Advanced Concepts Team

"The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what's known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles - including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured." Pilot-wave theory reresurrected. Maybe something for the next "fundamental" :P physics RF?

And for the next 'Experimental Physics Stagiaire' position why not try to do "Unpredictable Tunneling of a Classical Wave-Particle Association" http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/eddi/Papers/PhysRevLett_TUNNEL.pdf, there are some rumors online that the results of Yves Couder Experiments can be reproduced with simple DIY vibrating tables! It is very funny to see the videos of the MIT's replication of this experiment (with lightening legends for those who are uncomfortable with the concepts involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF5iHQMjcsM)

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Physicsworld releases their top 10 breakthroughs of the year 2014, ESA's Rosetta mission tops the list with the achievement of landing on a comet.

Localized high concentrations of methane have been discovered by the Curiosity rover. This points to localized sources of methane of yet unknown nature. Maybe the ACT's odor source localization should be resurrected!

Here's the an English article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/methane-spikes-mars-fuel-speculation-life-nasa-curiosity

interesting story with many juicy details on how they proceed ... (similarly interesting nickname for the "operation" chosen by our british friends) "The spies used the IP addresses they had associated with the engineers as search terms to sift through their surveillance troves, and were quickly able to find what they needed to confirm the employees' identities and target them individually with malware. The confirmation came in the form of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn "cookies," tiny unique files that are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as "target detection identifiers." Top-secret GCHQ documents name three male Belgacom engineers who were identified as targets to attack. The Intercept has confirmed the identities of the men, and contacted each of them prior to the publication of this story; all three declined comment and requested that their identities not be disclosed. GCHQ monitored the browsing habits of the engineers, and geared up to enter the most important and sensitive phase of the secret operation. The agency planned to perform a so-called "Quantum Insert" attack, which involves redirecting people targeted for surveillance to a malicious website that infects their computers with malware at a lightning pace. In this case, the documents indicate that GCHQ set up a malicious page that looked like LinkedIn to trick the Belgacom engineers. (The NSA also uses Quantum Inserts to target people, as The Intercept has previously reported.) A GCHQ document reviewing operations conducted between January and March 2011 noted that the hack on Belgacom was successful, and stated that the agency had obtained access to the company's

I knew I wasn't using TOR often enough...

Cool! It seems that after all it is best to restrict employees' internet access only to work-critical areas... @Paul TOR works on network level, so it would not help here much as cookies (application level) were exploited.

Interesting article about theoretical physics theories vs. experimental verification. Can we state that a theory can be so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing ? If a theory is proved to be untestable experimentally, can we still say that it is a scientific theory ? (not in my opinion)

There is an interesting approach by Feynman that it does not make sense to describe something of which we cannot measure the consequences. So a theory that is so removed from experiment that it cannot be backed by it is pointless and of no consequence. It is a bit as with the statement "if a tree falls in the forrest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?". We would typically extrapolate to say that it does make a sound. But actually nobody knows - you would have to take some kind of measurement. But even more fundamentally it does not make any difference! For all intents and purposes there is no point in forcing a prediction that you cannot measure and that therefore has noto reflect an event in your world.

"Mathematics is the model of the universe, not the other way round" - M. R.

A bit of an older story, but I was quite impressed (as a robotics non-expert) by the movement in the video. To me it shows the power of the brain and the "eagerness" (lack of better word) at which it tries to exert some control in the world around it.

A compilation of the highlights of the year, with Rosetta on the first page. There is a follow-up article about potential breakthroughs for 2015 based on ongoing research very interesting to see as well.

Our friends from NASA have come out with a plan to the human exploration of Venus in the time that everyone is speaking about Mars.

Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.

More in the ethic realm, I once was in a talk by Ivan Schuller (http://ischuller.ucsd.edu/) where he revisited the concept of Langmuir's Pathological Science (http://yclept.ucdavis.edu/course/280/Langmuir.pdf), defined as the act in which "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions" providing a list of aspects common to fraudulent science. Unfortunately there is no video of this very interesting talk, but the slides are available here: http://ethics.ucsd.edu/seminars/seminars/2006/summaries/Pathological_Science.pdf

By wearing clothes that have been dip-coated in a silver nanowire (AgNW) solution that is highly radiation-insulating, a person may stay so warm in the winter that they can greatly reduce or even eliminate their need for heating their home. With as extra bonus: Besides providing high levels of passive insulation, AgNW-coated clothing can also provide Joule heating if connected to an electricity source, such as a battery. The researchers demonstrated that as little as 0.9 V can safely raise clothing temperature to 38 °C, which is 1 °C higher than the human body temperature of 37 °C. How about that for personal comfort during the cold winter months

sounds almost like the asbestos story re-started :-)

Found an European project that takes care of the environmental, health and safety aspects of nanomaterials http://phys.org/news/2015-04-unleash-full-potential-nanomaterials.html

The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.

Something for the ACT! It costs just ~$5000.

nice indeed! just have to find a good project for it ...

Scientists have used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio-telescope system and NASA's Cassini spacecraft to measure the position of Saturn and its family of moons to within about a mile -- at a range of nearly a billion miles.

A team from Stanford showing possibility of solar flare prediction using AI techniques and data from the NASA SDO observatory.

Two apps - the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory (DECO) and Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones (CRAYFIS) - transform smartphones into miniature cosmic-ray detectors. They use the CMOS chips inside phones' onboard cameras to detect the secondary particles produced when cosmic rays - energetic, charged subatomic particles arriving from beyond the solar system - collide with air molecules in the Earth's atmosphere

Good news for fundamental physics and Earth system science, femtosecond lasers are now about to achieve space qualification thanks to fibre optics!  Applications include high resolution spectroscopy, absolute laser ranging, mapping of the geo-potential and testing of the theory of general relativity to name a few!

nice paper by the Koreans, did not know that they had already such a laser in orbit for a year. How much would this type be upscalable for our needs? in case we have not, we should reference it

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form - naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.