http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (Phys.org) -- Research into quantum bits (qubits) for use in a quantum computer has become tied to entanglement, the still mysterious phenomenon whereby subatomic particles exist in an entangled state such that any change to one happens simultaneously to the other, without communication or the passage of time. The reason entanglement of qubits is so important to the future of a quantum computer is because they are able to represent both a “1” and “0” state at the same time and because actions that cause a change in one entangled particle also cause the same change in its partner, theoretically allowing for processing speeds to increase exponentially when adding more entangled qubits. Thus far though, attempts to create entangled particles inside of a semiconductor material have been difficult to measure, and thus verify, due to their short lives. http://phys.org/news253530437.html Physics Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:40:01 EST news253530437 (PhysOrg.com) -- There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this "dark matter" really is. Many scientists think it's likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it. http://phys.org/news252607920.html Space & Earth Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:52:19 EST news252607920 Seven years ago, astronomers boggled when they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour. The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets? http://phys.org/news251632538.html Space & Earth Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:55:56 EST news251632538 (PhysOrg.com) -- Just as firemen use different methods to narrow the location of a person trapped in a building, scientists employ two techniques to find the hiding place of the theorized Higgs particle: direct searches for Higgs interactions and precision measurements of other particles and forces. http://phys.org/news249240191.html Physics Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:23:30 EST news249240191 Accelerating subatomic particles to almost the speed of light and then crashing them together reveals much about the nature of the matter. Nuclear physicists need to fully understand these complex collisions if they are to make sense of the large volume of experimental data the world’s particle accelerators generate every year. RIKEN scientists Zhong-Bo Kang and Feng Yuan, and their colleague Bo-Wen Xiao from Penn State University, USA, have presented a new theoretical framework that should accurately model one important type of interaction in particular: proton collisions.  http://phys.org/news248692199.html Physics Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:40:03 EST news248692199 (PhysOrg.com) -- In the basement of Hoyt Laboratory at Princeton University, Alexei Tyryshkin clicked a computer mouse and sent a burst of microwaves washing across a silicon crystal suspended in a frozen cylinder of stainless steel. http://phys.org/news245567380.html Physics Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:12:53 EST news245567380 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover has begun monitoring space radiation during its 8-month trip from Earth to Mars. The research will aid in planning for future human missions to the Red Planet. http://phys.org/news243069275.html Space & Earth Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:14:41 EST news243069275 (PhysOrg.com) -- In early November 1572, observers on Earth witnessed the appearance of a "new star" in the constellation Cassiopeia, an event now recognized as the brightest naked-eye supernova in more than 400 years. It's often called "Tycho's supernova" after the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who gained renown for his extensive study of the object. Now, years of data collected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope reveal that the shattered star's remains shine in high-energy gamma rays. http://phys.org/news243018275.html Space & Earth Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:05:12 EST news243018275 Scientists are quivering with anticipation - flying halfway around the world for a close-up view of the action and devouring the latest updates from the blogosphere the way some girls track the doings of Justin Bieber. http://phys.org/news242917320.html Physics Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:10:01 EST news242917320 (PhysOrg.com) -- The constellation Cygnus, now visible in the western sky as twilight deepens after sunset, hosts one of our galaxy's richest-known stellar construction zones. Astronomers viewing the region at visible wavelengths see only hints of this spectacular activity thanks to a veil of nearby dust clouds forming the Great Rift, a dark lane that splits the Milky Way, a faint band of light marking our galaxy's central plane. http://phys.org/news241721228.html Space & Earth Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:47:26 EST news241721228 Help to unravel the mysteries of the Universe! With the SixTrack project developed by EPFL, your computer can provide CERN with additional computing power. http://phys.org/news238666297.html Physics Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:12:05 EST news238666297 (PhysOrg.com) -- A simple atomic nucleus could reveal properties associated with the mysterious phenomenon known as time reversal and lead to an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. http://phys.org/news237536324.html Physics Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:18:54 EST news237536324 (AP) -- Aside from the slogan on the water tower that reads "City of Energy," there is little in this leafy Chicago suburb of gently rolling hills to indicate that it has been the center of the universe when it comes to studying, well - the universe. http://phys.org/news236448465.html Physics Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:07:56 EST news236448465 The news media were abuzz this week with reports of experiments conducted at the Gran Sasso particle detector complex in Italy, apparently showing subatomic particles called neutrinos had traveled from the giant particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva, to the Italian detector at a speed just slightly faster than the speed of light -- a result that, if correct, would overturn more than a century of accepted physics theory. Professor of Physics Peter Fisher, head of MIT's Particle and Nuclear Experimental Physics division, answered some questions about these new findings. http://phys.org/news236236993.html Physics Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:23:33 EST news236236993 One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein's theory of relativity - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world's foremost laboratories. http://phys.org/news235921802.html