Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

From a laptop warming a knee to a supercomputer heating a room, the idea that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone. But theoretical physicists have discovered something astonishing: not only do computational processes sometimes generate no heat, under certain conditions they can even have a cooling effect

It seems perfectly natural to expect that two motorists who depart from the same location and follow the same directions will end up at the same destination. But according to a Johns Hopkins University mathematical physicist, this is not true when the "directions" are provided by a turbulent fluid flow, such as you find in a churning river or stream. Verifying earlier theoretical predictions, Gregory Eyink's computer experiments reveal that, in principle, two identical small beads dropped into the same turbulent flow at precisely the same starting location will end up at different – and entirely random – destinations.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Last week, Burnaby, British Columbia-based company D-Wave Systems, Inc., announced that it sold its first commercial quantum computer. Global security company Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland, bought the quantum computer for a rumored $10 million, which includes maintenance and other services for several years.

For thousands of years, craftsmen have applied gilding, a thin layer of gold, to objects to enhance their value. Now, researchers at DOE's Jefferson Lab are using this same idea to enhance materials for accelerator science.

An international research team has successfully developed a widely applicable method for discovering the physical foundations of complex fluids for the first time. Researchers at the University of Vienna and University of Rome have developed a microscopic theory that describes the interactions between the various components of a complex polymer mixture. This approach has now been experimentally proven by physicists from Julich, who conducted neutron scattering experiments in Grenoble

(PhysOrg.com) -- Over the weekend, at a physics conference in France, Fermilab CDF collaboration member, Giovanni Punzi, gave a presentation where he showed some slides that appeared to back up the rumors that cropped up a month ago on the Internet, suggesting the team had found some evidence that might hint at the existence of a previously unknown particle; which would of course refer to the infamous Higgs Boson.

(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Michigan physicists used the electric fields generated by intersecting laser beams to trap and manipulate thousands of microscopic plastic spheres, thereby creating 3-D arrays of optically induced crystals.

The creation of a new quasiparticle called the "hybrid plasmon polariton" may throw open the doors to integrated photonic circuits and optical computing for the 21st century. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have demonstrated the first true nanoscale waveguides for next generation on-chip optical communication systems.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By taking advantage of the properties of periodic systems, physicists have described how to efficiently time-reverse ultrashort electromagnetic pulses.

(PhysOrg.com) -- By controlling how light bends around an object, researchers have built a shrinking device that makes objects appear smaller than they actually are. Although the original object does not actually shrink, the illusion of the smaller object is convincing enough to confuse viewers since the real size of the object cannot be perceived.

Making the power of synchrotron light available to more businesses, building new experimental equipment and developing new capabilities are three of the areas of collaboration in a trans-Atlantic memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between Diamond Light Source Ltd.

Holographic Dark Information Energy gets my vote for the best mix of arcane theoretical concepts expressed in the shortest number of words – and just to keep it interesting, it’s mostly about entropy.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The international ITER project is setting out to store the energy of stars in a reactor. To meet this challenge, scientists must be able to measure the properties of matter in fusion

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics prepare quantum mechanical entanglement of two remote quantum systems.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In an amazing display of lights and sounds, the Open Spark Project and the Tesla Orchestra, formed from researchers at Case Western Reserve University, have taken Tesla coils to a whole new level. Their new Tesla Orchestra uses Tesla coils to covert music into an amazing display of lightning and sound.