GriffinScience

Wow… Aaron O’Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object | Video on TED.com: “Physicists are used to the idea that subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics, completely different to human-scale objects. In a breakthrough experiment, Aaron O’Connell has blurred that distinction by creating an object that is visible to [...]

From New Scientist… WHAT shape is an electron? The standard model of particle physics predicts that electrons are egg-shaped, but that the amount of distortion from a perfect sphere is so tiny that no existing experiment could possibly detect it. However, a rival theory called supersymmetry predicts that this egg-shaped distortion should be large enough [...]

Fascinating… Heaviest Particle of Antimatter Found | Big Bang & Antihelium | LiveScience: “At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – a particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — the nuclei of gold atoms collide, head-on, at near the speed of light. This simulates the conditions just after the Big [...]

We’ll start with #1 in a couple of weeks when we pick back up with classes… AAAS – AAAS News Release – “SCIENCE: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade”: “Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics. Back in March, however, a group of researchers [...]

Fusion is a fascinating process that occurs all the time. The problem is that stars are very good at producing fusion reactions. Here on earth, however, we aren’t as good at making these reactions. Why would we want to create fusion reactions? Simple: limitless (and virtually free) energy. The Promise of Fusion: Energy Miracle or [...]

Here are the goals for the four main areas we’re covering in our opening unit o’ studies. By the end of the unit, you should be able to confidently have a grasp on the following tasks… History Describe how atomic theory has changed from Ancient Greece to the 21st century by highlighting some of the [...]

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 [...]

Yikes! YouTube – Neil DeGrasse Tyson – Death By Black Hole

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 [...]

Thanks to Evan for the link (make sure to watch the Carl Sagan video from Cosmos below)… Cosmonaut Sergi Avdeyev: By the time his stint in space was over, he had experienced 0.2 seconds less than the rest of the world did. This made him 0.2 seconds younger than he would have been if he [...]