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Physics Week in Review: January 10, 2014

As you read this, we are making our way back to sunny Los Angeles after spending some time in Seattle. The Emerald City is on fire with Seahawks fever, so it seems appropriate to read that geologists Are Going to Measure Seattle Seahawk Fans’ Feetquake, via the judicious distribution of sensors around the stadium.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


As you read this, we are making our way back to sunny Los Angeles after spending some time in Seattle. The Emerald City is on fire with Seahawks fever, so it seems appropriate to read that geologists Are Going to Measure Seattle Seahawk Fans' Feetquake, via the judicious distribution of sensors around the stadium.

Scientists Conjure Curves From Flatness. New research based on kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper, is providing a set of rules for imbuing flat surfaces with curvature. Related: Origami: mathematics in creasing.

The Large Hadron Collider Sets Its Sights on Dark Matter. After finding the Higgs boson, the LHC has had a refit to enable it to operate at even greater extremes – and to solve more questions about the beginnings of the universe. Related: Shh! DEAP-3600 is hunting dark matter. How far will scientists go to cut through the noise in search of a subtle signal?


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Researchers create quantum memory that’s stable for six hours. It needs a very strong magnetic field chilled close to absolute zero.

Shields Up: Now You Can Make Yourself a Cloaking Device For Only $150. "The 'Rochester Cloak' isn’t your average high-tech cloaking device; rather than using exotic materials to bend light around an object as if it were not there, it uses four ordinary consumer-grade lenses to achieve the same effect."

The Vulgar Mechanic and his Magical Oven: A Renaissance alchemist pioneers feedback control.

Heavy Metals: New Underwater Ink and Metal Photographs by Alberto Seveso. Per Colossal: "Seveso achieves the ethereal forms in his photographs by mixing ink with metallic powders which are then suspended in different fluids."

The Algorithm That Unscrambles Fractured Images. The ongoing revolution in image processing has produced yet another way to extract images from a complex environment.

The boy who put a star in a jar: Jamie Edwards made history when he built a working nuclear fusion reactor at school.

The Science of Small: How does the Ant-Man suit work?

The Physics of a Flawless Triple Cork 1620 Snowboard Flip.

Debunking Hollywood: exploring the difference between a "Hollywood fall" and a real life fall. Related: When Does the Air Resistance Force on a Dropped Object Make a Difference?

What Does a Faster-Than-Light Object Look Like?

First MRI Images Of Diamond Vacancies: An entirely new way to control nuclear and electronic spins in diamond crystals could lead to a much more powerful generation of quantum computers.

Aerodynamics researchers play with air and water to make amazing flying machines.

NASA astronomers: "Pillars of Creation" might also be "pillars of destruction."

A Simple Form of Poker “Essentially” Solved by AI Computer That Taught Itself To Bluff. Even the best poker player wouldn’t stand a chance against this new computer algorithm.

Nova is (per Laughing Squid) an "animated short video by London-based visual artist James Alliban that uses video of bioluminescent deep sea creatures like the comb jellyfish as the inspiration for abstract animated forms. The resulting structure resembles a surreal organism that is locked into an ever-increasing state of perpetual growth, decay and transformation."

Nanowire clothing could keep people warm - without heating everything else.

Splash-Form Tektites: Cosmic Donuts Recreated by Levitation. "Splash form tektites are tiny shards of natural glass created from spinning drops of molten rock flung from the earth during an extra-terrestrial impact, such as when the earth is hit by asteroids or comets."

The search for our beginnings: “Volcanologists go to volcanoes for their field work, but meteoriticists never go to asteroids!”

Bell's Inequality at 50: John Bell's famous theorem made it clear that classical physics can't explain quantum effects.

Don’t bet on the failure of relativity. Related: We don't need to chuck our best physics theories to explain dark energy.

A Spider is now circling the South Pole searching for gravitational waves.

Don't write off ET yet. It’s true that we haven’t seen alien life, but neither have we seen much of the universe.

Identifying Glen Seaborg's Lost Plutonium. "Scientists at Berkeley have had to rely on nuclear forensics to substantiate whether this radioactive fleck was really produced in 1942 by the physicist who first discovered the element."

After Turing and Hawking, now it’s the stage story of the man behind the bomb. The lives of scientists have been played out across stage and screen in recent months, with the RSC now turning to the controversial atomic physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

Are quantum dot TVs - and their toxic ingredients - actually better for the environment?

Space Weather Fallout: Plasma Waves In Earth's Atmosphere.

Physics Can't Explain Why You Spill Your Tea.

Picturing the past with mass spectrometry: mastering isotope analysis to reconstruct ancient climates and cultures.

How Many Raincoats Does it Take to Model a Prison Escape? Using Models to Get Into Those Hard-to-Reach Places.

An accelerator-driven form of carbon dating advances everything from archaeology to personalized medicine.

How to calculate Pi using a pump-action shotgun.

Earthfall: What would happen if the Earth stopped in its orbit?

Einstein’s God: Krista Tippett and Theoretical Cosmologist Janna Levin on Free Will, Science, and the Human Spirit.

On Expecting Things to Fall Apart: We understand entropy surprisingly early in life.

Is the Isaac Newton Apple/Gravity Story True? The Royal Society Presents the Evidence.

The 19th-Century Photography Trick That Changed How We See Snow.

How to have mind-boggling fun with infinity. The human brain is happy working with nice finite numbers. As soon as you start working with infinity, things start happening that are completely counter-intuitive.

Rocket scientists are in love with a goofy rocket simulation game called Kerbal.

Teen MacGyver Invents Battery to Save the Planet. 14-year-old creates eco-battery with aluminum foil, old guitar strings, and club soda.

How To Avoid Thinking in Math Class: First in a Series from Math With Bad Drawings. "In teaching math, I’ve come across a whole taxonomy of insidious strategies for avoiding thinking. Albeit for understandable reasons, kids employ an arsenal of time-tested ways to short-circuit the learning process, to jump to right answers and good test scores without putting in the cognitive heavy lifting. I hope to classify and illustrate these academic maladies: their symptoms, their root causes, and (with any luck) their cures. But... it’s not always bad to avoid thinking. It’s often healthy, even necessary. So I also hope to highlight the good heuristics, the sensible shortcuts, and the wisdom of seeing math class as an effort to program your autopilot."

Lovers, Scientists, And Other Animals: An Interview With Mari Ruti.

One Breath: The Story of Freediver William Trubridge. How deep is too deep? Diving to 100 metres on a single breath takes more than strong lungs and limbs.

How Much Math Is Needed To Make a Pixar Movie? Numberphile chats with animator Tony DeRose.