Science: Last October, the American TV network CBS premiered the now popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Centering on two male physics postdocs and the blonde girl who moves in next door, The Big Bang Theory follows the sitcom formula of placing quirky, exaggerated characters in situations both odd and mundane.
The Big Bang Theory is the first time a prime-time comedy has taken science this seriously--partly in thanks to experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Freelancer Karen Heyman recently spoke with Saltzberg and one of the show's creators Bill Prady for Science magazine, and paid a visit to the set of The Big Bang Theory, to learn how cutting-edge research gets injected into the show.
Christian Science Monitor: Unlike most of MIT, Amy Smith's workshop is far from cutting-edge. There are no next-gen computers, no vials of polysyllabic chemicals, no fancy equipment. The space is decidedly low-tech – and that's the point. D-Lab students pinpoint practical problems in the developing countries and then brainstorm and build solutions. Because the people they are trying to help are below the poverty line, the class's inventions must be simple, effective, and most important, inexpensive. "What people need is usually completely different from what we imagine sitting here in America," says Jodie Wu, a mechanical engineering junior, whose group went on a school-sponsored trip to Tanzania over winter break. The D in D-Lab stands for three things – development, design, and dissemination – and each is the theme of a different semester-long class.
ENN: Sahara dried out slowly, not abruptly: study: The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert's history published in the journal Science.
csmonitor.com: Scientists around the world are scrambling to unlock the secrets behind a new group of materials that act as autobahns for electricity – conducting current with virtually no wasteful resistance.
The discovery establishes a third major group of so-called high-temperature superconductors – a broad category that scientists first uncovered in 1986. Such materials hold the promise of making everything from computers to electric motors far more efficient, as scientists boost the temperature frontiers at which the materials work.
Related Physics Today article
New family of quaternary iron-based compounds superconducts at tens of kelvin May 2008
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
Washingtonpost.com: The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday proposed tightening the federal limits for lead in the air, but the proposal fell short of what its own scientists said is required to protect public health.
Space.com: In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy.
 Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction--a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Chronicle.com: Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
New York Times: The world’s major powers agreed in London on Friday to offer Iran modest new incentives to coax it to freeze important nuclear activities. The agreement was reached at a meeting that brought together Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior officials from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. “We’ve got an agreement on an offer that will be made to the government of Iran,” David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said for the six governments. The offer underscores a growing consensus that the current policy of punishing Iran into submission with sanctions has failed.
Physics Today: The European Space Agency has released images of Cyclone Nargis making its way across the Bay of Bengal just south of Myanmar on 1 May 2008.
 The cyclone hit the coastal region and ripped through the heart of Myanmar on Saturday, devastating the country. The picture (right) is from the Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument working in Reduced Resolution mode to deliver a spatial resolution of 1200 meters.
Under an international charter founded by ESA, the French space agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) eight years ago, the agencies provide satellite data free of charge to those affected by disasters anywhere in the world. On 4 May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asked for support.
With inundated areas typically visible from space, Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly being used for flood response and mitigation. One of the biggest problems during flooding emergencies is obtaining an overall view of the phenomenon, with a clear idea of the extent of the flooded area.
These Envisat radar images above highlight the extent of flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by the cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar on May 3, 2008, devastating the country. The left image, acquired on Feb. 5, 2007, shows the situation approximately one year ago. The black and dark areas in the image on the right, acquired on May 5, 2008, indicate areas potentially still flooded two days after the event. Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar data are especially well suited for delivering information on floods, which are usually accompanied by rain and therefore cloudy conditions. Radar sensors can peer through clouds, rain or local darkness and are especially sensitive to moisture on the ground. Both images have a 75 m pixel grid on the ground and show an area approximately 100 km wide.
New York Times: Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it. “The shift in research focus has been just tremendous,” said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak’s research labs.
Nature News: Researchers are buzzing about a new type of software that allows them to manage their research paper downloads from online journals much more effectively. One of the most popular programs is Papers, a commercial offering released last year with a similar interface to iTunes, Apple's successful music-file organizer. Papers and similar programs are able to read a file's 'metadata' so that a batch of PDF (portable document format) files can be sorted by, for example, author, journal name or year. Users can add new files to their hard drives by 'dragging and dropping' or use the program to search and download directly from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and the arXiv preprint server.
Science: As climate-change skeptics like to point out, worldwide temperatures haven't risen much in the past decade. If global warming is such hot stuff, they ask, why hasn't it soared beyond the El Niño-driven global warmth of 1998? Mainstream climate researchers reply that greenhouse warming isn't the only factor at work. And in a new paper, they put some numbers on that rebuttal. They show that regional and even global temperatures are being held down by a natural jostling of the climate system, driven in large part by vacillating ocean currents. The study "shows how natural climate variability can mask the global warming effect of greenhouse gases," says climate researcher Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, U.K., "but only for a few years."
Argus Leader: Most South Dakotans probably don't either, but as the Sanford Underground Lab at Homestake takes the first concrete steps toward operations, people in the Black Hills and the rest of the state might get better acquainted with scientific concepts such as "dark matter." About 350 scientists gathered in Lead recently to begin outlining some of the first groups of experiments.
San Francisco Chronicle: General Motors, the nation's largest automaker, is working to reinvent itself as a green company but still opposes California's efforts to set its own global warming emissions standards for cars, Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner said Thursday in San Francisco. In a speech before the Commonwealth Club, Wagoner touted his company's efforts to design and sell cars powered by electricity or alternative fuels.
Nature: After 20 years of hard labour, squeezed states — light and matter whose quantum fluctuations have been arduously suppressed below standard levels of quantum noise — are coming of age and are ripe for application.
