It’s Alchemy, I tell you!

Turning cement into metal?

Apparently so:

“This phenomenon of trapping electrons and turning liquid cement into liquid metal was found recently, but not explained in detail until now,” Benmore said. “Now that we know the conditions needed to create trapped electrons in materials we can develop and test other materials to find out if we can make them conduct electricity in this way.”

The results were reported May 27 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the article “Network topology for the formation of solvated electrons in binary CaO–Al2O3 composition glasses”.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-cement-metal.html#jCp

 

Posted in science. Tags: . 1 Comment »

Catching Up on Interesting Stuff

Over the last little while,  have come across some very interesting articles and such which I want to post about – but simply don’t have the capacity to fully explore.  So, I’d like to catch up by presenting a whole bunch of them in one post for your pleasure!

UPDATE:  A pregnant British woman is arrested for walking down the street in Great Britain and carrying the British flag.  Really!

Interesting DIY inventions are coming out of China.

The mystery of the ‘Skeleton Lake’ (India) seems to be solved.

Were the Eastern Crusades defensive wars?

On the copyright/erosion-of-privacy/governments-spying-on-citizens/corporatism front:

Meanwhile, in Science:

And in the economy:

Islam:

Political Islam/Creeping Sharia:

General politics:

And if you want more links to various articles to read, check out Steynian 468nth.

Thunderf00t: The Potential of Mankind

 

NASA, Google to share a quantum computer

Let me just say – quantum computers are neat!

Not that I know that much about them, but my older son is rather fascinated with them and is actively focusing his education so as to work with them.  As a matter of fact, he recently started his first research job in Mathematics – and, yes, it is in the field of combinatorics.

When I heard that NASA is getting a quantum computer, and that Google is going in on the deal, I got very excited indeed!

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.

This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.

Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.’

Science rules!

The First Music Video Recorded in Space

Had to include it here…

Make sure to check out his amazing videos from the Space Station, like the following one where he wrings water out of a wash-cloth:

http://youtu.be/fMaZeKiQEgo

Brilliant!

Ozmoroid: Science – as woo as you want

Our Solar System May Be More Unusual Than Previously Thought

We studied our Solar system an thought we understood how all kinds of solar systems form.

Then we looked around…and the evidence does not fit our hypothesies:

‘As of this month, we’ve discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us.

“We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer [planetary] systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days,” says Steve Vogt, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up.”

All of sudden, we’re the abnormal ones. We have to figure out why our solar system turned out different from all the others.’

Posted in science. Tags: . 2 Comments »

Thunderf00t: How does fire start?

P.S. Don’t blink!!!

Minute Physics: How big is the Universe?

 

Quantum Mechanics 5 – Schrödinger Equation