Physics

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What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests t…

Scientific American

Three Tiny Exoplanets Suggest Solar System Not So Special

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Adding to its already long roster of firsts , NASA's Kepler spacecraft has found the three smallest extrasolar planets ever detected — all of them smaller than Earth, and the most diminutive no larger than Mars. The newly discovered trio forms a …

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Future Studies Will Extend Census of Middleweight Black Holes

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Editor's note: In her article, " Goldilocks Black Holes ," Jenny E. Greene discusses the search for black holes with masses ranging from roughly 1,000 suns to a million suns–middleweights on the cosmic scale. These intermediate-mass h…

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A Plenitude of Planets: Galactic Search Finds Exoplanets Are More Commonplace Than Stars

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The next time you look up at the night sky and find yourself marveling at the number of stars overhead, know that you are only seeing part of the magnificent bounty that our galaxy holds. Most of those Milky Way stars are not isolated orbs. Rather an a…

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Supersoldier ants created in the lab by reactivating ancestral genes

(PhysOrg.com) — There are over 1100 species of Pheidole genus ants, and most individual ants belong to either the worker or soldier caste. In only eight of the Pheidole species, some individuals can belong to a “supersoldier” subcaste instead, and these ants fight off predatory army ant species and bar their way by blocking off [...]

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Are Superluminal Neutrinos Possible? Pions Don’t Want to Decay Into Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2011) — When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein’s theory of special relativity and couldn’t find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment. Read more

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Fed “string theory,” computer reportedly explains our 3D space

A long-controversial but pop­u­lar the­o­ry of the uni­verse has en­a­bled a su­per­com­puter to ex­plain why space ap­pears three-di­men­sion­al, some phys­i­cists say. The hu­man brain can’t really con­ceive of a space with more than three di­men­sions, of­ten called height, width and length. But sci­en­tists say there is no math­e­mat­i­cal rea­son there can’t be more such di­rec­tions. [...]

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