The Official Science Thread

That is amazing to think about. Our oldest signals have only reached a fraction of ONE galaxy!! There are countless more, with such vast distances between.

Humans have only been creating radio waves for about 120 yrs, right? And I would assume we've only been generating ones with any substantial power for less time than that, and intentionally transmitting them into space for even less.

Is there something I'm missing, or should that circle be smaller than 200 light years?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I remember reading that our signals aren't powerful enough to be considered anything more than noise at something like ~100 light years out anyway.

edit, yep, we're all alone in our 100 light year bubble
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily...2012/3390.html

A special note to the pedants: yes, I do realize that the signal from our radio and TV broadcasts is so attenuated by that 100-light-year boundary as to be undetectable except by some kind of magical alien technology

This working on a super basic level at present, but imagine millions/billions of these at the nano scale, able to replicate any object you throw in your magic bag full of tiny robots.

Originally Posted by Xcelratr

Humans have only been creating radio waves for about 120 yrs, right? And I would assume we've only been generating ones with any substantial power for less time than that, and intentionally transmitting them into space for even less.

Is there something I'm missing, or should that circle be smaller than 200 light years?

The circle is 200 light years in diameter, since we've only been broadcasting ~100 years, it reaches 100 light years in each direction (hence the 200 ly diameter).

Self

Thanks for clearing the cobwebs out of my brain.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Simulation of a black hole eating a star

There's a cloud of Hydrogen near the center of our galaxy, they're expecting to see something like this happen once it becomes close enough to the hole.

http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1151e/

Science and techmology.

The Middle of the Earth

Pretty interesting.............I did not know the pressure was that great in the center....

And it is hard to believe that there is a 'giant ball in the center of the Earth that rotates independently.

-----------------------------------------------------



As if the inside story of our planet weren’t already the ultimate potboiler, a host of new findings has just turned the heat up past Stygian.


Geologists have long known that Earth’s core, some 1,800 miles beneath our feet, is a dense, chemically doped ball of iron roughly the size of Mars and every bit as alien. It’s a place where pressures bear down with the weight of 3.5 million atmospheres, like 3.5 million skies falling at once on your head, and where temperatures reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as the surface of the Sun. It’s a place where the term “ironclad agreement” has no meaning, since iron can’t even agree with itself on what form to take. It’s a fluid, it’s a solid, it’s twisting and spiraling like liquid confetti.

Researchers have also known that Earth’s inner Martian makes its outer portions look and feel like home. The core’s heat helps animate the giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates floating far above it, to build up mountains and gouge out seabeds. At the same time, the jostling of core iron generates Earth’ magnetic field, which blocks dangerous cosmic radiation, guides terrestrial wanderers and brightens northern skies with scarves of auroral lights.


Now it turns out that existing models of the core, for all their drama, may not be dramatic enough. Reporting recently in the journal Nature, Dario Alfè of University College London and his colleagues presented evidence that iron in the outer layers of the core is frittering away heat through the wasteful process called conduction at two to three times the rate of previous estimates.

The theoretical consequences of this discrepancy are far-reaching. The scientists say something else must be going on in Earth’s depths to account for the missing thermal energy in their calculations. They and others offer these possibilities:

¶ The core holds a much bigger stash of radioactive material than anyone had suspected, and its decay is giving off heat.

¶ The iron of the innermost core is solidifying at a startlingly fast clip and releasing the latent heat of crystallization in the process.

¶ The chemical interactions among the iron alloys of the core and the rocky silicates of the overlying mantle are much fiercer and more energetic than previously believed.

¶ Or something novel and bizarre is going on, as yet undetermined.

“From what I can tell, people are excited” by the report, Dr. Alfè said. “They see there might be a new mechanism going on they didn’t think about before.”

Researchers elsewhere have discovered a host of other anomalies and surprises. They’ve found indications that the inner core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the planet, although geologists disagree on the size of that rotational difference and on how, exactly, the core manages to resist being gravitationally locked to the surrounding mantle.

Miaki Ishii and her colleagues at Harvard have proposed that the core is more of a Matryoshka doll than standard two-part renderings would have it. Not only is there an outer core of liquid iron encircling a Moon-size inner core of solidified iron, Dr. Ishii said, but seismic data indicate that nested within the inner core is another distinct layer they call the innermost core: a structure some 375 miles in diameter that may well be almost pure iron, with other elements squeezed out. Against this giant jewel even Jules Verne’s middle-Earth mastodons and ichthyosaurs would be pretty thin gruel.

Core researchers acknowledge that their elusive subject can be challenging, and they might be tempted to throw tantrums save for the fact that the Earth does it for them. Most of what is known about the core comes from studying seismic waves generated by earthquakes.

