The Sun has unleashed its most powerful eruption of 2013 so far.The solar flare – a sudden release of radiation – peaked at 1705 BST on Monday, and was associated with a huge eruption of matter.When these eruptions reach Earth, they can interfere with electronic systems in satellites and those on the ground.

via BBC News – Sun unleashes X-Class solar flare.

Most obsolete Apple products are worthless and confined to the back of a drawer – but not this. The Apple-1, built by Steve Wozniak in the garage of Steve Jobs parents garage some 37 years ago, is up for auction later this month in Germany at Auction Team Breker.

via BBC News – Apple, Pascal and Enigma: 350 years of technology on sale.

Scientists have studied two dead stars that give us a glimpse, they say, of what our Solar System might look like a few billion years from now.

Our Sun will expand outwards when its nuclear fuel runs low and will ultimately blow off its outer layers.

Some of the inner planets will be consumed in the process and asteroids will be thrown out of their orbits.

A Cambridge-led team says it has seen evidence for this big upheaval in the atmospheres of the two burnt-out stars.

And the researchers believe their study has also given them some further insight on where planets can exist in our Milky Way Galaxy.

The pair of dead stars resides in the Hyades cluster, in the Constellation Taurus, about 150 light-years from Earth. They are so-called white dwarfs – the exhausted cores of average-size stars not unlike our Sun.

The astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to probe these two remnants, deciphering their chemistry with the observatory’s powerful Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

This showed the dwarfs to be “polluted” with silicon – the element found in the rocky material that makes up the Earth, the other inner planets in our Solar System, and its asteroids.

It is an indication that rock is falling on to the dead stars, their gravity likely shredding the material and spreading it out into a thin disc as it gets pulled ever closer.

Rocky river

“Stuff must be falling on to [each] star at a very high rate,” explained Dr Jay Farihi of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.

“We can calculate the number of grams per second. That turns out to be something like a small river’s worth of material.

The study used the Hubble telescope

“And based on the whole phenomenon of polluted white dwarfs and what we’ve learnt in the last few years, we know that there’s a disc of material that must be feeding the star’s atmosphere with this silicon-rich material,” he told BBC News.

“That disc has to come from some disrupted, torn-apart planetesimal. The easiest way to describe it is a modest to large-sized asteroid.”

Computer modelling suggests that as ageing stars throw off their outer layers and lose mass to become a dwarf, they destabilise the environment around them.

It becomes gravitationally perturbed, with any big planets still orbiting the dead star then nudging smaller rocks in all directions – many of them towards the dwarf.

Hubble’s Hyades observations are very probably showing us this process in action. And it is a vision of what is to come for our own Sun.

In just a few billion years from now, it will use up all of its hydrogen fuel and will swell to become a red giant. Finally, it will dump a large proportion of its gaseous mass to leave a hot, compact and faintly glowing ember.

It also should be pulling in rocks that get too close, gravitationally pulverising them into a thin disc that gradually and continually dopes the remnant atmosphere with silicon.

Planet construction

Clusters like Hyades are places where many stars are born and live relatively close by to each other. But they are also locations where very few planets have thus far been detected.

To date, of the roughly 800 planets catalogued beyond our Solar System, only four are known to orbit stars in a cluster. That may be because these places are very energetic, which makes it difficult to discern orbiting planets using our current observation techniques.

What this latest research implies, however, is that stars in clusters almost certainly do have planets.

“The body responsible for [the silicon pollution] we see must have been an asteroid about 50-100km in size,” Dr Farihi told the BBC’s Material World programme on Radio 4.

“Asteroids or big rocks are really the building blocks of planets, so the fact that we’re seeing giant rocks at these stars means that terrestrial planets were built during the stars’ energy-producing lifetime.

“The question of whether they retain those planets to this day is a little bit more tricky. I would venture to say ‘yes’, because we need large planets to push these rocks around so that they can get close to the star and pollute its atmosphere.”

Dr Farihi’s team reports its work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

via BBC News – ‘Dirty’ stars hint at Sun’s future.

