Recently in Everyday Physics Category

Nature: The mechanisms that govern the rate at which glasses soften on heating have long been a mystery. The finding that colloids can mimic the full range of glass-softening behaviors offers a fresh take on the problem.

Related Link
Soft colloids make strong glasses

The Economist: There is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers.

Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow.

One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy.

Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers, through a company called Saltworks Technologies, have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the Sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh water, is one thing that is in abundant supply.

A test plant in Vancouver, Canada, will open this month.

guardian.co.uk: Prosthetics worn by disabled sprinters confer no speed advantage, scientists have found. If anything, they may reduce the top speed a runner can achieve.

The research supports the case made by the South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who uses flexible carbon-fiber blades in races.

Pistorius has long argued that he should be allowed to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in races, but athletics authorities banned him from doing so in last year's Olympic games, claiming that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes.

But the new study by Alena Grabowski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the authorities may have come to the wrong conclusion.

Related Link
Running-specific prostheses limit ground-force during sprinting Biology Letters

ScienceNOW: When Spanish conquistadors seized the Inca emperor Atawalpa in 1532, they demanded an enormous ransom of silver and gold that took weeks to collect.

Such an enormous stash suggests that the Andean people knew sophisticated metallurgy, but there has been little evidence to support this.

Now a team of geologists and archaeologists have found clues that may indicate that these indigenous people refined gold with mercury amalgamation, an important metallurgical technique that is still in use today.

The Daily Telegraph: Growers are using powerful cameras on board a satellite 500 miles above Earth's surface to take images of their vineyards, showing them where to plant vines and when to harvest the grapes.

The high-resolution pictures are so accurate they can calculate the number of leaves per square meter which is directly proportional to the quality and yield of grapes.

Farmers will also be able to scan surrounding areas to see what land may be good for cultivation and so help the industry expand.

The technology known as Oenoview is developed by Infoterra, a division of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, and has already been used in various wine-growing areas of France.

It works by calculating the density of foliage on vines by analyzing the light that reflects off them.

Science: Many aerosols cool the atmosphere (a negative forcing), whereas ozone and black carbon aerosol have a warming effect (a positive forcing).

There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks, argue Almut Arneth and colleagues in Science.

However, changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional.

Drew T. Shindell and colleagues at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, report that current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases.

As Arneth and colleagues state:

Changing aerosol burdens may alter local and regional cloud cover and precipitation, change the intensity or timing of the monsoon circulation, and even shift precipitation across national borders. Changes in cloud cover and precipitation will also feed back on the photochemistry and rainout of short-lived species. These issues must be considered if aerosol emissions are to become part of climate policy.

Given the toxicity of pollutants, the question is not whether ever stricter air pollution controls will be implemented, but when and where. The jury is out on whether air pollution control will accelerate or mitigate climate change. Still, the studies available to date mostly suggest that air pollution control will accelerate warming in the coming decades.

Related Links
Clean the air, heat the planet?
Improved attribution of climate forcing to emissions

The Daily Telegraph: A team of fluid dynamics experts have worked out what causes the so-called "teapot effect" and have come up with a way to put an end to it.

They have deduced that at low pouring speeds tea starts to stick to the inside of the spout, causing the flow to momentarily stop and then start again—in other words to dribble.
 
By reducing the friction between the spout and the fluid, the dribble can be all but be eradicated even towards the end of a pour, claim the scientists at the University of Lyon in France.

Hindustan Times: Physicist Nicholas Kurti was at the forefront of molecular gastronomy—using science in cooking during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1960s Kurti used to wow crowds by demonstrating the then unfamiliar technology of microwaves. Microwaves are good for heating water but not for melting ice.

A hollowed out block of ice filled with water and heated for 30 seconds in an microwave oven would result in boiling water but the ice would remain frozen. (Editor's note: Do not try this experiment without supervision.)

A microwave oven produces an electric field that reverses direction billions of times a second, forcing the water molecules to keep realigning their orientation. As the molecules realign, they collide and that collision produces heat.

But frozen water molecules (the ones in ice) are trapped in a rigid lattice work so they can't flip back and forth and create heat. That's why the ice did not melt even when the water boiled. (Eventually of course, the heat from the water would have melted the ice.)

Kurti used that principle to create a dessert called Frozen Florida with a cold exterior and a hot interior (two
recipes can be found at the link "Continue reading Making a scientific dessert".)

Related Physics Today articles
The virtual cook: Modeling heat transfer in the kitchen November 1999
Obituary: Nicholas Kurti June 1999

Various: A 180-km-diameter crater in Mexico called Chicxulub was formed by an object 10 km across that caused a 100-million-megaton explosion when it hit Earth. Until now, that event had generally been believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A bigger crater, named Shiva, which was found by Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, is 500 km across. The explosion that caused it may have been 100 times the size of the one that created Chicxulub.

Chatterjee presented his latest findings on Shiva to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, on 18 October.

The late era of the dinosaurs was a period in which volcanic activity was frequent and common, yet the dinosaurs were thriving until the two objects hit Earth.

According to the Economist:

The picture that is emerging, then, is of a strange set of coincidences. First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other—a geological eyeblink. Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active. Or, to put it another way, what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.

Related Links
I am become Death, destroyer of worlds The Economist
Dinosaurs 'could have been wiped out by 25 mile wide meteor' The Daily Telegraph
Giant impact near India—not Mexico—may have doomed dinosaurs GSA
The significance of the contemporaneous Shiva impact structure and Deccan volcanism at the KT boundary

BBC News: Art experts at the Science Museum think they may have found the world's oldest painting to feature a watch in a hitherto unknown picture of a member of the influential Medici family.

The picture forms part of a new exhibit on measuring time.

Related News story
Science Museum consults Italian experts in bid to reveal owner of earliest portrayed watch Culture 24

Physics Today: Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. University of Missouri researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

"To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries.

Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, currently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro/nanoelectromechanical systems. Although nuclear batteries can pose concerns, they are safe are already powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.

Kwon's innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwons battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.

The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor, said Kwon. By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.

Kwon has been collaborating with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, and is working to build and test the battery at the facility.

In the future, they hope to increase the battery's power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that the battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.

CNN.com: Building's connected to Rome's ancient Mediterranean port "Portus" have been discovered after being buried for 1800 years.

The site consists of an amphitheater, a Roman warehouse and the ruins of an Imperial palace by University of Southampton archaeologists owes much to modern technology.

"It's true I think also to say that we have kind of rediscovered it because the great Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani reported the discovery of a theater in the 1860s but nobody could actually find it," said Simon Keay, a leading expert on Roman Archaeology to CNN.

The site is less than a mile from Rome's Fumicino International Airport, and was discovered using modern sensors, ground-penetrating radar and probes to compile a digital underground map of the area.

"So we then played around with it on the computer screen, we did a virtual reconstruction of it and amphitheater shape grew out of the screen and we knew that we were on to something very special," said Keay.

Science: Current computer-aided design tools are not making it easy for architects to design buildings for energy efficiency. New software is needed.

Related News Story
Training to climb an Everest of digital data New York Times

New York Times: Leonardo da Vinci probably would have loved the use of scientific gadgetry to locate his lost masterpiece.

The Guardian: An orchestra of ancient instruments, many of which exist only in paintings and yellowing manuscripts, will perform its first concert at the end of the year.

Many of the instruments have not been heard since the times of Socrates in the fifth century BC, though some of the instruments date back even further, to the bronze age a thousand years earlier.

Scientists are reconstructing the sounds of the instruments, including the earliest predecessors of the bass guitar, harp and oboe, by building mathematical models of them on computers, using descriptions in ancient texts and paintings on artifacts recovered from archaeological sites in Greece.

NPR: In a new biography called The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, author Graham Farmelo digs deep into the archives and personal papers of a Nobel-winning physicist.

You can also read an interview of Paul Dirac through the American Institute of Physics's history center.

Oral History Transcript—Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

Nature: In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung)—the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.

The spoils—released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to history professor Kristie Macrakis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2005—have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police.

Macrakis's analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions, and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.

