LEt’s not get a head of ourselves though. What exactly is magnetic soap? Scientists have long been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase their ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system. Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. Previously they worked on soaps sensitive to light, carbon dioxide or changes in pH, temperature or pressure. Their latest breakthrough, reported in Angewandte Chemie, is the world’s first soap sensitive to a magnetic field.

Ionic liquid surfactants, composed mostly of water with some transition metal complexes (heavy metals like iron bound to halides such as bromine or chlorine) have been suggested as potentially controllable by magnets for some time, but it had always been assumed that their metallic centres were too isolated within the solution, preventing the long-range interactions required to be magnetically active. Surely something that would qualify for stimulusfunding small business loans.

The team at Bristol, lead by Professor Julian Eastoe produced their magnetic soap by dissolving iron in a range of inert surfactant materials composed of chloride and bromide ions, very similar to those found in everyday mouthwash or fabric conditioner. The addition of the iron creates metallic centres within the soap particles. more

This year, he posed the open-ended question “what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?”. (I added the “scientific” part to the title myself, which in hindsight was probably not the correct thing to do. I assume it was worded this way carefully, and I made a mistake adding the word. I was just trying to simplify what it was likely about by adding the word, but clearly it is not my question so I probably shouldn’t have. Without the word it becomes much more open-ended, which is the clear intent, but I won’t remove it now since it is already archived.)

This is a question that I find quite interesting. Personally, I am no scientist so I would have absolutely NO IDEA how to answer it. I can certainly appreciate the passion that scientists would have answering it, however. Listening to passionate scientists is always something that is highly entertaining, and informative to me. While I can think critically, and logically, I have never spent a good deal of time studying any scientific discipline exclusively to be considered more than someone that just likes to know things about the world. Something I assume many others do, and find it to be something we all should at least try to do. After all, the search for truth and understanding is always something I feel is important even to the point of figuring out how a signal booster cell phone works. Science is always something I am interested in and if there is one thing I can thank religion for it is that it got me much more interested in science. Not to figure out what religion had to say about it, but to actually understand what religion is too lazy to look for, and answers rather than just make up things to fill in the gaps.

I will not attempt to explain any of these explanations myself. If you go to the blog post about this you will find 192 responses already to the question and you can see them for yourself. It is a fascinating read and one I hope you will take the time to view.

In the experiment the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department bomb-disposal range. Nothing stopped it. It went on a path of destruction that went into the neighborhood below at 4:15 PM where children were returning home from school.

The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, authorities said.

There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all — only awakening because of plaster dust.

It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family’s Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.

The show will be stopped momentarily while they investigate the accident. Obviously everyone is grateful that nobody got hurt, and feels a big sigh of relief. Now just the investigation to figure out exactly what went wrong.

It appears as if this group is working with funding from the U.S. Army Research Office, which should surprise nobody. These scientists have devised an invisibility cloak material that hides objects from detection using light that is visible to humans. The new device is a leap forward in cloaking materials, according to a report in the ACS journal Nano Letters.

Xiang Zhang and colleagues note that invisibility cloaks, which route electromagnetic waves around an object to make it undetectable, “are still in their infancy.” Most cloaks are made of materials that can only hide things using microwave or infrared waves, which are just below the threshold of human vision. To remedy this, the researchers built a reflective “carpet cloak” out of layers of silicon oxide and silicon nitride etched in a special pattern. The carpet cloak works by concealing an object under the layers, and bending light waves away from the bump that the object makes, so that the cloak appears flat and smooth like a normal mirror.

You might need a holter medical monitor if you see someone appear out of nowhere with one of these cloaking devices. Although Nightkin from the Fallout universe and many others within have discovered the art of the Stealth Boy, or Chinese Stealth Armor, it appears the real world hasn’t quite caught up to the super mutant technology.

Friday they released a report that they had been smashing particles together at a record intensity in a key advance in their program to unveil mysteries of the universe. The new record was some 6 per cent more particles per unit than the previous record, set by the U.S. Fermilab’s Tevatron collider last year. BCBSNC

Each collision in the LHC’s 27-kilometre (16.8 mile) circular underground tunnel — at a tiny fraction under the speed of light — creates a simulation of the Big Bang which brought the universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago

“Beam intensity is the key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step,” said Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.

“Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential.”