Its billed as the worlds only known example of a dinosaur stampede – but new research is challenging the established version of events at Lark Quarry, in the Australian outback, almost 100 million years ago.Rewind the clocks 95 million years, and imagine the scene.Youre at the edge of a watering hole in what today is north-eastern Australia. And youre not alone.More than 100 little dinosaurs are here, ranging from the size of chickens to ostriches.Theyre drinking peacefully, when – all of a sudden – a giant meat-eating dinosaur tears out of the brush. Its teeth and claws flash as it races in for a meal.The little guys scatter for their lives – their feet digging into the soft mud. Its a dinosaur stampede.”This incident would have taken five minutes, if that. Its a snapshot in time,” says John Taylor, a tour guide at the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, at Lark Quarry in central Queensland.”This event that you can see right here before your eyes, you cannot find anywhere else in the world,” he says, pointing to the fossilised footprints scattered across a giant slab of rock.Thousands of visitors from around the world visit the site each year, and in 2004 it was added to Australias National Heritage list.The tracks were discovered in the 1960s by a quarry manager – who at first thought they must have been bird footprints.Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteIf we simply accept the last 30 years of accepted stampede work is wrong… it really does take the significance out of the site”Scott HocknullQueensland MuseumIn the 1970s, they were recognised as dinosaur tracks, and the area was excavated. More than 60 tonnes of rock were removed, revealing between 3,000 and 4,000 footprints, which in 1984 were identified by scientists as being the result of a dinosaur stampede.The idea of the great stampede entered into dinosaur folklore. The Australian Department of the Environment says it provides “scientific underpinning” for the stampede scene in Spielbergs Jurassic Park – though a consultant who worked on the film denies it was the inspiration.”Stampeding dinosaurs is a fantastic story,” says Anthony Romilio, a graduate palaeontology student at the University of Queensland – and the young scientist now leading the challenge to the established version of events.”People love dinosaurs – and whats more exciting than having hundreds of dinosaurs stampeding?”But Romilio says the facts just dont seem to add up, and in a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in January, he and his co-authors argue there never was a stampede at Lark Quarry.

via BBC News – The great dinosaur stampede that never was?.

Three patients in Scotland have died after catching a new strain of the Clostridium difficile C.diff bug.All three were in the same health board area and two of the patients were in the same hospital.Health Protection Scotland HPS said it had identified a novel C.diff strain, designated ribotype 332.HPS said the deaths were the first reported cases in the UK and worldwide and that health officials had been put on alert.The first two cases emerged in December 2012 and January 2013 and the third was identified in another hospital last month.No linkAn HPS spokesman said: “All three cases were severely ill due to other underlying conditions and died following their episode of CDI C. difficile infection.”Other than the shared ribotype, no link has been identified between the cases from the separate hospitals.”HPS said it had alerted clinicians and laboratory staff throughout Scotland.The spokesman said that the identification of a novel ribotype did not require immediate changes to surveillance or antibiotics use and that the same infection prevention and control measures applied.HPS added that new ribotypes have emerged frequently during the past 10 years.

via BBC News – Three die after catching new C. diff strain in Scotland.

The identity is a special case of Euler’s formula from complex analysis, which states that for any real number x:

where the values of the trigonometric functions sine and cosine are given in radians rather than degrees.

In particular, when x = π, or one half-turn (180°) around a circle:

Since

and

it follows that

which yields Euler’s identity:

The physical explanation of Euler’s identity is that it can be viewed as the group-theoretical definition of the number π. The following discussion is at the physical level, but can be made mathematically strict. The “group” is the group of rotations of a plane around 0. In fact, one can write:

with δ being some small angle.

The last equation can be seen as the action of consecutive small shifts along a circle, caused by the application of infinitesimal rotations starting at 1 and continuing through the total length of the arc, connecting points 1 and -1 in the complex plane. Each small shift may then be written as:

and the total number of shifts is π/δ. In order to get from 1 to -1, the total transformation would be:

Taking the limit when δ → 0, denoting iδ = 1/n and the equation , we arrive at Euler’s identity.

π is defined as the total angle which connects 1 to -1 along the arc. Therefore, the relation between π and e arises because a circle can be defined through the action of the group of shifts which preserve the distance between two points on the circle.

This simple argument is the key to understanding other relations involving π and e.

[edit]Generalizations

Euler’s identity is also a special case of the more general identity that the nth roots of unity, for n > 1, add up to 0:

Euler’s identity is the case where n = 2.

In another field of mathematics, by using quaternion exponentiation, one can show that a similar identity also applies to quaternions. Let {i, j, k} be the basis elements, then,

In general, given real a1, a2, and a3 such that , then,

For octonions, with real an such that and the octonion basis elements {i1, i2,…, i7}, then,

