Featured Science Threads - Page 12

In the spirit of "It's fun to make lists", tell the forum what software you use in your field of study - with emphasis on what programs you use, rather than what general purpose computer languages you use. How much of your software is used because its a favorite of a particular department at a particular university?

Is Anybody Reading the Syllabus? To Find Out, Some Professors Bury Hidden Gems (Chronicle of Higher Education). I never used the Easter-egg trick myself, but if I had a nickel for every time I answered a question about something that was in the syllabus (e.g. "How much does this test count towards the final grade?") I could have retired years ago.

This paper offers a Nobel laureate perspective on the history, status and future of GR in the astrophysical regime..., General Relativity and Cosmology: Unsolved Questions and Future Directions.

It is with great sadness that the woman who I thought would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Physics, Deborah Jin, has passed away this past Sept. 15, after a battle with cancer. This one will truly hurt. She was in the prime of her life and her career. The Nobel Committee missed a tremendous opportunity to award a deserving physicist of her prize.

Congrats to three British physicists working at US universities who have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for revealing the secrets of exotic matter. Thoughts?

Time for the October challenge! This time a lot of people sent me suggestions for challenges. I wish to thank them a lot! If you think of a good challenge that could be included here, don't hesitate to send me!

Recently, I've been reading about those space mining companies (like Deep Space Mining and Planetary Resources), and from an amateur point of view, I thought that the overall idea was pretty interesting. But what's the feasibility of such a project? Are there any chances that we could develop this technology within the next decade or so?

My only source of information on dark matter is popular science texts, like New Scientist. One thing that is never explained is how it gets to aggregate around galaxies. Lacking the ability to shed energy by radiation, it seems it should just fly straight past and through, never even getting trapped into an orbit. I can think of two possible explanations, neither very convincing...

Cutting down rain forest causes desert, and this is viewed as an upset to the world's climate. What I'm wondering is whether any and all desert is basically bad, or whether some amount of desert somehow contributes to the health of the planet. In other words, if we exclude the man made deserts from consideration, would the natural deserts that exist be considered to have a positive effect on the earth...

Could be a common wrong definition or an ineffient way to solve a certain equation. I don't know, what in science and math bugs you? Educators should fill this thread! :D

Some say block-chain economies, some say driver-less cars and some say clean energy. What do you think?

The GAIA telescope has been mapping stars in the Milky Way with unprecedented quality and quantities. It has been assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy and has currently mapped over 1 billion stars. There are already hints that the Milky Way may be shaped differently from what we thought...

In an earlier thread, Science Vulnerability to Bugs, I mentioned the case "Faulty image analysis software may invalidate 40,000 fMRI studies". In another recent case (can't find the link), an author decided to un-license his public domain contribution and withdrew it from publicly shared libraries, which broke very many products dependent on it.

As already posted on PF, and you have likely seen in the news, a SpaceX rocket exploded, September 1, 2016. Elon Musk is reaching out for help in finding out how it happened. I already have my idea of what might have happened, but I want to let everyone else look for themselves to see if they can deduce anything. Some of the smart people at PF might be able to see something that the...

In this video Murray Gell-Mann discuses Quantum Mechanics and at 11:42 he discuses entanglement. At 14:45 he makes the following statement: "People say loosely, crudely, wrongly that when you measure one of the photons it does something to the other one. It doesn't." Do most physicists working in this field agree with the above statement?

Thus is something you don't see in every textbook. A not so complicated method to relate integrals and limits involving Euler's constant.

September, schools restart, summer ends, but a new challenge is here:
RULES:
1) In order for a solution to count, a full derivation or proof must be given. Answers with no proof will be ignored....

Scientists found a virus that is made out of 4 to 5 separate components - it infects mosquitoes, and they have to catch at least four of those components to get infected, the smallest, fifth component is optional. For plants and fungi, similar viruses were known before, but (at least according to the study) this is the first example in animals studied in detail. I have never heard of those things before and I thought it would be interesting to share that.

I'm working on the following fun problem. I have a circle of a given radius, R0. (Green circle in the image). I want to be able to supply a radius of the first circle that is to fit into this large circle. Lets say R1 is 0.75 * R0. Following this I find the best position of R2 (to maximize its radius), is on top of the smaller circle. This is the largest circle that can fit inside the green circle without...

I've had a pretty poor experience going through the standardized education system in California, and now that I'm in college, I'm really fed up with how mathematics is taught (even at the college level). With this said, I thought it would be fun for me to redesign the entire math education curriculum from scratch exactly the way I would want it to be. I think this might be a fun general discussion about how math is taught in the US...

I would like to imagine how would physics look in a Universe governed by Standard model, sans Higgs. IOW: how would the unbroken SU(2)*U(1) be different from our usual broken one? There is no "usual" electromagnetism in such a Universe. Instead, there are two new forces, SU(2) weak isospin and U(1) weak hypercharge. (I'll be skipping word "weak" from now on)...

Life as a scientist sounds way more fun when you describe it like you're a six year old.
"I can read things some people can't read so I read them and then write them again only now those people can read it." Now's your turn.

Published today in Nature: "At a distance of 1.295 parsecs1, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (α Centauri C, GL 551, HIP 70890 or simply Proxima) is the Sun’s closest stellar neighbor and one of the best-studied low-mass stars. It has an effective temperature of only around 3,050 kelvin, a luminosity of 0.15 per cent of that of the Sun, a measured radius of 14 per cent of the radius of the Sun2 and a mass of about 12 per cent of the mass of the Sun."...

Humans created that tool, that language, that consists of axioms and their implications. Mathematics does a good job of communicating the behavior of physical phenomena. How is it that mathematics and the physical reality agree with each other ?

Due to the constant never ending supply of "cool stuff" happening in Aerospace these days I'm creating this thread to consolidate posts every time something new comes along. Please feel free to add random information if its relevant. So to start things off here is the SpaceX Dragon launch coming up shortly, I'll be following up afterwards to see how it all goes.

I heard from many sources that quantum mechanics is purely random in nature. Has this been demonstrated? Phenomena like the wave function collapse are considered 'purely random'. If we can establish that collapse is random, we have to base that on the property of being statistical in its nature, right?

As far as I understand, it is a big step towards replicating RNA systems. They found an RNA enzyme that can synthesize longer RNA molecules, and fully replicate shorter RNA molecules - completely without proteins. It cannot replicate itself (or its corresponding RNA), that would be another huge step.

August is already well underway, so time for some nice challenges! This thread contains both challenges for high schoolers and college freshmen, and for more advanced people. Also some previously unsolved challenges are omitted.

The Perseid meteor shower will be at it's peak next Friday (August 12)! They'll be seen best in the Northern Hemisphere and mid-southern latitudes around 1:00 am. Anybody going to go out and see them?