The American Physical Society (APS), publisher of the prestigious Physical Review journals, has appointed Rachel Burley as its first Chief Publications Officer (CPO). In this new role, Burley will manage more than a dozen leading peer-reviewed journals.
Princeton researchers have solved a 54-year-old puzzle about why certain fluids strangely slow down under pressure when flowing through porous materials, such as soils and sedimentary rocks.
Only a few years ago, the astronomy and heliophysics communities were skeptical about whether CubeSats could reliably obtain scientific data. But these breadloaf-size satellites have proven their ability to return useful data. During the APS April Meeting 2019, Christopher S. Moore will describe how the twin Miniature X-ray Solar Spectometer CubeSats measure soft X-rays from the Sun. These were the first solar science-oriented CubeSat missions flown for the NASA Science Mission Directorate.
The Chelyabinsk meteor caused extensive ground damage and numerous injuries when it exploded on impact with Earth’s atmosphere in February 2013; to prevent another such impact, Amy Mainzer and colleagues use a simple yet ingenious way to spot these tiny near-Earth objects as they hurtle toward the planet. She will outline the work of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office this week at the APS April Meeting in Denver -- including her team’s NEO recognition method and how it will aid the efforts to prevent future Earth impacts.
After watching YouTube videos of people supercooling water in a bottle and then triggering it to freeze by banging it, something about this concept solidified for Matthew M. Szydagis, an assistant professor of physics at the University at Albany, State University at New York, especially when he saw it again during the Disney movie “Frozen.” During the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, Szydagis will describe how this inspired him to explore whether a subatomic particle like dark matter can trigger the freezing of supercooled water.
Researchers hoping to better interpret data from the detection of gravitational waves generated by the collision of binary black holes are turning to the public for help. West Virginia University assistant professor Zachariah Etienne is leading what will soon become a global volunteer computing effort. The public will be invited to lend their own computers to help the scientific community unlock the secrets contained in gravitational waves observed when black holes smash together.
A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible. But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to travel through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University.
This tip sheet highlights interesting presentations from the upcoming 2019 APS April Meeting in Denver -- a major international meeting that features talks and presentations about discoveries in astrophysics, particle physics, energy research and many other areas of modern physics. The meeting runs from Saturday, April 13 through Tuesday, April 16 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, located at 1550 Court Place in downtown Denver.
Information on the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, which explores research from “Quarks to Cosmos.” It runs from Saturday, April 13 through Tuesday, April 16 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. At the meeting, the latest breaking research in particle and astrophysics will be presented -- from long views of massive, ancient objects in the universe to short-lived, subatomic interactions. The meeting will also feature thoughtful presentations by experts in education, policy, the history of physics, and many other areas.
A new APS report, “The Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy,” shows the significant role of physics, which contributed an estimated $2.3 trillion (12.6 percent of U.S. GDP) in 2016 alone. Industrial physics encompasses the application of physics knowledge and principles to the design and manufacture of products and services. Many people working within this field have job titles other than physicist, so this report includes all aspects of industrial physics contributions.
Researchers have created tiny functional, remote-powered, walking robots, developing a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialized silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks. Each one of a robot’s four legs is just under 100-atoms-thick, but powered by laser light hitting the robots’ solar panels, they propel the tiny robots. The researchers are now working on smart versions of the robots that could potentially make incredible journeys in the human body.
Mathematician Shankar Venkataramani’s research group recently discovered a lot of new, powerful geometries involved in frilly surfaces, which he will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. For mathematicians, frilly is plain language for an inflected nonsmooth surface -- one that changes the direction in which it bends, such as with kale or coral. Venkataramani’s group developed the mathematics to describe these surfaces, and the combination of new geometry insights and age-old slugs might just be the right combination for a new generation of flexible, energy-efficient soft-bodied robots.
The latest data from the giant planets has sent researchers back to the drawing board. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years before its dramatic final dive into the planet’s interior, while Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for two and a half years; the data collected has been “invaluable but also confounding,” said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston. Innovative design that protected the instruments from fierce radiation and powered the mission on solar energy alone has reaped plenty of surprises.
Solar cells offer a clean source of energy, but the efficiency of a fixed solar system is limited: The sun moves, but solar cells do not. Beth Parks has devised an astonishingly simple way to overcome this limitation -- a bucket of water. As she will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting, she developed a frame that holds the solar cell with a bucket suspended on either end. By controlling the leak of water from one of the buckets, the solar cell shifts, tracking the arc of the sun throughout the day.
Knitting may be an ancient manufacturing method, but Elisabetta Matsumoto believes that understanding how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength will be invaluable for designing materials for future technologies, and a more detailed understanding of the knitting “code” could benefit manufacturers around the world. Members of the Matsumoto group are delving through the surprisingly complex mathematics that underlies tangles of yarn -- work Matsumoto will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.
Humans have a knack for finding patterns in the world around them. Researchers are building a model that shows how this ability might work, which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. The brain does more than just process incoming information, the researchers say. It constantly tries to predict what’s coming next. The new model attempts to explain how people can make such predictions.
A new frontier in the study of magnetic materials, femtomagnetism, could lead to ultrafast magnetic storage devices that would transform information processing technologies. Now, researchers report a tabletop method to characterize such a faster magnetic storage using high-harmonic generation of laser light in iron thin films. Their work, which Guoping Zhang will present at the 2019 APS March Meeting, has the same vision as quantum technology.
Princeton researchers are exploring how cooperation arises in human societies, where people tend to cluster into various group types -- political, religious, familial, professional, etc. -- which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. Within such groups, people can cooperate or “defect” and receive payoffs based on those exchanges. Cooperation, they observed, is most favored when allowing for the existence of “loners” -- people who are temporarily not members of any group.
Researchers have analyzed the real-time effect of a large-scale hack on automobiles in a major urban environment. Using percolation theory, they analyzed how a large, disseminated hack on automobiles would affect traffic flow in New York City, and they found that it could create citywide gridlock. However, based on these findings the team also developed a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent mass urban disruption -- work they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.
Theory suggests that metallic hydrogen should be a superconductor at room temperature; however, this material has yet to be produced in the lab. Metal superhydrides are packed with hydrogen atoms in a configuration similar to the structure of metallic hydrogen. Models predict they should behave similarly. Samples of superhydrides of lanthanum have been made and tested, and at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, Russell Hemley will describe his group’s work studying the material.
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