New York Times: Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?. “The Theory of Everything is still not in sight, but with computers taking over many of the chores in life — translating languages, recognizing faces, driving cars, recommending whom to date — it is not so crazy to imagine them taking over from the […]
EurekAlert: Drawing the line to answer art’s big questions. “Algorithms have shown that the compositional structure of Western landscape paintings changed ‘suspiciously’ smoothly between 1500 and 2000 AD, potentially indicating a selection bias by art curators or in art historical literature, physicists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and colleagues report […]
ArXiv Blog: arXiv staff to participate in the #strike4blacklives. “The arXiv staff is deeply saddened and angered by the recent killings of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. We recognize that Black people live with the injustices of systemic racism every day — and have for centuries […]
Neowin: Neural networks are now being used to track exotic particles at CERN. “Research within the domain of physics has profited from the rise of artificial neural networks and deep learning. In the past, we’ve seen them being applied to study dark matter and massive galaxies. Continuing this pattern, we now have artificial neural networks […]
University of Notre Dame: Quantum Interest. “Published in Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s, Epistemological Letters was a critical venue for work that was viewed as marginal by mainstream physicists of the era — work that would later contribute to important developments in areas such as quantum computing, quantum encryption and quantum teleportation. Think a […]
University of Arkansas: Textbooks by University of Arkansas Faculty Added to Open Textbook Library. “Three openly licensed textbooks written by University of Arkansas faculty are now available in the Open Textbook Library.” The new textbooks cover physics, astronomy, and technical writing.
ScienceBlog: Using Soundwaves To Search Through Big Data With More Stability And Ease. “In a paper published in Nature Research’s journal, Communications Physics, researchers in the University of Arizona Department of Materials Science and Engineering have demonstrated the possibility for acoustic waves in a classical environment to do the work of quantum information processing without […]
Ars Technica: Physicists discover hidden text in what was thought to be blank Egyptian papyri. “A team of German scientists has used a combination of cutting-edge physics techniques to virtually ‘unfold’ an ancient Egyptian papyrus, part of an extensive collection housed in the Berlin Egyptian Museum. Their analysis revealed that a seemingly blank patch on […]
ScienceBlog: Seeking New Physics, Scientists Borrow From Social Networks. “…MIT physicists have found a way to automate the search for strange and potentially new physics, with a technique that determines the degree of similarity between pairs of collision events. In this way, they can estimate the relationships among hundreds of thousands of collisions in a […]
Carnegie Mellon University: New App Aims to Teach Special Relativity Hands-On. “Many people have at least heard of Albert Einstein’s famous theory of special relativity, or its key formula E=mc2. Understanding that theory and how it affects the complex relationship between space and time in the universe is another matter entirely. Carnegie Mellon University Professor […]
Physics Today: Commentary: Celebrating and supporting African American women in physics. “African American Women in Physics (AAWIP) was founded to honor those pioneering women, to inspire future physicists, and to connect with allies interested in promoting diversity in physics and other STEM fields. By maintaining a list of all of the African American women with […]
Princeton University: Good news for future tech: Exotic ‘topological’ materials are surprisingly common. “In a major step forward for an area of research that earned the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, an international team has found that substances with exotic electronic behaviors called topological materials are in fact quite common, and include everyday elements such […]
PLOS One Blog: Peer-reviewed physics for Wikipedia: PLOS ONE Topic Pages. “Despite Wikipedia’s importance as a resource for both practicing physicists and the wider community, it is rare for professional physicists to contribute, in part because there are few, if any, professional incentives to do so. We’re all in agreement that researchers should receive proper […]
Engadget: Stephen Hawking’s last paper on black holes is now online. “Stephen Hawking never stopped trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes — in fact, he was still working to solve one of them shortly before his death. Now, his last research paper on the subject is finally available online through pre-publication website ArXiV, […]