Various: Two earthquakes caused devastation across the Pacific earlier this week. One, based off the coast of Samoa caused a tsunami; the other, near Sumatra, was so deep that no tsunami occurred, but the loss of life on the surrounding area may be greater.

"The chances of there being a connection between these two earthquakes is extremely slim," said University of Ulster geophysicist John McCloskey, told the London Times. The 10,000 km distance between the quakes and the orientation of the tectonic plates made a causal link physically implausible, he said.

"The real danger in the coming days is that a second larger quake with a magnitude of around 8.5 could occur just off the coast of Padang," Professor McCloskey said. That could result in a huge tsunami submerging the town and surrounding coastline, which has a population of about 1.5 million.

A magnitude 6.6 event off the coast of Sumatra happened earlier today.

The tsunami earthquake

The tsunami that devastated the islands of Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga was the result of a shallow rupture in the earth's crust on one of the most geologically active areas of the world—where the Pacific plate is plunging westward under the Australia plate at a rate of 86 mm a year.

The earthquake, which was measured as high as 8.3 on the Richter scale, occurred 190 kilometers southwest of American Samoa. The event caused one side of the fault line to push up several meters higher than the other side, according to initial estimates.

Gary Gibson, a senior seismologist at Environmental Systems and Services in Melbourne, told Australia's ABC network that the energy released in the earthquake was approximately one-thirtieth the size of the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake near the island of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Gibson also mentioned to the Sydney Morning Herald that this earthquake was unusual in that it was due to a north-east to south-west tension in the crust. "The earth [was] being stretched rather than compressed," he said.

After the earthquake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a tsunami warning for South Pacific nations, including New Zealand, which experienced a rise in sea level of 40 cm, but Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga were too close to the initial event to get enough warning.

"People who live in areas where tsunamis can occur are generally educated about them," said John Bellini, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver, Colorado. "If you feel an earthquake, get to high ground as fast as you can." In this case, he adds, "Five minutes was not enough time for emergency services to move into action."

Analysis of the data indicated that Hawaii was too far away for any major tide rise to occur.

Related Links
Map of the two earthquakes
Sumatra and Samoa earthquakes were inside the 'Ring of Fire' fault lines London Times
Samoan tsunami caused by 'shallow quake'
When two plates collide: rupture set off wave Sydney Morning Herald
Tsunami forecasts quicker, more accurate Honolulu Advertiser
Tsunami warning system unable to help Samoans Inside Science

Nature News: An independent report has all but ruled out radioactive contamination from the experiments of physicist Ernest Rutherford as the source of a cluster of deaths at the University of Manchester, UK.

Related Link
Manchester University deaths not linked to Rutherford radiation The Guardian

Physics Today: A team of engineers and artists working at the University of Washington's Solheim Rapid Manufacturing Laboratory has developed a way to create glass objects using a conventional three-dimensional printer and "open-sourced" the technique so anyone can use it.

The team's method, which it named the Vitraglyphic process, is a follow-up to the Solheim Lab's success last spring printing with ceramics. (See an example image on the right. Photo credit: University of Washington)

"It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything," said UW professor Mark Ganter.

Three-dimensional printers are used as a cheap, fast way to build prototype parts. In a typical powder-based 3D printing system, a thin layer of powder is spread over a platform and software directs an inkjet printer to deposit droplets of binder solution only where needed. The binder reacts with the powder to bind the particles together and create a 3D object.

Glass powder doesn't readily absorb liquid, however, so the approach developed for ceramic printing had to be radically altered.

By adjusting the ratio of powder to liquid the team found a way to build solid parts out of powdered glass that fused when heated to the right temperature.

Glass is a material that can be transparent or opaque, but is distinguished as an inorganic material (one which contains no carbon) that solidifies from a molten state without the molecules forming an ordered crystalline structure. As the glass molecules remain in a disordered state, the resulting object is technically a super-cooled liquid rather than a true solid.

"By publishing these recipes without proprietary claims, we hope to encourage further experimentation and innovation within artistic and design communities," said UW associate professor Duane Storti.

Ronald Rael, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working with the Solheim Lab to set up his own 3D printer. Rael is working on new kinds of ceramic bricks that can be used for evaporative cooling systems.

"3D printing in glass has huge potential for changing the thinking about applications of glass in architecture," Rael said. "Before now, there was no good method of rapid prototyping in glass, so testing designs is an expensive, time-consuming process." Rael adds that 3D printing allows one to insert different forms of glass to change the performance of the material at specific positions as required by the design.

NYTimes.com: The modern car still contains 60 percent of steel by weight.

But automotive steel has changed quite a bit since the Ford company's first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. Metallurgists and manufacturers have learned to manipulate steel's microstructure through precise control of processing to create sheet steels of increasing strength. Prompted by crash-worthiness requirements and the need to make cars lighter to improve gas mileage, automakers are replacing conventional steels with advanced high-strength ones.

Where once a single grade of steel might have sufficed, the typical "body in white," as automakers call a car's basic skeleton, might now be a patchwork of a dozen or more steels of different types and strengths, tailored through computer modeling to handle the stress and strain of normal driving—and of severe crashes.

Physics Today: Panasonic will launch next month a new household LED lightbulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

The screw-in bulbs that fit common light sockets are part of the EverLed line.

According to Panasonic, if used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years. That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

The Boston Globe: For more than two decades, scientists have strived to build an artificial nose that can mimic what is sometimes called our most elusive sense. Now, with a growing slate of potential applications—detecting cancer in a breath, say, or identifying airborne toxins on the battlefield—the technology is advancing and efforts are proliferating.

In North Grafton, a small startup company, CogniScent, is working on an electronic nose that resembles a yellow Dustbuster and sniffs out everything from molds to dangerous chemicals. At MIT, researchers are working on "RealNose," a Pentagon-funded project inspired by dog noses that aims to use actual biological parts—the smell receptors that recognize odor molecules. And, further afield, the Space Shuttle just returned to Earth carrying an "ENose," that spent about six months gathering scent data on the International Space Station.

The work is beginning to pay off, in prototypes of devices that are showing their promise in lab experiments.

Building magazine: After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora programme.

The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.

Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."

"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."

"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."

The Register: In a project described as "the computing equivalent of the raising of the Mary Rose," engineers at Bletchley Park intend to restore a 1950s-era computer—featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory—to working order.

The machine in question was built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. It was designed in 1949 to automate the job of a human calculating team, whose work was apparently so boring that mistakes became unacceptably frequent.

Physics Today: Last year, Derek Briggs, director of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and colleagues discovered that tiny fossilized structures usually 1-2 μm long, which were previously believed to be the remains of bacteria on fossilized feathers, were in fact carbon deposits called melanosomes that could produce black and white strips on the ancient feathers.

Briggs's team published new research in the journal Biology Letters, based on 40-million-year-old fossilized feathers obtained from deposits in Messel, Germany. Using scanning electron microscopy, the team proved that shining some light on the melanosomes can create a diffraction pattern whose iridescence, or color sheen, is similar to that seen on modern bird feathers.

"Discovery of a color-producing nanostructure in a fossil feather opens up the possibility that we someday be able to determine such colors in fossil birds, as well as in feathered dinosaurs," said H. Richard Lane, a paleontologist and program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

"The feathers produced a black background with a metallic greenish, bluish or coppery color at certain angles—much like the colors we see in starlings and grackles today," said Richard Prum, one of the paper's authors.

Related Links
Structural coloration in a fossil feather
The colour of fossil feathers

WSJ.com: In a vault beneath the British Library, Jeremy Leighton John, the library's first curator of eManuscripts, grapples with a formidable historical challenge.

How to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today's discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder: Scientists who collaborate via e-mail, Google, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

"It would be tragic if there were no record of lives that were so influential," John says.

Related Link
The future of saving our past Nature

NPR: NPR's Science Desk has assembled a list of some of the year's most fascinating science reads. The authors represented on NPR's list pull diverse topics out from their everyday contexts.

