There’s been a new study on you blog readers out there. The academic definition of a blog is a modified web page with dated entries in reverse chronological order. However, a UC of Irvine study found that participants considered many more things that needed to be present in blogs, such as RSS feeds, trackback and the presence of conversation like leaving comments after entries or polls.
Blog readers also become more consistent in their reading rather than subject matter oriented. The blogs people read become part of a person’s daily or weekly habit, like reading the paper was or will become.
Apparently, the timing of a story is not as important as is the position it is among other entries. As long as the story is near the top, readers are for the most part less concerned with the date the story was posted. This goes against the theory that blog readers have a constant need to be up to date.
The best part is that readers feel pressure and a responsibility to make “insightful contributions.” This pressure on themselves is as equal to the expectation they have on the bloggers to post frequent, high-quality posts.
The study was fun to read about, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Only 15 participants were used even though they were over various ages.
“This study is really just the beginning,” said Tomlinson, an ICS professor and affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “With the rapid expansion of online social media such as Flickr and YouTube, understanding how people consume these media will be vital to understanding their broader social impacts.”
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Smallest Space Vacuum Found Not Made by Hoover
Astronomers have found the smallest black hole yet. It is only 3.8 times the mass of our own sun with a diameter of 15 miles. This black hole is very close to the minimum size astronomers predict possible to even occur.
The two astronomers, Nikolai Shaposhikov and Lev Titarchuk work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. They found the black hole in the Milky Way in the binary system XTE J1650-500 (catchy name!).
According to Shaposhikov, "this black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."
The two figured out the size of the black hole by using a new technique. They used the relationship between a black hole and dust that surrounds it and swirls downward. This dust tends to pile up at the edges and turns into hot gas, which radiates X-rays. These X-rays have a pretty regular pattern of intensity that the astronomers can view.
It was previously thought that these oscillations depended on the size of the black hole. Titarchuk realized that the larger the hole, the further the hot gas is pushed out, so the oscillations go slower and slower. The two astronomers used a database of information of other black holes and their oscillations to calculate the size of this new, very small black hole.
Apparently small black holes can exert stronger tidal forces than the larger ones, so no black hole is a “safe” black hole. "If you ventured too close to J1650's black hole, its gravity would tidally stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," says Shaposhnikov.
The two astronomers, Nikolai Shaposhikov and Lev Titarchuk work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. They found the black hole in the Milky Way in the binary system XTE J1650-500 (catchy name!).
According to Shaposhikov, "this black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question."
The two figured out the size of the black hole by using a new technique. They used the relationship between a black hole and dust that surrounds it and swirls downward. This dust tends to pile up at the edges and turns into hot gas, which radiates X-rays. These X-rays have a pretty regular pattern of intensity that the astronomers can view.
It was previously thought that these oscillations depended on the size of the black hole. Titarchuk realized that the larger the hole, the further the hot gas is pushed out, so the oscillations go slower and slower. The two astronomers used a database of information of other black holes and their oscillations to calculate the size of this new, very small black hole.
Apparently small black holes can exert stronger tidal forces than the larger ones, so no black hole is a “safe” black hole. "If you ventured too close to J1650's black hole, its gravity would tidally stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," says Shaposhnikov.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Quantum Communication
Hackers have been getting better and better, worrisome to those of us vulnerable to identity theft, which is all of us. So when physicists finally proved the possibility of constructing a quantum information channel, I breathed a little easier.
For the first time, physicists were able to identify individual returning photons after firing them and reflecting them off a space satellite in orbit. This proved the feasibility of building a completely secure channel for global communication using quantum mechanics.
This is good for places like banks and communication companies (like your cell phone company) because it is the only form of communication that could ensure beyond any doubt that there are no eavesdroppers.
The research team is from Padova University in Italy and shot their photons at the Japanese Ajisai Satellite. Before now, the longest distance quantum-encrypted communication could be verified was 150 kilometers. This satellite was 1,500 kilometers above the earth.
