http://sciencewriter.org Davide Castelvecchi, Freelance Science Writer: Physics, Astronomy, and Math Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:06:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Stephen Goldup/Univ. of Edinburgh TAMING CHANCE. This molecule acts like the microscopic demons James Clerk Maxwell envisaged in the 19th century. Thermal or Brownian motion moves a ring-shaped molecule (blue) from one side to another of a dumbbell-shaped molecule (yellow). But a "gate" molecule (green) is designed to lock the ... http://sciencewriter.org/2008/03/brownian-motors/ In the past few months, I have occasionally collaborated to Science News' Book Reviews page. Here are the mini-reviews I've written so far. The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist — Reviel Netz and William Noel Some of the works of ... http://sciencewriter.org/2008/01/some-book-reviews/ Call it Murphy's Law of knots: If something can get tangled up, it will. "Anything that's long and flexible seems to somehow end up knotted," says Andrew Belmonte, an applied mathematician at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Belmonte has plenty of alarming anecdotal evidence. "It certainly happens in my ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/12/knot-physics/ Slightly noisy signals can turn into rare large spikes in an optical fiber's output, in much the same way as unpredictable weather conditions occasionally create monstrous, isolated oceanic waves, researchers have found. The new technique for creating such "rogue waves" in the lab might help physicists understand them as a general ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/12/optical-rogue-waves/ Cover illustration by Anders Sandberg This artist's impression represents a view of a hyperbolic plane -- the kind of beast that M. C. Escher loved to paint -- projected on the surface of a sphere. Maldacena's concept of the holographic universe translates a string theory living in hyperbolic space (the 3-D ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/11/ten-years-of-holographic-universe/ Tobias Reichenbach Cyclic competition. (This is an artist's rendition; the actual output of the computer simulation is the image below.) In many ecosystems, several competing species coexist because none is best at everything. Tobias Reichenbach of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and his colleagues ran computer simulations of three virtual bacteria ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/11/cyclic-competition/ The experiment ran for seven days, and magnesium-40, like Adam, didn't show up until the fifth day. It was a long-sought isotope thought to be the heaviest magnesium that can exist, having 16 more neutrons than the most common form of magnesium. Three nuclei of magnesium-40 were recorded, and it ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/10/let-there-be-aluminum-42/ Washed away Last year, physicists reported seeing tantalizing experimental traces of the axion, a hypothetical subatomic particle that's been mentioned as a possible constituent of cosmic dark matter. But the axion was showing up where theory said it shouldn't be. It now looks as if it wasn't there after all. The particle ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/10/getting-no-axion/ Carbon flatland "Graphene has always been before our eyes, but no one ever tried to look," says Andre Geim, a physicist at the University of Manchester in England. A single-atom-thick, chicken wire web of carbon atoms, graphene forms the layers that stack up to make the graphite found in pencil lead ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/09/graphene-is-forever/ While calling NASA’s “manned” space flight programs (such as [the International] Space Station) worthless with regards to science, Steven Weinberg calls NASA’s “unmanned” space flight programs (such as Martian robots Spirit and Opportunity robots and Hubble Telescope) very important to the advancement of science. Steven Weinberg stated at the Tuesday, September ... http://sciencewriter.org/2007/09/classic-weinberg/