131 posts · 157,112 views
A blog that explores the unknown, technology, space, science and strange things with a skeptical and analytical eye.
Greg Fish
131 posts
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- May 16, 2012
- 05:05 PM
- 71 views
why we’d want to make some more antimatter
by Greg Fish in weird things
Maybe the investors behind Planetary Resources should consider creating antimatter instead of building fuel depots on asteroids they want to mine since all they'd need to do to guarantee unimaginable profits is just a single gram of the stuff. Granted, the collider they'd have to build to smash ions until they decay into positrons and [...]... Read more »
Ronan Keane, & Wei-Ming Zhang. (2012) Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization. n/a. arXiv: 1205.2281v1
- April 27, 2012
- 08:00 PM
- 120 views
oh quantum causality, we hardly knew ye…
by Greg Fish in weird things
Here's what sounds like a rather typical experiment with quantum mechanics. A pair of devices we'll call Alice and Bob, or A and B in cryptographic parlance, measure entangled photons which we know can be entangled at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. A third device called Victor, or an intermediary in [...]... Read more »
Ma, X., Zotter, S., Kofler, J., Ursin, R., Jennewein, T., Brukner, �., & Zeilinger, A. (2012) Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping. Nature Physics. DOI: 10.1038/nphys2294
- April 4, 2012
- 05:05 PM
- 162 views
how to make random machines do your bidding
by Greg Fish in weird things
Long time readers probably noticed that the last month was a little off. Posts weren't coming as per the blog's natural rhythm and the annual April Fools gag was also absent. But there was a good reason for this, one I'd be happy to share with you if it wasn't for the fact that you [...]... Read more »
Greg Fish. (2012) Managing contextual artificial neural networks with a service-based mediator. n/a. arXiv: 1204.0262v1
- March 29, 2012
- 05:05 PM
- 191 views
how do we find relativistic alien rockets?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Say that somewhere out there is a species of space-faring aliens which have relativistic rockets or warp drive technology that lets it travel between solar systems. Considering the sheer size of the universe, it's probably a good bet that at least one exists. And as these aliens are tooling around, their spacecraft will likely leave [...]... Read more »
Garcia-Escartin, J.C., & Chamorro-Posada, P. (2012) Scouting the spectrum for interstellar travellers. n/a. arXiv: 1203.3980v1
- March 20, 2012
- 04:35 PM
- 224 views
why human morality is a tricky calculus…
by Greg Fish in weird things
We've already seen the scope-severity paradox, the tendency of humans to lose track of the heinousness of a crime when the numbers of those affected by it are high enough, which explains why millions are outraged when a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain shoots and kills a harmless teenager in his zeal, while a continuing genocide [...]... Read more »
Cushman, F., Gray, K., Gaffey, A., & Mendes, W. (2012) Simulating murder: The aversion to harmful action. Emotion, 12(1), 2-7. DOI: 10.1037/a0025071
- March 16, 2012
- 05:24 PM
- 220 views
are neutrino beams the wi-fi of the future?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Say you need to communicate not just with someone or something far away, but someone or something very, very deep underground, or underwater, or on the other side of a planet. You could create satellite relays which will bounce the signal around to get to your target wherever it is in space, but that requires [...]... Read more »
D. D. Stancil, P. Adamson, M. Alania, L. Aliaga, M. Andrews, C. Araujo Del Castillo, L. Bagby, J. L. Bazo Alba, A. Bodek, D. Boehnlein.... (2012) Demonstration of Communication using Neutrinos. Phys Let A. arXiv: 1203.2847v1
- March 3, 2012
- 09:40 AM
- 269 views
do warp drives emit tachyon shockwaves?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Speaking of space-based weapons, here’s an interesting one for you. Once upon a time, when writing about warp drive physics, I asked whether the creation of a warp bubble by a superluminal ship could have some very nasty effects on any nearby planets due to the energy involved, and had my fears validated by a [...]... Read more »
Brendan McMonigal, Geraint F. Lewis, & Philip O'Byrne. (2012) The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter. Physical Review D. arXiv: 1202.5708v1
- February 5, 2012
- 01:35 PM
- 320 views
why aliens might not need a stabilizing moon
by Greg Fish in weird things
Quite a bit of scientific literature on astrobiology is filled with references to very exacting criteria for exoplanets capable of sustaining alien ecosystems. They have to be just the right distance from their suns, have the right kind of atmosphere, fall in the right temperature range, and hopefully, have a large stabilizing moon to counter [...]... Read more »
Lissauer, J., Barnes, J., & Chambers, J. (2012) Obliquity variations of a moonless Earth. Icarus, 217(1), 77-87. DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.013
- January 25, 2012
- 04:55 PM
- 418 views
do decaying neutrons travel between universes?