“There is a tangible feeling that we are on the threshold of new discovery,” said his deputy, Sergio Bertolucci, CERN’s research director.

Familial DNA is what it implies. The DNA of a blood relative. This is being used more and more for evidence found at crime scenes in which there is no match for the DNA found on the scene. The controversial practice searches the database for a familial match of the evidence at the scene to get a lead. So…if the suspect has a blood relative that has been arrested in the past they may be getting a knock on the door even if they aren’t already in the system. There is no muscle building supplements that can get you out of a DNA match.

Recently adopted in the state of Virginia and under consideration in Pennsylvania, the controversial search technology is used in Colorado and California, where it was credited with nabbing suspects in serial murders

Been a while since you delved into good Sci-fi hasn’t it? This is kid’s stuff if you watch shows like Fringe (Fridays at 9PM ET on Fox. Watch it! It is about to be cancelled if you don’t!) that discuss alternate universes and travelling between the two like turnign on a Delta faucets, but still always been more sci-fi than reality, at least in the public realm.

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light — light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Last summer, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone and his team published a study explaining the theory behind an anti-laser, demonstrating that such a device could be built using silicon, the most common semiconductor material. But it wasn’t until now, after joining forces with the experimental group of his colleague Hui Cao, that the team actually built a functioning anti-laser, which they call a coherent perfect absorber (CPA).

Abstract from their report published this month:

In the time-reversed counterpart to laser emission, incident coherent optical fields are perfectly absorbed within a resonator that contains a loss medium instead of a gain medium. The incident fields and frequency must coincide with those of the corresponding laser with gain. We demonstrated this effect for two counterpropagating incident fields in a silicon cavity, showing that absorption can be enhanced by two orders of magnitude, the maximum predicted by theory for our experimental setup. In addition, we showed that absorption can be reduced substantially by varying the relative phase of the incident fields. The device, termed a “coherent perfect absorber,” functions as an absorptive interferometer, with potential practical applications in integrated optics.

Stone believes that CPAs could one day be used as optical switches, detectors and other components in the next generation of computers, called optical computers, which will be powered by light in addition to electrons. Another application might be in radiology, where Stone said the principle of the CPA could be employed to target electromagnetic radiation to a small region within normally opaque human tissue, either for therapeutic or imaging purposes.

Theoretically, the CPA should be able to absorb 99.999 percent of the incoming light. more

Peter Weyand from Southern Methodist University, USA, is fascinated by the effect that body size has on physiological function.

“This goes back to Max Kleiber’s work on resting metabolic rates for different sized animals. He found that the bigger you are the slower each gram of tissue uses energy,” explains Weyand, who adds, “It’s interesting to know how and why metabolism is regulated that way.”
Intrigued by the question of why smaller people use more energy per kilogram body mass than larger individuals when walking, Weyand teamed up with Maurice Puyau and Nancy Butte, from the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine, and undergraduate Bethany Smith. Together they decided to measure the metabolic rates of children and adults, ranging from 5 to 32 years old, weighing between 15.9kg and 88.7kg and ranging in height from 1.07m to 1.83m, to try to find out why larger people are more economical walkers than smaller people.

Cell phone users irritate so mightily because their background chatter forcibly yanks listeners’ attention away from whatever they’re doing, says psychology graduate student Lauren Emberson of Cornell University. Overhearing someone spewing intermittent exclamations into a handheld gadget lacks the predictability of hearing a two-way exchange and thus proves inherently unsettling, Emberson and her colleagues report in an upcoming Psychological Science.

That makes it harder to focus on one’s own immediate business, be it reading a book, contemplating a work presentation or driving a car, the researchers propose.

These new results raise the unsettling possibility that drivers operate vehicles poorly not only while talking on cell phones (SN: 3/13/10, p. 16) but also when passengers gab on the devices. Further research will look for such an effect in people operating driving simulators.

I find this hard to believe. I suppose your passenger whining about acne scar removal cream to someone else and not hearing the ohter side could annoy, but who knows. I guess you may be trying to figure out what they are saying as it could be a mutual friend on the other side and trying to figure out a plan. People aren’t too bright you see and can’t LISTEN while they look forward.

“Drivers should be aware that one’s attention is drawn away from current tasks by overhearing someone on a cell phone, at least in our attention-demanding lab tasks, and that this effect is beyond conscious control,” Emberson says.