The team is now working on emitting and receiving quantum keys, strings of 1s and 0s. I’ll continue to update with more information as it becomes available, as they continue to improve on this really cool high-tech form of communication.
For the first time, physicists were able to identify individual returning photons after firing them and reflecting them off a space satellite in orbit. This proved the feasibility of building a completely secure channel for global communication using quantum mechanics.
This is good for places like banks and communication companies (like your cell phone company) because it is the only form of communication that could ensure beyond any doubt that there are no eavesdroppers.
The research team is from Padova University in Italy and shot their photons at the Japanese Ajisai Satellite. Before now, the longest distance quantum-encrypted communication could be verified was 150 kilometers. This satellite was 1,500 kilometers above the earth.
The team is now working on emitting and receiving quantum keys, strings of 1s and 0s. I’ll continue to update with more information as it becomes available, as they continue to improve on this really cool high-tech form of communication.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
"Quantum of Solace"
The mountain of a particularly large telescope will be featured in the new James Bond movie, apparently titled “Quantum of Solace”. The film will highlight the European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope’s site, which is located 2600 meters up Cerro Paranal mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert. I’m not clear on whether the telescope itself will be in the movie, but the hotel in the desert that people stay in when visiting will.
The place is a desert, and a creepy one. It looks like Mars. The villain of the movie hides out at this hotel in this wasteland and Bond has to go after him.
Atacama Desert. Courtesy of the US Geological Survey
The place is a desert, and a creepy one. It looks like Mars. The villain of the movie hides out at this hotel in this wasteland and Bond has to go after him.
Atacama Desert. Courtesy of the US Geological SurveyI am always 50/50 on physics portrayed in the movies. I like the attention, but I am wary of Hollywood getting it wrong. Last time a telescope was portrayed in a Bond movie that I can remember was the radio telescope Arecibo in Puerto Rico in the movie “Goldeneye.” For me, this was very convenient, because I could use this movie as an example whenever I received I blank stare when I mentioned I did research at Arecibo telescope. Aparently it isn’t enough to be the largest radio telescope in the world, you also have to have a movie star jump on you.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Beep beep...
There was a cute interdisciplinary study published today about bats and computers. Bats use echolocation to get around and find food, but scientists didn’t know how they could tell one plant from another. If you ever saw those pictures of a bat flying around, I always got the impression they just heard the echo. Do the echoes sound different off an apple than an orange? To understand this, the researchers developed an algorithm that can do the same thing.
Apparently it isn’t as hard as everyone thought it was once the researchers sat down and worked it out. Scientists in Germany recorded thousands of echoes from live plants of five different species. Then they created an algorithm that takes the time-frequency information from these echoes that could identify the plants.
The best part of this is that it uses physics to help understand an animal without hurting it in any way. Yay!
You can find a copy of the research paper here.
Apparently it isn’t as hard as everyone thought it was once the researchers sat down and worked it out. Scientists in Germany recorded thousands of echoes from live plants of five different species. Then they created an algorithm that takes the time-frequency information from these echoes that could identify the plants.
The best part of this is that it uses physics to help understand an animal without hurting it in any way. Yay!
You can find a copy of the research paper here.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Lucky it wasn't the Professor's Smell-o-scope
The first organic molecule, methane, has been discovered on an extrasolar planet. An extrasolar planet is any planet orbiting a star that’s not our own. This is an important finding in the search for life outside our solar system. The scientists who made this discovery also insist that the methane they have found also mean that there is water on this planet, even though this is no friendly place to life as we think of it.
The researchers found the methane on planet HD 189733b, and it is a “hot Jupiter”. “Hot Jupiters” are even larger than our Jupiter and orbit their stars extremely close. This one only takes over two days to go around its star.
The discovery was made with the James Webb Space Telescope, proving that this telescope can detect organic molecules on planets around other stars. It made this discovery when the planet passed in front of the star. The gases in the planet’s atmosphere gave off their unique signatures on the starlight from the star. “Water alone could not explain all the spectral features observed. The additional contribution of methane is necessary to fit the Hubble data,” said co-author Giovanna Tinetti from the University College London and the European Space Agency.
Methane is very prevalent on our own planet and comes from natural gas as well as other places, like livestock. Of course, Tinetti pointed out, “The planet’s atmosphere is far too hot for even the hardiest life to survive - at least the kind of life we know from Earth. It’s highly unlikely that cows could survive here!”
The researchers will continue their work and hope that in the future they will find evidence of these molecules on rockier planets that we find more familiar, ones that are more like Earth. “This observation is proof that spectroscopy can eventually be done on a cooler and potentially habitable Earth-sized planet orbiting a dimmer red dwarf-type star”, said Mark Swain, lead author of a paper in the 20 March issue of Nature.
I think I might try to post once a week on Wednesdays for a bit, unless breaking news occurs. I had a busy week lately, my sister came to visit and it was really great but it wasn't conducive to a great work environment. If any readers have any advice, please let me know. I want to write on a schedule, and news is never on a schedule! Thanks for reading!
The researchers found the methane on planet HD 189733b, and it is a “hot Jupiter”. “Hot Jupiters” are even larger than our Jupiter and orbit their stars extremely close. This one only takes over two days to go around its star.
The discovery was made with the James Webb Space Telescope, proving that this telescope can detect organic molecules on planets around other stars. It made this discovery when the planet passed in front of the star. The gases in the planet’s atmosphere gave off their unique signatures on the starlight from the star. “Water alone could not explain all the spectral features observed. The additional contribution of methane is necessary to fit the Hubble data,” said co-author Giovanna Tinetti from the University College London and the European Space Agency.
Methane is very prevalent on our own planet and comes from natural gas as well as other places, like livestock. Of course, Tinetti pointed out, “The planet’s atmosphere is far too hot for even the hardiest life to survive - at least the kind of life we know from Earth. It’s highly unlikely that cows could survive here!”
The researchers will continue their work and hope that in the future they will find evidence of these molecules on rockier planets that we find more familiar, ones that are more like Earth. “This observation is proof that spectroscopy can eventually be done on a cooler and potentially habitable Earth-sized planet orbiting a dimmer red dwarf-type star”, said Mark Swain, lead author of a paper in the 20 March issue of Nature.
I think I might try to post once a week on Wednesdays for a bit, unless breaking news occurs. I had a busy week lately, my sister came to visit and it was really great but it wasn't conducive to a great work environment. If any readers have any advice, please let me know. I want to write on a schedule, and news is never on a schedule! Thanks for reading!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Two New Discoveries
Two discoveries occurred this month: one confirmed a way to make basic particles, another found out that the misnomer “planetary nebula” may not be such a misnomer after all.
Physicists at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring accelerator said they saw the subatomic particle “charmed-strange meson” decay into a proton and an anti-neutron. This is news because they’ve never seen this happen before, though it has been predicted. Seeing it happen in this direction means it could have happened the other way. This gives physicists new clues on how the universe formed, and how particles first came together.
“It’s the sort of thing that, for many years, people have known should happen,” said John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the collaboration. “What we have done is show that it does, and how often.”
The accelerator smashes electrons with positrons at extremely high energies (3-5 billion electron volts; an electron volt is the kinetic energy gained by an electron passing through a potential difference of one volt). This produces rare and short-lived particles physicists can then study.
I love the particle physics discoveries. If you think of physics as the science that gets at the bottom of it all, then particle physics is one of the true fields in physics that still tries to tear apart the world into its composite parts. Do you think we’ll ever find the last indivisible particle? Or do you think that going smaller is just as infinite as space and every time we think we’re at the end, there’s more there to split?
At the other end of the spectrum, astronomers now believe that small stars and even Jupiter-sized planets are actually responsible for those beautiful planetary nebulae. Those planetary nebulae that for years and years we have been told have nothing to do with planets. The name “planetary nebulae” was given hundreds of years ago, but even in the 19th century astronomers realized they were only large clouds of dust, but by then it was too late and the name had stuck.
In a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at the University of Rochester say that planets orbiting a dying star may be the things responsible for creating the appearance of the nebulae (“pillars of creation”).