The Dangerous World Of Butterflies
Newton And The Counterfeiter
My Stroke Of Insight
The End Of Overeating
Born To Run

Some of these books offer page-turning narratives and compelling characters. Others introduce forgotten histories and rituals of unknown cultures that will make you just stop and blink.

If you have a favorite science book that you read over the summer, particularly a physics related book, then please tell others about it by entering details in the comment section below.

washingtonpost.com: When Jim Sanborn shows you his latest art, the jaw drops.

Over a three-year period Sanborn has created a fully operational electrostatic particle accelerator.

Throw the switch and 1 million volts of juice start flying down the tube. X rays zip off in every direction. Deafening zaps fill the air, and bolts of lightning spark around the metal sphere. Hunkered down in his lead-lined control booth, Sanborn can turn on his Geiger counters, turn up the power—and split the atom.

More impressive yet: Terrestrial Physics, as the new installation is called, is possibly the most substantial work of art to come out of Washington since the 1950s.

Physics Today: CyArk, a US nonprofit organization, and the US National Park Service are aiming to digitally preserve Mount Rushmore in South Dakota next month by scanning it with a series of laser beams. The three-dimensional model will be accurate to within 3mm.

The digital record will be created with technical and logistical support from the Scottish government department Historic Scotland and its partner, the Glasgow School of Art, as part of a broad international collaboration in developing preservation techniques for at-risk historical sites.

"While Mount Rushmore is a national icon in the US, there is expertise in other countries which can assist us to preserve it in a modern context," says Gerard Baker, superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, at a press conference announcing the deal.

The record is to help re-create the monument if it falls victim to a climate change, natural disaster, war, or terrorism.

Some historical artifacts have already been lost and scientists have been unable to re-create the original artifacts because of the lack of records. A classic example is Afghanistan's 2000-year-old Buddha statues in the Bamiyan province, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Other sites at risk include the Acropolis in Athens which is threatened by acid rain, and Machu Picchu in Peru.

CyArk's ultimate aim is to create 3D models of 500 threatened sites around the world.

Related Link
Historic Scotland Launch Scottish and International 3D Scanning Project

Physics Today: In one of the first examples of embedding a video player into a print magazine, the US television network CBS has paid Entertainment Weekly to play a 40-minute video in the 18 September issue. Ironically the ad mentioned Physics Today.

The video, which is activated when the magazine page is opened for more than 5 seconds, opens with Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist on the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, welcoming readers to "the current edition of Physics Today" before finding out he has been duped into supporting a different product.

Other parts of the page are touch sensitive to pull up additional content.

The advertisement is powered by technology similar to that used in a mobile phone. Designed by Los Angeles-based company Americhip, the video screen uses a 5 cm diagonal, 320x240 resolution, thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) says Americhips Bob Shaud. The display can be as large as 10 cm he adds, but the cost goes up significantly with larger displays.

The whole screen is only 2.7 mm thick and encased by polycarbonate to protect the display from damage. The remaining electronics are sandwiched behind the screen between two pieces of thick paper. The sound uses a similar chip to those found in electronic audio greeting cards. The battery lasts 65—70 minutes and can be recharged using a mini-usb connector.

The cost of embedding the video electronics is "more than a can of Pepsi," said CBS president of marketing George Schweitzer at a press conference earlier today, which is why only a small number of subscribers in New York and Los Angeles will receive the "video-in-print" ad, and why CBS managed to obtain additional sponsorship from the soft drinks manufacturer Pepsi. Paul Caine—president of the Time Inc. magazine group which publishes Entertainment Weekly—told the Wall Street Journal that it was in the "low teens."

"This is expensive technology," says Shoud "and the price per unit fluctuates depending on how many are ordered." A production run of 1,000 of these displays for a marketing campaign would lead to a cost per unit of about $50, increasing production to 100,000 units drops the price down to $20 he says.

In terms of educational use—such as embedding displays in textbooks—the pharmaceutical industry is evaluating whether the displays would be useful in providing doctors with instructions on how to use new drug examples.

Paul Guinnessy

Nature: How can identical particles be crammed together as densely as possible? A combination of theory and computer simulations shows how the answer to this intricate problem depends on the shape of the particles.

Science: White light–emitting diodes (LEDs) have already cracked several niche lighting markets, such as flashlights and bike lights. But they're still not ready to go head to head with cheaper incandescent bulbs and fluorescents that dominate the nearly $100 billion global lighting market. A new spate of advances, however, suggests that the whitecoats are coming. "There is steady movement and progress in the field," says E. Fred Schubert, an electrical engineer and LED expert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York.

ScienceNOW: With $27 billion a year in sales, lithium-ion batteries already dominate the market for rechargeables. But there's always pressure to do better. Now researchers report that they've come up with a way to use nanotechnology to either significantly increase the energy storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries or reduce their weight while maintaining their current energy content. The new work could lead to everything from lighter laptops to electric cars with a considerably longer range.

NYTimes.com: Applied physicist Stephen Kurtin has spent almost 20 years of his career on a quest to create a better pair of spectacles for people who suffer from presbyopia—the condition that affects almost everyone over the age of 40 as they progressively lose the ability to focus on close objects.

After many false turns and dead ends, he has succeeded in creating glasses with a mechanically adjustable focus.

The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible to focus alternately on the page of a book, a computer screen or a mountain range in the distance.

He says they are better than other glasses and some forms of Lasik surgery.

Slate: Physicist and science-fiction fan Dave Goldberg is particularly sensitive to the pleasures of mind-bending time- traveling narratives. He's also sensitive to their flaws:

Most fictional accounts of time travel are rife with paradoxes, parallel universes, and plot holes that violate strict physical laws: Instead of exploring the limits of our understanding, they make a mockery of them.

That's why I'm so excited about the film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, which tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to skip around in time while his long-suffering wife, Clare, waits for him at home. The premise is no more or less plausible than that of, say, Back to the Future, in which a tricked-out DeLorean must reach 88 mph to jump into the past. But The Time Traveler's Wife follows through on its premise in a realistic way.

A detailed hypothesis of how "realistic" time travel would work can be found at Slate.com.

Science: In 1997, physicists Imre Kondor of the Collegium Budapest and János Kertész of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics organized a conference on the budding field of econophysics, which has since enjoyed a mixed reputation. It is the biggest branch of complex-systems research, and physicists have flocked into finance. But many economists view econophysicists as dilettantes. "Shortly after this conference, I went to work in a bank, and I never met any animosity at all," Kondor says. "The reaction of the academic community has been markedly different than that of the practitioners."

WSJ.com: To conservator Sue Ann Chui at the Getty Museum, the 518-year-old wooden panel painting on her easel is a study in the subtle science of art.

Under scrutiny at her studio, the 15th-century masterwork depicting Madonna and Child is yielding its secrets to X-ray probes, ultraviolet scans, infrared reflectograms and molecular spectroscopy. The panel painting, like many thousands of others world-wide, was severely damaged by earlier efforts to preserve it. Ms. Chui is repairing the ravages of time and good intentions, while helping to turn a dying craft of panel conservation into material science.

"This specialization is a real rarity," says George Bisacca, a leading painting conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "It is in a curious spot between science, artisan skills and artistry, requiring very complicated judgment and knowledge from lots of different fields. That's why there are so few experts."

No more than half a dozen or so restoration specialists world-wide have the expertise for such sophisticated work, and most of them are nearing retirement. The only specialist training program for panel painting conservation, located in Florence, Italy, recently shut down. "It has created this vacuum in expertise," says Getty Conservation Institute scientist Alan Phenix.

Star-Banner: If you decided to take a nighttime walk down one of the county's unlit roads while wearing dark clothing, adding a ball cap to your attire might make work easier for Florida Highway Patrol troopers serving as traffic homicide investigators.

"Normally a ball cap will land close to the point of impact," when a pedestrian is struck by a motor vehicle, said FHP Corporal Mark Weber.

Weber is one of six FHP traffic homicide investigators—part physicist, part policeman, and part victim's advocate—who probe fatal crashes in unincorporated parts of the county.

Various: How do you map a city with no visible ruins?

