the performance criteria required. Now an improved NEM switch based on tunnelling has demonstrated how these switches may yet be a viable contender to succeed the conventional transistor in low-power devices.

“To be competitive, the NEM switch operation must be made more energy efficient and reliable,” says Farnaz Niroui, a researcher at the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. “Our proposed tunnelling switching mechanism based on molecular thin films enables us to achieve drastic miniaturization of the devices to lower the operating voltages and provide nanoscale force control for more repeatable and reliable performance.”

Traditional electromechanical switches complete a circuit when the two electrodes are in contact, and break it – ‘turn off’ – when they are not. Scaling these elements down to the nanoscale offers a switching mechanism that may outperform conventional transistors in terms of the on/off ratio and low leakage current that can be achieved. However, operating reliably at low voltages requires control over the nanoscale distance between the electrodes that is tricky in itself, and further complicated by adhesive ‘stiction’ forces that cause the device to fail.

Here, the tunnelling approach appears to provide the answer for Niroui and her team at MIT led by Vladimir Bulović, Jeffrey Lang and Timothy Swager. They sandwich a self-assembled organic molecular film – poly(ethylene glycol)-dithiol (PEG-dithiol) – between the electrodes and modulate the tunnelling current through the film as it compresses and recovers.

Nanotechweb.org:
Low-voltage electromechanical 'squitches' make their debut, Anna Demming

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KOLLEGE KIDS UPDATE 2 FOR JARVIS

Posted by Ricardo Holliman on September 24, 2015 at 11:15am

This is the latest update on Kollege Kids Jarvis. Your son Jr will get a dig on the new version of Kollege Kids.  This place is  Chessman Square; it is a district in the Land of Chessman/Africa America where the young people go.This area is Black Science Fiction Society District where young black  people who love Earth Squadron and BSFS.  Jarvis your son Jr will dig this new version and he will not be too old to watch this. 

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Ain't Misbehavin'...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 23, 2015 at 7:45am
A display from the Large Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment shows the paths of particles such as leptons created in the collision of two protons at the accelerator. LHCb and another accelerator experiment, Belle, have found preliminary evidence that leptons do not obey the known laws of physics.

CERN/LHCb Collaboration


Topics: High Energy Physics, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, Particle Physics, Standard Model, Theoretical Physics


Right or wrong, the cultural reference to the blog title here.

At the smallest scales, everything in the universe can be broken down into fundamental morsels called particles. The Standard Model of particle physics—the reigning theory of these morsels—describes a small collection of known species that combine in myriad ways to build the matter around us and carry the forces of nature. Yet physicists know that these particles cannot be all there is—they do not account for the dark matter or dark energy that seem to contribute much of the universe’s mass, for example. Now two experiments have observed particles misbehaving in ways not predicted by any known laws of physics, potentially suggesting the existence of some new type of particle beyond the standard zoo. The results are not fully confirmed yet, but the fact that two experiments colliding different types of particles have seen a similar effect, and that hints of this behavior also showed up in 2012 at a third particle collider, has many physicists animated. “It’s really bizarre,” says Mark Wise, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the experiments. “The discrepancy is large and it seems like it’s on very sound footing. It’s probably the strongest, most enduring deviation we’ve seen from the Standard Model.” Finding such a crack in the Standard Model is exciting because it suggests a potential path toward expanding the model beyond those particles currently known.

The eyebrow-raising results come from the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland and the Belle experiment at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan. Both observed an excess of certain types of leptons compared to others produced when particles called B mesons (made of a bottom quark and an antiquark) decay. Leptons are a category of particles that includes electrons, as well as their heavier cousins muons and taus. A Standard Model principle known as lepton universality says that all leptons should be treated equally by the weak interaction, the fundamental force responsible for radioactive decay. But when the experiments observed a large number of B meson decays, which should have produced equal numbers of electrons, muons and taus among their final products (after the different masses of the particles are taken into account), the decays actually made more taus.

Scientific American:
2 Accelerators Find Particles That May Break Known Laws of Physics
Clara Moskowitz

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Schrödinger's Bacterium...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 22, 2015 at 8:59pm
Electron microscope image of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, which could someday be put in a quantum superposition. (Courtesy: Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/Science Photo Library)


Topics: Biology, Quantum Mechanics, Schrödinger's cat, Superconductivity, Research


A proposal for putting a living bacterium into a superposition of quantum states has been unveiled by physicists in the US and China. If successful, the experiment would be the first realization – albeit microscopic – of Schrödinger's famous thought experiment involving a cat in a box that is simultaneously alive and dead until an observer makes a measurement by peering into the box. As well as improving our understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics, the researchers say that their proposed experiment could also yield a new technique for monitoring defects in biological molecules.

Superposition is a quirky property of the quantum world that allows a physical system such as an atom or photon to exist in two or more quantum states, until a measurement is made on it. In recent years, physicists have created superposition states using inanimate objects of increasing size, from electrons and photons to atoms, molecules and even tiny mechanical systems. Now, Tongcang Li* of Purdue University and Zhang-Qi Yin of Tsinghua University propose doing the same thing with a living object – a tiny bacterium – to realize a version of Schrödinger's cat.

