They Have Been Waiting Seventeen Years
Photo: The Star-Ledger
It has been 17 years and now a new cohort of cicadas are ready to emerge…
Welcome to Ronkville. Established: 2007 Population: 1 (though we get a lot of visitors passing through)
Click the timestamp to go to the full post or source. And read The Ronkville Morning Bugle to keep up on what news is buzzing around our little hamlet today.
The spring day lasts
visitors Go ahead, ask me a question.
Click the timestamp to go to the full post or source. And read The Ronkville Morning Bugle to keep up on what news is buzzing around our little hamlet today.
The spring day lasts
a little longer
around water
~ Issa
visitors Go ahead, ask me a question.
May 4, 2013
April 21, 2013
COLLEGE STATION — An international collaboration whose search for dark matter is powered by detectors being fabricated at Texas A&M University has for the first time observed a concrete hint of what physicists believe to be the particle behind dark matter and therefore nearly a quarter of the universe — a WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle.
Scientists with the international Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment involving Texas A&M high-energy physicist Rupak Mahapatra are reporting a WIMP-like signal at the 3-sigma level, indicating a 99.8 percent chance — or, in high-energy parlance, a hint of the mysterious substance dark matter that is believed to hold the cosmos together but to date has never been directly observed.
“In high-energy physics, a discovery is only claimed at 5-sigma or better,” Mahapatra said. “So this is certainly very exciting, but not fully convincing by the standards. We just need more data to be sure. For now, we have to live with this tantalizing hint of one of the biggest puzzles of our time.”
SuperCDMS researchers are announcing their breakthrough result in talks around the nation, including one at noon today (Monday, April 15) by Mahapatra, a principal investigator in the collaboration and a member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. Mahapatra’s public presentation will be held in the Stephen W. Hawking Auditorium within the Mitchell Institute and streamed live via TTVN. The collaboration has detailed its full results in a paper published in arXiv that eventually will appear in Physical Review Letters.
Notoriously elusive, WIMPs rarely interact with normal matter and therefore are difficult to detect. Scientists believe they occasionally bounce off, or scatter like billiard balls from, atomic nuclei, leaving behind a small amount of energy capable of being tracked by detectors deep underground, particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and even instruments in space like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) mounted on the International Space Station (ISS).
(via cab1729)
March 21, 2013
cool - but creepy - scanning Electron Microscope animations created by James Tyrwhitt-Drake at the UVic Advanced Microscopy Facility.
(via infinity-imagined)
March 7, 2013
February 11, 2013
Introductory Quantum Mechanics
- Classical And Quantum Optics
UPPER DIVISION COURSES
- Classical Mechanics
- http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/336k/Newton.pdf
- http://www.phys.psu.edu/~lammert/419/notes.html
- http://www.physto.se/~ingemar/anmek.pdf
- http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~rollinsr/phys605/
- http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/dynamics.htm
- http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys16/2004_lectures/
- http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~golwala/ph106ab/ph106ab_notes.pdf
- http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maloney/451/
- Classical Electromagnetism
- http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/em.html
- http://monopole.ph.qmw.ac.uk/~bill/emt/LecNotes.html
- http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/teach/module_home/px436/notes
- http://www-solar.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~alan/MT3601/Fundamentals/Fundamentals.html
- http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy122/Lecture_Notes/Index.html
- Video of Landau Level - http://vubeam.pa.msu.edu/lectures/phy962/962d/electrodynamics/
- Plasma Physics
(Source: sciencepanorama.com)
February 11, 2013
UNCERTAINTY
Werner Karl Heisenberg …the uncertainty principle, which asserts that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with certain pairs of physical properties of any given particle may be known, most famously momentum and position. Essentially, the more precisely one of the pairs is known - the less so for the other.
February 8, 2013
Now, you could say that this illustrates that the smooth motion of rotating circles can be used to build up any repeating curve even one as angular as a digital square wave. Each circle spins at a multiple of a fundamental frequency, and a method called Fourier analysis shows how to pick the radiuses of the circles to make the picture work. Decomposing signals like this lies at the heart of a lot of signal processing.
But is also just looks cool
(Source: matthen)
January 19, 2013
No Doomsday in 2013
Get happy.
The hands of the infamous “Doomsday Clock” will remain firmly in their place at five minutes to midnight — symbolizing humans’ destruction — for the year 2013, scientists announced . Keeping their outlook for the future of humanity quite dim, the group of scientists also wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to partner with other global leaders to act on climate change.
The clock is a symbol of the threat of humanity’s imminent destruction from nuclear or biological weapons, climate change and other human-caused disasters. In making their deliberations about how to update the clock’s time this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists considered the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, the slow and costly recovery from events like Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and extreme weather events that fit in with a pattern of global warming…
(Source: Yahoo!)
January 7, 2013
November 16, 2012
Doug Perrine’s photograph of the Maldives of Vaadhoo Island and a concentrated population of bioluminescent phytoplankton. Bioluminescence is a natural chemical reaction which occurs when a micro-organism in the water reacts with oxygen. When washed ashore by the tides, the phytoplankton’s chemical energy is turned into light energy, illuminating the waves.
October 12, 2012
Dr. Oliver Sacks talks about how hallucinogenic drugs helped him empathize with his patients.
September 7, 2012
A very cool X-ray of a stingray, whose cartilage skeleton (similar to that of sharks) looks like one of those embryonic alien incubators from the opening scene of a horrific sci-fi movie.
(via Twisted Sifter)
(via npr)
July 3, 2012
Did they find the Higgs Boson Particle?
Speculation is building in the international physics community about the contents of a press conference that has been called by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to be held on July 4, 2012.
Physicists expect that the announcement will be positive proof of the Higgs boson particle (AKA “the God Particle”) and a successful mission for the team. The anticipation reached a frenzied state yesterday when scientists from the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois announced that they had found significant supporting evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson.
So, you might be asking what’s so important about finding the Higgs boson?
The short answer is that the Higgs boson can account for all of the unexplained mass in the universe.
(Longer answer at http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/07/higgs-boson-anticipation/)
July 3, 2012
Tidal current patterns in the sand and sea grass at low tide
Image ID: sanc0915, NOAA’s Sanctuaries Collection
Location: Washington, Olympic Coast NMS
June 28, 2012
Gulf of Mexico Anemone
Photo: Expedition to the Deep Slope 2007, NOAA-OE.
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