space.com: There is a certain type of cosmic explosion that becomes, in a flash, the brightest thing in the universe, emitting for a few seconds as much radiation as a million galaxies, mainly at gamma radiation wavelengths. Most astronomers agree that only the birth of a black hole could supply enough spark for one of these intense flashes, but there remains a great deal of uncertainty over what converts the newborn black hole's energy into the radiation that astronomers detect.
Recent observations suggest that this "converter" is a high-powered magnetic beam, and not--as many theorists believe--a high-speed jet of hot material.
The Australian: Prime Minister John Howard has decided to take immediate steps to make possible an expanded nuclear industry in Australia, which could ultimately include nuclear power stations, uranium enrichment and nuclear waste treatment. He told Australians over the weekend they must face the reality that nuclear power stations "will come", probably in 10 years.
Howard is putting the nuclear power option at the heart of his election campaign on the economy and climate change, defying a Labor scare campaign and claims he was committing political suicide. "It's not political suicide to tell the truth," Mr Howard told the Nine Network's Sunday program. "There are only two ways that you can run power stations ... in this country. You can do it on fossil fuel or you can do it with nuclear power.
News@Nature: A team of researchers has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption says Nature's Geoff Brumfiel.
Quantum cryptography uses the laws of quantum mechanics to encode data securely and most researchers consider such quantum networks to be nearly 100% uncrackable. But, by using a "quantum-mechanical wiretap," a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to 'listen in'. The trick allowed them to tease out about half of the data, in a way that couldn't be detected by those transmitting or receiving the message.
The group admits that their hack isn't yet capable of eavesdropping on a real network. "It is not something that currently could attack a commercial system," says Jeffrey Shapiro, a physicist at MIT and one of the authors on the study. But they expect that one day it will be able to do so, if quantum encryption isn't adequately adapted to stop such hackers from succeeding.
NPR: As Congress continues to prepare legislation related to the American Competitiveness Initiative, a call to increase the number of graduates with science and engineering skills in the US to compete in the global economy, a report on NPR suggest that the majority of engineering graduates in India and China are so poor in terms of skills, that they cannot get employment. In fact, according to NPR's Vivek Wadhwa a US skills shortage isn't the reason for so many companies are exporting science and technology jobs overseas, cheap labor is.
Reuters: A mathematical formula can now predict how the frothy head on a beer changes over time, a finding that may have a wide range of commercial uses beyond pulling the perfect pint, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
The formula explains how the tiny bubbles that make up foam grow -- an explanation that could lead to the development of products such as metal shrink wrap.
USA Today: The world's most ambitious particle collider — which scientists hope could reveal what matter is made of — might not be fully functional until next year, months after its scheduled start-up date, officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Thursday.
Scientists have been scrambling to redesign a key U.S.-built part of the collider — located in a tunnel deep beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva — that broke "with a loud bang and a cloud of dust" during a high-pressure test for the collider last month.
Officials at the organization, known by the French initials CERN, said the possible delays are the result of the magnet failure and cooling processes that have been slower than expected for the 17-mile tunnel.
The aim of the CERN experiment is to make subatomic particles — in this case protons — travel at nearly the speed of light until they collide, emitting a shower of even smaller particles that will reveal mysteries about the makeup of matter.
"It's possible now, even likely that the November date will fall off the map and we will be going straight into high energy running next spring," CERN spokesman James Gillies said. "We're mostly there, actually. There are problems happening here and there and it would be strange if there weren't at a project of this magnitude."
China Daily:
China is looking to fuel its nuclear power industry with largely self-developed technology by 2020 as it gradually reduces its reliance on imported technology, a senior academic of the nation's top science institute said yesterday.
China's first self-developed pressurized water reactor is expected to be put to use by 2017, Ouyang Yu, an academic of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.
Science: In quantum physics, decoherence is a catch-all term that usually implies degradation of the purity of a quantum state. Over the past few decades it has been used as a guide to understand the loss of the two-body coherence called entanglement, which is an intrinsically quantum effect. In this context, it is relevant to fundamental questions such as: Why is the world mostly classical when we believe quantum theory provides all of the governing principles? The answer lies in the critical role of "largeness"; simply put, larger bodies lose coherence more quickly. This is the essential ingredient in producing nearly instantaneous decay of entanglement between two large bodies or between a large body and a small one. The role of largeness is seen when decoherence occurs increasingly faster with the size of the environment. Preservation of coherence is important in maintaining steady behavior of quantum systems whose coordinated action is critical, for example, among the working units of quantum computers when they become available.
