Blog

(Phys.org) —Last week was a big one for space science, as it was announced that astronomers created the first realistic virtual universe—a computer simulation called “Illustris” that is able to recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube, with 350 million light-years represented on a side.

Bad bacteria could soon have no place left to hide, thanks to new materials that turn the cell’s own defenses against them. Scientists at The University of Nottingham and GSK Consumer Healthcare have developed a technique that could locate the potential source of an infection by hijacking the normal processes of pathogens, thus revealing their location

(Phys.org) —Physicists Joseph Silk of Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and Jens Chluba of Johns Hopkins University have together published a Perspective piece in the journal Science, where they discuss the future of cosmological research in the wake of the detection two month ago, of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). They suggest several possibilities and detail the pros and cons of each.

The University of Texas at San Antonio announced today that the Cloud and BigData Laboratory in the UTSA College of Sciences is launching one of the largest Open Clouds in academia with initial 6600 COREs utilizing OpenStack software, co-founded by Rackspace, and Open Compute hardware, founded by Facebook, to support advanced computing and big data analytics research.

“What a curious feeling,” says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale, as she shrinks to a fraction of her size, and everything around her suddenly looks totally unfamiliar. Scientists too have to get used to these curious feelings when they examine matter on tiny scales and at low temperatures: all the behaviour we are used to seeing around us is turned on its head.

The Internet has fallen in love with place. From wildly popular Instagrammers like the photographer behind Humans of New York, to globe-trotters leaving digital travel notes on the story-sharing site Findery, to cloud-based services that help brands pitch themselves through location-based storytelling, the digital masses have discovered the thrill of writing about where they’re at.

To catalogue more than 12,000 lakes and lagoons in Mongolia’s steppe, to identify new Entomostraca species and to develop strategies to diagnose the state of lakes in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe are the main scientific challenges faced by the Limnological Catalogue of Mongolian Lakes, a project led by researcher Miquel Alonso, who collaborates with the Department of Ecology of the University of Barcelona and studies the limnology of lakes.

(Phys.org) —The Human Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon, led by the group’s director Chris Harrison, an assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction, have done work that shows how traditional hand movements to perform tasks such as measuring and erasing can be naturally applied to the digital screen, improving on a natural interaction with computers. They have come up with TouchTools, a gesture design approach.

(Phys.org) —Two teams of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three distant exploding stars that have been magnified by the immense gravity of foreground galaxy clusters, which act like “cosmic lenses”. These supernovae are the first of their type ever to be observed magnified in this way and they offer astronomers a powerful tool to check the prescription of these massive lenses.

Alaska’s seismic network records thousands of quakes produced by glaciers, capturing valuable data that scientists could use to better understand their behavior, but instead their seismic signals are set aside as oddities. The current earthquake monitoring system could be “tweaked” to target the dynamic movement of the state’s glaciers, suggests State Seismologist Michael West, who will present his research today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).