5 Questions for the Galaxy Finder | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-31 17:15:00
in fifth grade, Jeff Cooke devised an original theory of how the solar system formed. Bold as it was, his report did little to impress his Catholic-school teacher, whom he suspects frowned upon secular explanations for the heavens. Today, as an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, Cooke continues to chart his own course. Last year he used a novel image-stacking method to discover a supernova more than twice as old as Earth. This technique has also allowed him to observe extremely ancient galaxies, charting the early evolution of the universe...
Today’s physics news: Firing laser beams into the sky could make it rain, and more
Updated: 2011-08-31 10:18:20Today’s physics news: Firing laser beams into the sky could make it rain, and more Firing laser beams into the sky could make it rain, say scientists Researchers have used a powerful laser to produce water droplets in the air, a step that could ultimately help trigger rainfall. Guardian Telegraph Asteroid spotted by work experience [...]Big Idea: Darpa Challenge Inspires 4 Plans to Make Computers 40x More Efficient | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-30 17:50:00Last October China’s Tianhe-1A took the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2.5 petaflops, meaning it can perform 2.5 quadrillion operations per second. It may not hold the top spot for long, as IBM says that its 20- petaflop giant Sequoia will come online next year. Looking ahead, engineers have set their sights even higher, on computers a thousand times as fast as Tianhe-1A that could model the global climate with unprecedented accuracy, simulate molecular interactions, and track terrorist activity. The biggest hurdle to super-supercomputing is energy. Today’s supercomputers consume more than 5 megawatts of power. Exascale computers built on the same principles would devour 100 to 500 megawatts—about the same as a small city. At current prices, the electric bill alone for just one machine could top $500 million per year, says Richard Murphy, computer architect at Sandia National Laboratories. To avoid that undesirable future, Murphy is leading one of four teams developing energy-efficient supercomputers for the Ubiquitous High-Performance Computing program organized by the military’s experimental research division, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Ultimately the agency hopes to bring serious computing power out of giant facilities and into field operations, perhaps tucked into fighter jets or even in Special Forces soldiers’ backpacks... Image: Built-in cooling pipes will keep IMB's new Blue Waters super-computer running smoothly. Courtesy of NCSA
Today’s physics news: LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’, and more
Updated: 2011-08-30 11:47:46Today’s physics news: LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’, and more LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’ Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics. BBC Russia delays next manned space flight to ISS Russia has delayed the [...]Discover Interview: Anton Zeilinger Dangled From Windows, Teleported Photons, and Taught the Dalai Lama | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-29 18:20:00, ,
NASA's Inspiring, Enlightening, and Successful Search for New Earths | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-29 15:15:00LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’
Updated: 2011-08-28 18:43:16The HEP theory community is atwitter over a BBC News story LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’ that reports from the Lepton-Photon 2011 conference in Mumbai, where more null results relevant to supersymmetry were reported. According to the … Continue reading →How Pig Guts Became the Next Bright Hope for Regenerating Human Limbs | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-27 19:30:00The strange sensation in his right thigh muscle began as a faint pulse. slowly, surely, it was becoming more pronounced. Some people would have thought it impossible. But Corporal Isaias Hernandez could feel his quadriceps getting stronger. The muscle was growing back. When he first arrived in the trauma unit of San Antonio’s Brooke Army Medical Center in December 2004, Hernandez’s leg looked to him like something from KFC. “You know, like when you take a bite out of the drumstick down to the bone?” Hernandez recalls. The 19-year-old Marine, deployed in Iraq, had been trying to outfit his convoy truck with a makeshift entertainment system for a long road trip when the bomb exploded. The 12-inch TV he was clutching to his chest shielded his vital organs; his buddy carrying the DVDs wasn’t so lucky. Generally people never recovered from wounds like his. Flying debris had ripped off nearly 70 percent of Hernandez’s right thigh muscle, and he had lost half his leg strength. Remove enough of any muscle and you might as well lose the whole limb, the chances of regeneration are so remote. The body kicks into survival mode, pastes the wound over with scar tissue, and leaves you to limp along for life. For Hernandez, it had been three years and there was no mistaking it: He had hit a plateau. Lately the talk of amputation had cropped up again. The pain was constant, and he was losing hope. Then his life took another radical turn. He saw a science documentary on the Discovery Channel (no relation to this magazine) that told the story of a war veteran in Cincinnati named Lee Spievack whose fingertip had been severed by the propeller of a model airplane. Spievack’s brother, a surgeon in Boston, had sent him a vial of magic powder—the narrator called it “pixie dust”—and told him to sprinkle it onto the wound. Lee was to cover his hand with a plastic bag and reapply the powder every other day until his supply ran out. After four months, Lee’s fingertip had regenerated itself, nail, bone, and all... The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue. Image: Corporal Isais Hernandez shows off his healing thigh muscles. Courtesy of Scott Lewis.