by Greg Fish in weird things
According to string theorists, our universe is just one of many in an otherwise infinite cosmos and that all the different universes don't just sit quietly in a vacuum, but actively interact with each other when space and time bend and fold to create the right conditions for different forces and particles to jump between [...]... Read more »
Michael Sarrazin, Guillaume Pignol, Fabrice Petit, & Valery V. Nesvizhevsky. (2012) Experimental limits on neutron disappearance into another braneworld. n/a. arXiv: 1201.3949v1
- January 19, 2012
- 07:00 PM
- 389 views
performing an evolutionary feat in sixty days
by Greg Fish in weird things
One of the big predictions made by evolutionary theory is that if given the selective pressure to do so, colonies of unicellular organisms will combine into multicellular organisms and start forming divisions of labor. Going from single cell, to cooperative colony, to a macroscopic organism with differentiated cells had to happen over several billions years [...]... Read more »
Ratcliff, W., Denison, R., Borrello, M., & Travisano, M. (2012) Experimental evolution of multicellularity. PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115323109
- January 15, 2012
- 12:40 PM
- 416 views
can we explore space with unmanned drones?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Drone patrols are nothing new. By now, they're fairly humdrum stuff come to think of it. But what about a drone patrol on an alien world, one that could potentially last for decades and bring us a constant stream of data on everything we wanted to know about the world in question? Well, that's the [...]... Read more »
Barnes, J., Lemke, L., Foch, R., McKay, C., Beyer, R., Radebaugh, J., Atkinson, D., Lorenz, R., Le Mouélic, S., Rodriguez, S.... (2011) AVIATR — Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance. Experimental Astronomy. DOI: 10.1007/s10686-011-9275-9
- January 14, 2012
- 12:35 PM
- 444 views
to boost data density, chill and apply magnetism
by Greg Fish in weird things
Chances are, your computer's current hard drive can store around 500 GB, and if you're a real video editing or graphics enthusiast, you either bought yourself, or customized your computer to have a 1 TB drive. But what if in the same space that your hard drive takes up now, you could host a multi-PB [...]... Read more »
Loth, S., Baumann, S., Lutz, C., Eigler, D., & Heinrich, A. (2012) Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets. Science, 335(6065), 196-199. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214131
- January 13, 2012
- 10:45 AM
- 440 views
counting exoplanets by their gravitational wells
by Greg Fish in weird things
Depending on who you talk to, planets around alien suns are either somewhat rare due to the chaotic nature of planetary formation around infant stars, or even more plentiful than the stars themselves. Since exoplanets are rather small and dim, lost in the glare of their host suns, spotting them takes a lot of time [...]... Read more »
Cassan, A., Kubas, D., Beaulieu, J., Dominik, M., Horne, K., Greenhill, J., Wambsganss, J., Menzies, J., Williams, A., Jørgensen, U.... (2012) One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations. Nature, 481(7380), 167-169. DOI: 10.1038/nature10684
- December 17, 2011
- 10:58 AM
- 489 views
why martian microbes won’t outnumber earth’s
by Greg Fish in weird things
A recently trumpeted paper on astrobiology did some very interesting modeling in a search for places on Mars where some very tough terrestrial microorganisms could survive and came to a very surprising conclusion. It appears that some 3.2% of the red planet could be habitable by volume, which would make it more friendly to life [...]... Read more »
Jones, E., Lineweaver, C., & Clarke, J. (2011) An Extensive Phase Space for the Potential Martian Biosphere. Astrobiology, 2147483647. DOI: 10.1089/ast.2011.0660
