Al Gore and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The award was won for their efforts to raise awareness about global warming. There's a few interesting things to…
And the Physics Nobel Prize goes to…
Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg, for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance. This is one of those prizes that’s pretty well-deserved, because giant magnetoresistance is now applied for data readout on pretty much every magnetic hard drive being produced, such as those in one’s iPod. It’s not really my field of study, but let me take a stab at explaining what giant magnetoresistance is. I’ll do that by first discussing the application: reading and writing to computer/iPod hard drives. Odds are I’m going to screw up the field directions in all the pictures, but hopefully the arguments will be sound…
Quantum computing creeps forward
Researchers at Yale have apparently managed to take an important step forward in the development of quantum computers: they’ve gotten atoms to talk to each other coherently over a long distance.
What is ‘quantum computing’? To understand this, we begin by mentioning a classic problem in mathematics: the traveling salesman problem. Suppose a salesman needs to visit N cities during a round-trip sales route. Assuming the costs of travel between all pairs of cities are known, what is the cheapest route possible which visits each city only once?
Darn! No alien invasion… yet!
I'm terribly disappointed. Last week, a story out of Peru had all the hallmarks of a good alien invasion story -- a mysterious meteorite crashes near a small town in…
A ‘bizzare star’, an incomplete explanation
NASA just announced the discovery of a previously unnoticed astronomical phenomenon, a star exhibiting ‘comet-like’ behavior (H/T Personal Demon). This can be read about both on NASA’s web page as well as through CNN.
A large star in its death throes is leaving a huge, turbulent tail of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen in its wake that makes it look like an immense comet hurtling through space, astronomers said on Wednesday.
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Rocketing through our Milky Way galaxy at 80 miles per second — literally faster than a speeding bullet — the star is spewing material that scientists believe may be recycled into new stars, planets and maybe even life.
“We believe that the tail is made up of material that is being shed by the star which is heating up and then spiraling back into this turbulent wake,” said astronomer Christopher Martin of California Institute of Technology, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature.
There’s something about the explanation, at least as presented, which seems to me to be highly misleading, and possibly wrong.