Now i know that every last news source online has done this story already, hell it’s on the Drudgereport frontpage as i write this, but if for some reason you refuse to read anything but our humble blog here’s the story (plus it’s hard to not write a headline about watermelon viagra).

Without really going into much details (which would be hard too seeing as how this is more biology/medicine and I’m a physics student), they have found out that watermelons contain large quantities of a substance called citrulline, which has the benefit of increasing blood flow in your body, which is of course the same thing that Viagra does. It’s however not the exact same, as Viagra is organ specific, while watermelons would target the entire vascular system. The basic message is: fruit is good for you!

This is of course also a perfect time to bring in one of the most controversial XKCD comics ever made, the infamous fruit chart.

As you can plainly see, the watermelon is not a top contender in the fruit wars (in fact i’d have it even lower on the tasty bar, it’s bland as hell!). If for some miracle you don’t know XKCD, i can HIGHLY recommend reading it. It’s a comic with a bunch of nerdy humor and science jokes, but also bunches of quirky stuff, easily one of my top3 favorite places online.

P.S. Some practical advice to everyone, don’t get drunk the day before you have to move out of an apartment, spending a day hung over in cleaning supply fumes is far from optimal.

Well to be honest, huge is not the first word that springs into mind when you say one millimeter (that’s 0.0393700787 inches for you metrically challenged), but when it comes to atoms it’s a behemoth. The usual diameter of an atom is of the order of one Angstrom, which is 0.00000000001 meters, so we’re talking about an atom approximately seven orders of magnitudes bigger!

One of the first theories put forth to explain the behavior of atoms, was the so-called Bohr model, named after one of the greatest physicists ever to live, the Danish Niels Bohr. The basic premise of the model was that electrons orbit around a core of protons and neutrons, much like the moon orbits the earth. He used classical physics to calculate several properties of atoms based on this model, but it was ultimately wrong and the correct theory of atoms was found with quantum mechanics (which he had a big hand in founding). You can check out this explanation of it (also linked in the press-release), it looks kind of childish with the cartoons and everything, but it actually does a pretty good job of explaining it in a simple way.

The story does not end there though! As it often happens, once you scale things up from the very tiny, to the somewhat large, things stop exhibiting the weird effects of quantum mechanics, and start behaving more like classical systems we know and love from our every day life. This holds true for atoms as well, so atoms that are at a sufficiently large scale actually DO behave like the Bohr model predicts!

The scientists over at Rice University managed to make one of these very large Bohr atoms and observe it’s circular path around the nucleus. Like i said before, the size of the atom was close to one millimeter, a far cry from the one angstrom they usually are. The large size was achieved using lasers to excite the atom and electric fields to manipulate it into the configuration they wanted.

You can check out their press-release here, it’s quite short actually and to the point, and also discusses in a little more detail how they actually managed to make the potassium atoms so large, so i recommend reading it.

As a followup to my last post about Bells inequality, i figured i’d give you a quick link to an article written about a very recent test of it, confirming that indeed, quantum mechanics does not obey the Bell inequality. The next two paragraphs will quickly sum up my last article in case you didn’t read it. Those who did can feel free to skip it.

In “real life” we are used to be able to precisely predict the outcome of results. Say you throw a baseball to your friend, if you were to measure it’s direction and velocity, you could accurately predict exactly where it will land and when, plus how much energy it has etc, this is what is called “deterministic”, since we can accurately determine outcomes. On the quantum scale however,q things are quite different and outcomes of measurements can not be perfectly predicted, in fact different outcomes will be measured with a certain probability, and you have no way of predicting exactly what you’ll get.

Many people did not like this at all, such as Einstein, who proposed that quantum mechanics was simply an incomplete theory, and if only we had the full picture, quantum mechanics would be deterministic as well. In order for this to be true, quantum mechanics would have to fulfill the so-called Bell inquality, and in short, it does not (you can read the older article for a more in-depth view of it, this is just a quick sum-up for those that didn’t feel like reading the whole article).

