Science in the News (please post articles of general interest here)

[Probeman]

I always suspected as much!   

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/electron-shape-round-standard-model-physics

To quote from the article:

The finding improves the team's last best measurement (SN Online: 12/19/13) by a factor of 10 to find an EDM of 10-29 electron charge centimeters. That's as round as if the electron were a sphere the size of the Earth, and you shaved less than two nanometers off the North Pole and pasted it onto the South Pole, says Yale University physicist David DeMille, a member of the ACME team.

[Probeman]

In an experiment designed to capture dark matter decay (WIMPs), they instead managed to capture the decay of a nuclei with a half life 1 trillion times longer the the age of the universe:

https://www.universetoday.com/142101/dark-matter-detector-finds-the-rarest-event-ever-seen-in-the-universe/

What are the odds!   

[Probeman]

Now here's a science story a bit more relevant to EPMA:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-got-closer-than-ever-before-to-solving-the-physics-of-glass

The link in the above article is also quite interesting:

https://theconversation.com/is-glass-a-solid-or-a-liquid-36615

[Probeman]

Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post on the Apollo moon rocks (50th anniversary) featuring our colleague Ryan Ziegler:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/apollo-rocks-showed-how-the-moon-was-made-and-now-theyre-about-to-solve-more-mysteries/2019/05/12/e3919a16-6de5-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html

[Probeman]

As a microanalyst I sometimes think it helps to keep things in perspective:



https://xkcd.com/2135/

See you at M&M 2019 next month!   

[John Donovan]

Does anyone see a trend here?

Here's an update of some positive news:

[Probeman]

I just finished reading "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" by Nick Lane.

https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Why-life-way/dp/1781250375

Although it came out in 2001, I didn't get to it until recently. Excellent book, quite technical, but very readable.

Basically he covers research on the origins of life (evolution of prokaryotes in something similar to today's alkaline hydrothermal vents), and the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes (simple to complex life).  Lots of discussion regarding ion flow and membranes. Life is chemiosmotic, I learned in this book!   

Here's a quote from the epilogue: "If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest".

How poetic!   

[Probeman]

Does anyone use the red/blue glasses for viewing 3-D images as seen here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D

We've used red/blue glasses for viewing these 3-D "anaglyph" 3-D images in our lab using Alicona's Mex software:

https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=1055.0

Well this article on investigations of how praying mantises see in 3 dimensions (apparently they are the only insects that do), is pretty cute because they fit them with tiny colored glasses:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/world-s-tiniest-3d-glasses-reveal-how-praying-mantises-see-world

[Probeman]

I'm sure glad that we only have singly ionized atoms to deal with in EPMA!   

https://scitechdaily.com/physics-problem-deepens-astrophysicists-puzzled-for-decades-rule-out-all-proposed-explanations/

[Probeman]

Electron quasi-particles:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01988-0

[Probeman]

Please don't miss comet NEOWISE:

https://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-c2020-f3-neowise

Look to the east before sunrise.  I saw it early this morning and it's definitely worth a look.
john

[Probeman]

Please don't miss comet NEOWISE:

https://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-c2020-f3-neowise

Look to the east before sunrise.  I saw it early this morning and it's definitely worth a look.
john

Now better to see this comet in the evening just after sunset. Look NW just above the horizon for high northern latitudes.

[Probeman]

Please don't miss comet NEOWISE:

https://earthsky.org/space/how-to-see-comet-c2020-f3-neowise

Look to the east before sunrise.  I saw it early this morning and it's definitely worth a look.
john

Now better to see this comet in the evening just after sunset. Look NW just above the horizon for high northern latitudes.

Got a nice view of comet NEOWISE around 22:00 last night. Even with some haze from a grass fire in town, the comet could be seen with the naked eye if you knew where to look.

With binoculars it's quite a sight. Just find the "bowl" of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), and scan down towards the horizon and you'll see it.

[Probeman]

This is pretty interesting:

https://scitechdaily.com/space-time-refraction-defies-fermats-principle-new-class-of-laser-beam-doesnt-follow-normal-laws-of-refraction/

Although Snell's Law still applies, the underlying change in velocity of the pulses is no longer applicable for the new laser beams, Abouraddy says. These abilities are counter to Fermat's Principle that says light always travels such that it takes the shortest path, he says.

"What we find here, though, is no matter how different the materials are that light passes through, there always exists one of our spacetime wave packets that could cross the interface of the two materials without changing its velocity," Abouraddy says. "So, no matter what the properties of the medium are, it will go across the interface and continue as if it's not there."

For communication, this means the speed of a message traveling in these packets is no longer affected by traveling through different materials of different densities.

[Probeman]

Artificial intelligence solves Schrödinger's equation. Quantum Monte Carlo:

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-artificial-intelligence-schrdinger-equation.html