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Einstein Gets Proved Right Yet Again with Relativity test.

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Time dilation is the notion that time is dependent upon your relative speed and gravity’s pull. It’s a theory that’s been tested time and time again; first with highly accurate caesium atomic clocks, then with even more accurate strontium atomic clocks, and each time Einstein still comes up correct every time.

Just recently a group of researchers from the Paris Observatory set up various strontium atomic clocks around Europe to see if their different speeds as the Earth spun affected their relative times the same in which Einstein predicted in his theory of special relativity. General relativity is often used by physicists to predict the behavior of large objects such as galaxies and stars. It’s also used in quantum mechanics to predict how particles will interact with one another. So, just to re-iterate and separate the two – special relativity relates to gravity and space while special relativity relates to gravity and space.

There’s a relativity rule that exists called the Lorentz invariance which basically says that all physical laws will be the same. This is regardless of if you’re standing still, sitting down, moving, or floating in space. The problem is light can only go one speed in a vacuum, so two people moving at different speeds would need to agree on one. It may only be a subtle difference, in time delay depending on the speed you’re moving, but it’s still there.

A recent experiment used four optical lattice clocks based on the ticking of thousands of strontium atoms which switch energy levels around 430 trillion times a second. These clocks are three times more accurate than caesium atom clocks. While two of them were located in the Paris Observatory, another was in Braunschweig, Germany, and the fourth was in Teddington, UK. Because of their positions globally, the three cities move at different speeds as the Earth spins which should mean that time flows differently for each too.

The team was able to detect which clocks were ticking at a different speed to the others by detecting any variations in their frequencies. Once they had these measurements the researchers were able to conclude that the Lorentz variation was still intact, proving Einstein right, once again.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/05L5F4GwOqM

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Germany Opens New ‘Fake Sun’ Hydrogen Producing Facility

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The world’s ‘largest official sun’ has just been exposed over in Julich, Germany in the Synlight building. Spanning an area of 45 feet by 52 feet on one wall of the building are 140 Xenon short-arc lamps. When these lamps are flicked on, and all are pointed at the same 20 x 20 cm area, they create a light so intense it more than 10,000 brighter than any solar radiation found on Earth, with a core temperature of over 3,000 degrees Celsius.

It’s been set up this way to mimic largely concentrated power plants that use a whole field of mirrors to focus sunlight on one particular area where it melts salt that’s then used to generate electricity through the steam it creates. Researchers are the German Aerospace Center, also known as DLR, think this same method can be used to extract hydrogen from water vapor. If successful, this could revolutionize the solar power industry by introducing a new cost efficient process that’s capable of supplying a constant source of a great, safe renewable energy – hydrogen.

 

The only problem now is figuring out how to do it. Although it sounds good on paper, researchers haven’t quite succeeded in making it work. So now for the team, it’s a case of lots of tinkering with the artificial light they do have to see how the best way to go about this is. It’s not the first hydrogen project to go underway. Several before it including artificial photosynthesis and biomass reactions have tried and failed, so now it’s over to the ‘fake sun’ to see what it can do.

Wath the video. URL:https://youtu.be/yMXAihLk9JM

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Mysterious Radio Signal Detected from Deep Space

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A deep space radio signal called ‘Lorimer burst’ has remained a mystery for quite some time.  It was originally discovered back in 2007 after analyzing a sky survey that was taken in 2001. The incredibly powerful radio signal flashed very bright for around five milliseconds and then disappeared. The astronomers later found that whatever was behind sending this blast of radio waves must have been around 3 billion light years away, in another galaxy.

More and more of these signals have been detected over the past few years, with one detector capturing one of these bursts once every day on average. Each of these bursts come from single events that occurred billions of light years away, but as to where the source is exactly, remains a mystery. What astronomers do know is that they must be caused by a cataclysmic astronomical event of some description, but are unable to pinpoint what exactly.

 

One theory is that it’s because of a ‘magnetar’ (a magnetic neuron star).  When a star that’s much bigger than our Sun dies, a neuron star is what remains. It tends to be around 20 kilometers or so in diameter and incredibly dense.  Some of these stars throw off beams of radiation, called pulsars, as they spin around very quickly. A magnetar, on the other hand, spins much slower and is extremely magnetic.  Professor Matthew Bailes is the director of the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Melbourne, and he says, “These are the most magnetic stars in the universe, and now and then they have very large explosions on them, which may be a good candidate for the origin of these things.”

