Physics Nobel goes to Serge Haroche and David Wineland
The Nobel citation said the award was for “ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems”.
Always extra nice (for me) when it’s familiar faces from AMO physics. There’s a good summary up at Uncertain Principles
Have you ever dreamed of shrinking yourself so you could go inside an ant colony and see exactly what they do in there? You may have owned an ant farm when you were a kid, but do ants really behave how they would normally within a clear plastic sheath only about 1 inch by 1 inch? Doubtfully. Playing with ants isn’t just for kids as Florida State University professor Walter Tschinkel shows us in just a moment. Tschinkel replicates the form of ant colonies by pouring molten aluminum into the tunnels, letting the metal harden, and then meticulously excavating the result.
New Extreme Sport Combines a Jet Pack with a Jet Ski
No, I didn’t lose balance. I was diving.
How To Steal The Space Shuttle: A Step-By-Step Guide
I asked both officers if they thought, given Bond supervillian-levels of resources, it would be possible for someone to steal the shuttle.
They made two mistakes in their answers. First mistake was that the first cop told me it was “impossible.” The second mistake was that the other policeman told me “I won’t say impossible.” Now it sounds like a challenge.
Entangled in the Past: “Entanglement Between Photons that have Never Coexisted”
[T]wo entangled pairs of photons are created, and then a joint measurement of one photon from each pair creates an entanglement between the other two. The twist this time is that one of the photons from the first pair has already been measured before the second pair is even created.
1,001 Mind-Blowing Facts About Yo Momma
Style aside, there’s another reason I’m not a big fan of omnibus fact lists: that’s not a very scientific way to organize knowledge. Facts are some of the least useful things in science, so just dumping a list of them on readers will not generally result in much gain in understanding.
I agree with Matthew. I think most science facts should more accurately be termed science trivia. And there are a lot of science literacy quizzes which only test trivia. (Though there are some which do reward literacy if you haven’t memorized the answer but can still figure it out.)
Here are the fifteen professions that drink the most coffee. Guess who’s number one.
Among those polled, scientists and lab techs were found to be the heaviest coffee drinkers in the country. Anyone who works, or has worked, in science will likely find this result unsurprising. Science, after all, is a 24-hour job. Experiments often run on timelines that are in every way at odds with the circadian rhythms of a normal human being — or any other creature, for that matter. Many scientists work under crushing pressure to publish results before competing labs or research groups. Limited funding requires researchers to put in countless hours writing grant proposals when they could be doing science. (It’s not that they’re writing grants instead of doing science, by the way. They’re writing grants and doing science.)
Not me, though. I’ve never liked coffee and have cut way back on the caffeine thing.
(3 quadrocopters = 12 rotors)
To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it.
Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities.