everything

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
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Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

better living through chemistry -i think....

Psychopharmacologist's song from Mind Hacks by vaughan

Well, it doesn't get much stranger than this. OmniBrain has discovered an animation created by Prof Stephen Stahl, researcher and author of numerous academic papers and books on the neuroscience of psychoactive drugs, where he sings about his love of psychopharmacology. If that's not weird enough for you, it's to the tune of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta song and he's dressed as a 19th century Naval officer. I would describe more of it, but you really need to see it to fully appreciate it in all its glory. I'm sure no-one needs to remind a professor of psychopharmacology of the maxim "don't get high on your own supply", so I repeat it here purely for our collective reflection. Link to embedded video of the Psychopharmacologist's Song.

t-rays

Quantum teamwork produces T-ray beam - tech - 22 November 2007 - New Scientist Tech

A long-sought device able to produce a beam of 'T-rays' that could revolutionise airport security and medical scans has been created by persuading normally independent quantum junctions to work together.

The new gadget produces terahertz waves, or T-rays, which are sandwiched between infrared light and microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum. Many researchers are trying to use them because, like microwaves, they can pass through many materials such as clothing, but provide much higher resolution images.

But making terahertz waves is tricky. Lasers and microwave emitters can be pushed out of their usual ranges to emit them. But there remains a "terahertz gap" in the middle, between about 0.5 and 2 terahertz, which no device has been able to fill.

Now an international team led by Ulrich Welp at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, US, have started to close the gap. To make a powerful beam they coordinated teams of quantum devices that had previously been uncooperative.
Superconducter sandwich

Josephson junctions are made from a sandwich of superconducting material with an insulating filling. They can produce terahertz waves when voltage applied to the superconductors makes a "current tunnel" through the insulating layer.

Single junctions produce feeble amounts of radiation, though. Previous devices could only muster around a millionth of a millionth of a watt (a picowatt), and to make matters worse, researchers have struggled to work the junctions in sync.

Now Welp and colleagues made hundreds of junctions work together, creating a beam of laser-like terahertz light with 10,000 times more power (about half a microwatt).

The team used a high-temperature semiconductor called BSCCO, which naturally contains stacks of Josephson junctions in its structure. It comprises of superconducting sheets, a couple of atoms thick, separated by 1.5 nanometer insulating gaps.

"We were able to pack in a huge number of Josephson junctions" in each crystal, Welp says. In a strip of the material about one micron tall, 100 microns wide, and 300 microns long, they fitted in more than 600 junctions.

The usually unruly junctions were tamed with a carefully chosen voltage applied across the superconductor. That created a stationary electromagnetic wave that coordinated the junctions' actions. "That was the trick," Welp says. "People were never able to synchronize all these junctions before."
Filling the gap

"It's analogous to a laser," he adds, which also use reflecting cavities to provide feedback that makes molecules, such as those of noble gases, emit synchronised light waves.

By using different size crystals, they were able to fire T-ray beams of 0.36 to 0.85 terahertz, covering about a third of the terahertz gap. They aim to decrease the gap further by making their crystals narrower, Welp says, and also plan to increase the power output.

The new study is a significant step forward, says August Yurgens of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. "Attempts to synchronize many Josephson junctions for producing radiation have so far not been very successful."

"If the power output were boosted up to 1 to 10 milliwatts, it would be a very promising niche device", complementing other devices that create terahertz radiation at other frequencies, Yergens says.

The frequencies covered by the new device are some of the more useful for imaging. "You have to be slightly below one terahertz to take full advantage of such radiation," he adds.

Journal reference: Science (vol 318, p1291)

Toads are 'open-minded' about sex

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Toads are 'open-minded' about sex

Toads are 'open-minded' about sex By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News See how the male toads' mating tactics compare Male S. bombifrons Male S. multiplicata Some female toads are rather open-minded when it comes to choosing a mate, a study reveals. US researcher Karin Pfennig found female spadefoot toads will flout the general evolutionary rule of not breeding with other species. She discovered that the amphibians, under some conditions, will mate with other species to help boost the survival rates of their offspring. The research is published in the journal Science. Spadefoots breed in small ponds, which can often dry out, killing any developing tadpoles. Dr Pfennig, from the University of North Carolina, has discovered that when a pond is very shallow, one species of female spadefoot, S. bombifrons , will often mate with another closely related species, S. multiplicata , rather than males of their own kind. She believes the reason is down to tadpole development. S. bombifrons tadpoles develop much more slowly than S. multiplicata , meaning they have to spend longer in the ponds. But the hybrid offspring between the two species develop rapidly, meaning that they are more likely to survive if the pond dries out quickly.

golden ratio

Curvy women may be a clever bet
Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, a US study suggests.

Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.

The bigger the difference between a woman's waist and hips the better.

Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.

In this area, the fat is likely to be the much touted Omega-3, which could improve the woman's own mental abilities as well as those of her child during pregnancy.

Men respond to the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child, the researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California said.

The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK's most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.

But experts are not convinced by the findings.

"On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it's very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet," said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.

"And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner."

mind reading

BBC NEWS | Health | Paralysed man's mind is 'read'

BBC NEWS
Paralysed man's mind is 'read'
Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay's brain is imagining some 80% of the time.


CAUSES OF LOCKED-IN SYNDROME:
Brain injury
Drug overdoses
Stroke
Disease which damages nerve cells

In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.

"We hope it will be a breakthrough," says Joe Wright of Neural Signals, which has helped develop the technology.

"Conversation is what we're hoping for, but we're pretty far from that."

Reading minds

Experts in the field of neuroscience agreed it was an exciting advance.

We are lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped - or feared - we may be five years ago
John Dylan Haynes
Max Planck Institute

"It hasn't come completely out of the blue," said Professor Geraint Rees, a neuroscientist at University College London.

"We have been moving towards decoding primitive vocabulary for a while now. But this is certainly an interesting development, although invasive techniques, where something is out in someone's brain, such as these will of course carry risks."

Reading people's minds remains a far-off prospect, however.

"There is a huge difference between a technique like this, which is able to pick up signals the subject wants to be picked up, and being able to delve deep into the mind," says Professor John Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

"It's very exciting that we are starting to be able to translate some basic thoughts, but we are a lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped - or feared - we may be five years ago.

getcher snake erl

10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets

By Rob Beschizza November 17, 2007 | 8:41:32 PMCategories: Religion

Some gadgets change the world. Others don't. These ones, however, are very effective at one thing in particular: teleporting money out of customers' pockets.

Q-Ray Bracelet

The FTC smacked down Q-Ray's "ionized" bracelet to the tune of $87m
after the makers made deceptive advertising claims. The $200 placebo
trinkets are still on sale, however — the ad copy just makes vague
intimations of "wellness" and the like instead of specific medical
claims.

Whether "ionization" even does anything, however, is a moot
point. Tested by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at an electron
microscopy lab, it found that the thing wasn't ionized at
all. Even for true believers, it's a waste of wonga.

Orbo

When it comes to gadgets, perpetual
motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish
company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a
long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the
scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded:
enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait! Steorn gave its deal to 22 scientists who'll "validate" the device. Don't hold your breath, chaps.

Perhaps it's art, a complex exploitation of media credulity and
skeptics' blood pressure. Perhaps its a clever-dick ad for Steorn's
marketing abilities. What it isn't, however, is a free energy machine.

Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin'
clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly
small, you're selling a measurement error.

Danie Krugel's DNA search device

Marshall McLuhan may have seen technology as an extension of the
human body, but we're not going to fall for this one: former South
African cop Danie Krugel's "quantum" box, which he claims can locate
anyone on Earth, when primed with a sample of their DNA.

Science-challenged
bumpkins at Britain's Observer and Telegraph newspapers fell for it hook, line and sinker.
After Krugel approached the parents of missing toddler Madeleine
McCann, then told them she'd been buried on a beach, the Observer
described this hogwash as "forensic DNA tests" by a "detective renowned
for locating abducted children."

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science called the reportage "contemptible." Krugel's led more than one bereaved family up the garden path, it transpires: The Daily Mirror delivered a much-needed debunking.

The magical mystery box weds "complex and secret science techniques"
with GPS to show exactly where the missing person is. Krugel, however,
won't let anyone examine it. If anyone gets a chance, swap it out for
one of Mother Mohiam's when he's not looking, would you? That'll teach
him.

Harmony Chip

The Harmony Chip is so transparently useless as to be an object lesson in how drivel may be dressed up as science.

Everything is just as it should be. The appropriation of scientific teminology to tout snake oil. Misrepresented research from real scientists. A website slathered in testimonials. Vague medical claims about pain relief, blood pressure and curing headaches. A long-haired, bare-chested Yorkshireman
with a fake Eastern name who rambles emptily about the nature of
innovation and who attributes commonplace platitudes to himself.
Wait... What?

Harmony "revitalizes" blood and water, improves your golf
swing, speeds recovery from injury and "personal development," and
makes you "clearer" and "cleverer." It improves gas mileage, reduces
tire wear, cuts emissions, reduces workplace turnover and absenteeism,
cleans swimming pools, refreshes "exhausted" engine oil, and protects
one from radio waves. It even does the dishes.

Buy the basic kit for $200. Buy it with a pair of headphones —
"probably the most powerful self-development accelerator on the planet"
— for $537. Go get yours, now! Do
it!

Philip Stein Teslar Watch

Described by Wired's Katie Dean as "a watch powered by snake oil," Teslar watches contains a chip (uh oh) that purports to emit a frequency that
"neutralizes the electromagnetic fields" output by cellular telephones,
computers and radios.

Most scientists don't think such fields are harmful anyway, but
even if they were, a feeble wristwatch wouldn't protect you from the
radio waves rattling around every human head on planet Earth.

"There is not a chance in the word that [it] will do anything
but lighten your wallet," says John Molder, a professor of radiation
oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Here's the blurb, straight from the company's website: "When a Teslar
watch is worn on the left wrist, the frequency goes into the triple
warmer meridian on the left wrist, and then travels throughout the
body, canceling out harmful static caused by electromagnetic fields
(ELF) along the way."

This snake oil starts at $600.

Screen Mist

Clarins' Expertise e3P
"ultra-sheer screen mist" purports to offer a "Magnetic Defense
Complex" with Rhodiola Rosea and Thermus Thermophillius, to protect
you from all that horrible radio pollution.

At about $40, this bottle of failure takes the electromagnetic biscuit.

The Guardian, for one, found its makers unwilling or unable to cite the scientific research that they said supports their claims.

The main cause of premature skin aging is sunlight, for which the
cure is darkness or sunscreen. If you want to get away from EM
radiation, spraying water on your face
is not an effective way to do so—even if it does have bits of
dead
Siberian weeds in it.

MPion MP3 Player

Done listening to the MPion's stash of music? It won't take
long, with only 128MB of flash storage on board.

The real feature of this device is is
"negative ion generator," which is said to clean pores when you smudge
the unit over your face. Yours, for only $170, in Japan.

Even if this thing harmed bacteria, the effect would be more
than compensated for by the torrent of them acquired by smooshing the grease from your own hands all over
your chops.

Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator

With so many crackpot devices out there with alleged wellness benefits, it's hard to pick one out. Ah, the agony of choice.

Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator, however, is like the
Telsar Watch's big daddy. Plug it in, and it supposedly emits
"non-Hertzian frequencies" to remove "harmful" radio waves from the
building and allow biological de-stressing. It also purportedly makes
electrical devices safer and more efficient.

Reports of success
tend to be anecdotal rather than evidential, but don't let that stop
you buying this AU$300 toy. Actually, do let it stop you.

The sellers of this particular device don't like to be called on their nonsense: when one critic, Daniel Rutter, upbraided the Power Modulator online, its makers issued a series of nutty legal threats and had his website taken offline. Say "Hi" to the Streisand Effect, guys. Maybe it'll help shift some of your junk.

The thing is just an extension cord with a ghetto line
filter: three aluminum plates held close to a copper conductor running
the length of the device. The plates have holes in them, because
Harmonic Products also sells them as pendants.

A Beech Knob

If paying thousands of dollars for a volume control isn't spendy enough, try upgrading it with a pair of $485 wooden volume knobs, replacing the standard bakelites.

There's just no reason to pay this much for wood, even for committed audiophiles. Look at it this way: unlike speakers,
signal processors or even cables, there's no engineer out there
dedicating his life to polishing wooden volume knobs.

This well-known pearl of rot may, unfortunately, now be a thing of the past. The product page seems to have been removed. Where will the world get its $485 volume knobs? Silver Rock beech knobs 4 lyfe!

Dowsing Rods

I can't let you go without mentioning the all-time classic
scam-friendly gadget. Be it two
precision-engineered brass rods, dangling crystals or old hazelwood,
divining is to the technology of magical thinking as the humble
flintknap is to invention itself.

Usually associated with the search for water, dowsers search for pretty
much everything: buried gold, gemstones, hydrocarbons and murder
victims are just the beginning of a practice stretching back millenia.

Generous skeptics and even some dowsers maintain that the rods serve to
amplify near-imperceptible twitches caused by the suppressed wisdom of
the unconscious mind. Unfortunately, such inspired ideomotoring
vanishes under test conditions, like just so much Randi-fodder.

10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Some gadgets change the world. Others don't. These ones, however, are very effective at one thing in particular: teleporting money out of customers' pockets.

Qray

Q-Ray Bracelet

The FTC smacked down Q-Ray's "ionized" bracelet to the tune of $87m after the makers made deceptive advertising claims. The $200 placebo trinkets are still on sale, however — the ad copy just makes vague intimations of "wellness" and the like instead of specific medical claims.

Whether "ionization" even does anything, however, is a moot point. Tested by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at an electron microscopy lab, it found that the thing wasn't ionized at all. Even for true believers, it's a waste of wonga.

Orbo

Orbo

When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded: enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait! Steorn gave its deal to 22 scientists who'll "validate" the device. Don't hold your breath, chaps.

Perhaps it's art, a complex exploitation of media credulity and skeptics' blood pressure. Perhaps its a clever-dick ad for Steorn's marketing abilities. What it isn't, however, is a free energy machine.

Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin' clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you're selling a measurement error.

Krugel_2 Danie Krugel's DNA search device

Marshall McLuhan may have seen technology as an extension of the human body, but we're not going to fall for this one: former South African cop Danie Krugel's "quantum" box, which he claims can locate anyone on Earth, when primed with a sample of their DNA.

Science-challenged bumpkins at Britain's Observer and Telegraph newspapers fell for it hook, line and sinker. After Krugel approached the parents of missing toddler Madeleine McCann, then told them she'd been buried on a beach, the Observer described this hogwash as "forensic DNA tests" by a "detective renowned for locating abducted children."

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science called the reportage "contemptible." Krugel's led more than one bereaved family up the garden path, it transpires: The Daily Mirror delivered a much-needed debunking.

The magical mystery box weds "complex and secret science techniques" with GPS to show exactly where the missing person is. Krugel, however, won't let anyone examine it. If anyone gets a chance, swap it out for one of Mother Mohiam's when he's not looking, would you? That'll teach him.

Harmonychip

Harmony Chip

The Harmony Chip is so transparently useless as to be an object lesson in how drivel may be dressed up as science.

Everything is just as it should be. The appropriation of scientific teminology to tout snake oil. Misrepresented research from real scientists. A website slathered in testimonials. Vague medical claims about pain relief, blood pressure and curing headaches. A long-haired, bare-chested Yorkshireman with a fake Eastern name who rambles emptily about the nature of innovation and who attributes commonplace platitudes to himself. Wait... What?

Harmony "revitalizes" blood and water, improves your golf swing, speeds recovery from injury and "personal development," and makes you "clearer" and "cleverer." It improves gas mileage, reduces tire wear, cuts emissions, reduces workplace turnover and absenteeism, cleans swimming pools, refreshes "exhausted" engine oil, and protects one from radio waves. It even does the dishes.

Buy the basic kit for $200. Buy it with a pair of headphones — "probably the most powerful self-development accelerator on the planet" — for $537. Go get yours, now! Do it!

Teslar_better

Philip Stein Teslar Watch

Described by Wired's Katie Dean as "a watch powered by snake oil," Teslar watches contains a chip (uh oh) that purports to emit a frequency that "neutralizes the electromagnetic fields" output by cellular telephones, computers and radios.

Most scientists don't think such fields are harmful anyway, but even if they were, a feeble wristwatch wouldn't protect you from the radio waves rattling around every human head on planet Earth.

