Official "Science News" Thread

[Dubslow]

Estimate suggests that our galaxy contains 17 billion sizzling-hot Earths

These 17 billion planets would be circling their parent stars more closely than Mercury orbits our own sun — which means that, in many cases, the planets would be too hot for liquid water to exist. A few such worlds already have been found, including a "lava planet" known as Alpha Centauri Bb that's just 4.3 light-years away from us.

Someday, the type of simulation that astronomers used to estimate the number of hot Earths can be used to estimate how many habitable Earths could provide a home for life as we know it in the Milky Way. But not just yet.

[science_man_88]

Exclusive: U.S. nuclear lab removes Chinese tech over security fears

LONDON (Reuters) - A leading U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory recently discovered its computer systems contained some Chinese-made network switches and replaced at least two components because of national security concerns, a document shows.
A letter from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, dated November 5, 2012, states that the research facility had installed devices made by H3C Technologies Co, based in Hangzhou, China, according to a copy seen by Reuters. H3C began as a joint venture between China's Huawei Technologies Co and 3Com Corp, a U.S. tech firm, and was once called Huawei-3Com. Hewlett Packard Co acquired the firm in 2010.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by science_man_88

Exclusive: U.S. nuclear lab removes Chinese tech over security fears

Hehe, this is good for "misleading titles" thread. At my level of English I understood from the title that they fired a poor tech guy because he was Chinese, or even worse, they jailed/killed him :D

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Hehe, this is good for "misleading titles" thread. At my level of English I understood from the title that they fired a poor tech guy because he was Chinese, or even worse, they jailed/killed him :D

That's what I initially thought too, then I was like "well, who cares about paranoid removal of some routers"

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Hehe, this is good for "misleading titles" thread. At my level of English I understood from the title that they fired a poor tech guy because he was Chinese, or even worse, they jailed/killed him :D

tech also means technology.

[Dubslow]

This is old news and an old paper, but I've only found it today and it's the first time I've seen the real motivation for the "warp drive" interferometer proof-of-concept experiment. (It also helps that I've just completed an intro to diff-geo course and so now understand quite a bit more of the basics of GR.)

http://earthtech.org/publications/da...nference_2.pdf

As the Alcubierre LIF [locally inertial frame] (ALIF) warp sphere takes on a large spacetime expansion boost and starts to move off-brane as suggested by equation (7), the photons emitted from it will not be able to intersect the coordinate observer (lab) frame because the photons were emitted off-brane from the ALIF. This is the reverse scenario we discussed earlier where photons on the brane were not able to interact with an electron off of the brane. Unless something acts on the off-brane photons to reduce their boost, they will not be detected by the on-brane coordinate observer. Hence, an Earthbound coordinate observer will most likely see a dimming effect when viewing the ALIF as its spacetime expansion boost increases. Similarly, the ALIF will see his/her surrounding universe grow dimmer and dimmer as photons emitted on-brane cannot reach the now off-brane ALIF.

It is this inability to electromagnetically interact that we want to made note of the fact that a positive energy density was commensurate with a negative pressure for the warp sphere. Equation (7) suggests that all matter within that sphere cannot electromagnetically communicate with matter here on the brane. However, we can still detect its pressure and energy density effects. These are characteristics familiar to another form of energy in the cosmos, called “dark energy.” Dark energy can be mathematically modeled the same way that we have just described above.

Therefore, we have sketched a theoretic made to adopt similar characteristics to dark energy including its inability to electromagnetically interact. It is interesting that this line of thought has its roots in cosmological inflation. In this process, we noted indirectly that a toroidal positive energy density could yield a spherical negative pressure region.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by science_man_88

Strong quake shakes West Coast, reignites fears of the 'big one'

When there are NOT occasional quakes near known fault lines is when people should get scared....

[science_man_88]

Astronomers Discover a Planet Almost Identical to Earth

Just over a week after astronomers boldly announced that they would discover an Earth twin elsewhere in the universe within the year, NASA's Kepler telescop spotted a pretty good candidate. Unglamorously named KOI 172.02 -- KOI stands for Kepler Object of Interest -- this planet is the most Earth-like planet astronomers have discovered yet.

The differences are slight. It's roughly 50 percent larger than Earth and orbits a star that closely resembles our own sun at a distance that would make the surface of the planet habitable. (The size makes it a "super Earth" rather than an "Earth twin.") With an 242-day long year, it's slightly closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun but otherwise enjoys all of the same ideal conditions as we do, as far as astronomers can tell.

[Batalov]

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...onest-Methods/

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by Batalov

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...onest-Methods/

I love this, thanks! Scientific studies are still generally carried out by human beings, and it's nice to have a bit of confirmation that this is so.

[Spherical Cow]

Originally Posted by Batalov

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...onest-Methods/

Great article- Thanks for posting that. It reminded me of an overly-honest statement I had in a publication:

"This plot is included to show the variations within the four quadrants, and as partial justification for a recent plotting software purchase."

Admittedly, the publication is the only one I've had in that journal, but it is also the one of which I am most proud in my career:

"Serendipitous Discovery of a Macroscopic Manifestation of Quantum 'Entanglement' in Office Beverages" in 1998 in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Norm