A small body (spin, photon, atom, exciton, quantum dot, Cooper pair, etc.), on the other hand, can continue to behave as a quantum mechanical unit, even if not macroscopically entangled. A topic that remains open in almost all decoherence discussions, however, is the preservation or destruction of two-body quantum coherence when both bodies are small. For example, it has been predicted only recently that the one-body and two-body responses to a noisy environment can follow surprisingly different pathways to complete decoherence. Experimental entry into this new domain is needed, and impressive results are now reported on page 579 of this week's Science magazine. The researchers have devised an elegantly clean way to check and to confirm the existence of so-called "entanglement sudden death," a two-body disentanglement that is novel among known relaxation effects because it has no lifetime in any usual sense--that is, entanglement terminates completely after a finite interval, without a smoothly diminishing long-time tail.
R&D magazine: Stanford Univ. and the U.S. Dept. of Energy are looking to ‘turn conventional wisdom on its head’ with the LINAC Coherent Light Source.
About seven months ago, the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Menlo Park, Calif., broke ground for the linear accelerator (LINAC) Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The project is an extremely powerful, $400-million laser, designed to photograph molecules and chemical reactions that previously were impossible to see. And, although excavation crews have not completed boring through the sandstone to complete the new tunnel for the LCLS, collaborators of the project have taken a major step into making it a reality.
Washington Post: NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin held an unusual meeting with the staff of the inspector general who oversees his agency and then ordered that video recordings of the meeting be destroyed, a House panel said yesterday.
In a letter to Griffin, the chairman of the Science and Technology subcommittee on investigations and oversight demanded an explanation from the NASA administrator and accused him of improperly trying to influence the watchdog office's decisions on what it should investigate.
In addition, the letter from Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said the order to destroy the meeting tapes, which was issued by NASA's chief of staff, "appears on its face to be nothing less than the destruction of evidence."
In a response yesterday, NASA spokesman David Mould said that the meeting was proper, and was a way for Griffin to discuss outstanding issues with the inspector general's staff and to express support for a strong watchdog office
Nature: Rapid development is seeing carbon dioxide levels soar.
The New York Times: A New Zealand company said Monday that it had secured financing from an investor in Silicon Valley to produce ethanol from an untapped source — carbon monoxide gas.
MSNBC: Space weather forecasters can't agree on how intense coming storm will be
CCNews: A team from U of T’s marine geophysics group is participating in a joint project to create the world’s largest cable-linked sea floor observatory on the Pacific Ocean floor.
Various: The European Southern observatory last night announced the discovery of a planet only 50 percent larger than the Earth, and a mass five times as great, in orbit around Gliese 581, a nearby star 20.5 light years away. The planet, called Gliese 581c, orbits in the temperate zone, the region in which water can be liquid, thus making Gliese 581c the first planet outside our solar system that could be habitable.
However, astronomer Wesley Traub of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, tells USA Today that he doubts Gliese 581c is hospitable enough for life. "It is probably tidally locked to the star, like the moon to the Earth," he says. That means the star-facing side of the planet receives boiling heat, while the far side would be frozen.
The discovery was made by using a very sensitive spectrograph on a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile; the spectrograph was able to detect the feeble tugs on the star caused by the orbiting planets. A paper about Gliese 581c has been submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics, but the results have not yet been confirmed independently.
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NPR: The Bush administration's plan for a new set of nuclear warheads to replace the aging ones in the U.S. stockpile received a tough review today from some outside experts, who criticized the plan's cost.
San Francisco Chronicle: A group of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has broken Internet speed records — twice in two days. Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that the researchers on Dec. 30 sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols.
MSNBC: Today marks the 17th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's "birth" in space, and in a reversal of the usual routine, it's traditional for the Hubble team to give a gift. This time, astronomers are offering a wide-angle panorama of the Carina Nebula - a blazing-hot cosmic cookery that may be much like the environment that gave rise to our own solar system.
The New York Times: E. Dorrit Hoffleit, an astronomer who studied the features of stars visible to the naked eye, edited a standard reference on them and was probably the oldest working scientist in her field, died on April 9 at her home in New Haven. She was 100.
Chicago Sun-Times: Evanston native says we may learn to forecast solar activity
ScienceNow: Physicists and electrical engineers around the world are pushing hard to make materials that twist a fundamental law of optics and bend light the "wrong way." Such "left-handed" materials could be used to make lenses that focus light much more tightly than ordinary lenses can, as well as other novel devices. But a critical aspect of the current approach won't work because it violates the principle that cause must precede effect, one theorist argues.
Daily Press: The physics research site will offer public demonstrations Saturday, hoping that visitors find science cool.
The New York Times: E. Dorrit Hoffleit, an astronomer who studied the features of stars visible to the naked eye, edited a standard reference on them and was probably the oldest working scientist in her field, died on April 9 at her home in New Haven. She was 100.
Yahoo!News: Astronomers have spotted a giant cloud of superheated gas 6 million light years wide that might be generated by a cluster of supermassive black holes.