"There is not a chance in the word that [it] will do anything but lighten your wallet," says John Molder, a professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Here's the blurb, straight from the company's website: "When a Teslar watch is worn on the left wrist, the frequency goes into the triple warmer meridian on the left wrist, and then travels throughout the body, canceling out harmful static caused by electromagnetic fields (ELF) along the way."

This snake oil starts at $600.

V_826Screen Mist

Clarins' Expertise e3P "ultra-sheer screen mist" purports to offer a "Magnetic Defense Complex" with Rhodiola Rosea and Thermus Thermophillius, to protect you from all that horrible radio pollution.

At about $40, this bottle of failure takes the electromagnetic biscuit.

The Guardian, for one, found its makers unwilling or unable to cite the scientific research that they said supports their claims.

The main cause of premature skin aging is sunlight, for which the cure is darkness or sunscreen. If you want to get away from EM radiation, spraying water on your face is not an effective way to do so—even if it does have bits of dead Siberian weeds in it.

Mpion_facial_blast_2 MPion MP3 Player

Done listening to the MPion's stash of music? It won't take long, with only 128MB of flash storage on board.

The real feature of this device is is "negative ion generator," which is said to clean pores when you smudge the unit over your face. Yours, for only $170, in Japan.

Even if this thing harmed bacteria, the effect would be more than compensated for by the torrent of them acquired by smooshing the grease from your own hands all over your chops.

Modulator500

Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator

With so many crackpot devices out there with alleged wellness benefits, it's hard to pick one out. Ah, the agony of choice.

Harmonic Products's EMP Power Modulator, however, is like the Telsar Watch's big daddy. Plug it in, and it supposedly emits "non-Hertzian frequencies" to remove "harmful" radio waves from the building and allow biological de-stressing. It also purportedly makes electrical devices safer and more efficient.

Reports of success tend to be anecdotal rather than evidential, but don't let that stop you buying this AU$300 toy. Actually, do let it stop you.

The sellers of this particular device don't like to be called on their nonsense: when one critic, Daniel Rutter, upbraided the Power Modulator online, its makers issued a series of nutty legal threats and had his website taken offline. Say "Hi" to the Streisand Effect, guys. Maybe it'll help shift some of your junk.

The thing is just an extension cord with a ghetto line filter: three aluminum plates held close to a copper conductor running the length of the device. The plates have holes in them, because Harmonic Products also sells them as pendants.

Knob

A Beech Knob

If paying thousands of dollars for a volume control isn't spendy enough, try upgrading it with a pair of $485 wooden volume knobs, replacing the standard bakelites.

There's just no reason to pay this much for wood, even for committed audiophiles. Look at it this way: unlike speakers, signal processors or even cables, there's no engineer out there dedicating his life to polishing wooden volume knobs.

This well-known pearl of rot may, unfortunately, now be a thing of the past. The product page seems to have been removed. Where will the world get its $485 volume knobs? Silver Rock beech knobs 4 lyfe!

Dowser Dowsing Rods

I can't let you go without mentioning the all-time classic scam-friendly gadget. Be it two precision-engineered brass rods, dangling crystals or old hazelwood, divining is to the technology of magical thinking as the humble flintknap is to invention itself.

Usually associated with the search for water, dowsers search for pretty much everything: buried gold, gemstones, hydrocarbons and murder victims are just the beginning of a practice stretching back millenia.

Generous skeptics and even some dowsers maintain that the rods serve to amplify near-imperceptible twitches caused by the suppressed wisdom of the unconscious mind. Unfortunately, such inspired ideomotoring vanishes under test conditions, like just so much Randi-fodder.

big red Mars

Mars Doubles in Brightness



Image credit: NASA
Image credit: NASA

During the past month, Mars has doubled in brightness and it is putting a nice show for backyard stargazers.

"Mars is starting to look really nice through my 10-inch telescope," reports amateur astronomer Friedrich Deters of LaGrange, North Carolina, who took the picture at right on Nov. 17th.

"Very nice!" agrees Dan Peterson of Racine, Wisconsin, who captured a similar snapshot the next night.

The blue polar swirl in these pictures is the "North Polar Hood"—a giant icy cloud that forms over the Martian north pole during winter. Why blue? That's the color of sunlight scattered from very tiny crystals of ice (smaller than the wavelength of light itself) floating in the cloud. The blue hood vs. Mars' red terrain appear in pleasing contrast through any mid-sized backyard telescope.

