Approaching Light Speed

Erase a CD with High Voltage

One enterprising individual has created the most secure way to wipe out Compact Discs, by using a step-up transformer and creating a 150,000 Volt pd, whilst a CD rotates in the middle. The sparks arc through the metal in the CD and evaporates it, ripping it all off as the CD rotates. The CD is rendered transparent and unreadable. This may be the most secure method to remove data on conventional recordable CDs used in offices.

Verona Rupes: Tallest Known Cliff in the Solar System

Could you survive a jump off the tallest cliff in the Solar System? Quite possibly. Verona Rupes on Uranus' moon Miranda is estimated to be 20 kilometers deep -- ten times the depth of the Earth's Grand Canyon. Given Miranda's low gravity, it would take about 12 minutes for a thrill-seeking adventurer to fall from the top, reaching the bottom at the speed of a racecar -- about 200 kilometers per hour. Even so, the fall might be survivable given proper airbag protection. The above image of Verona Rupes was captured by the passing Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft in 1986. How the giant cliff was created remains unknown, but is possibly related to a large impact or tectonic surface motion.

Meteors

After midnight, the only meteoroids escaping collision are those ahead of the Earth and moving in the same direction with velocities exceeding 18.5 miles per second (30 kilometers per second). All others we will either overtake or meet head-on.

But before midnight, when we are on the back side, the only meteoroids we encounter are those with velocities high enough to overtake the Earth. Therefore, on average, morning meteors appear brighter and faster than those we see in the evening.

And because the Leonids are moving along in their orbit around the sun in a direction opposite to that of Earth, they slam into our atmosphere nearly head-on, resulting in the fastest meteor velocities possible: 45 miles per second (72 kms).  Such speeds tend to produce bright meteors, which leave those aforementioned long-lasting streaks or trains in their wake.

Also, as Leo is beginning to climb the eastern sky near and before midnight, there is a small chance of perhaps catching sight of an "Earth-grazing" meteor.

Earth-grazers are long, bright shooting stars that streak overhead from near to even just below the horizon. Earth-grazers are distinctive because they follow a path nearly parallel to our atmosphere. 

12.04.1961

Jacob Barnett, a 12 year old boy prodigy

More info here!

Star Size Comparisons

Graphene

Electronics researchers love graphene. A two-dimensional sheet of carbon one atom thick, graphene is like a superhighway for electrons, which rocket through the material with 100 times the mobility they have in silicon. But creating graphene-based devices will be challenging, say researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, because new measurements show that layering graphene on a substrate transforms its bustling speedway into steep hills and valleys that make it harder for electrons to get around.

Scientifically, You Probably Are in the Slowest Moving Line

As you wait in the checkout line just before Christmas, your observation is correct. That other line is moving faster than yours. That's what Bill Hammack (the Engineer Guy), from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana "proves" in this YouTube video.
The video was released just in time for the final days of the holiday shopping season, as a lesson in queueing theory for the holiday season. Using the work of Agner Erlang, a Danish engineer who helped the Copenhagen Telephone Company determine the best level of service with the minimum number of operators, Hammack shows stores can determine the best number of cashiers in a store.
Ironically, the most efficient set-up is to have one line feed into several cashiers. This is because if any one line slows because of an issue, the entry queue continues to have customers reach check-out optimally. However, this is also perceived by customers as the least efficient, psychologically.
It does indeed imply that Fry's Electronics checked with Hammack before starting their practice of using one queue and multiple checkout lines.
In fact, scientifically, it can be proven that the other line is more likely to move faster than your line.  As shown in the video, in a system with three checkout lines, 2/3 of the time, the other lines will move faster than yours. Watch the video below. 

