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More than a century after the idea was first floated, physicists have finally figured out how to tie water in knots in the laboratory. The gnarly feat, described today in Nature Physics1, paves the way for scientists to experimentally study twists and turns in a range of phenomena - ionized gases like that of the Sun's outer atmosphere, superconductive materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields that describe elementary particles.

Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knotted "vortex rings" - which are essentially like tornado bent into closed loops and knotted around themselves, as Daniel Lathrop and Barbara Brawn-Cinani write in an accompanying commentary. In Kelvin's vision, the fluid was the theoretical 'aether' then thought to pervade all of space. Each type of atom would be represented by a different knot.

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Kelvin's interpretation of the periodic table never went anywhere, but his ideas led to the blossoming of the mathematical theory of knots, part of the field of topology. Meanwhile, scientists also have come to realize that knots have a key role in a host of physical processes.

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Think 3D printers are cool? Check out this 3D pen!

Looks like fun! I wonder if you could do the same with a hot glue gun... (memo to self: play more with hot glue gun)

Oh, I like this one. One more point for swarm intelligence! :)

We could have come up with an inspiration like this !!! As creative as the roots :-) "These male amphibians use their calls to attract the female, who can recognise where it comes from and then locate the suitor. The problem arises when two males are too close to one another and they use their call at the same time. The females become confused and are unable to determine the location of the call. Therefore, the males have had to learn how to 'desynchronise' their calls or, in other words, not call at the same time in order for a distinction to be made."

Now we just need an x-ray mode and we are done.

reads way too pessimistic to me - or too optimistic if you are an AI guy .... Luis? Dario?

"Hbar Technologies plans a Kickstarter effort to raise US $200,000 for the next phase design of an antimatter-propelled spaceship. The two scientists behind this design effort are a veteran Fermilab particle accelerator scientist and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist and founding director of the U.S. Center for Space Nuclear Research. They originally developed it for NASA at the turn of the millennium."

In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

Be careful .... new technologies are killing us!!!

New technologies, old stupidity. I remember the Polish couple one from the news... Horrific, kids left traumatised for life...

Once more, science at the service of humankind...

Very interesting article on use of neuro drugs in military ...

"One of the leading theories describing how the most energetic cosmic rays are produced may need a rethink in light of a new study by physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. The team had set out to detect the extremely energetic neutrinos that are expected to be produced alongside high-energy cosmic rays in the violent explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars - but after looking at hundreds of these explosions, no such neutrinos have been found. "

beautiful and hypnotic, but I'd like to know exactly what it is they are visualizing. These don't seem to be the changes in people's locations during phone calls...

There are few certainties in plant biology. But, surely, leaves are green and designed to engage in photosynthesis. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Underground leaves of Philcoxia trap and digest nematodes...discovering a new carnivorous plant.

I will never sleep thinking that these things are everywhere....

As far as I'm concerned, that's next Nobel in chemistry :)

The only way to study the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics is to test them over enormous distances in space. And physicists are already making plans

"Higgs Boson partices - guaranteed to satisfy! Need mass in your objects? Get some Higg Bosons!" "The Higgs Boson particles are SOLD WITH THE JAR! You may not be able to SEE the Higgs Boson particles unless you use a large hadron collider." "Q: Since it is, after all, the god particle; can you observe closely and tell use what religion it is?"

If physicists are ever to entangle humans they'll need to understand the role that noise plays in the experiments. Now they've carried out the first tests to find out

remember what we tried to do with Mihaly for the CDF about in 2003 - they are now doing it .... fantastic