On the right, an artificial atom generates sound waves consisting of ripples on the surface of a solid. The sound, known as a surface acoustic wave (SAW) is picked up on the left by a “microphone” composed of interlaced metal fingers. According to theory, the sound consists of a stream of quantum particles, the weakest whisper physically possible. The illustration is not to scale. (Credit: Philip Krantz, Krantz NanoArt)
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Close-ups of an experiment conducted by John Bush and his student Daniel Harris, in which a bouncing droplet of fluid was propelled across a fluid bath by waves it generated. (Credit: Dan Harris)
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The Smoluchowsi trapdoor is a simple test for any proposed exorcism of Maxwell’s demon. It is immediately obvious that an information based exorcism is of no use. The are no sensors in this simple device that collect information; and there are memory devices that would need erasure if the demon is to return to its original state. (Credit: Hemmo, M.; Shenker)
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Gravity Probe B (GP-B) has measured spacetime curvature near Earth to test related models in application of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (Credit: S. Hossenfelder, Wiki Commons)
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The research group resolved the challenging issue attributed to solid crystals, namely widely spread emission wavelengths, and succeeded in fabricating many single-photon sources that emit photons with nearly identical emission wavelengths. (Credit: National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS))
via innovations-report
C H Figure 1: Acausality: Penrose diagram of a black hole with signature c hange at high curvature (hashed region). In contrast to traditional non-sing ular models, there is an event horizon (dashed line H , the boundary of the region that is determined by backward evolution from future infinity) and a Chauchy horizon (dash-dotte d line C , the boundary of the region obtained by forward evolution of the high-curvature re gion) (Credit: Martin Bojowald)
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Giant alien planets known as “hot Jupiters” can induce wobbles in their parent stars that may lead to the wild, close orbits seen by astronomers. This diagram shows the relationship between wobbling stars and the orbital tilt of hot Jupiter planets. (Credit: Cornell University/N.Storch, K.Anderson, D.Lai)
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A team of researchers has identified seven dust particles that were returned to Earth in 2006 by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft, which might have originated in the interstellar medium. This false-color image shows a diffraction pattern created by one of these particles, named Orion. Image (Credit: Zack Gainsforth)
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“While it may sound a bit odd, we actually learned a great deal about this supernova by detecting absolutely nothing,” said Raffaella Margutti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. “Now we can essentially rule out that the explosion was caused by a white dwarf continuously pulling material from a companion star.” (Credit: NASA)
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When parasitic plants such as dodder attack plants like the sugar beet shown here, there is a vast exchange of genetic information between the plants, a Virginia Tech researcher has discovered. (Credit: Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sceinces)
via techtimes
The fragmentation of the Novato meteorite on Oct. 17, 2012, as depicted in a horizontally mirrored image to show the progression of the event (from left to right). (Robert P. Moreno Jr., Jim Albers and Peter Jenniskens/NASA-SETI)
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Engineering PhD student Willem Olding aims to take out the tedium in creating mapping systems to free-up time for more important work. (Credit: Richard Jupe)
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NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 spacecraft, which launched in 1978, flew by the moon on Aug. 10, 2014 and is heading toward the sun. (Credit: SpacecraftforAll.com)
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The influence of the Higgs boson and its field (inset) on cosmological inflation could manifest in the observation of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 telescope (background). (Credit: EPFL)
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A bit of heat. Two parallel, thin plates that exchange heat via thermal radiation can form a thermal “bit” that changes rapidly between “one” and “zero.” One of them is made of a material like VO2 that switches between two states with different thermal properties, depending on its temperature. (Credit: P. Ben-Abdallah/Univ. of Paris-Sud)
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Cygnus Orb-2 spacecraft ‘Janice Voss’ bids farewell to the ISS at 6:40 a.m. EDT, Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. It’s set to reenter the atmosphere on Aug. 17. (Credit: NASA TV)
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The Quantum Computer Science project was completed in August 2013. The project focused on the mathematical aspects of quantum computing. Andris Ambainis, a theoretical computer scientist at the University of Latvia in Riga, was the principal coordinator of the project. (Credit: Ritvars Skuja)
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Kaggle is currently running about 20 contests on its site. Most of them will attract between 300 and 500 teams. But the Higgs contest, which does not end until September, has already drawn almost 970. Names appear and drop off of the leader board every day. (Credit: Sandbox Studio, Chicago)
via symmetrymagazine
DARPA wants its new experimental spaceship to fly 10 times within in 10 days and it wants the contractor to show that the vessel can fly at 10 times the speed of sound or more. (Credit: DARPA)
via thedailybeast
A lot of physics is based on the assumption that the mass of a proton remains constant over time—pretty much forever. But what if that’s not true? What if it grows or shrinks over time? That would mean that the ratio between them and electrons changes as well, and if that’s true, then physicists are going to have to come up with some new ideas to explain what that might mean. (Credit: S. Schiller et al., Phys. Rev. Lett (2014))
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Light-field displays for mobile devices might be only a year away. Ostendo’s light-field display produces 3-D images using light-emitting pixels and piles of pixel-level processing. (Credit: Ostendo Technologies)
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Candidate Higgs boson events from collisions between protons in the LHC. The top event in the CMS experiment shows a decay into two photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). The lower event in the ATLAS experiment shows a decay into 4 muons (red tracks).(Credit: NASA)
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A time sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images, taken in the 15 years from 1994 to 2009, showing the collision of the expanding supernova remnant with a ring of dense material ejected by the progenitor star 20,000 years before the supernova. (Credit: NASA)
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Computational techniques developed by a team from NIST and IU could enable precise computation of atomic properties that are important for nuclear medicine, as well as astrophysics and other fields of atomic research. Image: Paco Ayala (Fotolia)
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The Perseus galaxy cluster is one of the most massive objects in the universe, containing thousands of galaxies immersed in a vast cloud of multimillion degree gas. (Credit: NASA)
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Two closely orbiting black holes in a galaxy about 4.2 billion light-years from Earth emit wavy jets, seen as a bluish spiral, while the third black hole in the trio is more distant, emitting linear jets off to the right.
via abc.net
More than 600 000 galaxies from the BOSS survey were utilized to measure the strength of gravitational interactions of galaxies extremely far away from each other. This is a visual representation of that measurement; the amount that the circles are distorted, or squashed from perfect concentric rings, indicates the velocity that galaxies are falling towards each other and hence the strength of the gravitational interactions. (Credit: BOSS/U. Portsmouth)
via phys.org