You don't need a telescope to enjoy Mars, however. It is plainly visible to the naked eye, bright and red, standing out among the pale stars of Gemini as something definitely different.

Finding the constellation and the planet within is child's play on Nov. 26th and 27th. That's when the nearly full Moon glides past Mars, only one degree away, and draws attention to the pair. If you can find the full Moon, you can find Mars. Look east before bedtime on Monday evening, Nov. 26th, or west before dawn on Tuesday morning, Nov. 27th.

Take a cup of coffee outside on Nov. 27th and spend some time sipping it while the sun rises and a hint of blue infuses the twilight sky. The sight of the silver Moon and red Mars backlit by blue sky is breathtaking. Sky maps: Nov. 26, Nov. 27.

Why has Mars gotten so bright and attractive? It's because Earth and Mars are converging. At closest approach on Dec. 18th, the two worlds will lie only 55 million miles apart. That may sound like a great distance, but it is just a hop, skip and a jump on the vast scale of the solar system. NASA is taking advantage of the close encounter to send a new mission to Mars: the Phoenix Lander. Phoenix launched in August 2007 and is due to reach Mars in May 2008, joining the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity already there.

Take a look at Mars: If it is this good now, what will it be like in December? Stay tuned!

Source: Science@NASA, by Dr. Tony Phillips

light into matter, matter into light

Harvard press release:

IN TINY SUPERCOOLED CLOUDS, PHYSICISTS EXCHANGE LIGHT AND MATTER
Technique may give scientists a new degree of control over fiber-optic communication and quantum information processing

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Physicists have for the first time stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space and then revived it in a completely separate location. They accomplished this feat by completely
converting the light pulse into matter that travels between the two locations and is subsequently changed back to light.

Matter, unlike light, can easily be manipulated, and the experiments provide a powerful means to control optical information. The findings, published this week by Harvard University researchers in the journal
Nature, could present an entirely new way for scientists and engineers to manipulate the light pulses used in fiber-optic communications, the technology at the heart of our highly networked society.

"We demonstrate that we can stop a light pulse in a supercooled sodium cloud, store the data contained within it, and totally extinguish it, only to reincarnate the pulse in another cloud two-tenths of a
millimeter away," says Lene Vestergaard Hau, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Hau and her co-authors, Naomi S. Ginsberg and Sean R. Garner, found that the light pulse can be revived, and its information transferred between the two clouds of sodium atoms, by converting the original optical pulse into a traveling matter wave which is an exact matter copy of the original pulse, traveling at a leisurely 200 meters per hour. The matter pulse is readily converted back into light when it enters the second of
the supercooled clouds -- known as Bose-Einstein condensates -- and is illuminated with a control laser.

"The Bose-Einstein condensates are very important to this work because within these clouds atoms become phase-locked, losing their individuality and independence," Hau says. "The lock-step nature of
atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate makes it possible for the information in the initial light pulse to be replicated exactly within the second cloud of sodium atoms, where the atoms collaborate to revive
the light pulse."

Within a Bose-Einstein condensate -- a cloud of sodium atoms cooled to just billionths of a degree above absolute zero -- a light pulse is spatially compressed by a factor of 50 million. The light drives a
controllable number of the condensate's roughly 1.8 million sodium atoms to enter into quantum superposition states with a lower-energy component that stays put and a higher-energy component that travels between the two Bose-Einstein condensates. The amplitude and phase of the light
pulse stopped and extinguished in the first cloud are imprinted in this traveling component and transferred to the second cloud, where the recaptured information can recreate the original light pulse.

The period of time when the light pulse becomes matter, and the matter pulse is isolated in space between the condensate clouds, could offer scientists and engineers a tantalizing new window for controlling and
manipulating optical information; researchers cannot now readily control optical information during its journey, except to amplify the signal to avoid fading. The new work by Hau and her colleagues marks the first successful manipulation of coherent optical information.

"This work could provide a missing link in the control of optical information," Hau says. "While the matter is traveling between the two Bose-Einstein condensates, we can trap it, potentially for minutes, and
reshape it -- change it -- in whatever way we want. This novel form of quantum control could also have applications in the developing fields of quantum information processing and quantum cryptography."

