Science Daily May 28, 2019 The equations used to describe the large variety of phenomena occurring in fluid flows are well known. But when turbulence comes into play, the solutions to the equations become non-linear, complex and chaotic. This makes it impossible, for example, to predict weather over an extended time horizon. Yet turbulence has a surprising tendency to move from chaos to a highly structured pattern of turbulent and laminar bands. Until now, researchers didn’t have powerful enough mathematical tools to verify this. Researchers in Switzerland combined dynamical systems theory, with existing theories on pattern formation in fluids and […]
Category Archives: Science without borders
12 irreplaceable innovations made possible by NSF
NSF May 22, 2019 Before the internet was commercialized, before your phone was smart, before there was a picture of a black hole, there was an NSF–funded researcher pursuing their curiosity. NSF funded research has laid the foundation for many of the groundbreaking discoveries and game–changing technologies we know today. Here are 12 innovations and discoveries made possible through NSF support…read more.
Glassy menagerie of particles in beach sands near Hiroshima is fallout debris, study concludes
Science Daily May 13, 2019 An international team of researchers (Malaysia, France, USA – UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) recovered complex association of millimeter-sized, aerodynamically-shaped debris, including glass spherules, glass filaments, and composite-fused melt particles was from beach sands on the shores of the Motoujina Peninsula in Hiroshima Bay, Japan. These paticles are generally produced by single high-energy catastrophic events, such as an extraterrestrial body impacting Earth or a nuclear explosion. This study interprets the large volumes of fallout debris generated under extreme temperature conditions as products of the Hiroshima August 6th, 1945 atomic bomb aerial detonation. The […]
NIST publishes final green paper on ‘Unleashing American Innovation’
Fedscoop April 24, 2019 The document, “Unleashing American Innovation” details options for enhancing how federally funded inventions move from the laboratory to the marketplace. The options include streamlining federal regulations, encouraging public-private partnerships, engaging with private-sector investors, building a more entrepreneurial workforce and more. The paper does not prescribe policy, but it does offer suggestions for how future policy might be crafted. According to the paper the government invests about $150 billion annually across 300 federal laboratories as well as U.S. universities and private sector R&D institutions. The Lab-to-Market CAP goal aims to get more of the innovations created out […]
5 Times People Thought a Science Idea Was Crackpot, And Were Proven Spectacularly Wrong
Science Alert February 12, 2019 Robert H. Goddard said “every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realised, it becomes commonplace.” Science has the power to change the world, but it’s not always an easy path to enlightenment. At many junctures throughout history, proponents of revolutionary ideas have come up against criticism and pushback from the establishment. Science is all about experimentation, trial, error, and evidence. It may have taken years, but each of the following five ideas, once considered preposterous or silly, has now been accepted as correct: Continental drift ; Evolution ; Heliocentricity ; […]
The future of work still requires people—so stop investing in them at your own peril
MIT Technology Report January 4, 2019 The World Development Report 2019 says advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss, meaning overall numbers haven’t changed. Jobs are relocating, not disappearing. According to the report in countries with the lowest human capital investments today, our analysis suggests that the workforce of the future will only be one-third to one-half as productive as it could be if people enjoyed full health and received a high-quality education…read more.
Best of Last Year—The top Phys.org articles of 2018
Phys.org December 21, 2018 It was another great year for science, and physics was front and center. Here is a selection of great advances and discoveries reported by Phy.org in 2018… read more.
The land that failed to fail: How China caught up with the West
The Star November 21, 2018 China’s communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail. China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other…read more.
Infinite-dimensional symmetry opens up possibility of a new physics—and new particles
Phys.org November 16, 2018 For a half-century, physicists have been trying to construct a theory that unites all four fundamental forces of nature, describes the known elementary particles and predicts the existence of new ones. An international team of researchers (Germany, Poland) posit that the symmetries that govern the world of elementary particles at the most elementary level could be radically different from what has so far been thought and that it unifies all the forces of nature in a way that is consistent with existing observations and anticipates the existence of new particles with unusual properties that may even […]
Nobel prizes for 2018
Nobelprize.org October 4, 2018 Physics Chemistry Medicine