BLOGS

Yesterday's edition of Science includes a demonstration of an all-optical transistor that can be switched between its on and off states using a single photon. Although it's an impressive demonstration of physics, the work also indicates that we're likely to stick with electrons for a while, given that the transistor required two lasers and a cloud of a cold atomic gas.

The work relied on a cold gas of cesium atoms. These atoms have an extremely convenient property: two closely separated ground states, each with a corresponding excited state. All of these states are separated by an energy that corresponds to a specific wavelength of light, so using a laser of that wavelength allows you to shift the system into a different state.

Childhood experiences, both good and bad, can affect the developing architecture of the brain. When parents and other caregivers read frequently to a child, it reinforces the brain connections that will help the child develop reading and thinking skills. Experiences and environment also determine whether neural circuits involved with motor skills, behavior control, memory and other functions form robustly. Experiences also can influence gene expression in the developing brain by affecting the production of proteins that bind to DNA in the neurons, Cameron said. Scientists are just starting to understand such "epigenetic" factors in brain development.

When the body's response to stress — the rush of adrenaline, the increase in heart rate, the elevation of certain hormone levels — is constantly active, Cameron said, the result is "toxic stress" that can reduce the number of neural connections in the cognitive areas of the brain at a time when they should be proliferating.

A Kaiser Permanente study on adverse childhood experiences with 17,000 participants found that childhood exposure to violence, domestic abuse, family neglect or other stresses can have life-long consequences, including a higher probability of alcoholism, illicit drug use and depression. Cameron said the research suggests that children exposed to many adverse events early in life even have an elevated risk of heart disease in their 50s.

There are ways to prevent such outcomes. Good parenting, better nutrition and more cognitively stimulating experiences can "contribute very positively to a healthy trajectory" in life, Cameron said.

The most important influence on a neighborhood's crime rate, the researchers found, was the neighbors' sense of "agency" or willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good.

Earls and his colleagues found that some neighborhoods were functioning well and that the entire city was not under siege as some news reports might suggest. "We found that collective efficacy was, indeed, operating as a protective factor," he said.

The researchers also found that the benefits of collective efficacy go beyond easing violence. It also seems to be associated with more use of parks and recreational spaces in neighborhoods, initiation of sexual activity at later ages among youths, and even less obesity and fewer admissions to hospitals for asthma attacks.

I experienced my own personal collective efficacy from parents, a sister, a faith community that cared about me despite my circumstances. That charity was also extended to my closest friends.

"United States" seems idealistic to the point of oxymoron. We are divided: between sound science and utter fantasy; facts and ideology. I've read the most inspiring as well as inflammatory postings since the Zimmerman verdict (some calling him a "patriot"; Coulter tweeted "hallelujah"). It is more than just a tragic event centered on iced, tea, skittles and profiled suspicion. It is our addiction to talking points; our predilection to making sensation provocateurs equivalent to journalists; our treatment of Americans as aliens on their own soil: never mind immigration reform.

New York has just experienced one of the warmest days on record, but the doubt of climate research has been planted by forces that want to confuse the issue to maximize energy industry profits. Fracking used to be a curse on Battlestar Galactica, and has been studied with as much resolve. We're falling behind in science, technology, engineering and mathematics largely, unlike other countries we completely lack a "collective efficacy": we don't encourage women and minorities into the sciences; we fight political chimeras and windmills with the resolve  of quixotic dragon slayers; we want the usual suspects and magical thinking to keep us on top as whole industries are shipped overseas; we have an "us-versus-them" mentality so that we don't see the value in our fellow countrymen and women to pursue liberty, happiness...and life (reorder intentional).

And, our fast-approaching last place has never been a good place to start a sprint.

AAAS: Experts Describe Long-Term Impacts of Stress on the Young Brain
Chicage Tribune: CPS lays off more than 2000, including 1000 teachers

NASA's Green Propellant Infusion Mission, or GPIM, has passed its first thruster pulsing test, a major milestone that paves the way for a planned test flight in 2015, agency officials said. NASA unveiled the rocket thruster success Tuesday (July 9) in Washington, D.C., during a briefing with aerospace industry officials and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO).

The GPIM initiative aims to demonstrate that a green fuel with nearly 50 percent better performance than hydrazine could power Earth-circling satellites and eventually deep space missions.

Vincent and Victor are still competing to learn about the world, but they have chosen different ways of learning. Victor became a chemical engineer, while Vincent became a physicist. “[Victor] wanted to be much more practical with his way of handling things, and I wanted to really learn what was going on in a fundamental level,” Rodgers said. Vincent studies an offshoot of superstring theory, a theory that says the universe's fundamental constituents are tiny vibrating strings. He studies the way gravity works in various conceptions of string theory. He uses mathematics to describe his theories, and he sometimes takes a pen and paper to bed with him at night to make calculations. “It's fun,”Rodgers said. “I think there's some really great stuff [in physics] to play around with.”