In July 2007, during a severe drought, Paolo Mozzi, a geomorphologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and his team took aerial photos of Altinum, a Roman trading center that thrived between the 1st and 5th centuries CE, that lay beneath farm fields close to Venice, reports the BBC and ScienceNow. The photos were taken in several wavelengths of visible light and in near-infrared, with a resolution of half a meter.

When the images were processed to tease out subtle variations in plant water stress, a buried metropolis emerged. Lighter crops traced the outlines of buildings—including a basilica, an amphitheater, a forum, and what may have been temples—buried at least 40 centimeters below the surface. To the south of the city center runs a wide strip of riper crops. They were growing above what clearly used to be a canal, an indication that Venice's Roman forebears were already incorporating waterways into their urban fabric.

Related Links
The Map of Altinum, Ancestor of Venice Science
Maps reveal Venice 'forerunner' BBC
Ancient Roman City Rises Again ScienceNow

Nature News: A set of little lenses is stoking a big debate amongst physicists. At issue is whether the tiny spheres are capable of beating the so-called diffraction limit, beyond which no lens can, in theory, work.

BBC News: We might never consider the size of the raindrops as we hurry for cover, but their variety has puzzled scientists for many years.

Now, by filming one falling raindrop, researchers in France have explained why the drops are an array of so many different sizes.
Reporting in the journal Nature Physics, the team described how the drop deformed and burst as it fell.

News@UofT: Just about any road with a loose surface—sand or gravel or snow—develops ripples that make driving a very shaky experience. A team of physicists from Canada, France, and the UK have re-created this "washboard" phenomenon in the lab with surprising results: ripples appear even when the springy suspension of the car and the rolling shape of the wheel are eliminated. The discovery may smooth the way to designing improved suspension systems that eliminate the bumpy ride.

"The hopping of the wheel over the ripples turns out to be mathematically similar to skipping a stone over water," says University of Toronto physicist Stephen Morris, a member of the research team.

NYTimes.com: Spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted—a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for Alan B. Shepard Jr and John Glenn and watched, transfixed, the scene at Tranquility Base. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.

John Noble Wilford looks back to the early days of spaceflight in which he wrote what he calls "the greatest story of my career 'Men Land on Moon."

Photos about the Moon can be found in their media blog, or track the history of the Apollo 11 mission in real time at WeChooseTheMoon.org, a web site that is re-creating the entire Apollo 11 trip as it happened.

Various: An opera about string theory and five-dimensional space has premiered in Paris.

Hypermusic Prologue is a collaboration between composer Hèctor Parra and Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, who authored Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Allen Lane, 2005), an account of cutting-edge physics, including string theory, and the likelihood that there exists additional spatial dimensions.

Randall says that the piece which is basically about two physicists, one of whom explores other dimensions, and one who stays at home. It tries to capture the competition in cutting edge science, the creativity in science as well as in art, says Randall in the above video. "It wasn't clear how to incorporate the ideas into an opera...it did turn into an exciting collaboration."

Baritone James Bobby and soprano Charlotte Ellett sang Randall's libretto, accompanied by musicians and technicians of the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain.

A review in Nature by Stefan Michalowski and Georgia Smith says that the singers and musicians gave "admirable performances, with flashes of startling beauty."

Hypermusic Prologue will be performed on 27–28 November at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, Spain, and on 6 December in the Grand Auditorium of the Philharmonie, Luxembourg.

CNET News: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.

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The Economist: The proteins that make up chicken feathers could provide a cheap ($200 per car) and effective way to store hydrogen fuel in cars.

Richard Wool and a colleague, Erman Senöz, have discovered that keratin—the fibres that make up feathers—when heated in the absence of oxygen, forms hollow tubular structures six millionths of a meter across and riddled with microscopic pores, much like carbon nanotubes.

To avoid melting the fibers they first heat-treated the feathers to around 215°C. This strengthened their structure and allowed further heating to 400–450 °C. At this point the material becomes more porous, increasing its surface area and its hydrogen-storing capacity.

Washingtonpost.com: University of Maryland engineering professor Bruce Jacob had a few songs he wanted to record, tunes that had been jangling around in his head for years. He bought a guitar, but the notes he played never sounded as good as the music he had imagined.

Here's how Jacob, 43, describes the sounds a guitar makes: "If you have a bunch of paints, you can create any paint you want from the three or four fundamental colors. With guitars, it's the exact same thing. You can make any sound you want out of three or four colors. But most guitars have one color."

So Jacob decided to create a better guitar, attacking an elusive aesthetic problem with a series of math equations, a circuit board, and wiring. He and a couple of his students launched Coil, a company that uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize the sound in guitars.

Science News: Concrete creeps. And now scientists think they know why.

New measurements suggest that the rearrangement of nano-sized concrete particles is responsible for the way buildings, bridges, and other load-bearing concrete structures deform over time, a process technically known as “creep.” The new insight could allow engineers to make stronger and longer-lasting concrete, researchers report in a study to be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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NPR: From sci-fi to documentaries, good science films tell the human story behind scientific ideas. Which films get the science right, and which don't? Physicist and movie critic Sidney Perkowitz runs through some of this summer's top science flicks.

The Economist: A few years ago Yadong Yin was experimenting with tiny beads that changed color when a magnetic field was applied to them. This was interesting but there was no obvious way to turn them into a product

Now Yin and his colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, have come up with possible applications that range from a new type of paint to lipsticks and giant advertising billboards.

Yin’s beads are magnetochromatic microspheres. They are made from tiny blobs of polymer that contain particles of iron oxide. The structure of these particles changes in a magnetic field in a way that produces “interference” colors when light is shone on them.

It is the rearrangement of the particles’ microstructures that produces the pertinent detail.

The new research appears in the 15 June Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Nature News: Metrologists are on a path to redefine the unit of temperature. The freezing point of water will never be the same again, finds Nicola Jones.

ScienceNOW: New research shows that the smaller droplets in a rainstorm often surpass what appears to be the speed limit for rain. The findings should help scientists devise models that could lead to more accurate weather forecasts.

The Economist: Chunqi Jiang, a physicist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues have come up with a way to kill bacterial infections that appear as a biofilm on the roots of teeth: use of a "cold" plasma torch.

Plasmas are gases in which the molecules have been stripped of some or all of their electrons, to create positive ions. Cold plasmas can be made using high electrical voltages.

The team report in Plasma Processes and Polymers that when their plasma plume was directed into the infected interiors of teeth, it succeeded in clearing up well-established infections completely.

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New Scientist: Studies over several decades have shown that market fluctuations have a lot in common with processes such as earthquakes that originate in systems that are very much out of equilibrium and naturally subject to abrupt upheavals (Physica A, vol 387, p 3967).

This means price fluctuations on the stock market do not have a bell-shaped "normal" distribution, with the bulk in the mid-range and a steady decline towards each extreme.

In fact, the distribution has a much fatter tail of large price fluctuations, subverting a crucial assumption that underlies much of economic theory.

The implication is that extreme market events, such as a one-day crash capable of wiping out millions of investors, occur naturally in financial markets even in the absence of any extraordinary circumstances.

By contrast, most economists and financial analysts regard such events as strange and unpredictable outliers. "This is, at least in part, because basic market theories can't explain these large fluctuations in any natural way," says physicist Gene Stanley of Boston University, a leader in such analyses.

Science: Last month, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) was putting the brakes on research into automotive hydrogen fuel cells.

Chu cites the cost and durability of vehicle fuel cells, the inability to store large volumes of hydrogen fuel, the absence of a carbon-free way of generating the hydrogen, and the need to build a nationwide refueling infrastructure.

The issue came down to a simple question, says Chu: "Is it likely in the next 10 or 15 or even 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen-car economy? The answer, we felt, was no."

But many scientists and energy experts believe Chu asked the wrong question and, therefore, made the wrong call.

No alternative-vehicle technology will make a major impact on carbon emissions, petroleum use, or anything else within the next 20 years, they say, because it takes longer than that for a new technology to displace what is already on the road.

In the long run, they say only two technologies—hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles—are capable of getting the job done. And only one variation, plug-in hybrids, will be on the market anytime soon.