Another fantastic thing about these bursts is that they carry so much information about the universe with them. “Every time the radio waves go past an electron, the electron’s presence gets encoded in the burst of photons. We can use this to count how many electrons there are between us and half way across the universe, which is incredibly exciting because almost all of the ordinary atoms are not in galaxies, they’re just sitting around in the intergalactic medium,” Bailes commented. Now it’s a case of putting all the information together that’s been gathered in order to help us better understand more about some of the missing matter in the universe.

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Researchers Observe Superfluid Helium Behaving Like a Black Hole.

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 Superfluid helium follows a bizarre rule of physics. The information in a system — entropy — increases with the surface area of the system not with the volume. In simulations of the superfluid, the entropy of atoms (blue) entangled with one another (green) increases with the surface area of the sphere of particles (gray).

One of the strangest laws of physics has been demonstrated by scientists this week as they show the forces at play in superfluid helium are the same as those controlling the behavior of a black hole’s event horizon. This extraordinary liquid is one that is able to flow carelessly without friction. Having been observed in both vast black holes and atomic scale helium, researchers believe it could be the key to solving one of the deepest problems in physics today – the quantum theory of gravity.

When we talk about black holes, we also have to consider their relationship to entropy. Entropy is the disorder of the Universe and how something progresses from a state of order to disorder. A simple example if entropy can be seen in that of an egg. While an untouched egg will have low entropy, a scrambled egg will have high entropy. Because of entropy time only ever moves forward. Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein discovered back in the 1970’s that when matter gets too close to the event horizon of a black hole and falls in, the entropy (in this case the information that’s added to the black hole) will only increase as fast as the black hole’s surface area increases.

Del Maestro is one of the team and physicists from the University of Vermont, and he said, “We have found the same type of law is obeyed for quantum information in superfluid helium.” To get to this conclusion the team had first to create a simulation of superfluid helium-4, which is helium that’s temperature sits just 2 degrees above absolute zero. This is when the helium begins to transform from a gas into a fluid but with no viscosity, meaning if you poured some into a cup and gave it a spin, the helium would continue to spin forever.

The individual atoms that made up superfluid helium became quantum entangled with one another, and when Maestro and his team uploaded their simulation onto two supercomputers, they found they were able to run separate simulations of 64 helium atoms as they began to transform into a superfluid. “Like a holograph, it seems that a three-dimensional volume of space is entirely encoded on its two-dimensional surface. Just like a black hole,” the team explained.

Del Maestro said in a press statement, “Entanglement is a non-classical information shared between parts of a quantum state. [It’s] the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics that is most foreign to our classical reality. Our classical theory of gravity relies on knowing exactly the shape or geometry of space-time.”

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/2Z6UJbwxBZI

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A Breakthrough for the Medical World Comes in the Form of a Tiny Robot.

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Robots are everywhere now, and the medical world is no different. There may not be complete robotic surgeons just yet, but various automated technology is making its way slowly into the operating room. A breakthrough for the medical world has come this month in the form of a tiny robot that is a world’s first. This marvelous device that replaces the need for a doctor entirely to perform certain segments of a larger surgical procedure.

Stefan Weber is a professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland’s ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research and lead author of the study, and he said, “We were on this project for more than eight years. And in contrast to a lot of research, we really stuck to one application for the entire time.”  Weber and his team designed and created a robot that was able to drill a very thin tunnel into a human skull during a cochlear implant surgery.  But, in theory there’s no reason why this device can’t be used on other types off surgeries too.

During a cochlear implant procedure, surgeons have to drill a 2.5 millimeter wide tunnel through a section of skull that’s surrounded by taste and facial nerves.  Because of the intricacy of this procedure, between 30 and 55 percent of patients actually lose some hearing during the process of getting the implant. Weber says, “Humans are operating at the limits of their skill-sets, haptically ad visually. But if it’s designed right, a robotic system can operate at any resolution – whether it’s a millimeter you need or a tenth of a millimeter.”

So after years of research and work building the robot, it looks like it’s finally paid off. The robot was first successfully used on a 51 year old patient last year and since then three more successes have followed.  Moving forward, Weber and team and now working on using a robot in a different step of the implant procedure – threading an electrode into the inner ear.

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