Brain Malfunction Prevents Rats From Remembering Deliciousness of Spicy Food | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-27 17:00:00Just one encounter with an aroma can sear the scent into your memory for years. The same thing happens in rats, and researchers from the University of Bordeaux in France have exploited this to gain important insight into memory formation. When the brain encounters an odor, it temporarily saves the data in the banana-shaped hippocampus. But it is the frontal cortex that eventually encodes the memory into long-term storage. To decipher how that process unfolds, neurobiologist Bruno Bontempi and colleagues took advantage of a rather rude behavior in rats: The rodents often smell the breath of their fellow creatures to determine whether a new food is safe to eat. A single encounter can generate a lasting memory of the agreeable meal.Image: iStockphoto
The Toxinator: EPA Robot Tests Chemicals to See if They're Poison | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-26 17:00:00:
Star eaten by a black hole: still blasting away | Bad Astronomy
Updated: 2011-08-26 13:30:58
: Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS M101 supernova update Sea level rise has slowed temporarily Star eaten by a black hole : still blasting away In late March of 2011, an extraordinary event occurred : a black hole in a distant galaxy tore apart and ate a whole star I wrote about this twice at the time here’s the original post and a followup article including a Hubble image of the event Now , there’s more info the black hole , lying at the center of a galaxy nearly 4 billion light years away , has about 8 million times the mass of the Sun . When it tore the star apart , about half the mass of the star swirledToday’s physics news: scientists unearth a once-massive star that has been transformed into a planet made of diamond, and more
Updated: 2011-08-26 10:20:34Today’s physics news: scientists unearth a once-massive star that has been transformed into a planet made of diamond, and more Astronomers discover planets made of diamonds Scientists at the University of Manchester think they have unearthed a once-massive star in the Milky Way that has been transformed into a small planet made of diamonds. The [...]This Week’s Hype, Part III
Updated: 2011-08-25 22:15:45Today’s Wisconsin State Journal covers the String Phenomenology 2011 conference going on in Madison this week, where, according to the organizers, about 100 scientists are discussing how to “test string theory”: The Madison conference is something of a milestone in … Continue reading →Big Idea: A Shock to the Heartland | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-25 16:30:00The magnitude 5.8 quake that struck central Virginia yesterday was felt from Florida, to Maine to Missouri. “This is probably the most widely felt quake in American history, even though it was less than a 6.0,” says Michael Blanpied, a USGS seismologist DISCOVER contacted today. The reason for this intensity is that the East Coast, like the controversial New Madrid Seismic Zone in the central U.S., is located in amidst old faults and cold rocks in the middle of the North American tectonic plate. This is very different than far more common quakes plaguing coastal zones like California, caused by the constantly shifting outskirts of the continent’s plate. “Earthquake hazard is particularly high in the eastern and central U.S. because seismic waves travel so efficiently through the old, cold rocks in the middle of the plate, and that shaking carries very far,” says Blanpied. “Earthquakes in these zones are infrequent, but when they do occur, they shake such a large area, and so many people, it raises their importance.” We would do well to take a hint from Tuesday's expansive shake-up. It's lucky that it struck in rural America. But a similar tremblor in the crowded cities of the central U.S. is a matter of when, not if. And the region is woefully unprepared to mitigate the damage... Image: A map of the New Madrid Seismic Zone shows quakes greater than magnitude 2.5. Red circles represent quakes since 1973; blue shows those recorded earlier. Yellow denotes towns with populations greater than 10,00. Courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.