"There are uncertainties with both these technologies," says Joan Ogden, who heads the sustainable transportation energy program at the University of California, Davis. "So the idea of taking one off the table seems shortsighted."

New Scientist: Although image special effects are largely done by computers nowadays, sound special effects are still based on physical props.

Doug James and Changxi Zheng at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have discovered how to reproduce the sound of flowing and dripping by modeling the way water creates sound in the real world (see video, above).

USA Today: Carl Franzblau, professor and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at Boston University Medical School, wanted to expose more young people to science. Then, he says, he had a vision, inspired by a bloodmobile.

The result — mobile science laboratories that bring science education to students—is expanding across the USA.

Mobile labs are active in at least 10 states and are an important tool in attracting young people to the so-called STEM courses—science, technology, engineering and math, Franzblau says.

The labs are buses or semis outfitted with the basics of science education: electricity, distilled water, freezers and refrigerators, scales, microscopes and even computer systems in some cases, he adds.

They are designed to travel to schools that don't have the resources to teach modern science to students, but they also are crucial in providing training to teachers in a field that can see a new discovery change curriculums overnight.

The Independent: The usual way that runways are inspected for any foreign objects or debris is by eye from a moving vehicle four times a day.

Graham Binns, chief engineer at the research company Qinetiq, says that this method is by no means ideal as it leaves large time gaps between inspections and makes it especially difficult to inspect runways at night.

Instead, Qinetiq has developed a system called Tarsier that is a camera coupled with a radar system which works throughout the day and night.

The radar sweeps the runway and looks for small changes to identify objects appearing. When an object is identified the coordinates are sent to the camera system, which accurately focuses in on the object and gives the human operator the opportunity to look at the debris and decide whether to do something, such as close the runway, or whether its debris that can be ignored.

In two years in operation at Vancouver, Tarsier has found over 400 items, including several classed as "posing significant risk."

NPR: Audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster discuss a revision to their discovery last year of the earliest-known recorded sound from 1860. They have determined it was being played twice as fast as it needed to be.

"What we thought was the voice of a young girl was really a 'chipmunk effect,'" says Feaster.

"When I imitated the new version during a trip to Paris in April, the response I got was: 'Ah! That's how we sing "Au Clair de la Lune" as a lullaby!' So we may have to give up our romantic notion of Scott recording the voice of his young daughter, but in return we may have a record of the way he sang his children to sleep," he says.

More information can be found at the first sounds website.

ScienceNOW: Tired of dealing with those newfangled fluorescent and halogen bulbs that tend to blow out and can't quite handle dimmer switches? You might just find solace from an old and trusted source: incandescent lights. A team of physicists has discovered a way to double the efficiency of these ordinary light bulbs. All it takes is a superfast laser blast to their filaments.

NPR: Students are counting down the days until the start of summer vacation, but is there a way to convince kids to do math over the break? Ira Flatow talks with Danica McKellar, Wonder Years actress turned math book author, about sharpening students' math skills.

Inside Science News: Search crews found debris fields Tuesday in the area where Air France flight 447 apparently crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

Recovering parts of the aircraft on the seabed however, will be difficult.

"The water is deep in that region," says John Perry Fish, CEO of American Underwater Search and Survey, “some 7000 meters deep in the deepest parts, but averaging about 4000 meters. It is near the mid-Atlantic ridge, [an undersea mountain range] which runs from Iceland to the south Atlantic."

The first problem in finding the debris and black boxes from the plane, he said, is that the aircraft was not being tracked on radar when it disappeared, "so you don't know exactly where to start. If you have a radar track, you can plot an area of a couple miles out from that point and start searching." Without the radar, he said, the task is to find the floating debris and do "hindcasting," which traces the path of debris backwards as it floats on the ocean currents.

Chris German, the chief scientist for the deep submergence group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, says that even with two debris fields located miles apart, the backtracking can be done. "You look at the ocean currents and wind and determine where the debris was 10 hours before, then 10 hours before that. You do that all the way back to when you think the crash occurred." Fish said that the hindcasting could trace out the path up to 30 days back in time.

Unmanned sonar-mapping submersibles can then be used to look for wreckage on the seabed, particularly the blackbox&which contains data about the final minutes of the flight—that emits an ultrasonic acoustic ping to help guide rescuers to its location.

The conditions however are at the limit of current technology, making any sort of recovery operation extremely difficult.

"Destroying a planet takes time. They're big, dense objects, and destroying one is not like popping a balloon or even vaporizing a city with nukes... Even if you drop a bomb or fire a death ray powerful enough to reduce a whole planet to rubble, you still have the problem of gravity; that rubble is going to stay where it is, or at worst, fly apart and then fall back together again.

The resulting planet would be loose rather than solid—picture a pile of sand or a dump truck full of gravel—but it would still be round, it would still have gravity, and you could still orbit your spaceship around it.

In the case of an explosion, the energies involved are colossal. The Earth (for example) weighs 6 billion quadrillion tons, and even if we ignore the force required to break it into small pieces, we still need to accelerate every scrap of it to escape velocity—over 10,000 meters per second—in every possible direction, to overcome their collective gravity and keep them from falling back together again. That means almost a quadrillion quadrillion gigajoules of kinetic energy. That's the equivalent ... of the total heat output of the sun for three full decades."

Nature News: The technology of incandescent lights has changed very little since Thomas Edison made it a commercial success in the 1880s.

Inside the bulb is a filament--tungsten in today's models--that is heated by the flow of electricity until it glows white and lights up the room. The design is simple, versatile, and cheap.

Nonetheless, that technology is now on the way out. In today's energy-hungry world, the devices are too wasteful: some 98% of the energy input ends up as heat instead of light. Halogen lamps, which look more high-tech, are not any better.

Multiply that waste by the number of incandescent bulbs in residential, industrial, and commercial settings -- an estimated 4 billion standard light sockets in the United States alone -- and it is clear why several countries are seeking to eliminate the bulbs entirely as a way to control carbon dioxide emissions.

Josh Wurman is president of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado, and a VORTEX2 member. He is now looking for storms in Nebraska, and joins host Neal Conan to talk about 15 years studying tornadoes.

Matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, releasing energy according to Einstein's famous formula E=mc². This tells us that one pound of antimatter is equivalent to around 19 megatons of TNT. There is the slight issue of containment - the antimatter has to be kept in a complete vacuum and prevented from touching the walls of the container. But once you've solved that one you can go out and wreak havoc... just as soon as you've got your antimatter.

And there's the big problem. In Angels & Demons, the antimatter is stolen from CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center. And it's true—scientists there really have produced antimatter. But only in submicroscopic quantities. "If you add up all the antimatter we have made in more than 30 years of antimatter physics here at CERN, and if you were very generous, you might get 10 billionths of a gram," CERN's Rolf Landua told New Scientist magazine. "Even if that exploded on your fingertip it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match."

Using interferometry--subtracting one picture from the other--Italian scientists overlaid the two radar pictures of the region to produce a map of colored waves.

Each colored ring is a measure of how much the ground has moved as a result of the earthquake.

The large green square represents the location of the main shock; the smaller green squares show large aftershocks. Along the yellow line east of L’Aquila geologists found an alignment of surface breaks after the quake, which indicate the orientation of the rupture. The colored wave pattern follows those breaks exactly, indicating that the ground had moved a few inches down to the left side of the yellow line. This movement is also represented by the black and white fault plane solution on the left.

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Their work has already helped surgeons find the location of a potentially life-threatening blood clot in a patient's heart.

Using sophisticated computer modelling developed to explore the flow of liquid metal through rocks, the scientists were able to show doctors where the patient's blood was gathering in a pool in their heart due to a blood clot.

Scientific Blogging: Unless you are a true baseball fan, you have probably never heard of Bob Feller. Maybe you have heard of Nolan Ryan. They were classic power pitchers. They threw hard and they threw for strikes.

Even if you are a baseball fan, unless you live and breathe the Detroit Tigers, you have probably never heard of Joel Zumaya.