IBM breakthrough brings us one step closer to exascale computing, even more intense chess opponents

The path to exascale computing is a long and windy one, and it's dangerously close to slipping into our shunned bucket of "awesome things that'll never happen." But we'll hand it to IBM -- those guys and gals are working to create a smarter planet, and against our better judgment, we actually think they're onto something here. Scientists at the outfit recently revealed "a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies." The new tech is labeled CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, and if executed properly, it could lead to exaflop-level computing, or computers that could handle one million trillion calculations per second. In other words, your average exascale computer would operate around one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today, and would almost certainly give Garry Kasparov all he could stand. When asked to comment on the advancement, Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research, nodded and uttered the following quip: "I'm am IBMer, and exascale tomfoolery is what I'm working on."

Albireo

Cygnus, often informally termed the Northern Cross, represents the swan into which the god Zeus turned himself to seduce Leda, wife of the King of Sparta. On early autumn evenings, Cygnus is high overhead from midnorthern latitudes, appearing to fly south along the bright sparkling band of the Milky Way. Because the constellation lies in the Milky Way it contains rich star fields and a wealth of open clusters visible with binoculars or small telescopes. However, the showpiece of Cygnus is not some large cluster containing hundreds of stars, but a lonely star that marks the head of the swan.

Albireo is one of the most beautiful double stars in the sky, probably the finest in the heavens for small telescopes. The two components are known as Beta Cygni A and B. A is the primary member of the system, a golden yellow or "topaz" star shining at 3rd magnitude, while B is known as the companion, a fainter 5th-magnitude star with a beautiful bluish color. B orbits around A with a period of revolution of about 600 years, and the two components have a wide separation of 34 arcseconds. This means that the system can be seen separately through the smallest of telescopes, and even with good binoculars. Albireo is noted for its superb color contrast, best seen if you put the stars slightly out of focus, or if you tap the telescope so that the image vibrates. The color effect seems to diminish in either very small or very large telescopes, or with too high a magnification. The optimum power is about 50x on a good 6-inch instrument.

Maxwell's demon demonstration turns information into energy

Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the "Maxwell demon" thought experiment devised in 1867.

Maxwell's demon was the invention of Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who wanted to contradict the second law of thermodynamics (although the name was given to the imaginary being later). This law implies it is not possible to invent a perfect heat engine able to extract heat from a hot reservoir and use all the heat to perform work, because some of the heat must be lost to a cold reservoir.
Maxwell imagined a box containing a gas at a particular temperature (or pressure). In any gas some molecules are hotter (moving faster) and some are cooler (moving slower) than the average. In Maxwell’s thought experiment a partition with a small trapdoor is placed in the box, and the trapdoor is guarded by the imaginary being who, without expending energy, selects which molecules go through to the other side.
The demon, for example, could allow only hotter molecules to remain on the right side, or pass through to the right side, while the cooler than average molecules are allowed into the left side. The end result is that all the hot molecules end up on one side of the box, which is therefore warmer than the other side containing only cool molecules. The demon has essentially converted a mixed gas (disordered state or higher entropy) to separated gases (ordered state or lower entropy), apparently violating the second law of thermodynamics which also says entropy in an isolated system should not decrease.
In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them. The temperature difference in the box could then be used to run a heat engine, with heat flowing from the hot end to the cold end, which also appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
In a now-classic 1929 paper on Maxwell’s demon, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard showed that the thought experiment does not actually violate the laws of physics because the demon must exert some energy in determining whether molecules were hot or cold.

Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a "spiral-staircase-like" potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location.
The team observed the particle using a high-speed camera. The particle had some thermal energy and moved in random directions. When it was moving up the staircase they allowed it to move freely, but when it moved down the staircase they blocked its movement via a virtual wall created by an electric field. The virtual wall therefore acted like a Maxwell’s demon, only allowing the particle to move in one direction, but not forcing or pushing it.
As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. The experiment did not violate the second law of thermodynamics because energy was consumed in the experiment by the apparatus used, and by the experimenters themselves, who did work in monitoring the particle and adjusting the voltage, but Sano said the experiment does demonstrate that information can be used as a medium for transferring energy.
The results also verified the generalized Jarzynski equation, which was formulated in 1997 by statistical chemist Christopher Jarzynski of the University of Maryland. The equation defines the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information.

