The Infinite Story – Boundless, Timeless and Endless

Infinity has haunted human minds for thousands of years. It challenges theologians and scientists alike to understand it, cut it down to size, find out if it comes in different shapes or sizes, and decide whether we want to outlaw it or welcome it with open arms into our human descriptions of the universe. It is also a live issue. Physicists’ quests for a theory of everything has been primarily guided by an attitude toward infinities. When asking a question of particle physics, for example, the appearance of an infinite answer was always taken as a warning that you had made a wrong turn in your search for a theory of everything.

Site – http://www.quantumbiocommunication.com

America’s Hottest Lab

A temperature of 2 to 3 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interior of any known star — has been achieved in a lab in New Mexico.  The temperature record was set recently in a test shot at the Z Pinch device at Sandia National Laboratory, where an immense amount of electrical charge is stored in a device called a Marx generator. Many capacitors in parallel are charged up and then suddenly switched into a series configuration, generating a voltage of 8 million volts.

Site – http://www.aip.org

Atom Wires

Physicists have built the world’s thinnest gold necklaces, at just one atom wide.  The smallest wire width in mass produced electronic devices is about 50 nm, or about 500 atoms across. The ultimate limit of thinness would be wires only one atom wide. Such wires can be made now, although not for any working electronic device, and it is useful to know their properties for future reference.

Site – http://www.aip.org

Mathematical Uncertainty

In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote a letter to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, in which he revealed, “I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet.� Besides suggesting theirs was a cerebral affair, the quote captures a certain fundamental tenet of mathematics that some mathematicians are now questioning.

Site – http://www.seedmagazine.com

Unintelligent Design

The cover story for this month’s Discover magazine tells of a recently discovered gigantic virus, Mimivirus, that has blurred the lines between viruses and bacteria, and spurred speculation that viruses could be the reason life evolved past single-celled organisms.” From the article: “This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud. In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story, in which some singular, inchoate entity stepped in to give rise to complex life-forms–humans in particular.

Site – http://www.discover.com

Hubble Pictures Pinwheel Galaxy In All Its Glory

The most detailed image ever made of a spiral galaxy has been compiled from 51 Hubble Space Telescope images. It may shed light on the cause of mysteriously bright X-ray emissions in the galaxy and has already revealed a stellar nursery where no stars were expected to form.

Site – http://www.newscientistspace.com

Entanglement Heats Up

Entanglement could occur at any temperature and not just in systems cooled to near zero according to new calculations by a team of physicists in the UK, Austria and Portugal. Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds and colleagues at the universities of Porto and Vienna have found that the photons in ordinary laser light can be quantum mechanically entangled with the vibrations of a macroscopic mirror, no matter how hot the mirror is. The result is unexpected because hot objects are usually thought of being classical. The finding suggests that macroscopic entanglement is not as difficult to create as previously believed and could have implications for making room-temperature quantum computers in the future.

Site – http://physicsweb.org

Taking Spying To Higher Level

A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency’s periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.   On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.

Site – http://www.nytimes.com

China Prepares To Launch Alternate Internet

The Chinese government has announced plans to launch an alternate Internet root system with new Chinese character domains for dot-com and dot-net. This may mean that Chinese Internet users will no longer rely on ICANN, the U.S.-backed domain name administrator, and, as one commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable Internet.

Site – http://politics.slashdot.org

How To Digitize A Million Books

Fifteen months after Google announced a book-scanning project of biblical proportions -– an effort to digitize the entire book collections of the New York Public Library and Harvard University libraries, among others — the company is still secretive about how they are solving key technical problems and won’t say how much they’ve accomplished so far.

Site – http://www.technologyreview.com

Quantum Physics Double Slit Experiment

Taken from the ‘What the Bleep’ movie.

Site – http://video.google.com

You Will Remember This

Scientists can now predict memory of an event before it even happens. A team at UCL (University College London) can now tell how well memory will serve us before we have seen what we will remember.

Site – http://www.eurekalert.org