A recent British Medical Journal paper describes a man aged 55 who presented to an eye, ear, nose and throat clinic with tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. He had been playing golf three times a week for 18 months using a King Cobra LD titanium club and he described the noise of the club hitting the ball as “like a gun going off”. He found the noise so unpleasant he was forced to discard the club. After detailed examination it was concluded that his hearing impairment was due to the noise of the golf club hitting the golf ball.

USA Today: So much for gangsters or communists infiltrating Hollywood. The real invisible menace turns out to be scientists.

CNet: Google Earth upped the cartographic ante again today with Google Earth 5 for Windows and Mac. As CNET News reported back in April 2008, the latest version incorporates even more data from NASA, the BBC, National Geographic, and other proprietary sources to create one of the most unique map offerings ever, meshing comprehensive real-time data on Earth's surface with information on the oceans, the stars that we see, historical maps, and topographical information on Mars.

The New York Times: Isaac Newton's apple hurt considerably less than Ryan Clark's coconut. But they did have a few things in common.

The Washington Post: You used to need hubris, millions of dollars and the support of a great research university to imagine building a replacement for the human eye.

Now it's become dream and quest material for artists and tinkerers.

The New York Times: With the inauguration of an administration avowedly committed to Science as the grand elixir for the nation's economic, environmental, and psycho-reputational woes, a number of scientists say that now is the time to tackle a chronic conundrum of their beloved enterprise: how to attract more women into the fold, and keep them once they are there.

Space.com: Two astronauts joined the millions of Americans who watched now-President Barack Obama's inauguration Tuesday, even though they were flying high above Earth aboard the International Space Station.

The developers of 'photonic ink' (P-Ink) say that the material could be used in electronic books or advertising displays.

MSNBC: 'Madonna of the Goldfinch' survived being shattered to pieces

The Christian Science Monitor: Painting homes a lighter shade does more than save money on air conditioning.

The New York Times: On a hillside overlooking this college town on the banks of the Hudson, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has erected a technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses.

Hartford Courant: Bob Grober, a professor of applied physics at Yale University, has invented a tool to help so-so golfers and big-money professionals improve the way they swing the club. It instantly converts the velocity of a swing into sound, allowing the listener to hear a golf stroke in progress.

Mr. Sanns, 51 years old, is part of a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists and science-fiction fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards and home laboratories.

Called fusors and based on a 1960s design first developed by Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, the reactors are typically small steel spheres with wires and tubes sticking out and a glass window for looking inside. But they won't be powering homes anytime soon -- for now, fusors use far more energy than they produce.

NPR: Back in 55 B.C., Julius Caesar invaded Britain for the first time. He kept a detailed record of his journey, straightforward enough for Latin students to read today. But in that record, Caesar failed to mention the actual date of his landing.

It's a puzzle that's had scientists and historians duking it out for centuries. Now, Donald Olson, a professor of physics at Texas State University, thinks he's got the answer. He explains how the stars aligned to shed light on this ancient mystery.

MSNBC: The Vatican keeps tabs on science, integrates new research into theology

Physics Today: 2008 北京奥运

As thousands of competitors gather in Beijing, China, for the 2008 summer Olympics, many of them over the coming weeks will be either using scientific advancements to gain a perceived performance edge, such as a new high-tech swimsuit, or applying physics subconsciously, to sail, ride, or play baseball.

Over the years the way athletes conduct sport has changed. In 708 BC, athletes would carry weights in the ancient form of the long jump. The weights, made of stone or lead, improved the jumpers' performance, reports Steven K. Blau.

The recent Wimbledon and French Open tennis championships raised questions concerning the high-speed nature of the serves. Should drag be increased on the ball to slow the serves down? Or the tennis racket be made smaller to increase the skill required to play the game? Howard Brody from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia believes practice is more likely to win championships, not high-tech rackets, after attempting to design the perfect tennis racket. And Rod Cross takes a detailed look at ball bounce in his discussion ofthe physics of the game.

Although technology might not help tennis players, it will destroy the game of baseball, predicts Robert K. Adair from Yale University. Adair has spent years studying baseball and why aluminum bats should be banned from the game.

David E. H. Jones pondered some time ago the perplexing question of how does a bicycle keep its stability? The answer involves torsorial forces, although some centrifugal forces will be keeping the speed cyclists on the Olympic raised track.

NPR's Andrew Prince looks at research done at George Washington University on the mechanics of the swimming in creatures such as fish and dolphins, and how its been applied to Michael Phelps' success in the Olympic pool, with his use of the dolphin kick, the undulating, wavelike motion he makes underwater.

But air quality may prove to be the most significant factor in the athletes’ performance, and a risk to the spectators, despite the attempts by the Chinese government to reduce pollution by closing factories and banning cars. Richard Stone from Science magazine asks what happens after the games finish?

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Science: In 1960, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila earned an Olympic gold medal without wearing any shoes. But bare feet on the Olympic track these days are passé, as athletes slip into ever more high-tech gear. Shoes, swimsuits, and clothing are getting lighter and stronger, adhering like glue to athletes' bodies and moving more fluidly through air and water.

The Independent: Can't tell the difference between paint stripper and a 1982 Château Pétrus? Well, scientists have developed a remedy: an "electronic tongue" that can distinguish between grape varieties and vintages.

Science: Drastic measures have brought down levels of some pollutants; a return to business as usual after the Olympics could be bad for health

The Times: Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards.

“Ships’ officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate,” said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies.

USA Today: Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light.

Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen's internal clock in check, because Madsen is living on Mars time.

Mars' day is 40 minutes longer than Earth's, and the start of the Martian day is always changing with respect to Earth time, as a result of their respective orbital motions.

Living on a schedule that shifts forward by 40 minutes everyday can wreak havoc on the human body, creating an effect that is essentially like perpetual jet lag.

New York Times: After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games. The story is based on an article that appeared in Nature.

New York Times: By lighting all of the building’s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.’s, Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis. spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.’s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.

But with increasing regularity in recent months, the Environmental Protection Agency has been receiving calls from radon inspectors as well as from concerned homeowners about granite countertops with radiation measurements several times above background levels. “We’ve been hearing from people all over the country concerned about high readings,” said Lou Witt, a program analyst with the agency’s Indoor Environments Division.

Slate.com: Airlines are suffering because of high fuel prices in the worst downturn the industry has seen in 8 years. In the short therm the airlines are raising prices and canceling routes, but over the longer haul, they need to start looking at two kinds of changes: a different kind of plane and a different kind of fuel says reporter Christopher Flavelle.

Science: The international acoustics meeting recently held in Paris, France has had a number of stories picked up by science magazine that appeared in last week's issue. Speech can betray fatigue according to a new software program that analyzes the phonetic features of each person's speech.

Tigers and polar bears have had their hearing tested: The bears had a hearing range similar to that of humans, between 125 and 20,000 hertz; Tiger have hearing sensitive to infrasound, sound of lower frequency than most mammals perceive.

Acoustic instruments in the Indian ocean designed to detect nuclear explosions are now being put to use detecting ice cracking in Antarctic thousands of miles away. Getting a statistical handle on the numerous small ice cracks that are not visible from space will help determine whether the rate of ice-shelf degradation stays within natural bounds or steadily increases due to mechanisms such as climate change.

New ultrasound-based technologies are poised to probe the inner structure of bones and treat otherwise incurable cancers but the hype surrounding these techniques may be minimizing some of the risks associated with the techniques.

FInally, the newest generation of archaeologists may be wielding sensitive microphones and recorders to map hidden and abandoned structures according to several sessions in Paris devoted to archaeological acoustics.

Washington Post: As energy costs continue to soar, home owners are becoming concerned that energy expenses could compromise their long-term housing plans. The Washington Post investigates five steps towards reducing your energy costs.

The Times: The Home Office has been investigating the use of high-tech pain rays against mobs as an alternative to the water cannon, according to a report by its Scientific Development Branch due to be published next month.

The so-called active denial system (ADS) projects microwave-like radiation for distances of more than 500 yards, creating an excruciating, full-body burning sensation in anyone caught in its beam. The millimetre-wave rays penetrate skin to a depth of about 1/64in but cause no permanent damage, according to Raytheon, the system’s US-based maker.