Physicists show that superfluid light is possible

Superfluidity – the phase of matter that enables a fluid to move up the sides of its container – has been known about since the 1930s. Since then, superfluidity has become a prime example of how quantum effects can become visible on the macroscopic scale under certain conditions. Although physicists have previously considered the possibility of superfluid light, their results have been inconclusive until now. In a new study, physicists from France have theoretically shown that superfluid motion of light is indeed possible, and have proposed an experiment to observe the phenomena.

In their study published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, Patricio Leboeuf and Simon Moulieras from the University Paris-Sud and CNRS explain that superfluidity is the ability of a fluid to move with zero dissipation or viscosity. A fluid behaves like a superfluid only under a certain critical velocity; above this critical velocity, superfluidity disappears. Most commonly demonstrated in liquid helium, superfluidity occurs when the helium is cooled and some helium atoms have reached their lowest possible energy. At this point, these atoms' quantum wave functions begin to overlap so that they form a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which all the atoms behave as one large atom, and their quantum nature is manifested on the macroscopic scale.
Previously, investigations of the superfluid motion of light have not revealed clear evidence of the existence of a superfluid critical velocity. Although some recent experiments have observed superfluidity related to light, these experiments did not use photons, but a composite particle, called a polariton, which is a mixture of a photon and an exciton.
In this study, Leboeuf and Moulieras have shown that a superfluid critical velocity does exist in a nonlinear medium. They explain how superfluid light can be observed in an array of waveguides. From a dynamical point of view, light propagating through a nonlinear medium is formally equivalent to a Bose gas of interacting massive particles. Light can travel straight along the waveguides in the longitudinal direction, or it can tunnel between adjacent guides in the transverse direction. The benefit of this set-up is that it allows the scientists to engineer different characteristics of the array and control the light's flow.
The physicists were specifically interested in what happens to a light pulse as it travels through the array at different velocities in the presence of a defect. If the light is scattered by the defect, it means dissipative processes have occurred. If the light pulse moves through the defect without changing its shape (i.e., without losing collectivity), there is no dissipation and the light has superfluid motion. Through their calculations, the physicists showed that, for certain low velocities, the transverse motion of light is superfluid with zero dissipation. When the velocity increases, dissipative processes occur that destroy the collectivity of the light's oscillations, and superfluidity breaks down.

In the future, the physicists plan to further investigate additional details of superfluid light, such as how it relates to an underlying quantum theory of light and how it is connected to Bose-Einstein condensation. They predict that superfluid motion is a general property of light that exists in a variety of scenarios, and is not limited to the waveguide array proposed here. Superfluid light could also have applications in light transport optimization.
“One straightforward implication is related to transport in the presence of noise,” Leboeuf said. “Such a noise is expected to be present generically, since any material has imperfections and impurities. The impurities are responsible for the scattering of light. In the superfluid regime, we expect a light pulse to be able to propagate through a noisy medium without being affected or scattered (perfect transmission).”
Leboeuf and Moulieras plan to perform their proposed experiment and are discussing the opportunity with experimental groups at the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures (LPN) at Marcoussis, France. However, the scientists said that superfluid light is not likely to have any strange effect analogous to a superfluid flowing up a container.
“The most basic 'strange' quantum effect that light shows related to superfluidity is, as shown in our article, dissipationless motion,” Moulieras said. “Another, though more indirect or spectacular, effect is related to quantized vortices, which were observed in laser patterns propagating through nonlinear media. Concerning other possibilities, such as fluid motion up the walls of a container, they are related, for atoms, to the forces between these atoms and a substrate, and the balance between capillary, gravity and viscous forces. We do not see a straightforward application of these concepts to photons, and therefore do not expect them for light.”