As John Vidale of the University of Washington explained, most earthquakes originate in the upper 30 miles of the globe (as do many volcanoes), and no seismic source has been detected below 500 miles. But the quakes’ energy waves radiate across the planet, detectably passing through the core.

Granted, some temblors are more revealing than others. “I prefer deep earthquakes when I’m doing a study,” Dr. Ishii said. “The waves from deep earthquakes are typically sharper and cleaner.”


For reasons that remain mysterious, the field has a funny habit of flipping. Every 100,000 to a million years or more, the north-south orientation of the magnetosphere reverses, an event often preceded by an overall weakening of the field. As it turns out, the strength of our current north-pointing field, which has been in place for nearly 800,000 years, has dropped by about 10 percent in the past century, suggesting we may be headed toward a polarity switch. Not to worry: Even if it were to start tomorrow, those of us alive today will be so many particles of dust before the great compass flip-flop is through.


More here.................

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/sc...ewanted=1&_r=1

I had heard of this before but never thought to find a version to play around with.

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.[1]

The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

http://golly.sourceforge.net/




I started playing around with different seeds, and after starting with a population of 14, I found a pattern that blew up. It started shooting off seeds, so I put some seeds in random spots that wouldn't move. The flying seeds hit the static ones and more life grew. I'm at generation ~18,500 and a population of ~2.6 million. The small circles are where a flying seed hit mine. The pattern in the upper left is a blowup of what I started with.

This is a couple weeks old, and you guys probably already know about it, but i thought it was pretty cool:

Scientists shatter quantum teleportation record

Chinese engineers have broken the record for quantum teleportation by successfully pairing particles over a distance of 97km.
This process does not involve the same physical object disappearing and reappearing in a new location, but rather "quantum entanglement", whereby two particles act as one system despite being two seperate entitites.
Essentially, a photon transmits its quantum state to another photon, which becomes a clone of the original.

The real-world application of this research is the potential for instant data transfers. The data doesn't travel through physical space, and therefore is much harder to be hacked or intercepted.
Experts believe this will be an invaluable way for governments to transmit classified information in the future.
"Our result represents an important step towards a global quantum network," says the paper published by researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai.
Scientists have long struggled to harness the power of quantum entanglement in the lab. The paired particles, known as 'qubits', can easily become untangled due to disturbences such as air turbulence, and this risk increases over distance.
But this group of engineers claim to have overcome these challenges, using a 1.3 watt laser to ensure the beam connecting the twin photons stays on target.
Using this technique, the team was able to "teleport" more than 1100 photons across a lake in China, smashing the previous record of 16km, which was set by a different group of Chinese researchers in 2010.
While full-scale teleportation of humans in the style of Star Trek may be some way off, this team of engineers already has its sights set on satellite-based cryptography.
"Our results show that even with high-loss ground to satellite uplink channels, quantum teleportation can be realised," says the paper.
This procedure could provide super-secure communications all around the world.

Originally Posted by jeffro3000

This is a couple weeks old, and you guys probably already know about it, but i thought it was pretty cool:

Scientists shatter quantum teleportation record

Cant say I agree with their idea of it becoming super-secure. I havent seen anybody mention a way to track the entangled particles, or if it is strictly limited to 2. What if there is a 3rd piece that is entangled and moved off site, it would also recieve the same "updates" as the 2 involved in the experiment.

One could take this thought a step further and ask if we are all already entangled with some far off replica of our particles?

Originally Posted by Rubenk

Cant say I agree with their idea of it becoming super-secure. I havent seen anybody mention a way to track the entangled particles, or if it is strictly limited to 2. What if there is a 3rd piece that is entangled and moved off site, it would also recieve the same "updates" as the 2 involved in the experiment.

One could take this thought a step further and ask if we are all already entangled with some far off replica of our particles?

I think the 2 particles must be connected somehow, such as the laser beam in the experiment here. That somehow acts as a "wire" although the transfer happens instantaneously and with no data actually passing through the space between. That's what makes it secure. A third particle moved off site would not be "connected." I'll have to read up on entanglement though.



Sent from my ADR6400L using Bimmer App

That is not plastic in the image above, it's glass. In particular it's a sheet of Corning's new 100-micron-thick Willow Glass, a new ultra-thin and flexible substrate for LCDs and OLEDs. The extreme thinness of the glass should lead to lighter, svelter devices, but it also means that shape is no longer a barrier for design. In fact, Corning expects Willow Glass will eventually lead substrates to be manufactured "roll-to-roll" instead of "sheet-to-sheet" -- similar to how newspapers are printed. Even though the glass as thin as paper (literally) it doesn't give up its patented Corning toughness. Though, we wouldn't subject this to the same sort of abuse that the more brolic Gorilla Glass is built to withstand. Willow will start showing up in smartphones first, but the company is already looking into additional applications, such as solar cells and lighting. For more, check out the video and PR after the break.