Nature: A fierce rally of words is being played out ahead of the Wimbledon tennis fortnight in London. The inventor of Hawk-Eye — a high-speed camera-based device used to help tennis umpires make decisions — is arguing with academics at Cardiff University, who claim that the workings of the technology could be represented more transparently to the public.

Nature: A joint exploration of early modern physics and the surreal art movement shows these twentieth-century revolutions had more in common than we thought, explains Nature's Philip Ball.

Wired: YouTube videos that show a group of friends apparently cooking kernels of popcorn with their cellphones have been viewed more than a million times since they were uploaded last week.

The clever parlor trick (see embedded clip) looks amazing enough, but there's a hitch: It's not physically possible, according to University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield.

The Christian Science Monitor: A Victorian-era dream is reborn via fiberoptics and imagination in the 'telectroscope.'

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.

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.

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Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey, PLoS One

Technorati Tags: acoustics

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. 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 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, Ge, 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

Los Angeles Times: The technique of painting in oils was developed in Asia as long as 800 years before it appeared in Europe, according to a new report in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectroscopy. The research is based on an analysis of murals found inside caves at Bamian in Afghanistan.

"This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world," said Yoko Taniguchi, a historian at Tokyo's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties and one of the authors of the report.

The binders and pigments used in the Bamian murals were identified using gas chromatographs at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and a variety of X-ray technologies at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France

The synchrotron technology enabled researchers to study each layer in the paintings, identifying pigments and binders.

news.com: If you were at the Exploratorium here the other day, you might well have needed to be wary of flying objects.

That's because, way in the back of the world-class science exploration museum, senior scientist Paul Doherty was giving a primer on why the curveball--one of the most important pitches in baseball--curves.

Of course, being a hands-on kind of scientist, one who had kindly taken time out of his day to explain the physics of baseball, the only way Doherty could explain the science was to demonstrate it. So he was flinging balls everywhere, and boy were they curving.

New York Times: It was the end of January 2005, during the spawning season for a fish appropriately called the black drum. Nightly mating calls were at a crescendo. But no one living in the area seemed to realize the din was of aquatic origin.

James Locascio, a doctoral student in marine science at the University of South Florida, explains that at 100 to 500 hertz, black drum mating calls travel at a low enough frequency and long enough wavelength to carry through sea walls, into the ground and through the construction of waterfront homes like the throbbing beat in a passing car.

“Black drum have taken a liking to the canal system in Cape Coral,” Mr. Locascio said. “Their nightly booming is like a water drip torture that lasts for months.”

New York Times reporter Nonny de la Pena investigates the mystery of how fish make sound, and how the National Marine Fisheries Service is listening to fish sounds in an attempt to discover a new noninvasive way of managing declining fish stocks.

The Independent: The two men boarding the Eurostar to Paris this Wednesday will be unremarkable, save for the metallic suitcase they keep in their sight at all times. Their fellow passengers could be forgiven for shuffling away as they eye the words DO NOT DROP in red on the side of the case.

Far from transporting some doomsday device, the two British scientists will be carrying a kilogram of harmless metal. But not just any kilogram: it is the UK standard kilogram, used as the ultimate reference for everything from the accuracy of a grocer's scales to the ingredients in a pill.

Actually, it weighs a fraction more than a kilogram. And that is a problem: as the years go by, it is gaining weight. Scientists from Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) hope that cleaning the weight with a revolutionary new method, invented in the UK, will bring it back closer to its true mass. Long-term comparisons suggest that other nations' benchmark kilos are also gaining weight compared with the prototype in Paris – the definitive kilo based on the weight of a litre of water at 4C – which was cast in 1879.

Nature: Physicists' search for a theory of everything is entering territory more familiar to biologists: taxonomy. A small team of theorists is meeting in Tucson, Arizona, in April to discuss how to classify the billions upon billions of different possible universes created by string theory, which describes fundamental particles and forces as vibrating strings.

New York Times: Not long ago in this space, I spoke with Michio Kaku, the author of “Physics of the Impossible” and a professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about science-fiction-inspired technological breakthroughs that might actually occur within our own lifetimes. This week, Kaku talks about three long dreamt-of technologies that he categorizes as class I, class II and class III impossibilities — in other words, things you’ll simply never see during your time on earth. (Unless, like me, you plan to live forever.)

New Scientist: Long ago, antimatter all but vanished from existence, allowing matter to predominate and form the stars and planets of the universe. Exactly why this happened has been a mystery, but a particle accelerator in Japan may have found a new clue, and one that does not seem to fit the standard model of particle physics.

The Guardian: Bob Cernik likes using x-rays to probe the nature of materials. The Manchester University professor has been working at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire to develop a prototype 3D colour x-ray system to detect hidden explosives, drugs, or even cancer. Cernik's system uses "tomographic energy dispersive diffraction imaging" - or TEDDI.

TEDDI requires an x-ray source with a pencil-thin beam, a collimator (to put the radiation into parallel beams), a detector, and significant data analysis. The synchrotron provides high energies to penetrate dense metal objects, although Cernik will eventually use compact x-ray sources like the ones used in hospitals.

The end result will be a scanner that should be able to display a false color result of interior of a suitcase in under a minute.

Associated Press: Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University who worked as a labourer after emigrating from Russia to Israel, has succeeded in solving the elusive so-called road colouring problem.

The conjecture, posed by Adler, Goodwiyn and Weiss over 38 years ago, assumes that it is possible to create a "universal map" that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location.

Related Links
Avraham Trakhtman
The road coloring problem, Israel J. of Math
The road coloring problem (ArXiv)
A history of the Road coloring conjecture (Wikipedia)

Physics Today: Opportunities for amateur astronomers to observe the night sky are becoming rare as light pollution fades the night sky away. Yet, thanks to a new product called Google Sky, a simple desktop computer can provide some unprecedented views of the universe that were previously available only to professional astronomers. Google Sky is based on the same technology as Google Earth and displays the visible universe based on a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thumbnail images at the bottom of Google Sky's display can bring up high resolution images of the planets, the constellations, highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope, famous stars, galaxies and nebulae, and views of the universe in the x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. Other items available through Google Sky include:

* Infrared - An infrared view of the sky from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Change the transparency of this layer by moving the slide bar to blend the optical and infrared.
* Microwave - A view of the microwave sky from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which shows the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang.
* Historical - The sky as drawn by Giovanni Maria Cassini (printed in 1792) showing the constellations in their classical form from the collections of David Rumsey.

Other online observatories
Bradford Robotic Telescope
Micro-Observatory
Seeing in the Dark
Slooh

Various: Nearly one in ten troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are on disability because of damaged hearing.

Currently most troops rely on a pair of double-sided earplugs worth $7.40 to protect their hearing in war zones writes Chelsea J. Carter for the associated press. One side of the ear plug is designed to protect from weapons fire and explosions, the other from aircraft and tank noise. But the Marines were not given instructions in how to use the earplugs, and some cut them in half, while others used the wrong sides, making the devices virtually useless.

In any case, hearing protection has its limits. While damage can occur at 80 to 85 decibels — the noise level of a moving tank — the best protection cuts that by only 20 to 25 decibels. That is not enough to protect the ears against an explosion or a firefight, which can range upwards of 183 decibels, said Dr. Ben Balough, a Navy captain and chairman of otolaryngology at the Balboa Navy Medical Center in San Diego.

Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, says the Department of Veterans Affairs, costing the department nearly $805 million annually. The powerful roadside bombs detonated in Iraq cause violent changes in air pressure that can rupture the eardrum and break bones inside the ear. Sixty percent of U.S. personnel exposed to blasts suffer from permanent hearing loss, and 49 percent also suffer from tinnitus, according to military audiology reports. The hearing damage ranges from mild, such as an inability to hear whispers or low pitches, to severe, including total deafness or a constant loud ringing that destroys the ability to concentrate. There is no known cure for tinnitus or hearing loss.

