new scientific discoveries

[GuybrushWilco]

http://www.cnn.com/2...sics/index.html

 

"Wineland and Haroche work in the field of quantum optics, approaching the same principles from opposite directions. The American uses light particles to measure the properties of matter, whereas his French colleague focuses on tracking light particles by using atoms. Both Nobel laureates have found ways to isolate the subatomic particles and keep their properties intact at the same time, scientists at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in Stockholm, Sweden. Usually when these particles interact with the outside world, the properties that scientists would like to directly observe disappear, leaving researchers postulating over what is going on with them."

 

Forgive me if I am wrong, since I am no scientist, but doesn't this go against Heisenberg's principle?

Edited October 10, 2012 by GuybrushWilco

[Raithe]

For the random cool imagery..

 

 

Created by astrophotographer J-P Metsävainio, of a star cluster named IC 1396.

Writes Metsävainio:

 

"Since astronomical objects are too far away, no real parallax can be imaged. Doe to that, I have developed a method to turn my images to various 3D-formats. My work flow is based on scientific data from the object, distance and the source of ionization are usually known. The different types of the nebulae has typical structures, pillar like formations must point to the source of ionization, the radiation pressure forms kind of hollow area, inside of the nebula, around newly born stars, dark nebulae must be at front of the emission ones to show, etc... rest of the missing information is then replaced with an artistic vision.

The whole process is pretty much like sculpting."

 

Although according to others : Metsävainio's rendering is more art than science. Most of the stills that comprise this gif are actually artificially generated, "based on various assumptions on how nebulae are shaped."

[Humodour]

http://www.cnn.com/2...sics/index.html

 

"Wineland and Haroche work in the field of quantum optics, approaching the same principles from opposite directions. The American uses light particles to measure the properties of matter, whereas his French colleague focuses on tracking light particles by using atoms. Both Nobel laureates have found ways to isolate the subatomic particles and keep their properties intact at the same time, scientists at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in Stockholm, Sweden. Usually when these particles interact with the outside world, the properties that scientists would like to directly observe disappear, leaving researchers postulating over what is going on with them."

 

Forgive me if I am wrong, since I am no scientist, but doesn't this go against Heisenberg's principle?

 

Modern Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle simply states that for complementary quantities such as position and momentum (or say polarisation states of a photon), you can't know lots of information about both quantities at once. This is a fundamental mathematical property of quantum mechanics - it has nothing to do with your measuring device, how you measure, or anything you do to the system.

 

So Modern Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle allows you to interact with a particle without influencing its future state, if the interaction with the particle is sufficiently weak (i.e. if you're careful enough).

 

This is definitely a violation of Heisenberg's original formulation of the Uncertainty Principle, but that's because the original Uncertainty Principle was wrong. It was too restrictive because it posited that the measuring device and the act of measurement is what prevents you from knowing lots of information about complementary quantities. This old HUP posited that by measuring the particle, you were influencing it (think 'nudging' it and thus changing the system slightly, and this was responsible for the inability to know lots of information about complementary quantities.

 

This is wrong. It is the core maths of quantum mechanics that prevent us being able to know this level of information, and thus it is physically possible to measure a system without influencing it (or at least, you can measure a system and know precisely how you influenced it and thus eliminate your influence in your calculations - the same thing for our purposes).

 

I haven't read enough about the work of these guys to know if what they did is related to weak measurement, but it seems like it might be.

 

More about weak measurement here (as a start):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_measurement

Edited October 10, 2012 by Krezack

[GuybrushWilco]

Ah, thanks for the clarification Krezack. I do not study physics, but I do have at least a slight hobbyist interest in it, and I follow its developments. I just remember learning about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at some point, and this article suddenly made me think about it. It will be very interesting to see where Wineland and Haroche's research leads. Apparently it could prove useful to the development of quantum computers.

[Gorgon]

BOS radiation suit built for Fukushima cleanup. It'a missing a few of the plates, but the leg actuators look functional.

