Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Same face may look male or female, depending on where it appears in a person's field of view

ScienceDaily (2010-11-28) -- Neuroscientists have made the surprising discovery that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person's field of view, but female when they appear in a different location.

To find out more, follow: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101124124018.htm

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Monday, November 29, 2010

The very early universe behaved like a hot liquid?!

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Physicists from the ALICE detector team have been colliding lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in an attempt to recreate the conditions in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Early results have shown that the quark-gluon plasma created at these energies does not form a gas as predicted, but instead suggest that the very early universe behaved like a hot liquid.

The Large Hadron Collider enables physicists to smash together sub-atomic particles at incredibly high-energies, providing new insights into the conditions present at the beginning of the universe.

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ALICE (an acronym for A Large Ion Collider Experiment) researchers have been colliding lead nuclei to generate incredibly dense sub-atomic fireballs – mini Big Bangs at temperatures of over ten million degrees.

Previous research at lower energies had suggested the hot fire balls produced in nuclei collisions behaved like a liquid, yet many still expected the quark-gluon plasma to behave like a gas at these much higher energies.

Additionally, it has been found that more sub-atomic particles are produced in the collision than some theoretical models suggested.

“Although it is very early days we are already learning more about the early Universe,” said Dr David Evans, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, and UK lead investigator at ALICE experiment. “These first results would seem to suggest that the Universe would have behaved like a super-hot liquid immediately after the Big Bang.”

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The ALICE experiment aims to study the properties of the state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. The ALICE Collaboration comprises around 1,000 physicists and engineers from around 100 institutes in 30 countries. During collisions of lead nuclei, ALICE will record data to disk at a rate of 1.2 gigabytes (GB), equivalent to two CDs every second, and will write over two petabytes (two million GB) of data to disk. This is equivalent to more than three million CDs, or a stack of CDs without boxes several miles high!

To process this data, ALICE will need 50,000 top-of-the-range PCs, from all over the world, running 24 hours a day.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

First Alien Planet From Another Galaxy Discovered

HIP 13044b

Astronomers have confirmed the first discovery of an alien planet in our Milky Way that came from another galaxy, they announced Thursday.

The Jupiter-like planet orbits a star that was born in another galaxy and later captured by our own Milky Way sometime between 6 billion and 9 billion years ago, researchers said. A side effect of the galactic cannibalism brought a faraway planet within astronomers' reach for the first time ever.

The find may also force astronomers to rethink their ideas about planet formation and survival.

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Saturday, November 20, 2010

Doing Well in Calculus

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  • Develop an effective and time-efficient homework/study strategy for, not only your calculus class, but other classes as well. This will help you become a more confident, successful, and well-rounded student. It will lead to a healthier balance between work time and leisure time.
  • Spend at least two to four hours on each homework assignment. This affords you extra time to work on challenging homework problems and helps you organize your thoughts, questions, and ideas. The more time you spend on homework, the more likely you are to articulate clear, concise questions to your classmates and teachers. The more time you spend on homework, the less time you will spend on frantic, last-minute preparation for exams.
  • Definitions, formulas, and theorems that are introduced in class or needed to complete homework assignments should be memorized immediately . Postponing this until it's needed for the exam will impede your work speed on homework assignments and interfere with clearer and deeper understanding of calculus.
  • Spend time working on calculus every day . Doing some calculus every day makes you more familiar with concepts, definitions, and theorems. This familiarity will make calculus get easier and easier one day at a time.
  • Find at least one or two other students from your calculus class with whom you can regularly do homework and prepare for exams. Your classmates are perhaps the least used and arguably your best resource. An efficient and effective study group will streamline homework and study time, reduce the need for attendance at office hours, and greatly improve your written and spoken communication. The best time to use your classmates as study/homework partners is after you have made an honest effort on your own to solve the problems using your own wits, knowledge, and experience. When you encounter an unsolvable problem, don't give up too soon on it. Being stumped is an opportunity for mathematical growth and insight, even if you never solve the problem on your own. If you seek help prematurely, you will never know if you could have solved a tough problem without outside assistance.
  • Begin preparing/outlining for exams at least five class days before the exam. Outlining the topics, definitions, theorems, equations, etc. that you need to know for the exam will help you focus on those areas where you are least prepared. Preparing early for the exam will build your self-confidence and reduce anxiety on the day of the exam. It's also an insurance policy against time lost to illness, unexpected family visits, and last-minute assignments in other classes. Generally speaking, pulling all-nighters and doing last-minute cramming for exams is a recipe for eventual academic disaster.
  • Prepare for exams by working on new problems . Good sources for these problems are unassigned problems from your textbook, review exercises and practice exams at the end of each chapter, old hour exams, or old final exams. Studying exclusively from those problems which you have already been assigned and worked on may not be effective exam preparation. Problems for each topic are generally in the same section of the book, so knowing how to do a problem because you know what section of the book it is in could give you a false sense of security. Working on new randomly mixed problems more closely simulates an exam situation, and requires that you both categorize the problem and then solve it.
  • Use all resources of assistance and information which are available to you. These include classnotes, homework solutions, office hours with your professor or teaching assistants, and problem sessions with your classmates. Do not rely exclusively on just one or two of these resources. Using all of them will help you develop a broader, more natural base of knowledge and understanding.
  • Expect your exams to be challenging . If they are challenging, you will be prepared. If they are not challenging, you can expect to have an easy time getting a very high score !

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Saturday, November 13, 2010

CERN

SWITZERLAND CERN BIG BANGCentre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire (=European Nuclear Research Centre); a large scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, that studies particle physics. It operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory. Its members are from 20 European countries, and it is famous for building very large and powerful particle accelerators (=special machines for making very small pieces of matter move at very high speeds). Its new accelerator, the Large Haydron Collider (LHC), is the most powerful in the world."

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Wormhole

wormhole_graphic A hypothetical "tunnel" connecting two different points in space-time in such a way that a trip through the wormhole could take much less time than a journey between the same starting and ending points in normal space. The ends of a wormhole could, in theory, be intra-universe (i.e. both exist in the same universe) or inter-universe (exist in different universes, and thus serve as a connecting passage between the two).
Wormholes arise as solutions to the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In fact, they crop up so readily in this context that some theorists are encouraged to think that real counterparts may eventually be found or fabricated and, perhaps, used for high-speed space travel and/or time travel. However, a known property of wormholes is that they are highly unstable and would probably collapse instantly if even the tiniest amount of matter, such as a single photon, attempted to pass through them. A possible way around this problem is the use of exotic matter to prevent the wormhole from pinching off.

Many physicists believe wormholes (a "shortcut" through space and time) exist all around us but they are smaller than atoms.