JON CARTWRIGHT – Page 57 – & THREE QUARKS EDITORIAL

Plasmas have healing powers

Physics WorldJon Cartwright26 November, 2009

Published in Physics World, 26 Nov 2009

Two related studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of low-temperature plasma for killing drug-resistant bacteria on human skin – one of the biggest challenges facing modern medicine. In one study, researchers in Germany describe a device that can disinfect hands in seconds, while in the other they reveal how low-temperature plasmas can safely disinfect open wounds.

Bacterial infection is a serious problem in hospitals. Studies show that the infamous superbug methicillin-resistant Straphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) alone infects 100,000 people every year in the US and results in about 18,000 deaths. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

NASA data point to icy moon

Chemistry WorldJon Cartwright18 November, 2009

Published in Chemistry World, 18 Nov 2009

Scientists operating Nasa’s LCROSS (lunar crater observation and sensing satellite) mission, part of which impacted the moon on live television last month, say that shadowy lunar craters almost certainly contain water ice.

The claim comes in response to preliminary spectroscopic data showing the characteristic absorption and emission lines of water molecules and hydroxyl – the break-up product of water made from one hydrogen and one oxygen atom – in the Cabeus lunar crater. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Photo finish in race for strontium condensate

Physics WorldJon Cartwright18 November, 2009

Published in Physics World, 18 Nov 2009

An Austrian group has beaten its US counterpart by a matter of days in a race to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of strontium atoms.

Researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences submitted their paper on a strontium BEC – a mass of ultracold atoms all in the same quantum state – just 10 days before those at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The breakthrough makes way for more precise quantum timekeeping and new studies of the quantum nature of matter. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Why blood cells move in slippers

Physics WorldJon Cartwright5 November, 2009

Published in Physics World, 5 Nov 2009

Physicists in France and the US claim to have discovered why red blood cells adopt asymmetrical “slipper” shapes in small blood vessels. If correct, the knowledge could be used to diagnose certain diseases that affect cell structure, although not everyone agrees with the researchers’ conclusions.

Red blood cells moving through large blood vessels normally adopt symmetrical parachute shapes. But for 40 years scientists have known that, in smaller blood vessels, the cells often lose their symmetry and take on a shape something like a lopsided slipper. Until now, no one has seemed to know the reason why. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

High-temperature superconductor goes super thin

Physics WorldJon Cartwright2 November, 2009

Published in Physics World, 2 Nov 2009

Physicists in the US have created the world’s thinnest high-temperature superconductor, demonstrating that the phenomenon can exist over a thickness of a few atoms.

Gennady Logvenov and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, have created layered films of copper-oxide or “cuprate” materials and have discovered that they can localize the superconducting behaviour to a single atomic plane. They say that the discovery will help theorists to build more comprehensive models of high-temperature superconductivity, and lead to thin-film devices that have their superconducting properties tuned by electric fields. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Dark-matter paper raises questions over data sharing

Physics WorldJon Cartwright29 October, 2009

Published in Physics World, 29 Oct 2009

A preprint that uses NASA data to claim “possible evidence” for dark matter has led some researchers to question the US space agency’s data-sharing policies.

The preprint – which was uploaded to the arXiv internet server earlier this month by physicists Lisa Goodenough of New York University and Dan Hooper of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois – makes the claim by matching a theoretical model of dark matter to freely available data from NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray telescope. But with an official analysis of the same data yet to be published, some scientists have pointed out that, depending on the validity of the evidence, the preprint will either cause confusion or steal glory from the Fermi team. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Phantom space storms

New ScientistJon Cartwright6 October, 2009

Published in New Scientist, 6 Oct 2009

Whether it’s showering spacecraft with lethal radiation, filling the sky with ghostly light, or causing electrical surges that black-out entire cities, space weather is a force to be reckoned with.

Thankfully, all is calm in space on the day that I speak to Bill Murtagh at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. “Last week we saw a moderate storm, and that was about the most interesting event in months,” he reassures me. “It’s pretty quiet today.”

And Murtagh should know – his job is to forecast space weather, which comprises any disturbance in near-Earth space, including the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere where satellites roam. Many of the serious events involve disturbances in the charged portion of the atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, which stretches from 80 to 1000 kilometres above sea level. The finger of blame has always been pointed at the sun, which bombards the Earth with a stream of charged particles in the form of the solar wind. During the last three years, though, the sun’s cycle of activity has hit a trough, and as Murtagh observes, space weather is temporarily calm. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Fisheye gives new route to perfect images

Physics WorldJon Cartwright30 September, 2009

Published in Physics World, 30 Sep 2009

A fisheye lens proposed over a century ago can produce perfectly focused images without using any exotic “negative refractive index” materials, a physicist in the UK has calculated.

Ulf Leonhardt of St Andrews University claims that a fisheye lens – of the type invented by the great 19th century physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell – can focus beyond the troublesome diffraction limit, which precludes standard lenses from achieving a resolution finer than the wavelength of light. […]

The rest of this article is available here.

Beleaguered LHC gears up for restart

Physics WorldJon Cartwright1 September, 2009

Published in Physics World, 1 Sep 2009

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is finally set to restart in mid-November following last year’s accident. Initially it will collide protons at an energy of only 3.5 TeV per beam, and staff at CERN will have to wait until late next year before trying to run the collider at its maximum energy. Collisions of 14TeV (7TeV per beam) will therefore not take place until 2011 at the earliest. […]

To read the rest of this article, please contact Jon Cartwright for a pdf.

Physicists shed light on mysterious battlefield injury

Physics WorldJon Cartwright1 September, 2009

Published in Physics World, 1 Sep 2009

A common battlefield brain injury could originate in the blast waves of nearby explosions, even though such waves cause relatively small accelerations of a soldier’s body. That is the conclusion of physicists in the US who have used computer simulations to study the causes of traumatic brain injury (TBI), a poorly understood condition that appears to be on the increase.

According to the simulations, the blast waves of grenades, landmines and other devices can bypass a soldier’s helmet, distort the skull and inflict potentially dangerous loads on the brain. These loads may be sufficient to cause TBI, even when there has been no contact with shrapnel from the explosion. […]

The rest of this article is available online here.