This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Tenacity, audacity, intuition, patience, a lot of talent and a little luck are healthy qualities for a young scientist. Jun Yao has them all. 

The fifth-year graduate student at Rice University believed so strongly in his discovery two years ago that he went to the mat for it. 

What Yao found could be a game-changer in the budding field of nanoelectronics. While working on a project to create memory devices based on graphite, he discovered that he could form nanocrystalline pathways in silicon oxide, an insulator that was underlying the graphite, simply by applying voltage. Smaller pulses of about 8 and 3.5 volts would repeatedly break and reconnect the pathway. Better yet, the technique became the basis for a two-terminal resistive memory bit about 5 nanometers wide. 

via Electronics Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Memory Chips | LiveScience.

Humankind has seen the Stone Age, the Golden Age, and the Iron Age. Some would argue the 20th century should be called the Silicon Age. Based on the events of its first 10 years, the 21st century may very well become known as the Carbon Age.

via The Carbon Age: Dark element, brighter future | Green Tech – CNET News.

Since December, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been smashing particles together at record-setting energy levels. Physicists hope that those high-energy collisions could replicate the conditions seen immediately after the Big Bang, shedding light on how our universe came to be. Now, data from collisions that took place in July suggests that the LHC may have have taken a step toward that goal.

via A step closer to Big Bang conditions? More study is needed to confirm the latest LHC findings.

A new kind of probe microscope can measure the force needed to push a single atom.

via Technology Review: Feeling the Force.

A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved fishbowls. The sponsors of the measure explained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl because the curved sides give the fish a distorted view of reality. Aside from the measure’s significance to the poor goldfish, the story raises an interesting philosophical question: How do we know that the reality we perceive is true?

via The Elusive Theory of Everything: Scientific American.

You might expect black holes to be, well, black, but several decades ago Stephen Hawking calculated that they should emit light. Now, for the first time, physicists led by Francesco Belgiorno of the University of Milan, Italy, claim that they have observed this weird glow in the lab.

via Hawking radiation glimpsed in artificial black hole – physics-math – 28 September 2010 – New Scientist.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2010) — Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, "No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die," as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path.

via Quantum computing closer than ever: Scientists using lasers to cool and control molecules.

In an effort to uncover some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, an international team of researchers has developed the largest space-based particle physics detector. Known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), it will study the universe and its origins by searching for dark matter and antimatter and measuring the composition of cosmic rays with greater precision than any previous device.

via Technology Review: Big Bang Detector Heads to Space.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2010) — For scientists, supernovae are true superstars — massive explosions of huge, dying stars that shine light on the shape and fate of the universe.

via 3-D computer simulations help envision supernovae explosions.

A great list of books on the topic. Hasn’t been updated in a year but still a pretty good resource:

http://www.nanotech-now.com/transhuman-books.htm

Another interesting list:
http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/transhumanism

And another:
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/book_index.html

Hey look…another:
http://transhumanistwiki.com/wiki/Category:Transhumanist_books

This is why science uses Inductive Logic where everything is a probability…it’s not possible to know everything for sure. We leave that up to the religious. Science loves to be ‘proven wrong’ because it only increases our understanding of the Universe. And I don’t mean that in a ‘Universe out there’ kind of way…we ARE the Universe peering out (or in?) at itself!

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen atoms. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

Why alpha takes on the precise value it does, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia presents evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to scrutiny they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it. more>>>

The “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book…

Click here for the complete article found on the Reuters website.

The new book is titled The Grand Design and is co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow.

Share

Scientists in Europe say they have likely solved the case of the missing neutrinos, one of the enduring mysteries in the subatomic universe of particle physics.

If confirmed in subsequent experiments, the findings challenge core precepts of the so-called Standard Model of physics, and could have major implications for our understanding of matter in the universe, the researchers say.

For decades physicists had observed that fewer neutrinos – electrically neutral particles that travel close to the speed of light – arrived at Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted.

That meant one of two things: either the models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos along the way.

At least one variety called a muon-neutrino was actually seen to disappear, lending credence to a Nobel-winning 1969 hypothesis that the miniscule particles were shape-shifting into a new and unseen form.

Now scientists at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics have for the first time observed – with 98% certainty – what they change into during a process called neutrino oscillation: another type of particle known as tau.

“This will be the long-awaited proof of this process. It was a missing piece of the puzzle,” says Professor Antonio Ereditato, a researcher at the Institute and spokesman for the OPERA group that carried out the study.

“If true, it means that new physics will be required to explain this fact,” he says. more>>>

The velocity of a microscopic bead has been measured for the first time, contradicting a century-old claim by Albert Einstein. The same technology used to make the measurement may eventually be used to force such beads to exhibit quantum mechanical behaviour that is normally seen in subatomic objects.

Microscopic particles in liquid or gas undergo Brownian motion – jittery, random movements that are the result of countless collisions with neighbouring molecules.

Albert Einstein studied this motion, and in 1907, he predicted that a microscopic particle’s kinetic energy – and thus the square of its velocity – should be proportional to the temperature of its surroundings.

But directly testing this idea, which is called the equipartition theorem, is difficult to do for Brownian particles. That’s because the many collisions experienced by the particle cause it to change speed and direction extremely quickly. more>>>

This is a guided tour down to the CERN LHC ATLAS in Geneva Switzerland, filmed around the 7th of February, 2007