NPR (audio): James Kakalios, author of The Physics of Superheroes, talks about the science of the action flick Iron Man.
American Journal of Physics: String theorist Moataz H. Emam briefly discusses the accomplishments of string theory that would survive a complete falsification of the theory as a model of nature; and argues that such an event suggests that string theory should become its own discipline, independent of both physics and mathematics.
Nature: The origin of the cosmic rays that bombard Earth has troubled physicists for nigh on a century. Supernova remnants are a favoured source — but we should keep our minds open to alternatives.
Science: In 2001, mathematical physicist Neil Turok went back for the first time in 25 years to his childhood home, South Africa, to visit his parents. Dismayed by the lack of opportunities for math graduates in Africa and motivated by his father, a former antiapartheid activist, the University of Cambridge researcher took action. Over the next 2 years, Turok had a derelict building near Cape Town renovated into a new institute, enrolled 29 math graduates from 11 African nations, and persuaded mathematician colleagues to teach there for 3-week shifts. "It's a very inspirational venture, … a real flagship project," says Britain's Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, who has visited the institute.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) continues to grow (see sidebar, p. 605), but Turok isn't stopping there. He's leading the effort to replicate it at 15 centers across the continent, each focusing on a different area of applied math, such as economics. "When people hear about AIMS, they get very excited," Turok says, "and people see the spark of something much, much bigger."
Related Physics Today article
Institute nurtures African math and science graduate students April 2008
Science News: Bats using sound to find their way in the dark boom louder than home fire alarms and rock concerts, according to new measurements.
Fortunately all that noise stays at frequencies too high for human hearing reports Annemarie Surlykke of University of Southern Denmark in Odense. She and Elisabeth K.V. Kalko of the University of Ulm in Germany recorded and analyzed the yells bats emitted while hunting outdoors at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s field station on Barro Colorado Island in Panama.
One of the two loudest bats on record, the bulldog bat (Noctilio leporinus) blasted out echolocation sounds in the range of 137 decibels, compared to 108 decibels for home smoke detectors.
Species from four bat families made sounds that, at a distance of 10 centimeters, ranged between 122 and 134 decibels (measured on a scale that sets the threshold of human hearing at 0 decibels), the researchers say in the April PLoS One. Two species flying over open water made the loudest sounds yet recorded for any bat, averaging around 137 decibels and even hitting 140.
Related Article
Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey, PLoS One
Technorati Tags: acoustics
New Scientist: A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The "ghost imaging" technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.
Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.
Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object - a toy soldier.
Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons, not correlated quantum pairs.
They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar.
Related Link
Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.77.041801)
Science News: Astronomers are honing measurements of a familiar cosmic parameter to shed new light on dark energy, the mysterious entity that’s accelerating the universe’s rate of expansion. Known as the Hubble constant, this parameter indicates the current rate at which distant astronomical objects are receding, a number that can be used to estimate the age of the universe. A new measuring method has reduced uncertainty in the constant’s value by more than half, to 4.8 percent, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore reported May 5, at the beginning of a four-day Space Telescope symposium on dark energy. The method relies on laserlike radio emissions from water molecules that lie within the swirling disk of gas that surrounds a supermassive black hole at the heart of a relatively nearby galaxy, NGC 4258.
New York Times: Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities. A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.
Space.com: NASA has pushed back the planned launch of the final flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope by up to five weeks due to external fuel tank delays, mission managers said Thursday. Space shuttle program manager John Shannon said that the additional time required to include post-Columbia safety improvements in two shuttle fuel tanks supporting the Hubble servicing mission have delayed the spaceflight to no earlier than late September. A seven-astronaut crew was slated to launch toward Hubble aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 28. "We really cannot make that date with the external tank processing," Shannon told reporters in a briefing here at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "I really think it's a small price to pay, to tell you the truth, four to five weeks for all the improvements that we're getting on this tank."
Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory (1). However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers (2) are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.
Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646
The New Yorker:In 1999, when physicist and millionaire Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.
The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Physicist Lowell Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by biologist Edward Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner.”
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
Mother Jones: The search for the perfect battery is fraught with obstacles—namely the laws of physics.
Nature News: How does our classical world emerge from the counterintuitive principles of quantum theory? Can we even be sure that the world doesn't 'go quantum' when no one is watching? Philip Ball talks to the theorists and experimentalists trying to find out
Wired News: The Arctic will remain on thinning ice, and climate warming is expected to begin affecting the Antarctic also, scientists said Friday. "The long-term prognosis is not very optimistic," atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University said at a briefing. Last summer sea ice in the North shrank to a record low, a change many attribute to global warming. But while solar radiation and amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are similar at the poles, to date the regions have responded differently, with little change in the South, explained oceanographer James Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What researchers have concluded was happening, was that in the North, global warming and natural variability of climate were reinforcing one another, sending the Arctic into a new state with much less sea ice than in the past.
The Sunday Times: A fusion laboratory designed to recreate the temperatures and pressures inside the sun could be built in Oxfordshire under plans being drawn up by British scientists The aim is to build the world’s most powerful lasers and use them to blast tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel to create energy. The process could, say the researchers, be a partial solution to the world’s energy crisis, offering a source of safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radio-active waste. “The aim is to destroy matter by turning it into pure energy,” said Dr John Collier, head of the high power laser programme (HiPER) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which was launched last week. “This is the same process that powers the stars. Our task is to find how to control it to offer humanity a new source of energy.” HiPER, would place Britain at the forefront of research on nuclear fusion, now enjoying a global revival after decades of neglect. The Rutherford laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is seen as the most likely site.
msnbc.com: One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
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