So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.
Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.
There you are again, at the 11th hour, wrapping that present.
Off comes the price tag, ‘snip’ goes the scissors, and you peel off a piece of tape. Except that the tape, sensing your hurry, tapers down to a point and leaves with a useless, triangular piece. So you try again, once you find the point that was left on the tape roll. And once again, you find your piece of tape narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
The same *!@#$ phenomenon happens with wallpaper, too. You can’t just peel it off in a nice, even swath; no, it has to peel away from the wall in those deterministically infuriating triangles.
Well, for what it's worth, it’s not you, it’s physics.
Now, an MIT mathematician and his international team of colleagues officially christen that effect "The Wallpaper Problem.” More importantly, in the March 30 issue of Nature Materials, they try to explainwhy, using a model of the peeling problem that accurately predicts the angle of the triangle.
These cosmic associations go way back, at least back to when the Pythagoreans were whipping themselves into a perfect frenzy over the number 10. The best of the numbers, of course, are cosmic in both senses of the word (from Merriam-Webster):
(1) of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness, or the universe in contrast to the earth alone
(2) of, relating to, or concerned with abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas.
Scott Funkhouser, A visiting physics prof at The Citadel has given us another: 10^122.
The Big Bang, he says, is just one of many "bangs" in an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction between string-theoretical objects called "branes." Dark energy pulls two branes together and -- Ka-BLAMO -- they "separate and expand to form galaxies and stars."
io9: What was the most challenging aspect of making a film that involved teleportation?
Liman: We did everything for real.
Yeah, I'd imagine reconstituting the physical laws of the universe would be pretty challenging. And while staying on budget? Hell, he's Einstein and Thalberg rolled into one!
We've already talked about the reality of teleporting in our hallowed pages, but ScienCentral somehow managed to corner teleportation movie Jumper director Doug Liman and star Hayden Christensen at MIT to ask them what they really know about the scientific conceit of their latest flick. Check it:
The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travelers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.
The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).
In the film "Jumper," Hayden Christensen plays a superhero who can transport himself by wishing it so. The "I Dream of Jeannie"-like technique sounds a lot easier than Doc Brown's method of rigging up a time traveling DeLorean.
But how close is the film's teleporting to reality?
The New York Times reports on a recent panel of MIT physicists who broke down the science of teleporting. MIT's Edward Farhi said physicists have managed to teleport the quantum information of a photon for about one and a half miles, “a little less exotic than what you see in the movie.”
On Christmas Day, a tiger leapt from its enclosure before killing a 17-year-old visitor to the San Francisco Zoo. In a new paper posted on the arXiv, a couple of enterprising Boston-based investigators tackle the basic physics problem implied by the incident:
Can a tiger overcome an obstacle that is thirty-three feet away and twelve and a half feet tall?
It’s a classic two-dimensional projectile motion problem – could a tiger, running at its maximum speed and launching itself at the right angle, clear the fence surrounding the enclosure? (You’d think the problem might have been worked out a little sooner...) In the paper, the authors helpfully connect their equations to the real world, like in this quip:
We begin by first writing down the two-dimensional kinematical equations satisfied by
the projectile (tiger).
In 2006, invisibility cloaks took the world by storm, thanks to a joint effort by mathematicians, physicists and Harry Potter.
This year, however, the physicists have another surprise: you can be invisible AND silent!
Two independent teams of scientists came up the plans for a “cloak of silence,” a device which will be able to create a pocket of silence around an object by redirecting sound waves. Some physicists used to think such a device was mathematically impossible, but the two teams, one from Duke and the other from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, say their equations check out. (Image courtesy of Duke.)
The technology can be used by engineers to build better concert halls or hide submarines from sonar, but it’s unlikely that the scientists will come up with a cloak you can throw over your neighbor’s noisy dog. (And if a tree fell in the forest and everyone was wearing an acoustic cloak, would it make a noise?)
The ink is called OVI, for Optically Variable Ink -- so named because it appears to change color when viewed from different angles.
If you have a 100 dollar bill handy (and you would if you worked at 60 Second Science, where we maintain at all times a large vault full of cash that we swim in like Scrooge McDuck) you can see it on the number 100 on the bottom right side of the bill. This ink is only made for and sold to the U.S. Contrary to claims made in the original article I'm sourcing, this ink is used all over the world on all kinds of banknotes, or it was as of 2001, which is when the ink's maker, Sicpa of Switzerland, stopped delivering the ink to North Korea for fear that Kim Il-sung's government was using it to counterfeit U.S. $100 bills.
"Rechristens." Get it? This is "A" material, people.
Anyway. Just in time for the holidays, Darwin's Rottweiler, aka Richard Dawkins, has written an essay in which he tots up all the Biblical/historical inconsistencies regarding the birth of Jesus. (Was this published in the Annals of the Galactically Obvious or even Preaching to the Choir Monthly? No, just The New Statesman.)
All by way of proposing instead that we honor December 25th for its real, Brights-approved significance: being the birthday of Isaac Newton.
So, this being the last day I'm posting before the holiday break, I wanted to wish everyone "a Happy Newton Day." Hope you get everything you wished for!
I even found a science-boosting carol to go along with it (courtesy of the nerdily-awesome physics video game Portal). Listen after the jump.
The 
Cambridge University physics prof Neil Turok 
The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travelers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.
On Christmas Day, a tiger leapt from its enclosure before killing a 17-year-old visitor to the San Francisco Zoo. In a new paper posted on the arXiv, a couple of enterprising Boston-based investigators 