- December 14, 2011
- 06:00 PM
- 1,369 views
the dark monsters who will inherit our universe
by Greg Fish in weird things
Bizarre things are lurking out there in our universe. Titanic beasts born as space and time shatter under more than enough energy to be felt across thousands of light years, beasts with the power to devour stars whole as they whip the very fabric of reality around their gaping maws like their plaything and dictate [...]... Read more »
McConnell, N., Ma, C., Gebhardt, K., Wright, S., Murphy, J., Lauer, T., Graham, J., & Richstone, D. (2011) Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies. Nature, 480(7376), 215-218. DOI: 10.1038/nature10636
- December 13, 2011
- 04:05 PM
- 1,430 views
eliminating dark matter with an intuitive culprit
by Greg Fish in weird things
Few things are as reviled on popular science and physics comment sections as dark matter and dark energy because aside from indirect observations, we’ve never actually detected either. We can see that something is pushing galaxies apart from each other while another invisible force holds these galaxies together, but there have been many attempts to do away with both in a theoretical sense. [...]... Read more »
Carati A. (2011) Gravitational effects of the faraway matter on the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. n/a. arXiv: 1111.5793v1
- December 4, 2011
- 07:31 AM
- 483 views
why computers can’t predict revolutions
by Greg Fish in weird things
Back in September, news worldwide reported the results of a paper which claimed that a supercomputer had a knack for predicting revolutions and key global events, able to pick up on the events of Tahir square in Cairo and even get a fix on Osama bin Laden’s location. After reviewing the paper in question, I [...]... Read more »
Leetaru, K. (2011) Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space. First Monday, 16(9). info:/
- December 1, 2011
- 07:07 AM
- 447 views
so what’s the fine for breaking relativity?
by Greg Fish in weird things
Since the science world is abuzz with news of experiments detecting neutrinos making a 732 kilometer trip in record time, 60 nanoseconds ahead of light itself, I have two questions. First is how big of a speeding ticket to give the neutrinos in question, and second is whether these neutrinos could now go back in [...]... Read more »
Cohen, A., & Glashow, S. (2011) Pair Creation Constrains Superluminal Neutrino Propagation. Physical Review Letters, 107(18). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.181803
- May 18, 2011
- 09:24 AM
- 993 views
gliese 581d gets the nod for habitability
by Greg Fish in weird things
At the rate we’re going, it seems that the first target for one of our future interstellar spacecraft will just have to be the Gliese 581 system. Beyond the initial hype generated by the announcement of planet 581g and a very deflating set of calculations showing that it may have just been a mirage, there [...]... Read more »
Wordsworth, R., Forget, F., Selsis, F., Millour, E., Charnay, B., & Madeleine, J. (2011) Gliese 581d is the first discovered terrestrial-mass exoplanet in the habitable zone. The Astrophysical Journal, 733(2). DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/733/2/L48
- May 16, 2011
- 09:15 AM
- 941 views
cyclical cosmology debate keeps on cycling…
by Greg Fish in weird things
Since we last discussed the universe according to Roger Penrose, I thought the physics community wasn’t going to dedicate more time to the theory of cyclical cosmology, but apparently, I was wrong. It seems that the theory still lives and is being debated by scientists trying to figure out whether the concentric circles that could [...]... Read more »
Moss, A., Scott, D., & Zibin, J. (2011) No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2011(04), 33-33. DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2011/04/033
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