BuzzSkyline - Slashdot User

Submission + - Electricity From Salty Water (physicscentral.com) 1

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Friday July 24, 2009 @08:58AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "It's possible to produce energy by simply mixing fresh and salty water. Although chemists and physicists have long known about the untapped energy available where fresh water rivers pour into salty oceans, the technology for exploiting the effect has been lacking. An Italian physicist seems to have solved the problem with the experimental demonstration of a "salination cell" that creates power given nothing more than input sources of salty and fresh water. Apparently the renewable, environmentally friendly energy source is comparable to "each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high." A paper describing the technology is due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters."

Submission + - Earthquake Invisibility Cloak (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Sunday July 19, 2009 @10:00AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."

Submission + - Human-powered Submarine Races (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @09:26PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Physics Buzz is reporting on the 7th International Human-Powered Submarine Races, held all last week at Carderock Naval Surface Warfare Center in Maryland. Contestants crawled inside homemade fiberglass submarines to pedal for glory down a 100-meter underwater course. The biennial contest, staged in a 3000-foot-long test pool, draws university and high school students from across the US as well as the UK, Mexico, Canada, and Venezuela. (Florida's Springstead High School and their sub, Sublime, FTW!)"

Submission + - Shapeshifting Metamaterials (aps.org)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Tuesday June 23, 2009 @08:46AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Physicists have been working to develop metamaterial-based invisibility technology for years, but now a group of researchers in Hong Kong has published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that offers even more imaginative applications. According to one of the Phys. Rev. editors, the researchers "describe how a particular object could be optically transformed into another: a spoon may appear to be a cup, or one may see a peephole where there is really a solid wall. Rendering an object invisible then becomes one case out of many possible illusions." Oddly enough, Sirius Black is not listed as one of the authors."

Submission + - Steve Chu Still Publishing Physics papers (physicscentral.com) 1

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Friday June 19, 2009 @06:22PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Sure, he's officially the US Energy Secretary now, but Steven Chu still has enough physicist in him to have a paper published in this week's issue of Physical Review Letters. He and his coauthors have developed a new and improved atom interferometer, which could be used to aid aircraft navigation, detect gravitational waves from supernovas and colliding black holes, or perform various other super-sensitive measurements."

Submission + - Tsunami Invisibility Cloak (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Monday September 29, 2008 @04:24PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "New Scientist is reporting on a lab-scale experiment that may lead to a tsunami invisibility cloaks, which could protect islands, open-ocean platforms and even coastlines from dangerous waves by effectively making them invisible to tsunamis. The technology is based on the same sorts of negative index of refraction ideas that some physicists are exploring as they try to make real versions of Harry Potter's optical invisibility cloak, except that it works with water instead of light."

Submission + - Red Cars are Louder than Blue or Green Cars (autoblog.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Wednesday July 02, 2008 @02:43PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Autoblog is reporting on a new study showing that people believe red cars are louder than other color cars, even if they're putting out exactly the same amount of sound. The study is being presented this week at the Acoustics '08 meeting in Paris."

Submission + - World's Smallest Trophy up for Grabs (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @05:29PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The American Physical Society is offering what they claim will be the smallest trophy ever made for the winning entry in the football-themed NanoBowl video contest. The NanoBowl trophy is being made by the Craighead research group of Cornell University, which also produced the nanoguitar (the holder of the Guinness Book record for the smallest guitar). The trophy will include features a billionth of a meter across, and will only be visible under powerful electron and scanning-tunneling microscopes. Apparently, the nanotrophy will be awarded in a ceremony to be held in a phone booth on Super Bowl Sunday 2008."

Submission + - Computing with Heat (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Thursday October 18, 2007 @01:23PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Thermal logic gates could soon lead to computers that run purely on heat, according to research to be published October 24th in the journal Physical Review Letters. The proposed thermal AND, OR, and NOT gates would be built of newly developed heat transistors, which were first announced this past July."

Submission + - Mand Dies after 3-Day Internet Gambling Binge (cnn.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @07:27AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Chinese authorities believe a man in Beijing died of exhaustion after three continuous days of Internet gambling. Sounds like a misdiagnoses to me, otherwise countless people should have dropped dead while playing Halo or Final Fantasy."

Submission + - Dark Web turns deadly in Japan (yomiuri.co.jp)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Friday September 14, 2007 @11:42AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The Japanese news site Daily Yomiuri is reporting that a woman was murdered in a robbery concocted with the aid of dark Web sites set up to help criminals find accomplices. Kenji Kawagishi, and unemployed man in Aichi Prefecture, sent messages from his cell phone to the "Dark Employment Security Web," which hooked him up with two other men who were also hard-up for cash. Tsukasa Kanda, a sales agent for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and Yoshitomo Hori (unemployed), joined with Kawagishi in kidnapping 31-year-old Rie Isogai while she was on her way home from work. The men robbed her of 70,000 yen (about $600), murdered her, and dumper her in the woods of Mizunami, Gifu Prefecture."

Submission + - NSF-funded "Dark Web" to battle terrorists (nsf.gov)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Wednesday September 12, 2007 @12:31PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The National Science Foundation has announced a University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on "advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online." The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which "automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content" with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release. Of course, that means that Big Brother will be able to keep en eye on all the Anonymous Cowards posting on /. too."

Submission + - The first mixed reality experiment (physicscentral.com)

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Friday June 22, 2007 @02:51PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "The website PhysicsBuzz is reporting that researchers at the University of Illinois claim to have performed the first mixed reality experiment by coupling a real pendulum to its virtual twin. The researchers are exploring both the ways that the real world can affect virtual systems, and ways that virtual reality can affect the real world. Eventually, they hope to extend their studies to understand how virtual economies (such as those in the The World of Warcraft and Second Life) are coupled to real economies. The fact that virtual money and property can be purchased with real cash means that we can no longer think of online economies as separate from the real world. The researchers published their mixed reality paper in the May 2005 issue of the journal Physical Review E."

Submission + - Stephen Hawking Going to Iran for Physics Olympiad

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Thursday April 26, 2007 @11:08AM

BuzzSkyline writes: "PhysicsBuzz is reporting that Stephen Hawking will be traveling to Iran in July to address competitors in the 2007 International Physics Olympiad. The Olympiad is an annual competition among high schoolers from every continent who gather to battle for the gold medals awarded to the world's brightest physics students."

Submission + - Turbulence Control for a Safer Hajj

Submitted by

BuzzSkyline

on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:40PM

BuzzSkyline writes: "Science News is reporting that a fluid physics analysis of crowd motions during last year's disaster at Mecca helped to make this year's Hajj safer. When crowd pressure reaches a critical point, according to the new study, panic leads to motion similar to the swirling turbulence often observed in fluids. The researchers who performed the study worked with a Saudi civil engineer to develop image recognition software that warns of impending crowd turbulence. The organizers of Hajj could then slow the flow of pilgrims to reduce crowd pressure. The research is due to appear in this month's Physical Review E journal."

Slashdot Top Deals