via Euler’s identity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The quest to understand why our Universe is made of matter rather than antimatter has received a boost at the Large Hadron Collider.The LHCb experiment has for the first time observed decays of particles known as Bs mesons that preferentially end up as matter, rather than antimatter.However, the difference is still not enough to explain the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the cosmos.The work, published online, has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.Every member of the zoo of particles we know about has an antimatter cousin, identical in every way except for an opposite electric charge – the electrons and protons that in part make us up have positrons and antiprotons as their antimatter matches.The current theory for how the Universe got its start holds that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were initially created. But whenever the two meet, they destroy each other in a flash of light.Simply put, the Universe should have come to a blazing end just then. Something must have made for a slight excess of matter in order to lead to the matter-dominated Universe we see today.It is the subtle details of this preference for matter that the LHCb experiment is hunting for as it tracks particles created when protons are smashed together.Just like the long-running hint for the particle called the Higgs boson, clues arise in the showers of particles created by these violent collisions.Puzzle continuesPrevious work at the LHCb had seen hints of an excess of matter – called CP violation – in combinations of the fundamental particles called quarks.At other experiments around the world, the family of particles called mesons had been tackled, and small amounts of CP violation had been seen in two of the four meson types that have no electric charge.A third type, D0 mesons, showed early hints of CP violation at LHCb in 2011, but more recent studies suggest those hints were mistaken.LHCb, one of six experiments at the LHC, is dedicated to these kinds of studiesThe new work considered the fourth: Bs mesons. The LHCb team tracked how these particles decayed further into either the matter or antimatter version of particles called kaons.”If one decays more often to this final state… than the other one, then it shows a fundamental difference between matter and antimatter,” said Chris Parkes of the University of Manchester, spokesperson for the UK contingent of the LHCb collaboration.”Thats what weve seen – a difference of about one in four of these decays,” he told the BBC.But that difference still neatly fits within existing theory – the Standard Model – leaving a mystery unresolved.”However, the amount that we see is still compatible with the amount inside the Standard Model picture of particle physics, and this amount is just simply too small to explain why were all here, and why everything is still made of matter – so the puzzle still continues.”The answer to that puzzle will require considering different ways in which these particles and others decay into yet more particles from the zoo that may finally show enough CP violation to close the antimatter question.

via BBC News – Antimatter results emerge at LHC – but puzzle abides.

Back at the time of the Big Bang, when the universe sprang into existence, only the simplest elements – hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of lithium – were cooked up. You can’t build a planet from such fluffy stuff. It took the first generation of stars, which formed from these basic building blocks, to synthesize more complicated elements like carbon, oxygen, sulfur and the like via nuclear fusion in their cores.

When the stars exploded as supernovae, not only were these brand new elements blasted into space, but the enormous heat and pressure during the blast built even heavier elements like gold, copper, mercury and lead. All became incorporated in a second generation of stars. And a third.

The 2% of star-made elements, which include carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and silicon among others, went to build the planets and later became essential for life. We’re made of highly processed material you and I. The atoms of our beings have been in and out of the cores of several generations of stars. Think about this good and hard and you might just get in touch with your own “inner star”.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/101552/earth-is-the-most-exotic-place-in-the-universe/#ixzz2QzHXOulb

Earth is the Most Exotic Place In The Universe.

The “extraordinary level of conservation” of genetic data in the tulip tree remains largely unchanged since the dinosaurs, a study suggests.

The species’ genomic change is about 2,000 times slower than in humans, making it a “molecular fossil”, a team of US researchers said.

The new information has affected our understanding of flowering plants’ evolution, they added.

The findings have been published in the open access journal BMC Biology.

The team from the universities of Indiana and Arkansas sequenced the mitochondrial genome of the species (Liriodendron tulipifera), only to discover it had one of the slowest silent mutation rates (a process that does not affect gene function).

They added that the sequencing showed that many of the genes that had been lost during 200 million years of flowering plants’ (angiosperms) evolution had been preserved.

“Based on this, it appears that the genome has been more-or-less frozen in time for millions and millions of years,” explained co-author Prof Jeffrey Palmer.

via BBC News – Tulip tree’s genome is ‘molecular fossil’.

Researchers have revealed the first potential hints of the elusive material called dark matter at an underground laboratory in the US.

Though it is believed to make up a quarter of our Universe, dark matter – true to its name – has never been seen.

Scientists at the American Physical Society meeting showed three promising clues to it from the CDMS experiment.

However, they stressed the preliminary nature of the results and that more data are needed to confirm it.

Physics has a well-defined threshold for claiming that a new particle has been discovered, and this result still falls far short of that.

Nevertheless, given the feverish pitch of the hunt for dark matter – in other underground labs, at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and even in space – these three early hints have caused a stir at the meeting.

“It’s certainly something we want to be investigating,” CDMS collaborator Blas Cabrera of Stanford University told BBC News.

“This is science, and the further tightening up of what we see – or excluding it – is very important for us to do.”

Four-way search

Dark matter is believed to interact only very rarely with the normal matter we know well.

Deep within a mine in the US state of Minnesota, CDMS – which stands for Cryogenic Dark Matter Search – tries to catch those rare interactions as dark matter particles bump into the nuclei of atoms in a detector that is held at temperatures near that of deep space.

Continue reading the main story

Statistics of a ‘discovery’

Particle physics has an accepted definition for a “discovery”: a five-sigma level of certainty

The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance, in the absence of a real effect

Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a “loaded” coin

The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing nine heads in a row

Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 21 in a row

With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries

The facility reported two potential dark matter sightings in 2010, but those later turned out to come from the instrument itself.

The new results – to be posted to the preprint server Arxiv – show three signals that should only have a 0.19% chance of showing up if there were no particle causing them, around the level of what physicists call a “three-sigma” result.

via BBC News – Dark matter experiment CDMS sees three tentative clues.