Pretty much the perfect picture:

via Laughing Squid

If you’ll remember from our studies of String Theory and gravitons, I made the statement that I’m not a big fan of including gravity as a fundamental force of nature.

The New York Times has an in-depth piece that explains this more…

A Scientist Takes On Gravity – NYTimes.com: “So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled ‘On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,’ that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.”

You gotta love science!

Fascinating…

The Incredible Shrinking Proton That Could Rattle the Physics World | 80beats | Discover Magazine: “But the big story this week in Nature is that we might have been wrong all along in estimating something very basic about the humble proton: its size.

A team from the Paul-Scherrer Institute in Switzerland that’s been tackling this for a decade says its arduous measurements of the proton show it is 4 percent smaller than the previous best estimate. For something as simple as the size of a proton, one of the basic measurements upon with the standard model of particle physics is built, 4 percent is a vast expanse that could shake up quantum electrodynamics if it’s true.”

Of course this has major ramifications for how we view the current model of the nucleus, atom and the quantum world.

As we continue to learn more and more about the quantum world (using the LHC and other particle accelerators), we’ll continue to run into problems like this… which is why we need you all to hurry up and become scientists.

Very very cool…

Astronomers see exoplanet orbiting its parent star! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: “This is extremely cool news: astronomers have, for the first time, directly seen an exoplanet orbiting its star from one side to the other!”

Once we perfect the ability to discern the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system, it is going to get very interesting.

It makes sense that a black hole should be able to spin however it wants, but that’s not necessarily the case… until now (perhaps):

Are Backward Black Holes the Key to Galaxies’ Biggest Blasts? – ScienceNOW: “If you’re planning to be a star, steer clear of supermassive black holes that spin in the opposite direction from their surrounding galaxies. Astrophysicists now think that, for reasons predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, such black holes tend to create unusually energetic jets of particles—powerful enough to interfere with the star-making process not only within the galaxy but also across intergalactic space. The findings, if confirmed, would solve a longstanding mystery about why some galaxies produce much bigger—and therefore more energetic—particle jets than others do.”

Fascinating.

You all are so fortunate to be living in such a wonderful moment of discoveries!

The mystery deepens… neutrinos can shift from muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos (or change form)…

Slashdot Science Story | Chameleon-Like Behavior of Neutrino Confirmed: “While closing a chapter on understanding the nature of neutrinos, the observation of neutrino oscillations is strong evidence for new physics. The Standard Model of fundamental particles posits no mass for the neutrino. For them to be able to oscillate, however, they must have mass.”

We’re depending on you all to help us figure this out!

Just to let you in on a little secret, here’s why I think grades are overrated in education…

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution | Magazine: “Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in ‘if you do this, then you’ll get that’—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.”

I’d much rather have interested students than students I pound over the head for every grade percentage point.

Remember, science never stops improving itself.

Here’s a great example of new findings improving on the data and info first provided by Einstein’s investigations into Brownian Motion…

Brownian motion moves beyond Einstein’s equations: “There are nuances to particle movement and energy at tiny scales that one of Einstein’s equations did not capture, according to a paper published in Science this week. Researchers were able to measure the instantaneous velocity of a tiny glass bead undergoing Brownian motion, or making tiny random movements, and found that the particle was not always governed by the forces that Einstein predicted. Knowing how Brownian motion works at these short intervals may allow researchers to study these tiny particle systems for quantum effects”

Gotta love science!

Amazing.

Reflect on this next year as you enter into your studies of biology!

What are the ethical implications?

We touched on this when discussing photons in the last quarter of the year…

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km: “Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.”

Fascinating!