I Don't Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation
Recasting the bad reputation the profession of research professor has.
How would you react to this statement: “Many aspiring swimmers are not pursuing olympic careers because doing so would require spending 30, 40, 50 hours in the pool, in addition to weight and flexibility workouts. This single-minded, work-ethics focus of otherwise talented athletes gives olympic competitors bad reputation – we need to work on funding alternatives, such as support for olympians who can afford to spend only half of that time in the pool”
The Mo is Slow
Thermal physics in slow motion
Almost makes me want to get one of those cameras. Almost.
Marco!
The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them.
That overlooks one small factor, says Reginald Smith from the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester, New York state. He says that there is a limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. And when you factor that in, everything changes.
Quality Time
Meet Entropy Jones. Four hours of a baby play, condensed into about two minutes of time-lapse video.
No Sucker Punches
Scars Reveal How Triceratops Fought
It’s the iconic dinosaur battle, seared into every kid’s imagination from picture books and cartoons: Tyrannosaurus rex lunges, mouth agape, and Triceratops parries with its horns and bony neck frill. This scene probably did unfold in North American forests 65 million years ago, but new research suggests Triceratops also used its headgear in fights against its own species.
Paleontologists have proposed this idea before. It makes sense, given that other animals with horns or antlers, such as deer, use them against their own kind in battles for dominance or mating rights. The new study, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE, documented wounds on Triceratops fossils, backing the idea up with hard data for the first time.
Going Into Overtime
Entangled Particles Face Sudden Death
[I]n a paper published today in the journal Science, two physicists show that entangled particles can suddenly and irrevocably lose their connection, a phenomenon called Entanglement Sudden Death, or ESD.
“The degree of information entangled can disappear faster than the information itself,” said Joseph Eberly, a physicist at the University of Rochester, who, along with Ting Yu, co-authored the paper. “It’s completely non-classical physics.”
I don’t do experiments with entangled particles and I haven’t read the paper yet, but I was a little surprised to read that the model up to this point had been that entanglement was lost slowly. I had always gotten the impression that entanglement was much more a binary condition, so you wouldn’t describe particles as being a little bit entangled, any more than you would say someone was a little pregnant. I suspect this has to be tied to the question of how fast a wave function collapses.
Science 30 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5914, pp. 598 – 601
DOI: 10.1126/science.1167343
Polar Bear in a Snowstorm Jigsaw Puzzle
Solve it, and the next one is bigger
I'm Leaving, On a Jetpack
Real Water Rocket Guy – Analysis to come
[S]eems like something that would be on Swans on Tea
Well, now it is
Rhett now has a detailed analysis posted in which he explains how the thrust is generated, and estimates the power the pump must have to do this.
One thing to note about this is that it works because much of the propellant is not being carried onboard. The rocket is lifting the water in the feeder hose, but that’s all — after a few seconds, that water has been expelled. But the jetpack continues to fly, because additional water is being supplied. This is one of the big problems for rockets. They need to carry enough propellant to lift the payload, and all of the propellant and fuel (for some systems, e.g. ion drives, the propellant and the energy source aren’t the same thing). This is why rockets are really inefficient, and have such a small ratio of payload/rocket mass.
Magic Mirror
Making magnetic monopoles, and other exotica, in the lab
Physicist Shou-Cheng Zhang has proposed a way to physically realize the magnetic monopole. In a paper published online in the January 29 issue of Science Express, Zhang and post-doctoral collaborator Xiao-Liang Qi predict the existence of a real-world material that acts as a magic mirror, in which the never-before-observed monopole appears as the image of an ordinary electron. If his prediction is confirmed by experiments, this could mean the opening of condensed matter as a new venue for observing the exotica of high-energy physics.