Latest Physics Stories
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Jumping silicon atoms are the stars of an atomic scale ballet featured in a new Nature Communications study from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ORNL research team documented the atoms' unique behavior by first trapping groups of silicon atoms, known as clusters, in a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon called graphene. The silicon clusters, composed of six atoms, were pinned in place by pores in the graphene sheet, allowing the...
University of Michigan The rare Green Pea galaxies discovered by the general public in 2007 could help confirm astronomers' understanding of reionization, a pivotal stage in the evolution of the early universe, say University of Michigan researchers. Reionization occurred a few hundred million years after the Big Bang as the first stars were turning on and forming the first galaxies. During this period, the space between the galaxies changed from an opaque, neutral fog to a transparent...
WASHINGTON, April 3, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the first Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) results announced Wednesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. AMS is a cosmic ray particle physics detector on the exterior of the International Space Station. It was launched to the space station on space shuttle Endeavour's STS-134 mission on May 16, 2011. (Logo:...
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres In their latest experiment, Prof. Andrea Cavalleri from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at the Hamburg-based Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) and Dr. Michael Gensch from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) investigated together with other colleagues from the HZDR, the United Kingdom, and Japan if and how superconductivity can be systematically controlled. The objective of their...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Quantum-based communications is still in its infancy, but the technology is widely expected to become used as the next generation of secure data transfer. According to a new report in Nature Photonics, a group of German physicists has announced the successful transmission of a quantum security key from an aircraft to a ground station via laser, overcoming one of the technology’s biggest hurdles: the ability to transmit and receive...
NASA will hold a news conference at 1:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 3, to discuss the first results of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment. AMS is a state-of-the-art cosmic ray particle physics detector located on the exterior of the International Space Station. The briefing will be held in the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters at 300 E St. SW in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website. The participants...
Hill joins Tides to apply financial acumen and leadership SAN FRANCISCO, April 3, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Judith Hill joins Tides as CFO effective May 1st, 2013. Hill, formerly the Chief Financial Officer at Envision Education Foundation, brings over 20 years of CFO experience in organizations that span both the public and the private sectors to the role. "Judith has a proven track record of financial acumen and leadership," says Melissa Bradley, Tides CEO. "She brings to...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern, Switzerland have begun the process of upgrading. The $105-million upgrade should double the potential energy of what is already the world's most powerful particle accelerator. BBC News reports that the scientists believe the upgrade will enable them to discover more new particles like the Higgs boson discovery last year that will lead to a more complete theory of how the Universe...
University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences Many newly formed stars are surrounded by what are called protoplanetary disks, swirling masses of warm dust and gas that can constitute the core of a developing solar system. Proof of the existence of such disks didn’t come until 1994, when the Hubble telescope examined young stars in the Orion Nebula. Protoplanetary disks may potentially become celestial bodies such as planets and asteroids. But just how they...
Multiple Papers Presented on Company's New PicoSure(TM) Laser Tattoo Removal Technology WESTFORD, Mass., April 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Cynosure, Inc. (NASDAQ: CYNO) today announced the presentation of 16 scientific abstracts at LASER 2013, the 33(rd) Annual Scientific Conference of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS). The clinical research includes four abstracts intended to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the Company's PicoSure picosecond Alexandrite...
Latest Physics Reference Libraries
Nuclear fallout, or just simply fallout, known also as Black Rain, is the residual radioactive material that is propelled into the upper atmosphere after a nuclear black or a nuclear reaction that is conducted in an unshielded facility. It is so called because it "fall out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave have passed. It most commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash that is created when a nuclear weapon explodes, but such dust can also come from a damaged nuclear...
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Image Caption: NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 56,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years distant. Credit: NASA/ESA/Wikipedia What is Astrophysics? For much of the modern age the term Astrophysics has been used synonymously with Astronomy. This interchange is so common that many textbooks even offer the two as having the same meaning. However, from a strictly historical perspective there are differences...
Image Credit: Meteorologist Joshua Kelly When meteorologists are forecasting for ocean-going vessels, there are a few terms that we need to understand. The first term is wavelength. Wavelength is defined as the distance between two crests or between two troughs as seen in the image above. The example above highlights the crest to crest concept of wavelength. The next term that we use is wave height, and to determine this, we first must look at the wave when it passes our station. When...
Solar cycles: what are they and why should we care about them? Solar cycles are made up of what are known as solar minimums (min) and solar maximums (max). We refer to a solar min at the time when the sun is not active with many sunspots, while a solar max is just the opposite when we see a large increase in sunspot activity. So how long do solar cycles last? Typically they run on what is known as an 11 year cycle from the max to the min and then start over again anew. As of 2012 we...
![The Secret of a Snake\](/media/gallery/national-science-foundation-gallery/thumbs/thumbs_pf3292_cover10_h.jpg "The Secret of a Snake\")
![The Secret of a Snake\](/media/gallery/national-science-foundation-gallery/thumbs/thumbs_pf3292_cover9_h1.jpg "The Secret of a Snake\")
![The Secret of a Snake\](/media/gallery/national-science-foundation-gallery/thumbs/thumbs_pf3292_cover8_h.jpg "The Secret of a Snake\")
