While I am waiting for my computer to be formatted with the new hard drive for the 3rd time in 24 hours (the version of windows I installed seems to have issues with some drivers, audio and video), I thought I would share with you news from the Nature magazine. Nature is the most prestigious science journal, and certainly whoever publishes there is not some random person. Every week, amazing new discoveries come up, and in Nature many of them are published. Here are some highlights from last month's journals, which I read during the exam of EE105 that me and Katsouleas were proctoring.
- Scientists for the first time manage measure the size of Sagittarious A, the item that occupies the center of our galaxy. It is about 1.6 light years across, which suggests that its density is 10 times more than anything else on the universe we've ever seen; hence it is solid proof it is a supermassive black hole. Until now the occupation of the center of the galaxies from black holes was a speculation. Now we have solid proof.
- Vlasov and others from the Watson research center made a silicon chip that slows down light by 300 times! If this gets working massively, it will open the path for optical computers.
- Every 10 days, the last fluent speaker of a language dies....
- They found a gene in Drosophila that control homosexuality!
- The first antigravity patent was approved (crappy science, if you ask me).
- A certain asteroid that will fly close to earth at 2029 has a chance of hitting earth in its next trip. They published a design for a gravitational tractor to change its course - i.e., a spacecraft will hover close to the asteroid to gravitationally chance its trajectory...
- I also read a paper on computer networks from Greece, University of Athens! They used chaotic signals on opticall fibers to demonstrate information transmission.
- They built a six atom Schrodenger's Cat! 6 atoms are entagled to eachother and can transfer information all at once.
- The first images and data from Saturn's moon Titan finally are published. There is evidence of (methane) rain falling on the planet, which has created canals and small lakes...
- Hayabusha, a Japanese spacecraft has extracted material from a flying asteroid, and for the first time such a material will be returned to earth...
- The first evidence of the slowing down of the Atlantic current (that could lead England to have temperatures similar to Canada) are reported...
