Physics Week in Review: January 21, 2017
We're deluged with much-needed rain here in Los Angeles, but Jen-Luc Piquant nonetheless managed to collect her usual collection of nifty physics stuff on the Web this week.
First, as a palate cleanser, check out this transfixing audiovisual dive into varieties of emergence - including swarm behavior, cell cooperation, all of which are way cool.
A detailed theoretical recipe for making time crystals has been unveiled by two groups.
Did LeBron James Flop? Here's What Physics Says.
Strength of hair inspires new materials for body armor.
Galileo satellites experiencing multiple clock failures.
Why Hell Can't Freeze Over: Quantum Physics And Absolute Zero.
What Effects Of Quantum Physics Can We Observe In Our Daily Lives?
The science of that puke-filled, space-themed date on The Bachelor.
Ultrafast Camera Captures 'Sonic Booms' of Light for First Time.
The battle over the Thirty Meter Telescope, and what leaving the Big Island behind would actually mean.
The $2 billion plan to steal a rock from Mars. NASA is now building the rover that it hopes will bring back signs of life on the red planet. Best quote: JPL's Adam Steltzner saying "we're just going to engineer this shit."
NASA has a plan to protect us from asteroids, but lacks the funding to put it into action.
Breaking Limits in Science & Life: woman astronomer's 20-year quest to find 100 Earth-like planets is within reach.
Physics Explains How (But Not Why) Humans Can Throw Washing Machines.
Matter/antimatter mystery remains unsolved, per BASE experiment at CERN.
Squeezing Through A Loophole In The Laws Of Physics To Cool A Drum. Per Chad Orzel at Forbes: "Quantum uncertainty isn't an absolute prohibition on knowing a particular quantity, but a limit on how well you can know two things at once. You can gain knowledge about some property you care about by trading away knowledge about something you're not interested in, and physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have used this to cool a microscopic "drum" to unprecedentedly low temperatures." [Image: Teufel/NIST]
Back to the future: Silicon may work for quantum computing. Related: Carbon nanotube transistors push up against quantum uncertainty limits.
Why Are Four GPS Satellites Required To Locate Someone's Position?
Gravity Waves Might Be Lighting Up Venus' Atmosphere.
Science and Culture: Searching for shared inspiration, artists head to the world's largest science experiment: the Large Hadron Collider.
The Islamic View of the Multiverse: Muslim cosmologists find a guide to their scientific model-building.
Great Technical Innovations That Came From the World of Formula 1 Racing.
Sustaining High-Tech Economy Using Inspiration from Nature: "materials are produced, consumed, decomposed, reused." Related: New nanopowder made from Recycled eggshells can be used for next-gen data storage.
The Value of Basic Research. Analysts try to find the ROI of priceless scientific research.
"Just because something happens doesn't mean it was inevitable, or even likely." Duncan Watts on randomness and election polling predictions. It's in response to Nate Silver's thoughtful post-election polling post-mortem at FIveThirtyEight: What reporters--and lots of data geeks too--missed about the election, and what they're still getting wrong.
Yes, science is political. "An incoming president who clearly picks and chooses facts to suit his own version of the world changes the relationship between science and culture, in potentially destructive ways." Counterpoint: Climate Science Isn't Political, Lying About It Is.
Over Two Decades of Charting the Various Movements of Snails by Photographer Daniel Ranalli. "The best pieces depend on a certain degree of randomness for their success," said Ranalli. "I tend to think of the snail pieces as a metaphor for the order we establish in our lives, and how the element of chance enters in to affect the result-regardless of how much we attempt to structure it." [Image: Daniel Ranalli]
NASA used a supercomputer to simulate how air flows around a drone to learn more about how drones fly.
Stephen Hawking says he has a way to escape from a black hole.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Takes On a Science Skeptic. And it is a thing of beauty:
AL: Black holes don't make a lot of sense right now.
NDT: The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
AL: It has a duty to make sense to you.
NDT: It doesn't give a rat's ass how your five cents interact with this world.
How Emma Converse popularized astronomy-a century before Sagan, a brilliant woman became the poet laureate of space.
The Pioneering Female Sci-Fi Writer Whose Identity Was Kept Secret for 50 Years.
The Many Forms and Meanings of the Scientific Image. Seeing Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is a yearlong online project that explores photography's role in defining, promoting, and furthering science.
Bend your mind with some of Einstein's most famous thought experiments.
How Do "Skinny" Mirrors Work? All it takes is a slight curve in the glass.
Wear a nanoscale archive of all the world's languages on a necklace.
Check Out the Homemade Planetarium Built By A Very Committed Dude in Wisconsin.
Go inside Doctor Strange's mind-bending fight scene. Writer-director Scott Derrickson: "The idea became, 'What would a chase scene be like inside an M.C. Escher world?' Not just to present it as an exterior canvas, but to actually be inside of it, in motion."
Scientists shot footage of exploding citrus oils accelerating 1,000 times faster than a space rocket.
How long would it take a pay-it-forward chain to reach 7.4 billion people?
4K Slow Motion: Visualizing Combustion with a See Through Engine and Phantom Camera.