Today’s physics news: number of pupils taking GCSE physics up by 16.4%, Russian space freighter lost and more
Updated: 2011-08-25 11:25:24Today’s physics news: number of pupils taking GCSE physics up by 16.4%, Russian space freighter lost and more Number of pupils taking GCSE physics up by 16.4% First analysis of this year’s GCSE trends BBC Independent Russian space freighter lost An unmanned Russian freighter launched to take supplies to the International Space Station is lost [...]3 Spacecraft That Refuse to Quit | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-24 17:30:00A New Suspect in the Obesity Epidemic: Our Brains | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-23 17:50:00:
5 Things That Internet Porn Reveals About Our Brains | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-21 23:15:00With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world’s largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa—a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world—Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts. LESSON ONE: Age is important, but youth is not the only attractor The most influential male cue of all is chronological. Age dominates sexual searches, adult Web site content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six of them. When a man’s desire software evaluates a woman’s appearance, one of the most prominent criteria is age—and not just youth, either. Many sexual searches on Dogpile contain specific ages, such as “naked 25-year-olds” or “sexy 40-year-olds.” Though the popularity of adult women doesn’t quite reach that of teens, it is worth observing that more men search for 50-year-olds than search for 19-year-olds. There is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, but you may be equally surprised to discover there is significant erotic interest in 60- and 70-year-olds. At one high-traffic porn site, the single most popular term users enter into the search engine is mom. On AOL, one out of four people who searched for sexually attractive mothers (MILFs) also searched for teens. Though the total number of granny searches amounts to less than 8 percent of the total youth searches, there are more sexual searches for grannies than for some common fetishes like spanking... The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.
This Week’s Hype, Part II
Updated: 2011-08-21 19:39:18String theory hype is still coming fast and furious, so much so that the latest edition of This Week’s Hype needs to be a double issue. Today we learn that Black holes and pulsars could reveal extra dimensions, solving that … Continue reading →Sunday Night Higgs?
Updated: 2011-08-19 00:54:27Lepton-Photon 2011 begins Monday morning, the schedule is here. It should start off with a bang, with the latest Higgs search results from ATLAS and CMS presented starting at 11:20am local time, the middle of Sunday night here. There will … Continue reading →String Theorists Suggest Space Wormholes Possible
Updated: 2011-08-18 21:56:24I was just out for a bike ride, during which an idle thought came to me about a rule of thumb that might deserve publicity. This rule of thumb is that the mention of wormholes in a popular science book, … Continue reading →$100 Million From Simons and Simonyi for the IAS
Updated: 2011-08-18 15:18:26The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton announced today that Jim Simons and Charles Simonyi will donate $100 million to the Institute, in the form of matching funds for a $200 million campaign mainly aimed at increasing the endowment. For … Continue reading →Does String Theory Predict Low Energy Supersymmetry?
Updated: 2011-08-16 23:21:57It used to be that string theorists would respond to arguments that string theory predicted nothing with the claim that it predicted supersymmetry. For example, in an interview with Witten done for the PBS Elegant Universe series, one sees: NOVA: … Continue reading →The Fabric of the Cosmos on PBS
Updated: 2011-08-15 18:48:11A four-part NOVA series based upon Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos is coming to PBS this fall, starting November 2. In some sense this is a follow-on to his wildly successful The Elegant Universe NOVA series from 2003, … Continue reading →Talks at the KITP
Updated: 2011-08-12 20:39:22Back now from vacation, and found that there have been quite a few interesting talks at the KITP in Santa Barbara this week which are now available on-line: Since the EPS-HEP conference last month, the “First Year of the LHC” … Continue reading →20 Things You Didn't Know About... Magnetism | DISCOVER Magazine
Updated: 2011-08-12 17:45:00Heretic…?
Updated: 2011-08-04 15:58:27
Skip to content Asymptotia M and M Heretic Published by Clifford on August 4, 2011 in cosmology dark energy research science string theory and work 7 Comments We had a really interesting discussion of the quantum physics of de Sitter spacetime yesterday here in Aspen , starting with a review of the behaviour of scalar fields in such a background , led by Don Marolf , and then , after lunch , an open-ended discussion led by Steve Shenker . This is all quite difficult , and is of course quite relevant , since a piece of de Sitter is relevant to discussions of inflation , which seems from cosmological observations to have been a dominant phase of the very early universe . As the most symmetric space with positive cosmological constant , de Sitter may also be relevant to the universe today ,