In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality — a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based not on the textbook laws of classical physics, but on the less-tangible probabilities of quantum mechanics.
By Jennifer Chu
21 Feb 2014
Black widow spiders and their Australian cousins, known as redbacks, are notorious for their tainted love, expressed as an unsettling tendency to kill and devour their male partners. Astronomers have noted similar behavior among two rare breeds of binary system that contain rapidly spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars.
Vladimir Touraev, a Russian high school math teacher in the mid-1970s who 30 years later would become the first named professor in the Indiana University Department of Mathematics, has been awarded over $2.7 million to establish a new mathematics laboratory in Russia.
Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Astronomers for the first time have peered into the heart of an exploding star in the final minutes of its existence.
Messier 7, also known as NGC 6475, is a brilliant cluster of about 100 stars located some 800 light-years from Earth. In this new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope it stands out against a very rich background of hundreds of thousands of fainter stars, in the direction of the centre of the Milky Way.
Quantum Materials Corporation and Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) today announce Quantum Materials optioning Thick-Shell 'Giant' Quantum Dot patented technology with the potential of 10 to 100-fold improvement in solid-state brightness over conventional nanocrystal quantum dots (QD). High brightness leads to efficient use of materials and increased performance in electronic displays and solid state (LED) lighting.
A paper published in EPJ H provides the first English translation and an analysis of one of Albert Einstein's little-known papers, "On the cosmological problem of the general theory of relativity." Published in 1931, it features a forgotten model of the universe, while refuting Einstein's own earlier static model of 1917.
Computers do not necessarily have to perform error-free calculations in order to provide perfect results – they only need to correct their errors in a reliable way. And this will become even more important in the future, when it is hoped that quantum computers will solve some tasks several times faster than conventional PCs with computing processes that are very efficient but also prone to disturbances.
Astronomers see huge clouds of gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Once thought to be a relatively uniform, fog-like ring, the accreting matter instead forms clumps dense enough to intermittently dim the intense radiation blazing forth as these enormous objects condense and consume matter, they report in a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, available online now.
A new and powerful satellite has given researchers a way to see into the dark interiors of supernovae. Their observations of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A shed more light on the mechanics of these explosions.
Scientists using CSIRO's Parkes telescope and another telescope in South Africa have found evidence that a tiny star called PSR J0738-4042 is being pounded by asteroids — large lumps of rock from space.
Picture a single cloud large enough to span the solar system from the sun to beyond Pluto's orbit. Now imagine many such clouds orbiting in a vast ring at the heart of a distant galaxy, occasionally dimming the X-ray light produced by the galaxy's monster black hole.
For the first time, an international team of astrophysicists, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have unraveled how stars blow up in supernova explosions.
Biophotonic Solutions Inc. (BSI), the world leader in automated laser pulse compression, announces that its "MIIPS" laser pulse characterization, shaping, and compression technology was used in an advanced laser microscopy setup created by researchers at ICFO -- the Institute of Photonic Sciences -- in Barcelona, Spain, to study photosynthesis at the level of single molecules.