Physics Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:55:15 EST news235921802 Beginning Sunday, September 18, 2011 at NASA's launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, space scientists from the University of New Hampshire will attempt to send a balloon up to 130,000 feet with a one-ton instrument payload to measure gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, the remains of a supernova explosion that lies 6,500 light years from Earth. The launch is highly dependent on weather and wind conditions, and the launch window closes at the end of next week. http://phys.org/news235410839.html Space & Earth Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:54:25 EST news235410839 (PhysOrg.com) -- Cooks think of watched pots. Handymen grumble about drying paint. Kids dread the endless night before Christmas morning. http://phys.org/news234778339.html Physics Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:12:34 EST news234778339 (PhysOrg.com) -- A galaxy with a combination of characteristics never seen before is giving astronomers a tantalizing peek at processes they believe played key roles in the growth of galaxies and clusters of galaxies early in the history of the Universe. http://phys.org/news233497709.html Space & Earth Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:28:39 EST news233497709 Scientists at a meeting in Grenoble, France, recently stoked speculation that physicists at the world's biggest particle accelerator may soon provide a first look at the elusive Higgs boson - the final piece of evidence needed to prove that the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains the behavior of subatomic particles, is correct. http://phys.org/news232812529.html Physics Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:50:01 EST news232812529 Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist. http://phys.org/news231506652.html Space & Earth Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:00:44 EST news231506652 Hundreds of physicists from around the world are making plans to shoot the world's most intense beam of neutrinos from Illinois, underground through Iowa, all the way to a former gold mine in South Dakota. And Iowa State University's Mayly Sanchez is part of the research team. http://phys.org/news230199255.html Physics Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:14:33 EST news230199255 Every Friday afternoon for several years in the 1970s, a group of underemployed quantum physicists met at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in Northern California, to talk about a subject so peculiar it was rarely discussed in mainstream science: entanglement. Did subatomic particles influence each other from a distance? What were the implications? http://phys.org/news228379180.html Physics Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:40:06 EST news228379180 (PhysOrg.com) -- Neutron stars are the unimaginably dense corpses of what were once much more massive stars that died while being ripped apart in a supernova explosion. Their average density is typically more than one billion tons per teaspoonful, even denser than the nucleus of an atom that is composed of protons and neutrons. Because these densities can never be reproduced on the Earth, these objects are great extraterrestrial laboratories for the study of how matter and exotic particles behave under extreme conditions. http://phys.org/news226050124.html Space & Earth Tue, 31 May 2011 08:42:23 EST news226050124 (AP) -- A mammoth cosmic ray detector arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday, a $2 billion experiment that will search the invisible universe and help explain how everything came to be. http://phys.org/news224958749.html Space & Earth Wed, 18 May 2011 17:33:14 EST news224958749 The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will revolutionize what we know about invisible cosmic rays the same way NASA's Hubble Space Telescope rewrote what we know about the visible universe says the intellectual force behind the instrument. The AMS is to launch on space shuttle Endeavour in April. http://phys.org/news224935000.html Space & Earth Wed, 18 May 2011 10:57:24 EST news224935000 When high mass stars end their lives, they explode in monumental supernovae. But, when the most massive of these monsters die, theory has predicted that they may not even reveal as much as a whimper as their massive cores implode. Instead, the implosion occurs so quickly, that the rebound and all photons created during it, are immediately swallowed into the newly formed black hole. Estimates have suggested that as much as 20% of stars that are massive enough to form supernovae collapse directly into a black hole without an explosion. These "failed supernovae" would simply disappear from the sky leaving such predictions seemingly impossible to verify. But a new paper explores the potential for neutrinos, subatomic particles that rarely interact with normal matter, could escape during the collapse, and be detected, heralding the death of a giant. http://phys.org/news221140089.html Space & Earth Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:48:28 EST news221140089 (PhysOrg.com) -- Data collected by the BaBar experiment during its final months of operation in 2008 point to a new member of the "bottomonium" family of subatomic particles. BaBar collaboration member and SLAC physicist Valentina Santoro presented the results on behalf of the collaboration last month at the Lake Louise Winter Institute, a yearly conference held at Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada. The discovery adds another piece to physicists' model of the so-called "strong" force, which binds subatomic particles into larger chunks of matter. http://phys.org/news220863119.html Physics Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:52:15 EST news220863119 Using data from experiments performed in 2010 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists are studying rare particle decays that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter. http://phys.org/news220625632.html Physics Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:55:21 EST news220625632 (PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists are closer than ever to finding the source of the Universe's mysterious dark matter, following a better than expected year of research at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector, part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. http://phys.org/news215287580.html Physics Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:29:03 EST news215287580 An extraordinary underground observatory for subatomic particles has been completed in a huge cube of ice one kilometre on each side deep under the South Pole, researchers said. http://phys.org/news212337965.html Physics Thu, 23 Dec 2010 14:46:18 EST news212337965