Ginsberg, Garner, and Hau's work was supported by the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Also see the Editor's Summary, which also links to the News&Views article by


Michael Fleischhauer.

Read more in the Harvard Gazette .

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Schrodinger's Kittens

Published online 22 November 2007 |

Nature
| doi:10.1038/news.2007.277

News

Schrödinger's kittens enter the classical world

Theory shows how quantum weirdness could still be seen on a large scale.

Philip Ball

Watch closely enough, and a compass needle might occasionally jump instantaneously between directions.Getty

The
particles that make up the world obey the rules of quantum theory,
allowing them to do counterintuitive things such as being in several
different places or states at once, so why don’t we see this sort
of bizarre behaviour in the world around us? The explanation commonly
offered in physics textbooks is that quantum effects apply only at very
small scales, and get smoothed away at the everyday scales we can
perceive.

But that’s not necessarily so, say two
physicists in Austria. They claim that we’d be experiencing
quantum weirdness all the time — balls that don’t follow
definite paths, say, or objects 'tunnelling' out of sealed containers
— if only we had sharper powers of perception.

Johannes
Kofler and Časlav Brukner of the University of Vienna and the
Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, also in Vienna,
say that the emergence of the 'classical' laws of physics, deduced by
the likes of Galileo and Newton, from quantum rules happens not as
objects get bigger, but because of the ways we measure these objects¹. If we could make every measurement with as much precision as we liked, there would be no classical world at all, they say.

Killing the cat

Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously illustrated the
apparent conflict between the quantum and classical descriptions of the
world. He imagined a situation where a cat was trapped in a box with a
small flask of poison that would be broken if a quantum particle was in
one state, and not broken if the particle was in another.

Quantum
theory states that such a particle can exist in a superposition of both
states until it is observed, at which point the quantum superposition
‘collapses’ into one state or the other. Schrödinger
pointed out that this means that the cat is neither dead nor alive
until someone opens the box to have a look — a seemingly absurd
conclusion.

Physicists generally resolve this paradox by
invoking a process called decoherence: the destruction of quantum
superposition as quantum particles interact with their environment. The
more quantum particles there are in a system, the harder it is to
prevent decoherence. So somewhere in the process of coupling a single
quantum particle to a macroscopic object like a flask of poison,
decoherence sets in and the superposition is destroyed. This means that
Schrödinger’s cat is always unambiguously in a
‘realistic’ state, either alive or dead, and not both at
once.

But that’s not the whole story, say Kofler and
Brukner. They think that although decoherence typically intervenes in
practice, it need not do so in principle.

Bring the cat back

“We
prefer to say that the [kittens] are neither dead nor alive, but in a
new state that has no counterpart in classical physics.”

Johannes Kofler and Časlav Brukner

The
fate of Schrödinger’s cat is an example of what in 1985
physicists Anthony Leggett and Anupam Garg called macrorealism².
In a macrorealistic world, they said, objects are always in a single
state and we can make measurements on them without altering that state.
Our everyday world seems to obey these rules. According to the
macrorealistic view, "there are no Schrödinger cats allowed" says
Kofler.

But Kofler and Brukner have proved that a quantum state can get as 'large' as you like, without conforming to macrorealism.

The
two researchers consider a system akin to a magnetic compass needle
placed in a magnetic field. In our classical world, the needle rotates
with a smooth movement that can be described by classical physics. But
in the quantum world, the needle could be in a superposition of
different alignments, and would just jump instantaneously into a
particular alignment once we tried to measure it.

So why
don’t we see quantum jumps like this? The researchers show that
it depends on the precision of measurement. If the measurements are a
bit fuzzy, so that we can’t distinguish one quantum state from
several other, similar ones, this smoothes out the quantum oddities
into a classical picture. Kofler and Brukner show that, once a degree
of fuzziness is introduced into measured values, the quantum equations
describing an object’s behaviour turn into classical ones. This
happens regardless of whether there is any decoherence caused by
interaction with the environment.

Watch the kitten

Kofler says that we should be able to see this transition between
classical and quantum behaviour. The transition would be curious:
classical behaviour would be punctuated by occasional quantum jumps, so
that, say, the compass needle would mostly rotate smoothly, but
sometimes jump instantaneously.

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