Science: The world's production of oil will peak, everyone agrees. Sometime in the coming decades, the amazing machinery of oil production that doubled world oil output every decade for a century will sputter. Output will stop rising, even as demand continues to grow. The question is when.
NPR: It has been more than 90 years since Einstein put forward his theory of relativity. Physicists agree it is basically right, but they also suspect there is something deeper behind it.
The Economist: Using lasers to trigger fusion could prove cheaper than other techniques
BBC: A class of "failed" star called a brown dwarf emits beams of radiation that are thousands of times brighter than any released by the Sun.
Science: According to work described in Nature this week, a new spin on the atomic clock could yield some of the most precise measurements to date of fundamental physical constants--potentially providing crucial experimental tests of a number of "theories of everything."
The Christian Science Monitor: Public awareness about climate change is growing; 83 percent of Americans now call it a 'serious' problem.
MSNBC: The historic civil nuclear deal between the US and India is running into serious difficulties over New Delhi's insistence that the Bush administration rewrite elements of the law enacted by Congress last year.
Houston Chronicle: The names and Social Security numbers of 550 Los Alamos National Laboratory workers were posted on a Web site run by a subcontractor working on a security system for the lab.
USA Today: The debate over whether global warming affects hurricanes may be running into some unexpected turbulence.
Many researchers believe warming is causing the storms to get stronger, while others aren't so sure.
Now, a new study raises the possibility that global warming might even make it harder for hurricanes to form.
BBC: British scientists are planning to see whether a Star Trek-style deflector shield could be built to protect astronauts from radiation.
San Francisco Examiner: Japan is set to launch its first lunar orbiter this summer, but exploring the moon is just part of the mission.
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer: The United States is losing its lead in high-energy physics, a field of science it's dominated since the 1930s.
Scientists say Europe is now in the vanguard of a worldwide search to discover the deepest secrets that Mother Nature hides in bits and pieces of atoms.
The New York Times: Britain and China faced off on Tuesday in the first United Nations Security Council debate on climate change, with Britain pushing the issue and China saying the 15-member body had no competence to deal with it.
cbs5.com: Although some activists, community members and the Tracy City Council have voiced their opposition to a proposed plan to build a national bio and agro defense facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, site 300, lab spokesman Steve Wampler said Tuesday that there is also a great deal of support for the project.
BBC: Tiny "smart" devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could be carried in space probes to explore other planets, UK engineers say.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Scientists try to harness architecture of microscopic diatoms for commercial ventures
The New York Times: For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.
MSNBC: A new breed of robots could soon break free of assembly line duties to assist human living in myriad ways.
NPR: What do you get when you combine a high school library, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and a machine that makes sexy underwear? The answer is scheduled to blast off into space tonight.
The New York Times: For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.
San Francisco Chronicle: A command sent to the wrong computer address caused a cascade of events that led to the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in November, NASA investigators reported Friday.
ScienceNow: The harder you push a sled across a frozen pond, the faster it accelerates. In 1687, Isaac Newton quantified this most basic bit of physics with his second law, which states that the force applied to an object equals its mass times its acceleration (F=ma). Now scientists have verified this law with unprecedented precision, challenging critics who have suggested the rule somehow bends for very small accelerations.
Santa Fe New Mexican: New Mexicans are very familiar with this country's leading proponent of nuclear power -- U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican from Albuquerque.
Domenici is not shy about his vision: An advanced research center at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study new technology; a fuel recycling center to take partially spent nuclear fuel and reprocess it into something that can be burned; and a burner reactor that would produce electricity from this newly processed fuel.
The Christian Science Monitor: Astronomers question the accuracy of a key figure used to calculate the distance of faraway galaxies.
Science: A group of chemists reports finding a way to assemble tiny metal particles into a substance that can be shaped and fired--at little more than room temperature
CNET: Plants on other planets may be predominantly red or yellow, NASA scientists announced Wednesday.
International Herald Tribune: IBM has found a way to connect chips inside products ranging from cellphones to supercomputers, an advance that promises to prolong battery life in wireless devices and eventually speed up data transfers between the processor and memory chips in computers, IBM said Thursday.
Nature: Freedom-of-speech groups have expressed concern at the treatment of a prominent Venezuelan physicist who has been fired as head of a government research lab after poking fun at the government over nuclear policy issues.
The New York Times: An experiment that some hoped would reveal a new class of subatomic particles, and perhaps even point to clues about why the universe exists at all, has instead produced a first round of results that are mysteriously inconclusive.
China View: China successfully launched its second oceanic survey satellite "Haiyang-1B" (Ocean 1B) from Taiyuan Satellite Launching Center on Wednesday.
In a related story Sun Zhihui, China's top ocean research official, stated that China will develop five more oceanic satellites in the near future.
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