---

https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nic/icf/

Recipe for a Small Star

• Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea)
• Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
• Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts-the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.
• Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.
• Wait ten billionths of a second.
• Result: one miniature star.

In this process the capsule and its deuterium-tritium fuel will be compressed to a density 100 times that of solid lead, and heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius-hotter than the center of the sun. These conditions are just those required to initiate thermonuclear fusion, the energy source of stars.

By following our recipe, we would make a miniature star that lasts for a tiny fraction of a second. During its brief lifetime, it will produce energy the way the stars and the sun do, by nuclear fusion. Our little star will produce ten to 100 times more energy than we used to ignite it.

---

NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...UDV_story.html

Researchers have taken an atom and put it in two places at the same time. I know this has been done with electrons before, but never an atom.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-physici...precision.html

Researchers from the University of Bonn have just shown how a single atom can be split into its two halves, pulled apart and put back together again. While the word "atom" literally means "indivisible," the laws of quantum mechanics allow dividing atoms - similarly to light rays - and reuniting them. The researchers want to build quantum mechanics bridges by letting the atom touch adjacent atoms while it is being pulled apart so that it works like a bridge span between two pillars. The results have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dividing atoms? What sounds like nuclear fission and radioactivity is, however, a precision process using quantum mechanics. The laws of quantum mechanics allow objects to exist in several states simultaneously. This is what the so-called double-slit experiment is based on, where a particle can go through two slits at the same time. The Bonn scientists working with Prof. Dr. Dieter Meschede from the Institute for Applied Physics of the University of Bonn succeeded in keeping a single atom simultaneously in two places that were more than ten micrometers, or one hundredth of a millimeter, apart. This is an enormous distance for an atom. Afterwards, the atom was put back together undamaged.

The fragile quantum effects can only occur at the lowest temperatures and with careful handling. One method is cooling a cesium atom enormously using lasers - to a temperature of a tenth of a million above absolute zero - and then holding it with another laser. This laser beam is key to splitting the atom. It works because atoms have a spin that can go in two directions. Depending on the direction, the atom can be moved to the right or the left by the laser like on a conveyor. Key is that the atom's spin can be in both directions simultaneously. So, if the atom is moved to the right and left at the same time, it will split. "The atom has kind of a split personality, half of it is to the right, and half to the left, and yet, it is still whole," explained Andreas Steffen, the publication's lead author.

But you cannot see the split directly; if you shine a light on the atom to take a picture, the split will collapse immediately. The atom can then be seen in several images; sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right - but never in both places. And yet, the split can be proved successfully by putting the atom back together. Thus an interferometer can be built from individual atoms that can, e.g., be used to measure external impacts precisely. Here, the atoms are split, moved apart and joined again. What will become visible, e.g., are differences between the magnetic fields of the two positions or accelerations since they become imprinted in the quantum mechanical state of the atom. This principle has already been used to very precisely survey forces such as the earth's acceleration.

The Bonn scientists, however, are looking for something else: simulating complex quantum systems. Many physicists have been hoping for a long time to be able to simulate so-called topological isolators or plant photo¬synthesis - phenomena that are hard to capture with modern super computers - using small quantum systems. The first steps on the way to such simulators could consist of modeling the movement of electrons in solid bodies, thus gaining insights for innovative electronic devices. Examples for this are Dirac motion of electrons in a single graph-layer or the emergence of artificial molecules from interacting particles. But for this purpose, individual atoms would not only have to be well controlled, but also linked according to quantum mechanical laws since where the crux of the matter lies is exactly in a structure made up from many quantum objects.

"For us, an atom is a well-controlled and oiled cog," said Dr. Andrea Alberti, the team lead for the Bonn experiment. "You can build a calculator with remarkable performance using these cogs, but in order for it to work, they have to engage." This is where the actual significance of splitting atoms lies: Because the two halves are put back together again, they can make contact with adjacent atoms to their left and right and then share it. This allows a small network of atoms to form that can be used - like in the memory of a computer - to simulate and control real systems, which would make their secrets more accessible. The scientists believe that the entire potential of controlling individual atoms this precisely will become apparent over time.

More information: A digital atom interferometer with single particle control on a discretized space-time geometry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1204285109

---

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0604142615.htm
High Blood Caffeine Levels in Older Adults Linked to Avoidance of Alzheimer's Disease

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Researchers have taken an atom and put it in two places at the same time. I know this has been done with electrons before, but never an atom.

They've teleported a quark, then an electron, and now an atom.
Pretty soon we will be saying "beam me up Scotty".

Originally Posted by Master Po

They've teleported a quark, then an electron, and now an atom.
Pretty soon we will be saying "beam me up Scotty".

Have they teleported an entire atom? Quantum superposition and teleportation are two different things. Either way, we're going to need some serious computing power to store the location of every atom in the human body, all 6.7e1027 of them.