Vincent Rodgers teaches a class at Iowa called “Physics from Head to Toe,” which studies how physics can apply to the human body.

Rodgers greatly admires Albert Einstein, who in addition to discovering new ideas in physics such as the theory of relativity, also campaigned for world peace and wrote about the society around him. In his 1950 book, Out of My Later Years, Einstein wrote about racism in segregated American society. “What can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice?,” Einstein asked. “He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.” “He's much bigger than people already think he is," Rodgers said. “When you read the way [Einstein] acts throughout his life - this guy was really on it.”

By Josh Howgego and Nature Magazine

Water droplets, coffee granules, fragments of polystyrene and even a toothpick are among the items that have been flying around in a Swiss laboratory lately — all of them kept in the air by sound waves. The device that achieves this acoustic levitation is the first to be capable of handling several objects simultaneously. It is described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Typically, levitation techniques make use of electromagnetism; magnetic forces have even been used to levitate frogs. It has long been known that sound waves could counter gravity, too, but so far the method has lacked practical application because it could do little more than keep an object in place.

To also move and manipulate levitating objects, Dimos Poulikakos, a mechanical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and his colleagues built sound-making platforms using piezoelectric crystals, which shrink or stretch depending on the voltage applied to them. Each platform is the size of a pinky nail.

Scientific American: Sound Waves Levitate and Move Objects

Dr. Alexander is the Project Scientist for the U.S. portion of the international Rosetta mission. She has also been the Cassini Project Staff Scientist and as the final project manager of the Galileo mission, overseeing its fiery crash into Jupiter. Her scientific interests include gaskinetic theory, theory of gaseous escape from planetary and cometary regoliths, theory of surface bound exospheres, magnetospheric plasma theory (terrestrial and planetary), exobiology, interdiciplinary science, and oxidation / reduction potential of planetary and cometary regoliths.

Her most recent publications include:

• C. Alexander, A. Chmielewski, S. Gulkis, P. Weissman, D. Holmes, J. Burch, R. Goldstein, P. Mokashi, S.A. Stern, J. Parker, S. Fuselier, M. Kueppers, A. Accommazzo, “The U.S. Rosetta Project at its second Science Target: Asteroid (21) Lutetia,” IEEE Conference Proceedings, in press.
• C. Alexander, D. Sweetnam, S. Gulkis, P. Weissman, D. Holmes, J. Burch, R. Goldstein, P. Mokashi, J. Parker, S. Fuselier, L. McFadden, “The U.S. Rosetta Project at its first Science Target: Asteroid (2867) Steins,” IEEE Conference Proceedings, 2010.
• C. Alexander, R. Carlson, G. Consolmagno, D. Morrison, 400 Years of Discovery at Europa, Europa, Pappalardo, McKinnon, Khurana eds., University of Arizona Press, 2009.

NASA Science News: Mission to Land on a Comet
European Space Agency: Rosetta

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The scientists and engineers are developing a new plasma propulsion system designed for ultrasmall CubeSats. If all goes well, they say, it may be possible to launch a life-detection mission to Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa or other intriguing worlds for as little as $1 million in the not-too-distant future.

"We want to enable new missions that right now cost about $1 billion, or maybe $500 million — to go, for example, explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn," said project leader Ben Longmier, a plasma physicist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

To get the ball rolling, Longmier and his team launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Kickstarter Thursday (July 4). They hope to raise a minimum of $200,000 by Aug. 5, which should be enough to loft the miniature thruster on its maiden space voyage.

Chapel Hill
Eugen Merzbacher, prominent theoretical atomic and nuclear physicist, former chair of the Physics Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-founder of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, died June 6 (Thursday) at UNC Memorial Hospital from complications following surgery. He was 92.

Born in Berlin, Germany, he moved with his family to Turkey in 1935, where they remained throughout World War II. It was there that Eugen obtained an undergraduate degree in physics at Istanbul University. In 1947, he immigrated to the United States, and by 1950 had earned his doctorate in physics at Harvard University. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen a short time later.

Professor Merzbacher left a legacy behind him in the form of a text now in its third edition, introducing undergraduate and graduate students in physics to the subject so impactful on our modern era. It is a testiment, of what "good things [used to] come out of NC" (my home state) before its recent lurch into backwardness.

A link to the third edition here; an embed/link of the second below: