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.
Monday, March 31, 2008
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.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Cocktail Chatter
I really thought today was Thursday, or yesterday wasn’t. Either way, apologies for not posting yesterday.
I mentioned in the beginning that I hoped this blog would give fodder for cocktail parties. Well, have you ever wondered that at those cocktail parties, you have the ability to zero in on the voice of the person you’re talking to? Maybe you haven’t. But think about it. It’s a really loud room, and your brain is picking out the voice of just one person.
Okay, you may not be impressed, but if you have ever had to wear a hearing aid, you may have found out that our ears are a lot more complex than our man-made acoustic devices. Originally, scientists thought that we heard from directional cues. However, put in that hearing aid and all you get, though, is an increase in the background and you have an incredibly hard time picking out that one person in front of you.
Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany found a mechanism in the brain that solves this task. Their findings are published in PLoS ONE. Apparently, each speaker has a different “fine structure” acoustically, and each is represented in different areas of the brain, specifically the auditory cortex.
The brain uses an algorithm to pick out the voice you are concentrating on that gains control of all the others and so your brain can actually follow it and push the rest out of the way. They describe this, by the way, by using “functional neurophysiological, pharmacological and anatomical methods.” I couldn’t figure out how to translate that part, but really wanted to put that in (to impress upon you how complex this is). These findings may help improve hearing aids in the future so that it won’t just wash out conversations.
So tonight, while you’re at that cocktail party, pay attention to how you can pick out those voices so well. It’s not as simple a thing as you might have thought.
I mentioned in the beginning that I hoped this blog would give fodder for cocktail parties. Well, have you ever wondered that at those cocktail parties, you have the ability to zero in on the voice of the person you’re talking to? Maybe you haven’t. But think about it. It’s a really loud room, and your brain is picking out the voice of just one person.
Okay, you may not be impressed, but if you have ever had to wear a hearing aid, you may have found out that our ears are a lot more complex than our man-made acoustic devices. Originally, scientists thought that we heard from directional cues. However, put in that hearing aid and all you get, though, is an increase in the background and you have an incredibly hard time picking out that one person in front of you.
Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany found a mechanism in the brain that solves this task. Their findings are published in PLoS ONE. Apparently, each speaker has a different “fine structure” acoustically, and each is represented in different areas of the brain, specifically the auditory cortex.
The brain uses an algorithm to pick out the voice you are concentrating on that gains control of all the others and so your brain can actually follow it and push the rest out of the way. They describe this, by the way, by using “functional neurophysiological, pharmacological and anatomical methods.” I couldn’t figure out how to translate that part, but really wanted to put that in (to impress upon you how complex this is). These findings may help improve hearing aids in the future so that it won’t just wash out conversations.
So tonight, while you’re at that cocktail party, pay attention to how you can pick out those voices so well. It’s not as simple a thing as you might have thought.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Crash!
This just in!
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught the first ever image of active avalanches on Mars. They're near the Red Planet's north pole and show tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a slope where ice and dust have just fallen down.
Candice Hansen, the deputy principal investigator for the camera (called HiRISE) said, "we were checking for springtime changes in the carbon-dioxide frost covering a dune field, and finding avalanches was completely serendipitous."
Get the full story here.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught the first ever image of active avalanches on Mars. They're near the Red Planet's north pole and show tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a slope where ice and dust have just fallen down.
Candice Hansen, the deputy principal investigator for the camera (called HiRISE) said, "we were checking for springtime changes in the carbon-dioxide frost covering a dune field, and finding avalanches was completely serendipitous."
Get the full story here.
Monday, March 3, 2008
140-year-old math problem solved
I thought I would publish a short note today, then later this week either Wednesday or Thursday. Soon I will have a schedule!
I am a physics writer and not a math writer, but I thought this deserved a mention. It’s not very often that a 140-year-old math problem gets solved.
The problem existed in something called conformal mapping, which is used to take a complicated shape to a circular shape so that it is easier to analyze. Some of you might know the phrase “take a spherical cow…”
A formula called the Schwarz-Christoffel formula was developed in the mid-19th century to help with this. However, it only worked for things that didn’t have any holes or “irregularities.” For 140 years, even without the formula, you could figure this stuff out, as long as you didn’t have a hole.
Professor Darren Crowdy from the Imperial College in London has made the breakthrough and fixed this problem that has stumped mathematician, engineers and scientists for so long.
"With my extensions to this formula, you can take account of these differences and map them onto a simple disk shape for analysis in the same way as you can with less complex shapes without any of the holes," said Crowdy.
“Take a disk-shaped cow” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but cool nonetheless!
I am a physics writer and not a math writer, but I thought this deserved a mention. It’s not very often that a 140-year-old math problem gets solved.
The problem existed in something called conformal mapping, which is used to take a complicated shape to a circular shape so that it is easier to analyze. Some of you might know the phrase “take a spherical cow…”
A formula called the Schwarz-Christoffel formula was developed in the mid-19th century to help with this. However, it only worked for things that didn’t have any holes or “irregularities.” For 140 years, even without the formula, you could figure this stuff out, as long as you didn’t have a hole.
Professor Darren Crowdy from the Imperial College in London has made the breakthrough and fixed this problem that has stumped mathematician, engineers and scientists for so long.
"With my extensions to this formula, you can take account of these differences and map them onto a simple disk shape for analysis in the same way as you can with less complex shapes without any of the holes," said Crowdy.
“Take a disk-shaped cow” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but cool nonetheless!
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Dirty Space
Apologies for not posting yesterday like promised. Got stuck in Ikea and then in traffic between DC and Baltimore. Ew.
In the universe, patterns seem to repeat themselves but on different scales. This is what I thought when I saw this story. Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered that space may be filled with tiny “whiskers of carbon.” We can’t just wipe this carbon away with a paper towel, so this is dimming the light of far-away objects like Type 1a supernovae.
Now, Type 1a supernovae are the super important “standard candles” in cosmology. Astronomers use them to gauge distances in space. They’re called standard candles because they are so predicable that they can be used as measurement tools. When astronomers discovered a hic-up in their measurement scheme, they came up with dark energy, and the universe’s expansion to explain it.
Andrew Steele and Marc Fries of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory published a paper that shows their discovery of a new form of carbon that date from the formation of the solar system. Their carbon was produced by the sun, and so they hypothesize that the same kind could be produced and spread out into space by supernovae explosions. This would mess up measurements of the supernovae.
Currently, the researchers are not commenting on what this could mean for the dark energy hypothesis. They will feed the information into NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) missions that look for the effects of dark energy in order to understand its impact on dark energy models.
Back to what I mentioned about repeating patterns: In my research at Oberlin, I was in the “pulsar lab”. Really, we were using pulsars, or pulsating dead stars (another “standard candle”), to study the interstellar medium. I was part of the team that studied these patterns in the dust between the pulsars and us. This had huge implications, of course, because dozens of teams of scientists use pulsars to study space. If we could find a way to subtract this dust from the observations, then you could get a clearer, brighter signal.
The scales are different; our pulsars were within our galaxy, and pretty close to us in space terms. But these guys are talking about supernovae and universe expansion, which is on a far larger scale. But if you think about it, it makes sense. You can’t just have a whole lot of empty space out there, right? Just because something doesn’t emit light doesn’t meant it’s not out there. Space is really, really, really large and scientists are just starting to notice the not-so-sexy things like dust and carbon between the sexy stuff like supernovae and pulsars. But it’s the little stuff that can tell us how life formed. Right now, building life seems so impossible, but is that because we don’t even know what’s out there?
In the universe, patterns seem to repeat themselves but on different scales. This is what I thought when I saw this story. Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered that space may be filled with tiny “whiskers of carbon.” We can’t just wipe this carbon away with a paper towel, so this is dimming the light of far-away objects like Type 1a supernovae.
Now, Type 1a supernovae are the super important “standard candles” in cosmology. Astronomers use them to gauge distances in space. They’re called standard candles because they are so predicable that they can be used as measurement tools. When astronomers discovered a hic-up in their measurement scheme, they came up with dark energy, and the universe’s expansion to explain it.
Andrew Steele and Marc Fries of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory published a paper that shows their discovery of a new form of carbon that date from the formation of the solar system. Their carbon was produced by the sun, and so they hypothesize that the same kind could be produced and spread out into space by supernovae explosions. This would mess up measurements of the supernovae.
Currently, the researchers are not commenting on what this could mean for the dark energy hypothesis. They will feed the information into NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) missions that look for the effects of dark energy in order to understand its impact on dark energy models.
Back to what I mentioned about repeating patterns: In my research at Oberlin, I was in the “pulsar lab”. Really, we were using pulsars, or pulsating dead stars (another “standard candle”), to study the interstellar medium. I was part of the team that studied these patterns in the dust between the pulsars and us. This had huge implications, of course, because dozens of teams of scientists use pulsars to study space. If we could find a way to subtract this dust from the observations, then you could get a clearer, brighter signal.
The scales are different; our pulsars were within our galaxy, and pretty close to us in space terms. But these guys are talking about supernovae and universe expansion, which is on a far larger scale. But if you think about it, it makes sense. You can’t just have a whole lot of empty space out there, right? Just because something doesn’t emit light doesn’t meant it’s not out there. Space is really, really, really large and scientists are just starting to notice the not-so-sexy things like dust and carbon between the sexy stuff like supernovae and pulsars. But it’s the little stuff that can tell us how life formed. Right now, building life seems so impossible, but is that because we don’t even know what’s out there?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