Like i explained in the article, there have been numerous experimental tests of the Bell inequality at the quantum level, and they agree, it is indeed broken. I figured you might be interested in reading about the largest test of the Bell inequality so far, which spanned two laboratories across two different towns! They had it at this distance so they could make sure that there was no way that the two particles could have exchanged any information before they were measured, and once again, it has been confirmed that quantum mechanics are weird.

As this is not a press-release like most their news, but an actual article written by PhysOrg, i will simply point you towards it rather then recite it here.

Since i just finished a course in Quantum Information, which studies quantum cryptography, quantum computers and other such things, i thought i might write a few articles about these things as they are interesting, highly useful and seem to have captured the interest of the general public fairly well. I hope i can manage to explain this in a way that a lay-person could read this and get the gist of it, if i fail for some reason, feel free to leave a comment and i’ll try to elaborate on points i was unclear on.

To start with, i wanted to do a short article on something called Bells inequality, which shows us that the fact that outcomes of measurements in quantum systems occur with a certain probability (as opposed to being able to precisely predict the outcome of an experiment in classical physics) can not be explained away by simply saying that the theory of quantum mechanics is incomplete and if only we knew about those factors we have not found yet, we could perfectly predict everything.

To begin with, i’ll have to introduce one of the weirdest results of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement. It more or less means that it is possible to have two quantum systems (for example single photons (particles of light) or single atoms), that are somehow connected (entangled) with each-other, so there is no way to describe one particle without including the other. So for example lets say we have two atoms that have their spin entangled. A simplified way of imagining what the spin of an atom is, is that it’s the equivalent of the earth rotating about it’s axis. The two possible spins that the atom can have is spin-up, or spin-down, and using the analogy from before about the earths rotation, you can imagine spin-up being a clockwise rotation and spin-down being a counter-clockwise rotation. So what does it mean that they are entangled? Well it means that if you were to take atom #1 and measure it’s spin along the x-axis and get some result, then you know for certain, that atom #2 has the exact opposite spin. So say #1 measures spin-up, then you know that #2 has spin-down. This holds true even if the two particles are at the opposite ends of the galaxy!

Now if you think this is weird, don’t feel stupid, great minds were (and are) boggled by this as well, and in fact Einstein was sure that this could not be true. He argued that if you have two systems, A and B, that are completely separated by space, then the measurement of A must not modify the description of B. But when doing the math in quantum mechanics, this is exactly what you get! So Einstein maintained that the theory of quantum mechanics was incomplete, and that if you DID have the complete theory then the results of a measurement of a quantum system would not depend on probabilities, but you should be able to completely predict your results (like you can in classical everyday physics).

Phew! Ok that was a lot of backstory and explaining in order to get to what i really wanted to talk about, Bells inequality. So on one hand we have a theory giving us some very unintuitive answers, and on the other we have Einstein saying that this is only because the theory is incomplete, and if we had the full picture then all the weird things in quantum mechanics would make sense to us. But how can we test which one is true? This is where Bells inequality comes into play!

What it basically states, is that if you have three coins, and throw them all into the air at once, then you are 100% sure that at least two of them will be identical (heads/heads or tails/tails). So of P(1,2) is the probability of coin 1 and coin 2 being the same, then

P(1,2)+P(2,3)+P(1,3) >= 1

So the sum of all the probabilities should be equal to or more than 1 (100% probability). Seems pretty straight forward and obvious yes? Obviously 3 coins will have a 100% certainty to have 2 outcomes be the same, at least in the classical world we live in, and that’s where the catch is. If Einstein was to be right, and quantum mechanics was indeed deterministic like the classical world we know (that is to say, the current model of quantum mechanics is wrong), then this inequality HAS to be fulfilled for quantum mechanics.

So lets see what happens in the quantum picture. We’ll return to our entangled atoms from before, where Alice has one of them, and Bob has the other. The coins in this picture, are the spins of the atoms along different axis, so for example the spin along the x-axis can be either up or down, and each one has a 50% probability of being measured (remember that they can only do one measurement on each atom). So lets say that Alice measures the spin in the x-direction, and gets spin-up, she calls Bob and tells him the good news, so now Bob KNOWS that if he measures in the x-direction as well, he’ll get spin-down with 100% certainty (because they are entangled). So what happens now if Bob measures the spin along the y-axis? What is the probability of him getting the same result as he would have got along the x-axis (the equivalent of getting heads/heads, tails/tails)? Well without going into the math of quantum mechanics, i can tell you that it is 1/4. So looking back at the equation from Bells inequality, P(1,2)=1/4, and in fact P(2,3) and P(1,3) is also 1/4 (it doesn’t matter which axis you measure, it’s always the same math), so you see that

P(1,2)+P(2,3)+P(1,3)=3/4

which is obviously less then 1, and Bells inequality is therefore NOT fulfilled, and Einsteins explanation was wrong. This is also heavily backed by experiments done to test the Bells inequality, so it would seem that the current theory of quantum mechanics lives to see another day!

Now if you think about it, it’s not really that surprising that these things are completely counter-intuitive. After all, we humans never experience any quantum mechanical effects (they can only be observed at extremely small levels, like single atoms or single photons), so our brains have simply not evolved to be able to comprehend these things intuitively.

Lastly! Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog actually did a similar article a few weeks ago, where he discusses quantum cryptography (which also heavily depends on entanglement), i might write an article on that as well, assuming people didn’t fall sleep over this one and are interested in hearing more, but until then, you can check out his article.

Well, exams are over (and passed), so now i won’t have to take an exam or be at a lecture again … ever. As promised the rate of articles will pick up somewhat now, so here goes.

It seems like every other story we do somehow involves MIT doing something revolutionary, those guys are really at the forefront of science/engineering. This time around they claim to have made the worlds most power-efficient solar power solution.

The contraption is basically a cleverly designed mirror that focuses the sunlight it reflects onto a small area that absorbs the heat from the light quite efficiently into copper wires, that then transfer the heat to water surrounding them. The water then heats up and eventually produces steam, that could be used to power turbines, creating electricity. I could babble on here about the design and such, but MIT’s news service is actually quite good, and they have a video with the lead-designer explaining everything quite well, and he even demonstrates how the light beam is powrful enough to quickly make a plank of wood go up in flames. So check out this video here. I can also recommend reading their press-release on the matter.

Sorry for the infrequent posts here guys, my last exam is tomorrow so hopefully the frequency of posts will start going up again then.

In the meantime, i just wanted to draw your attention to a press-release from NASA where they are announcing that they have given out a deal to a contractor to develop a new space-suit by 2015. This is set to coincide with the return to the moon, so the spacesuit is required to be able to function both for space-walks at the international space station, as well as being suited for multiple moonwalks without needing much maintenance. Now the really cool thing about this, is that i had no idea they were actually planning a 6 month trip to the moon! I knew they were set to return, but not for such an extended period of time. To quote the article:

The suit will need to cope with a large number of moonwalks with minimal maintenance during the planned six-month lunar outpost expeditions.

Well this probably isn’t mind-blowing to many of you, as I’m positive this is very old news (it’s after all been a while since they announced they’d return to the moon), but somehow it completely escaped me. I can highly recommend reading the press-release, it’s quite well written and informative.

OK, let’s take this from the beginning…

In august 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was not worthy of it’s title as a planet because of the discovery of several Pluto-like objects outside the orbit of Pluto, and the fright that we would soon be teaching our kids a list of 50 planets. So they decided that Pluto should henceforth be known as a dwarf planet.

Alright… it may take some getting used to, but we’ll accept it.

But just as we’d all gotten used to the new definition, what could be a better idea then renaming the whole class again? Surely the IAU has nothing better to do? I guess not. Last week the IAU decided that Pluto and Pluto-like objects should now be called “plutoids”, giving Pluto back a lot of seemingly lost credit. I mean who wouldn’t want a whole class of objects named after them? So the official definition of a plutoid is:

“Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the sun at a distance greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighborhood around their orbit.”

