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

One of the few exceptions to the old saying “everybody is afraid of something” is a 44-year-old woman known to psychologists as patient SM.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A group of physicists working out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in proving what was until now, just theory; and that is, that visible photons could be produced from the virtual particles that have been thought to exist in a quantum vacuum. In a paper published on arXiv, the team describes how they used a specially created circuit called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to modulate a bit of wire length at a roughly five percent of the speed of light, to produce visible "sparks" from the nothingness of a vacuum.

In a game of one-upmanship, a Chinese team of physicists has figured out how to entangle eight photons simultaneously and to observe them in action; the previous record was six. In a paper published in arXiv, the team from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, describe how they were able to convert a single photon into two entangled photons, using a nonlinear crystal, and then how they repeated that process with one of the paired photons produced, while holding the other in place, producing another pair, and then did it repeatedly until they had eight photons all entangled together, all held in place and all observable for a period of time.

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine A massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way--but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted. A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates--for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000--have not been realized. "We have mathematically proven why these 'guesstimates' are flawed," says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published on arXiv, Cuban physicist Ernesto Althsuler and his team at the University of Havana, describe how they set out to reproduce a phenomenon they had observed while brewing the Argentinean drink mate, a type of tea. Althsuler noticed that after causing hot water to drop from one vessel down a very slight waterfall into another containing tea leaves, some of the leaf particulates managed to make their way back up the waterfall and into the hot water vessel.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Seventeen minutes may not seem like much, but to physicists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) project at the CERN physics complex near Geneva, 1000 seconds is nearly four orders of magnitude better than has ever been achieved before in capturing and holding onto antimatter atoms.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The long running debate on whether cell phones are capable of damaging human tissue and causing health problems received new fuel from a paper published at arXiv by theoretical biologist Bill Bruno from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.