physics

Stroke patient gets by with a little help from a bot

Turning to robots for speech and physical therapy may not be everyone's idea of high-quality, personalized health care. But for stroke patients -- particularly those in rural, isolated areas -- therapists can be difficult and expensive to come by, and rehabilitation can be elusive.

So a speech language pathologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is studying the interactions of stroke patients with the uBot-5, a child-size humanoid robot with arms and a computer screen through which therapists can interact with people. And for at least one stroke patient, the bot appears to be doing a stand-up job.… Read more

Physicist proposes to physicist in a physics paper

I fancy some physicists can be overly rational about love.

They analyze before, during, and after every act. They ask for feedback during and after every act.

While a French photographer might be having a post-coital cigarette and looking airily toward a window, a physicist might turn to his lover and offer: "So when your left hand touches my right shoulder, there's a 15 percent greater reaction in my nervous system than when your bottom lip touches my clavicle."

So just imagine what happens when two physicists meet, are together for seven years, and then one asks … Read more

It's time to show some love for the CD format

Pop a properly manufactured CD into a CD player, and you'll hear music in a second or two. In more than 30 years of playing CDs I've never once encountered scanning, searching, or error messages; after I press "Play," the music starts. Stick a properly manufactured DVD or Blu-ray in a working player, and you always have to wait a while to start watching the movie -- or it might not play at all. You might have to do a firmware update to play the disc. With DVDs and Blu-rays, there's no such thing as … Read more

Bazooka shoots ping-pong balls at Mach speed

The magic of physics can turn the mundane into something marvelous. Mark French, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, designed a supersonic air-powered ping-pong ball cannon that shoots the lightweight object at speeds so fast I would consider the device a lethal weapon of science.

A ping-pong ball reportedly blasts out of the special cannon at speeds equivalent to Mach 1.23 -- nearly as fast as an F-16 fighter jet. As evidenced in the video below, the high-speed ball can put a clean hole through a plywood paddle, a VHS tape, and other objects. The amount of energy delivered by the Mach-speed ping-pong ball equals the force of a baseball thrown at 125 mph or a brick falling from several stories up.… Read more

Double asteroid trouble may have wiped out dinosaurs

When asteroids attack, dinosaurs lose. Though there are still competing theories as to why we lost awesome animals like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptors, many scientists look to a long-ago asteroid impact to explain the wipeout.

A study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters adds a new wrinkle to the asteroid assumption by suggesting that the dinos may have had to contend with not one, but two deadly balls of flying space rock. Titled "Morphology and population of binary asteroid impact craters," the study was lead by Katarina Miljkovic from the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris.

If you look out into space around Earth, you'll find that about 15 percent of asteroids are binary, meaning they're traveling in pairs. However, only 2 to 4 percent of craters on Earth have been labeled as binary impacts. Miljkovic believes this number is under-reported and that many binary asteroids have been overlooked because their craters overlap.… Read more

Scientist: Hawking is 'brain in a vat'

The generally accepted form of wishing someone a happy birthday is to sing to the lucky person. Or perhaps buy him or her a gift.

A less accepted form is to compare the birthday person to Darth Vader and suggest he or she is merely a "brain in a vat."

Still, Helene Mialet, a UC Berkeley anthropologist of science, chose the path slightly less trodden.

Writing in Wired, she offered that perhaps Hawking should be referred to as Obi-Wan refers to Darth Vader: "More machine than man."

She went on to suggest that the eminent physicist'… Read more

At last! Angry Birds and CERN to create board game

I think I have found a solution for Zynga.

The company needs to get together with the United Nations peacekeeping forces around the world and create a board game in which people get killed, but not really.

How is it that I have had this quite brilliant notion?

Well, I have been stimulated by the news that Rovio, they who have enriched so many lives with Angry Birds, have got together with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, landlord for the Large Hadron Collider) to create new and amusing experiences to exercise young minds.

These will be under a … Read more

Want a Nobel? Forgo glasses, shave, wait till you're 60

When I interviewed Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka back in 2008, I had an inkling he'd win the Nobel Prize one day for his work on stem cells. I didn't pay any mind to his appearance or background.

Yamanaka shared the Nobel in physiology or medicine this week with Britain's John Gurdon for their groundbreaking work on changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any type of cell in the body.

It turns out that Yamanaka defied the odds. He was born in September, he's 50, bespectacled, and Japanese. According to a historical survey of Nobel laureates by the BBC, which goes back to 1901, those aren't favorable characteristics. … Read more

Nobel Prize in physics awarded for work in quantum optics

Two researchers received the Nobel Prize in physics today for their work in manipulating single particles of light or matter -- advancements that could help build a new type of super-fast computer based on quantum physics.

Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the United States independently developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature. The Nobel citation said such advancements, which allow researchers to directly observe individual quantum particles without destroying them, were previously thought unattainable.

"For single particles of light or matter the laws of classical physics cease to apply … Read more