What is How to Measure Sleep?
As we sleep, our brains pass through a series of stages, like shifting between gears in a car. The most famous is REM sleep, characterized by fluttering eye movements. But other categories include light sleep (stage S1), stable sleep (S2), slow-wave sleep (SS), and even being awake (W), each identified by a signature from polysomnography (PSG), in which electrodes record from the scalp, eyelids, and heart.
Fastest Camera Ever Built Uses Lasers
Spoiler
The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see.
The Casimir Effect and Nanomachines
In London’s terminology, the van der Waals/London/Casimir-Polder/Lifshitz interaction is a dispersion force, but it sounds far more exciting and mysterious when called “the Casimir effect” and described in terms of zero-point energy and quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuations. Cranks find it fascinating and hucksters profit.
Skulls in the Stars: Mr. Faraday goes wild — with atomic speculation! (1844)
There’s discussion of hard impenetrable spheres, but no, it’s not a “spring break” exposé. Just good old physics.
Shock doc’s new electrifying party trick
The project, which Dr Peter Terren calls the Modern Thinker, involves passing about 200,000 volts of electricity over his body, a routine that transforms him into a human sparkler for all of 15 seconds.
Scientists give a hand(edness) to the search for alien life
“If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,” Germer says. “But life’s self-assembly means they all would go one way. It’s hard to imagine a planet’s surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life.”
Because chiral molecules reflect light in a way that indicates their handedness, the research team built a device to shine light on plant leaves and bacteria, and then detect the polarized reflections from the organisms’ chlorophyll from a short distance away. The device detected chirality from both sources.
‘Hidden photons’ to send secret emails through Earth
You shouldn’t use a title which implies that the phenomenon has been confirmed, when it’s still hypothetical.
Hidden photons are a class of particles predicted by so-called supersymmetric extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Unlike normal photons, hidden photons could have a tiny mass and would be invisible because they would not interact with the charged particles in conventional matter. This means hidden photons would flit through even the densest materials unaffected.
The only place to spot them is in a vacuum, where they should sometimes “oscillate” into normal photons. There are already experiments searching for this effect: the idea is to shine a laser at a wall in a vacuum and see if any of the photons make it through to the other side by transforming into their hidden counterparts and back again. According to Ringwald’s group, if these experiments succeed it should be possible to scale up the apparatus so that the hidden photons become signal carriers and the “wall” becomes any stretch of ground or water.
Physics Buzz: Free Energy and the Press
Harlow mentions in passing that “Many scientists say the technology violates the basic laws of quantum physics.”
Really, such a sentence is tantamount to saying “It doesn’t work.” Unfortunately, that was lost on Harlow, who continued reporting as if the laws of physics could be changed with a simple majority vote in the local town council. Simply put the Universe doesn’t work that way. The problem here was this report aired at the same time that CNN announced it was closing down its entire science bureau.
Those who divide the people in the world into two types, and those who don’t.
Or, you can divide experiments up by classifying them as edible or inedible: Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive
The PRL from the ArXiv paper I linked to in Follow the Bouncing Atom has been published.
Phys Rev Focus has a story on it