“Few researchers have explored how something as small as a very low-mass star, a brown dwarf, or even a massive planet can produce several flavors of nebulae and even change the chemical composition of the dust around these evolved stars,” says Eric Blackman professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “If the companions can be this small, it’s important because low-mass stars and high-mass planets are likely quite common and could go a long way toward explaining the many dusty shapes we see surrounding these evolved stars.”
Most stars, when they die, will end as nebulae. The bigger ones end up as black holes, pulsars or neutrons stars, or fizzle out as brown dwarfs if they’re too small. When the star runs out of fuel, the core contracts and its envelope expands, throwing its “envelope” out into space. This is what we are made of: star stuff. That’s how larger elements are created, within stars. Then when a star exploded like that, those elements get flung out into space to be collected in a new solar system, like ours.
In their research, Blackman showed that when the planet in orbit with the star is in a wide enough orbit, the planet’s gravity begins to drag some of the star material around with it. Blackman says it looks a lot like a twisted wagon wheel. Eventually a torus of this dust forms, like this: Dumbbell Nebula.
The team is now calculating for more models with more precision to better map out what astronomers see in nebulae. It might turn out that most of the patterns we now see in planetary nebulae are actually from planets.
Physicists at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring accelerator said they saw the subatomic particle “charmed-strange meson” decay into a proton and an anti-neutron. This is news because they’ve never seen this happen before, though it has been predicted. Seeing it happen in this direction means it could have happened the other way. This gives physicists new clues on how the universe formed, and how particles first came together.
“It’s the sort of thing that, for many years, people have known should happen,” said John Yelton, a physicist at the University of Florida, one of many institutions that are part of the collaboration. “What we have done is show that it does, and how often.”
The accelerator smashes electrons with positrons at extremely high energies (3-5 billion electron volts; an electron volt is the kinetic energy gained by an electron passing through a potential difference of one volt). This produces rare and short-lived particles physicists can then study.
I love the particle physics discoveries. If you think of physics as the science that gets at the bottom of it all, then particle physics is one of the true fields in physics that still tries to tear apart the world into its composite parts. Do you think we’ll ever find the last indivisible particle? Or do you think that going smaller is just as infinite as space and every time we think we’re at the end, there’s more there to split?
At the other end of the spectrum, astronomers now believe that small stars and even Jupiter-sized planets are actually responsible for those beautiful planetary nebulae. Those planetary nebulae that for years and years we have been told have nothing to do with planets. The name “planetary nebulae” was given hundreds of years ago, but even in the 19th century astronomers realized they were only large clouds of dust, but by then it was too late and the name had stuck.
In a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at the University of Rochester say that planets orbiting a dying star may be the things responsible for creating the appearance of the nebulae (“pillars of creation”).
“Few researchers have explored how something as small as a very low-mass star, a brown dwarf, or even a massive planet can produce several flavors of nebulae and even change the chemical composition of the dust around these evolved stars,” says Eric Blackman professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “If the companions can be this small, it’s important because low-mass stars and high-mass planets are likely quite common and could go a long way toward explaining the many dusty shapes we see surrounding these evolved stars.”
Most stars, when they die, will end as nebulae. The bigger ones end up as black holes, pulsars or neutrons stars, or fizzle out as brown dwarfs if they’re too small. When the star runs out of fuel, the core contracts and its envelope expands, throwing its “envelope” out into space. This is what we are made of: star stuff. That’s how larger elements are created, within stars. Then when a star exploded like that, those elements get flung out into space to be collected in a new solar system, like ours.
In their research, Blackman showed that when the planet in orbit with the star is in a wide enough orbit, the planet’s gravity begins to drag some of the star material around with it. Blackman says it looks a lot like a twisted wagon wheel. Eventually a torus of this dust forms, like this: Dumbbell Nebula.
The team is now calculating for more models with more precision to better map out what astronomers see in nebulae. It might turn out that most of the patterns we now see in planetary nebulae are actually from planets.
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