 

[rjshae]

BOS radiation suit built for Fukushima cleanup. It'a missing a few of the plates, but the leg actuators look functional.

It looks slick, but what's with the plastic shoulder trim? Is that just to make any falling radioactive dust slide off?

[Gfted1]

Italian court convicts scientists for no quake warning

 

In other news, witch burnings also resume.

[AGX-17]

BOS radiation suit built for Fukushima cleanup. It'a missing a few of the plates, but the leg actuators look functional.

 

 

The US military's DARPA has been R&Ding actual "power armor" for combat for something like a decade, now. The "Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation" project.

Edited October 22, 2012 by AGX-17

[Gorth]

A new scientific un-discovery. Aka, where did it go???

 

The island that disappeared

 

"A SOUTH Pacific island identified on Google Earth and world maps does not exist, according to Australian scientists who went searching for the mystery landmass during a geological expedition.

 

The sizeable phantom island in the Coral Sea is shown as Sandy Island on Google Earth and Google maps and is supposedly midway between Australia and the French-governed New Caledonia.

 

The Times Atlas of the World appears to identify it as Sable Island. Weather maps used by the Southern Surveyor, an Australian maritime research vessel, also say it exists, according to Dr Maria Seton.

 

But when the Southern Surveyor, which was tasked with identifying fragments of the Australian continental crust submerged in the Coral Sea, steamed to where the island was supposed to be, it was nowhere to be found."

 

Morale of the story? Islands have become an endangered species? Better visit them before they are gone

[Raithe]

So for general astro-related news articles.. the latest breaking out is this..

 

Yahoo News: Voyager discovers magnetic highway on the edge of the solar system

 

Astronomy News: Voyager Cruising on a Magnetic Highway

 

ScienceNews: Voyager Crossing Superhighway to Solar System Exit

 

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a "magnetic highway" at the edge of the solar system, a surprising discovery 35 years after its launch, said the experts behind the pioneering craft.

 

Earlier this year a surge in a key indicator fuelled hopes the craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which marks the boundary between our solar system and outer space.

 

But instead of slipping away from the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself, Voyager encountered something completely unexpected.

The craft's daily radio reports sent back evidence that the sun's magnetic field lines were connected to interstellar magnetic fields. Lower-energy charged particles were zooming out and higher-energy particles from outside were streaming in.

They called it a magnetic highway because charged particles outside this region bounced around in all directions, as if trapped on local roads inside the bubble, or heliosphere.

 

"Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun's environment, we now can taste what it's like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway," said Edward Stone, a Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

 

"We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space. Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years away. The new region isn't what we expected, but we've come to expect the unexpected from Voyager."

 

Voyager is now 18 billion kilometres away from the sun, which is 122 times the distances from the Earth to the sun. Yet it takes only 17 hours for its radio signal to reach us.

 

Scientists began to think it was reaching the edge of our solar system two years ago when the solar winds died down and particles settled in space the way they would in a swamp.

 

An increase in the number of cosmic rays in May also led them to believe Voyager had approached interstellar space.

 

In July the reading changed again, and by August 25 Voyager was on the magnetic highway. The number of particles from the outside jumped sharply and the number of particles from the inside fell by a factor of 1000.

 

"It is as if someone opened the floodgates and they were all moved down the river, also some boaters powered up stream with close to the speed of light have been able to get in at last," said Stamatios Krimigis, Voyager's principal investigator of low-energy charged particles.

 

While the magnetic field is exciting, Krimigis sounded somewhat disappointed that Voyager had not yet escaped the solar system.

 

"Nature is very imaginative and Lucy pulled up the football again," he said, making reference to the classic comic strip Peanuts.

The twin Voyager craft — Voyager 2 was actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5 — were designed primarily to study the biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.

 

Taking advantage of a planetary alignment, they fulfilled that mission before pushing on to Uranus and Neptune, beaming back stunning images of the first two in 1979 and 1980, and the latter pair in 1986 and 1989.

