Group items tagged

"Time travellers may be using Twitter and Facebook, claim scientists, despite finding no evidence of it" the same can be said for most moders science "big claims with no evidence" :)

Apparently this cart settled some longstanding physics dispute... Would there be a way to think of something similar using solar wind? *no clue*

the counterintuitive aspect in my view is not the travelling against he wind but the faster than wind travelling with the wind, where the simple trick of having the wheels power the propeller flips the mind to understand it easily ... (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/downwind-faster-than-the-wind/)

But from that point of view it should also be counter-intuitive that it travels against the wind at twice the speed of the wind...

While my attitude to articles about interstellar travel is generally sceptical, this one seems to raise quite an interesting point... Physicists?

Also, remember never to dereference null pointers.

True, it's almost like installing accelerometers upside down...

"The Man from Earth" is real !! and there are apparently many of them around...

Global air travel contributes around 3.5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions behind/driving anthropogenic climate change, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But what impact does a warming planet have on air travel and how might that, in turn, affect the rate of warming itself?

Just forward your travel confirmation emails to: plans@tripit.com and this site sends you an email with a summary of your trip and more info etc. Looks like it's worth trying

NASA marketing interstellar travel to foreign bodies even without knowing how they actually look like.

title is misleading, but the paper is interesting (and as obvious as ignored)

sure was a fun assignment ...

apart from the doppler shift the perspective also changes when you look at objects while traveling close to the speed of light: http://www.spacetimetravel.org/tompkins/node1.html

Giving the title, I think the comment is not necessary...

Haha, nice article : One of the best-known versions of non-general relativistic quantum versions of time travel comes from Wheeler, as described by Feynman in his Nobel Prize lecture [16]: 'I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass." "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "Suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron."

Wiki Travel - Leo's favourite invention!!!

Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement

Travelling through wormholes is not much different from quantum teleportation using entangled black holes...

The Florida team generated a specially shaped laser beam that could self-accelerate, or bend, sideways.

very nice!!! read this e.g. "In addition to this self-bending, the beam's intensity pattern also has a couple of other intriguing characteristics. One is that it is non-diffracting, which means that the width of each intensity region does not appreciably increase as the beam travels forwards. This is unlike a normal beam - even a tightly collimated laser beam - which spreads as it propagates. The other unusual property is that of self-healing. This means that if part of the beam is blocked by opaque objects, then any disruptions to the beam's intensity pattern could gradually recover as the beam travels forward."

The film Batman Begins shows the character of Batman gliding using a rigid form of his cape. This paper assesses the feasibility of such a glide and finds that while a reasonable distance could be travelled if gliding from a tall building, the speed at which Batman would be travelling would be too dangerous to stop without some method of slowing down.

(don't forget to turn your hype-filters on...) MoNETA (http://cns.bu.edu/nl/moneta.html) stands for "MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent". It is one of projects participating in the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE project ("Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"): http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/bio/biologically/synapse/index.htm http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa08-28.html

wonder if we can use that to power a moon base .... or on-board a SBSP satellite

I am not the physicist but I thought it might be interesting, from a space security point-of-view

Yes it seems really interesting and opens new possibilities. However this technology review article is not very good and the guy uses terms which have a precise meaning (like teleportation), which is different from the word we know... Quantum teleportation is what we use for designing quantum computers, but we are quite far from any practical applications. This energy teleportation will allow new scheme involving energy (if it is experimentally confirmed) which is very nice. However it seems this occurs in an entangled many-body system, which the only macroscopic one I know is a bose-eintein condensate (BEC). So it would mean infuse energy in the BEC by doing a measurement on one of the atom and extract it few millimeters away by doing a measurement on another atom. very far from any long distance power transmission...

some ideas for movie Fridays A "must" see on my opinion (never heard about it in the past!) : Primer Sounds ideal: "Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1] Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following."

I watched it a while ago during my studies in Belgium... The plot is quite well summarized on this diagram: http://xkcd.com/657/large/ According to the text above I'm either savant or a liar (you choose). But I watched the movie under significant exposure to Belgian beer, so this may have helped...

why don't we use this for long-term space travel :-) ?? anybody wants to have a closer look into this?

super-highways: an old stuff, but still very fascinating ...