The proposal involves a tiny mechanical oscillator built by John Teufel and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado. That oscillator is an aluminium disc 15 μm across and 100 nm thick that forms the upper plate of a capacitor within a superconducting inductor-capacitor (LC) circuit. In 2011 Teufel's group was able to put the mechanical oscillator in its quantum ground state. This was done by first cooling the apparatus in a cryostat and then subjecting the oscillator to "sideband cooling", which involves coupling its mechanical vibrations to microwave radiation.

* Dr. Tongcang Li was Dr. Mark G. Raizen's former PhD student, University of Texas, Austin; my distinct honor to know both gentlemen.

Physics World:
Could 'Schrödinger's bacterium' be placed in a quantum superposition?
Edwin Cartlidge

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Molecules of Light...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 21, 2015 at 9:30am
Researchers show that two photons, depicted in this artist’s conception as waves (left and right), can be locked together at a short distance. Under certain conditions, the photons can form a state resembling a two-atom molecule, represented as the blue dumbbell shape at center.

Credit: E. Edwards/JQI


Topics: Optics, Physics Humor, Quantum Mechanics, Research, Science Fiction, Star Wars


No, "The Force is [not yet] with us Young Skywalker," but it is an interesting application you might soon find on your next gadget purchase, i.e. using photons instead of electrons switching states to carry information.

It’s not lightsaber time, not yet. But a team including theoretical physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has taken another step toward building objects out of photons, and the findings* hint that weightless particles of light can be joined into a sort of “molecule” with its own peculiar force.

The findings build on previous research that several team members contributed to before joining NIST. In 2013, collaborators from Harvard, Caltech and MIT found a way to bind two photons together so that one would sit right atop the other, superimposed as they travel. Their experimental demonstration was considered a breakthrough, because no one had ever constructed anything by combining individual photons—inspiring some to imagine that real-life lightsabers were just around the corner.

Now, in a paper forthcoming in Physical Review Letters, the NIST and University of Maryland-based team (with other collaborators) has showed theoretically that by tweaking a few parameters of the binding process, photons could travel side by side, a specific distance from each other. The arrangement is akin to the way that two hydrogen atoms sit next to each other in a hydrogen molecule.

* M.F. Maghrebi, M.J. Gullans, P. Bienias, S. Choi, I. Martin, O. Firstenberg, M.D. Lukin, H.P. Büchler and A. V. Gorshkov. Coulomb Bound States of Strongly Interacting Photons. Physical Review Letters, September 16, 2015.

NIST: Physicists Show ‘Molecules’ Made of Light May Be Possible, Chad Boutin

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Exploring Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 18, 2015 at 6:29am
Image source: Link below


Topics: Education, Economy, Humor, Jobs, STEM


A group of educational researchers have created an app for iOS, Android, PCs, and Macs, to teach physics to 9-graders. I'm a strong advocate of Physics-Chemistry-Biology, the reverse of how science is taught in high schools now.

The app, Exploring Physics, is meant to take particular physics curriculum already being taught in a number of public school districts, including Columbia's, and make it available digitally. The Exploring Physics curriculum app is designed to replace traditional lecture-based learning with discussions and hands-on experiments.

“The idea in the app is to have students learn by doing stuff,” said Meera Chandrasekhar, the co-creator of the app and a curators' teaching professor in the MU Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Even though it’s a digital app, it actually involves using quite a lot of hands-on materials.”

I thought this was a neat app to have and use. Teachers: See if your districts fund this for you. Students: You're likely not going to be able to use it DURING exams. Use it to reinforce your understanding of lecture and notes. The best apps of all are your eyes, ears, attention and participation.

Again, I get nothing except one, self-serving thing: a replacement workforce for when I retire. Call it my "school-to-STEM" pipeline.
Image source: Link below

Site: Exploring Physics

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Brain Freeze...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 17, 2015 at 6:47am
A scan of a young woman’s brain after being frozen.


Topics: Biology, NASA, Pseudoscience, Science Fiction, Space Exploration


A staple of science fiction on Einstein-relativistic terms has always been "sleeper ships," as you'll see at the link, NASA has funded a study. You'll see them in Star Trek or the Alien/Prometheus products, and most recently Interstellar. Essentially, you would go into a hibernation, whereby your vitals would be slowed to a crawl, and things like power, lighting and food for long journeys would be minimized, at least until so-called warp drive. Like Rumpelstiltskin, you would wake up out-of-time, but farther (and further ahead in time) than where you'd started. Brief sleeping and wake periods for say, a trip to Mars, this still may be possible. The other staple of speculative fiction is uploading oneself to a state of continuance/immortality. This article seems to throw some shade on such a special iconic wish, which may turn out to be just that...

I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain. She is drawn into a cottage industry spurred by “transhumanist” principles that offers to preserve people in liquid nitrogen immediately after death and store their bodies (or at least their heads) in hopes that they can be reanimated or digitally replicated in a technologically advanced future.