 

But with those jobs complete and both craft still functioning perfectly, project managers decided to keep mining information as the devices fly further into the void.

 

NASA has described Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 as "the two most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to explore."

 

The scientists controlling Voyager 1 — whose 1970s technology gives it just a 100,000th of the computer memory of an eight-gigabyte iPod Nano — decided to turn off its cameras after it passed Neptune in 1989 to preserve power.

 

Assuming the craft continues to function normally, they will have to start turning off other on-board instruments from 2020, and it is expected to run out of power completely in 2025.

[Wrath of Dagon]

Loony scientists try to prove we live in a computer simulation : http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/whoa-physicists-testing-see-universe-computer-simulation-224525825.html#more-id

[Gorth]

Hmm, so it's possible that the speed of light is just limited by the clock frequency of the galactic CPU...

[Wrath of Dagon]

Electric shirt : http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509766/nanotubes-turned-into-super-fibers/

[Gorth]

Not so much a "discovery" as baby steps to put a discovery into action...

 

Iter (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor)

 

A few pictures and notes from the construction site of a Fusion Power plant in Cadarache, Provence.

[pmp10]

Not so much a "discovery" as baby steps to put a discovery into action...

 

Iter (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor)

 

A few pictures and notes from the construction site of a Fusion Power plant in Cadarache, Provence.

Just don't believe the 2040 or solving energy problems nonsense.

Fusion is sadly nowhere near that.

[Raithe]

How NASA will build its very first Warp Drive

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

 

The Alcubierre Drive

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

 

Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre's notion a "passport to the universe." It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

 

White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

 

In terms of the engine's mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A "warp bubble" would then be generated that moves space-time around the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.

 

"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White told io9. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."

 

And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses). As a result, the idea was brushed aside as being far too impractical. Even though nature allowed for a warp drive, it looked like we would never be able to build one ourselves.

 

"However," said White, "based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope." The key, says White, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself.

 

 

A new design

In October of last year, White was preparing for a talk he was to give for the kickoff to the 100 Year Starship project in Orlando, Florida. As he was pulling together his overview on space warp, he performed a sensitivity analysis for the field equations, more out of curiosity than anything else.

 

"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.

 

He presented the results of his Alcubierre Drive rethink a year later at the 100 Year Starship conference in Atlanta where he highlighted his new optimization approaches — a new design that could significantly reduce the amount of exotic matter required. And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

 

That's a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.

 

 

 

Hitting the lab

Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments.

 

"We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million.

 

Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.

 

"Our initial test device is implementing a ring of large potential energy — what we observe as blue shifted relative to the lab frame — by utilizing a ring of ceramic capacitors that are charged to tens of thousands of volts," he told us. "We will increase the fidelity of our test devices and continue to enhance the sensitivity of the warp field interferometer — eventually using devices to directly generate negative vacuum energy."

 

He points out that Casimir cavities, physical forces that arise from a quantized field, may represent a viable approach. And it's through these experiments, hopes White, that NASA can go from the theoretical to the practical.

 

 

 

Waiting for that "Chicago Pile" moment

Given just how fantastic this all appears, we asked White if he truly thinks a warp-generating spacecraft might someday be constructed.

"Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice."

What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.

 

"In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."

 

His cautious approach notwithstanding, White did admit that a real-world warp drive could create some fascinating possibilities for space travel — and would certainly reset our sense of the vastness of the cosmos.

 

"This loophole in general relativity would allow us to go places really fast as measured by both Earth observers, and observers on the ship — trips measured in weeks or months as opposed to decades and centuries," he said.

 

But for now, pursuit of this idea is very much in science mode. "I'm not ready to discuss much beyond the math and very controlled modest approaches in the lab," he said.

 

Which makes complete sense to us, as well. But thanks to these preliminary efforts, White has already done much to instill a renewed sense of hope and excitement over the possibilities.

 

Faster-than-light travel may await us yet.

[Luridis]

Slide to unlock is apparently a new idea. I guess someone has to give them money for all those plastic cases that were made in the 1980's with slide-locks.