Alright, this is all getting a bit confusing to be honest, i mean it’s all semantics after all, there is no real meaning behind these things, it’s just us humans that like to label things. So fair enough, dwarf planets will now be named after the biggest dwarf planet known, Pluto. But hey, what happens then if we discover another large plutoid? As an astronomer in the above linked article points out:

“The only fly in the ointment that I can envision is if a plutoid larger, than, say, Mars is detected,” Laughlin points out. “In that case, I think we’d see a big flare-up of the what-is-a-planet debate.”

So here we are, just waiting for the next big thing in solar system object renaming (exciting, isn’t it?). Meantime a Japanese team of astronomers propose a theory that there may exist exactly such a large object anywhere from 100 to 200 AU from the Sun (one AU is the distance from the sun to earth). This would explain some of the odd things we see in the Kupier Belt, a large belt of icy objects (like plutoids) outside the orbit of Neptune. Seriously, I can’t wait for them to find this. Not only will the discussion be fun to watch, but a whole lot of actually interesting astronomy could be learned from such an object. Like if it has a hot core, there’s the possibility of an under-surface ocean, making it possible for life as we know it to evolve. Especially if the building blocks of life are floating around in space.

As i’m sure you all know by now the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is about to arrive in all it’s glory (and if you don’t, i refer you to an excellent video-explanation of it mentioned in a previous post). Set to kick off in July, the scientists are in full crunch mode to get all bells and whistles ready for the demolition of the world as we know it by creating a black-hole.

One of the major experiments in the LHC, is the so called ALICE experiment (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), which will, as the name suggests, study the collision of large ions, such as two lead ions colliding head on. In order to get data from these massively energetic collisions, they need some kind of measurement device to see how the particles coming out of it are flying around, and the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is the main particle tracking device in ALICE.

The chamber is filled with a gas that gets ionized (loses an electron) when the particles pass through it, leaving a trail behind that the detectors can measure. These detectors however, need to be very finely calibrated to get the best measurements possible, and that is what the scientists are working on now. Using a finely tuned laser to ionize the gas and shining it on mirrors very carefully placed throughout the chamber, they effectively simulate a particle trail, allowing for the first measurements on the finished system to be made. The results from these measurements are then used to finely calibrate the equipment, to have it all in tip-top shape for the big day. To quote Børge Svane Nielsen, the leader of the Danish research group from the Niels Bohr Institute:

We were very happy, when we managed to measure the first traces. It’s an important step and it shows that the detector system is working.

Original article here (sorry, only in Danish), courtesy of the Niels Bohr Institute (University of Copenhagen).

In between all those games to watch at the Euro 2008, I just wanted to give a quick post on some cool astronomy news that has been popping up all over the place the last few days.

There is no reason for me to try to explain something that is explained perfectly well in the ESO press release, but as the title suggests, ESO astronomers have detected 3 super-Earths (planets with masses from 1-14 Earth masses) in a nearby solar system. Now don’t get your hopes to high, as these planets are all too close to their star to be a nice place for life as we know it, but as they also point out in the article, this is a really good indication that there are a lot of rocky planets out there, and with every new telescope or detector, we get one step closer to being able to detect even smaller planets in even better orbits.

But once again, go read the announcement.
Among more mainstream news sites, the Bad Astronomer has of course also covered this.

Citizens of a small solar system in the Ursa Major constellation are being spammed grossly by inferior earthlings representing a particular earthy food company called Doritos, trying to increase sales of their flag ship product, the tortilla chips. In a 6 hour broadcast from an array of high power subspace radars on the Norwegian island of Svalbard on Earth, an MPEG file containing the ad piece was repeated over and over again, to make sure the Ursa Majorians would identify the message as intelligent.

The event has later been deemed pretty unintelligent as the inhabitants of the only habitable planet in the aforementioned solar system looks exactly like giant tortilla chips. They took the ad piece as a declaration of war, and have announced a soonish preemptive strike on Earth, probably causing the demise of the human race. As a fine example of same human race would have put it: “Doh!”

Milky Way Times is monitoring the situation and we’ll of course bring you any update as fast as possible. And don’t forget to vote on the top 5 human things you won’t miss.

*Snapping out of what seems to be an unending stream of science fiction thoughts induced by this news piece over at New Scientist.*

Now back to work on that subspace device… and maybe that runaway thoughts controller too.