The Navy and Marines have begun buying and distributing state-of-the-art earplugs, known as QuietPro, that contain digital processors that block out damaging sound waves from gunshots and explosions and still allow users to hear everyday noises. They cost about $600 a pair. According to Andrew Tilghman at Marine Times the QuietPro looks like an pod and is integrated into the users radio system, allowing troops to hear their radios and the sounds around them. A digital processor locks up at any sign of a blast that could damage the inner ear, and opens up again immediately after a blast to permit normal sound. The Marines have ordered 48,000 devices to be deployed over the next two years.

The Army also has equipped every soldier being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan with newly developed one-sided earplugs that cost about $8.50, and it has begun testing QuietPro with some troops.

In addition, the Navy is working with San Diego-based American BioHealth Group to develop a “hearing pill” that could protect troops’ ears. An early study in 2003 on 566 recruits showed a 25 to 27 percent reduction in permanent hearing loss. But further testing is planned.

And for the first time in American warfare, for the past three years, hearing specialists or hearing-trained medics have been put on the front lines instead of just at field hospitals, Hoffer said.

The main difficulty however, lies with the troops, who worry that ear plugs and other protection devices might limit awareness of their surroundings, and get them killed. “I think these soldiers are choosing between hearing damage and their lives, in their mind. And that may not literally be true.” said David Fagerlie, head of the American Tinnitus Association.

Related links
Hearing problems a constant reminder of Iraq duty (Stars & Stripes)
Hearing Loss Rises Among U.S. Soldiers in Iraq (American Speech-Language Hearing Association)
High-tech ear gear offers more protection (Marine Times)

Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.

Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.

Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).

"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"

Nature: The dream of perpetual flight without fuel has inspired pilots to take to the skies in solar-powered planes. Vicki Cleave looks at a mission to fly a solar plane through the night — and around the world.

FOXNews: The movie "Jumper," opening Thursday, has a hero with the extraordinary power to teleport anywhere on Earth by imagining the place he wants to go.

Duke University: A Duke University researcher says that his physics theory, which has been applied to everything from global climate to traffic patterns, can also explain another trend: why university rankings tend not to change very much from year to year.

Science News: Mathematician nominated for award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance

The New York Times: The saxophone, invented by Adolphe Sax, the Belgian instrument maker, and patented in 1846, is a curved tube of brass with holes. Its vibrations can reach high-pitched wailing notes, particularly when played by jazz musicians like John Coltrane.

Telegraph.co.uk: It has been a problem that's baffled children armed with buckets and spades for generations, yet new research has revealed that building the sturdy sandcastle is easier than first thought.

The New York Times: In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights, chalk and star power, science and art squared off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology one night last month.

New York Times: All that glitters golden is not gold. It could be aluminum. Or tungsten. Or another metal of Chunlei Guo’s choosing. In a feat of optical alchemy, Dr. Guo, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, and Anatoliy Y. Vorobyev, a postdoctoral researcher, use ultrashort laser bursts to pockmark the surface of a metal in a way that is not perceptible to the touch — it still feels smooth to the finger — but that alters how the metal absorbs and reflects light. The result, published in Applied Physics Letters, is that pure aluminum looks like gold, and the appearance is literally skin deep.

Related Links
Colorizing metals with femtosecond laser pulses

Nature: Acoustic method could quickly catch counterfeit coins.

The New York Times: The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

The Hindu: Indian craftsmen and artisans used nanotechnology extensively about 2000 years ago to make weapons and long lasting cave paintings, a Nobel laureate of Chemistry said here.

Wired: Physicist Dr. Robert Lang has turned geek pastime into a source of scientific innovation, using the art of origami to make significant contributions in the fields of astronomy, heart surgery and consumer safety.

NPR: Leonardo da Vinci is known for the "Mona Lisa" and other art masterpieces. But the Renaissance man also invented fluid dynamics and, perhaps, the scientific method.

Los Angeles Times: Scientists scan cities. Response teams are ready. And if there were a lethal device, experts would work on tracing the source.

Channel NewsAsia: To encourage more children to play outdoor, an American company has developed what is known as a sonic playground.

BBC: A new type of super-efficient household light bulb is being developed which could spell the end of regular bulbs.

The New York Times: Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Wired: Everybody's favorite cosmologist and climatologist, Rush Limbaugh, did a little bit yesterday on how global warming can't possibly be happening, because, come on, climatologists can't even accurately predict how many hurricanes are coming each year.

Guardian Unlimited: The only known recordings of a brilliant physicist who predicted the existence of parallel universes have been found in the basement of his rock star son's flat.

Washington Post: A small town in Prince George's County near Washington D.C. that has flooded four times in the past four years has put a technology more than 2,000 years old to work in a new $6 million pumping station that residents hope will keep them dry.

The design, known as an Archimedes screw for the 3rd century B.C. Greek mathematician credited with conceiving it, employs a massive, slowly turning screw to lift a huge quantity of water up a short distance. The new station in Edmonston uses three of the screws to raise water the 20 feet necessary to get it up and out of the town and into a levee system that runs along the Anacostia River. Common nearly everywhere else in the world, this is the first Archimedes screw to be used on the east coast for flood protection.

The researchers have used these electrodes to create a flexible light-emitting device. Both the anode and cathode are transparent which, even when repeatedly bent, twisted, rolled or folded completely over, continue to conduct electricity without losing any notable properties.

USA Today: Not quite. But geek heaven abounds on CBS' The Big Bang Theory one of the rare TV sitcoms to employ a physicist.

Telegraph.co.uk: Security guards, police officers and armed forces could become Robocops able to take bullets in their stride, thanks to a carbon nanotechnology yarn which can defect projectiles without a trace of damage.

Wired: Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells work, how catalytic converters clean up car exhaust and even why even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Ertl, who won the prize on his 71st birthday, told reporters that it ''is the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.''

''I am speechless,'' Ertl told The Associated Press from his office in Berlin. ''I was not counting on this.''

Related Web sites
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007
German Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize, Associated Press
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Won by Gerhard Ertl, NPR
Telephone interview with Gerhard, Nobel Foundation.
Gerhard Ertl's web site

BBC: Illegible words on church headstones could be read once more thanks to a scan technology developed in the US.

Reuters: Steroids can help batters hit 50 percent more home runs by boosting their muscle mass by just 10 percent, a U.S. physicist said on Thursday.

Wired: Price drops for semi-pro astronomy gear have put some impressive equipment in the hands of astrophotographer hobbyists. Here you'll meet some of the best DIY astrophotographers in this growing subculture.

The Christian Science Monitor: They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate?

The Boston Globe: The British soccer player David Beckham is famous for many things. His hairstyles (there's a website that allows you to view yourself with 13 of his distinct do's); his fashion choices (the British tabloids just loved his male sarong and pink nail polish); and his marriage to a pop star, Victoria Beckham -- Posh Spice of the Spice Girls.

And then there's his soccer fame, which is largely based on his innate command of the laws of physics.

Photonics.com: Workers could face a health threat -- in some cases, on par to that of cigarette smoking -- from office laser printers that emit large amounts of tiny particles into the air. Potential effects range from respiratory irritation to effects on the cardiovascular system and cancer, said Professor Lidia Morawska from the Queensland University of Technology, as reported in Australia's ABC Science Online.

Indianapolis Star: By explaining science behind motions, camp aims to draw more girls to technology field

Chicago Tribune: With its uniform pieces and simple moves, checkers may seem like a simple kid's game. But it took hundreds of computers running continuously for nearly 20 years before researchers announced today that the game has officially been solved, a major benchmark in the development of artificial intelligence.

Environmental News Network: As the summer swelters on, skyscrapers and apartments around the city will be cranking up the air conditioning and pushing the city's power grid to the limit.

Wired: When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine's memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.

The Guardian: We will never explain the cosmos by taking on faith either divinity or physical laws. True meaning is to be found within nature

Wired: The tiny brick library in Leonardo Da Vinci's hometown is putting 3,000 pages of the genius' work online in a high-resolution, searchable archive.

New London Day: Lawsuits allege that 'hot fuel' is costing motorists