If we could “upload” or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans, or roundworms). Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections, or connectome, lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.

MIT Technology Review: The False Science of Cryonics, Michael Hendricks

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Diverse Video Game Streamers - Twitch and Youtube

Posted by B.J. Brown on September 16, 2015 at 11:17am

Those of us who are gamers in this day an age all know of the recent sensation of video game streaming. Now that streaming services like Twitch and YouTube Gaming are available, we are seeing a new wave of content providers in the video content realm.

As a steamer myself, I'm amazed at the collectives and efforts that have been achieved by popular streamers such as Tessachka, Ducksauce, and more as they've managed to gain huge followings where people constantly donate and subscribe to their channels.

In that effort, I've noticed that there aren't any premiere PoC's in that realm...yet. In my strive to be one of thos chosen few, I've teamed up with #TheNetwork via NERD DIGITAL FANZINE, Ladies Of The Round Table, and #DiversifyStreaming2k15 in order to get a bit of exposure for the streaming that I do myself as well as the diverse group of fellow streamers that I've met and network with.

I'd love to try and get this group of streamers together with black game developers so that we can do what is being done with other independent games out there. Exposure on both fronts as well as interviews and simply promoting each other!

Please help out and share if you are in the gaming community. We'd love to get a large community of talented streamers, game devs, and content creators together so that this networking thing can be positive!

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Saturn's Moon Enceladus...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 16, 2015 at 6:22am
Illustration of the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus showing a global liquid water ocean between its rocky core and icy crust. Thickness of layers shown here is not to scale.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech


Topics: Moon, NASA, Planets, Planetary Science, Space Exploration


A global ocean lies beneath the icy crust of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus, according to new research using data from NASA's Cassini mission.

Researchers found the magnitude of the moon's very slight wobble, as it orbits Saturn, can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior, meaning a global ocean must be present.

The finding implies the fine spray of water vapor, icy particles and simple organic molecules Cassini has observed coming from fractures near the moon's south pole is being fed by this vast liquid water reservoir. The research is presented in a paper published online this week in the journal Icarus.

Previous analysis of Cassini data suggested the presence of a lens-shaped body of water, or sea, underlying the moon's south polar region. However, gravity data collected during the spacecraft's several close passes over the south polar region lent support to the possibility the sea might be global. The new results -- derived using an independent line of evidence based on Cassini's images -- confirm this to be the case.

"This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got it right," said Peter Thomas, a Cassini imaging team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.

NASA: Cassini Finds Global Ocean in Saturn's Moon Enceladus

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Heavily Al+ Implanted 4H-SiC...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 15, 2015 at 7:25pm
FIG. 1.
Comparison of (a) the Hall hole density and (b) the Hall hole mobility for 3 × 1020 cm−3 Al + implanted and 2000 °C/30 s MWA 4H-SiC samples, which are different only for the implantation temperature: (close symbols) 300 °C and (open symbols) 400 °C. The experimental data were corrected for contact size systematic error (see text).


Topics: Consumer Electronics, Economy, High Energy Physics, Ion Implantation, Semiconductors

Abstract


The processing parameters which favour the onset of an impurity band conduction around room temperature with a contemporaneous elevated p-type conductivity in Al + implanted 4H-SiC are highlighted by comparing original and literature results. In the examined cases, Al is implanted at 300–400 °C, in concentrations from below to above the Al solubility limit in 4H-SiC (2 × 1020 cm−3) and post implantation annealing temperature is ≥1950 °C. Transport measurements feature the onset of an impurity band conduction, appearing at increasing temperature for increasing Al implant dose, until this transport mechanism is enabled around room temperature. This condition appears suitable to guarantee a thermal stability of the electrical properties. In this study, the heaviest doped and less resistive samples (Al implanted concentration of 5 × 1020 cm−3 and resistivity of about 2 × 10−2 Ω cm) show a carrier density above the Al solubility limit, which is consistent with at least a 50% electrical activation for a 15% compensation. The model of Miller and Abrahams well describes the resistivity data of the lower doped sample, whereas a deviation from the behaviour predicted by such a model is observed in the higher doped specimens, consistent with the occurrence of a variable range hopping at low temperature.

Journal of Applied Physics:
Remarks on the room temperature impurity band conduction in heavily Al+ implanted 4H-SiC
A. Parisini1, M. Gorni1, A. Nath2, L. Belsito3, Mulpuri V. Rao2 and R. Nipoti3

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Into the Fray (the Elite of their Orders) - "The Northern Divide" Book Trailer II

Posted by Wamuhu Mwaura on September 9, 2015 at 5:38pm

These are no mere knights, these are the Elite of their respective Orders, and their quarrel is certainly not against mortal men. Journey into and across the eighth infinite realm at the side of its most powerful inherent. Into a world of incontestable majesty that is being bombarded on all sides.

« Come then Gendesh, you called Harvester of Souls, accursed Necromagians, vile conjurers in tow. »

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