 

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/31/171239/micron-lands-broad-slide-to-unlock-patent

[Gfted1]

U.S. Approves First Method to Give the Blind Limited Vision

[Raithe]

And more in patents then science.. but still:

cnet - Futuristic Handcuffs Would Administer Shocks and Drugs/

 

Sometimes an invention comes along that makes you excited about the future.

For a long time, it seems that handcuffs have been stuck in the movies of old. They restrain you, but, odd for our interactive world, that's all they seem to do.

Might I tempt you toward futuristic handcuffs that will offer you a small involuntary judder?

I am grateful to Gizmodo for discovering that Patent Bolt has lucked upon a patent that offers bound(less) excitement.

For these are handcuffs that offer surprises. Indeed, they might make the idea of being tased, bro, not quite so bad.

 

The patent is called "Apparatus and System For Augmented Detainee Restraint."

 

The augmentations it offers are truly quite something. You see, these handcuffs are "configured to administer electrical shocks when certain predetermined conditions occur."

These shocks might be "activated by internal control systems or by external controllers that transmit activation signals to the restraining device."

This progressive tool is the brainchild of Scottsdale Inventions.

　

And while you might be shocked or even excited by the idea of handcuffs with electric shock capabilities, might I move you further?

For Patent Bolt points out that this patent also allows for the idea of a substance delivery system. Yes, these handcuffs might also be used to, well, inject the detained with who knows what -- to achieve "any desired result."

 

Clearly, the desires of the detained and the detainer might differ. Yet, this patent allows for the possibility of the substance being in the form of "a liquid, a gas, a dye, an irritant, a medication, a sedative, a transdermal medication or transdermal enhancers such as dimethyl sulfoxide, a chemical restraint, a paralytic, a medication prescribed to the detainee, and combinations thereof."

Yes, you really did read the word "paralytic."

 

Naturally, some will be wondering whether, as in fine restaurants, the arresting officer will ask whether the detained has any allergies.

Some might be concerned, though that -- at least theoretically -- this creation might put quite some power into the hands of those who might not always be lucid or learned enough to use that power wisely.

[Gorth]

Cranium Rats? (those who've played PS:T might get the reference)

 

The ultimate lie detector or welcome to the "hive mind"? Interesting and scary at the same time

[AGX-17]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21651225

 

Eh, no biggie. But kind of interesting trivia.

[Gorth]

Fusion power plant

 

Just some pictures from France and a bit of trivia regarding the fusion reactor they are building. They call it safe. Not sure if anything that requires an operating temperature of 200 million degrees would qualify as "safe"? I hope they've got some good insulation.

 

Still, it might be the beginning of the end of oil companies and fossil fuel as we know it, even if it's going to take a decade or two yet.

[pmp10]

Fusion power plant

 

Just some pictures from France and a bit of trivia regarding the fusion reactor they are building. They call it safe. Not sure if anything that requires an operating temperature of 200 million degrees would qualify as "safe"? I hope they've got some good insulation.

 

Still, it might be the beginning of the end of oil companies and fossil fuel as we know it, even if it's going to take a decade or two yet.

Don't worry about fire hazard in fusion plants.

Chances are your toaster will burn the world down before any of them sets anything on fire.

The worst that could happen to environment is a mild radiation leak.

 

And don't believe in any fusion timetables either.

20 year is just what it will take to start running proper experiments.

In fact we still are missing some crucial pieces to the puzzle and the whole thing may yet prove completely unworkable.

[Wrath of Dagon]

This is amazing and if true will change the world, Lockheed-Martin claims they can filter salt out of water : http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/us-usa-desalination-idUSBRE92C05720130313

[Gorth]

This is amazing and if true will change the world, Lockheed-Martin claims they can filter salt out of water : http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/13/us-usa-desalination-idUSBRE92C05720130313

 

Looks interesting. Australian desalination plants have used osmosis so far to separate water and whatever is in it. This sounds almost like a giant coffee filter