‘Magnetricity’ Observed And Measured For First Time

A magnetic charge can behave and interact just like an electric charge in some materials, according to new research led by the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN).

The findings could lead to a reassessment of current magnetism theories, as well as significant technological advances.

The research, published in Nature, proves the existence of atom-sized ‘magnetic charges’ that behave and interact just like more familiar electric charges. It also demonstrates a perfect symmetry between electricity and magnetism – a phenomenon dubbed ‘magnetricity’ by the authors from the LCN and the Science and Technology Facility Council’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source.

In order to prove experimentally the existence of magnetic current for the first time, the team mapped Onsager’s 1934 theory of the movement of ions in water onto magnetic currents in a material called spin ice. They then tested the theory by applying a magnetic field to a spin ice sample at a very low temperature and observing the process using muons at ISIS.

The experiment allowed the team to detect magnetic charges in the spin ice (Dy2Ti2O7), to measure their currents, and to determine the elementary unit of the magnetic charge in the material. The monopoles they observed arise as disturbances of the magnetic state of the spin ice, and can exist only inside the material.

Professor Steve Bramwell, LCN co-author of the paper, said: “Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist in 1931, but despite many searches, they have never yet been observed as freely roaming elementary particles. These monopoles do at least exist within the spin ice sample, but not outside.

“It is not often in the field of physics you get the chance to ask ‘How do you measure something?’ and then go on to prove a theory unequivocally. This is a very important step to establish that magnetic charge can flow like electric charge. It is in the early stages, but who knows what the applications of magnetricity could be in 100 years time.”

via ‘Magnetricity’ Observed And Measured For First Time.

Chimpanzees Help Each Other On Request But Not Voluntarily

The evolution of altruism has long puzzled researchers and has mainly been explained previously from ultimate perspectives—”I will help you now because I expect there to be some long-term benefit to me”. However, a new study by researchers at the Primate Research Institute (PRI) and the Wildlife Research Center (WRC) of Kyoto University shows that chimpanzees altruistically help conspecifics, even in the absence of direct personal gain or immediate reciprocation, although the chimpanzees were much more likely to help each other upon request than voluntarily.

The findings are published October 14 in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Shinya Yamamoto and colleagues studied six pairs of chimpanzees (three mother-offspring pairs and three non-kin adult pairs) in two different experiments, designed to test whether the chimpanzees would transfer a tool to a conspecific even if doing so would bring no immediate benefit to themselves. In each case, two chimpanzees would be situated in two adjacent, transparent booths, either in a straw-use situation where the chimpanzee would need access to a straw to be able to drink the juice box available to it, or in a stick-use situation where the chimpanzee would need access to a stick to drag a juice reward back into the booth.

In the first experiment, the two chimpanzees would have access to the opposite tool needed to obtain the reward in their booth—the chimpanzee that needed the straw would have access to the stick and vice-versa. In the second experiment, the mother-offspring pairs were tested in a situation where there was no opportunity for reciprocation because each individual was assigned a fixed role—giver or recipient—for 24 trials (one week’s worth) before the roles were reversed.

The researchers found that the chimpanzees did spontaneously transfer tools in order to help their partner. This tool transfer occurred predominantly after the partner had actively solicited help (by poking its arm through a hole in the booth, for example, or by clapping), even when there was no hope of reciprocation from the partner (as in experiment 2) and even when the two animals were unrelated

via Chimpanzees Help Each Other On Request But Not Voluntarily.

This actually sounds like a well evolved code of conduct. Don’t help me unless I ask for it. To do otherwise infringes on my rights.  Can you think of any situation where you would disagree with this system?

Halloween fake spiders ‘could scare arachnophobic man to death’

John Stafford, a man who suffers from debilitating arachnophobia, has said that Halloween could scare him to death.

Mr Stafford, 54, of Scarborough, claims he has such a bad fear of spiders that his doctor has told him even fake rubber ones displayed in shop windows could give him a fatal heart attack because his heart is so badly bruised.

He said he is so terrified of spotting an arachnid that he is forced to stay indoors on Halloween.

Describing his reaction when he sees a spider, he said: “I stop breathing and pass out, it’s just terrifying.”

Mr Stafford added that he had tried everything from hypnosis to pills to cure his lifelong fear, but without success.

His wife Maria, 44, described the moment she feared for her husband’s life after he saw some spiders in a shop window display, saying he passed out and slumped against her before she was able to bring him round.

She added: “I’ve known my husband since I was four years old and I don’t want to bury him now.”

via Halloween fake spiders ‘could scare arachnophobic man to death’ – Telegraph.

Tongue stud ‘brain fatality risk’

Deadly brain abscesses should be added to the list of risks of having a tongue piercing, say doctors.

Archives of Neurology reports how a 22-year-old man who died in hospital following multiple brain abscesses weeks after getting his tongue pierced.

The man’s Israeli doctors warn infection can spread in the bloodstream from the piercing up to the brain.

Piercing can more commonly lead to chipped teeth and oral infections, and sometimes heart problems, say experts.

Despite the risks, tongue piercings remain popular.

Celebrities like Spice Girl Mel B and Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips have had their tongues pierced.

But experts say people should think twice and put their health before fashion.

Professor Damien Walmsley, scientific adviser to the British Dental Association, said: “Dentists are all too aware of the health problems that can be caused by oral piercings.

“There are many potential complications, ranging from pain and swelling to chipped or cracked teeth. Patients who have oral piercings can also suffer with recession of the gums and prolonged bleeding.

“Piercing of oral sites also carries with it a risk of infection. The clear message is that oral piercing is ill advised and should be avoided.”

Problems associated with body piercing can be down to poor hygiene during the procedure or people failing to heed advice about follow-up care at home.

Professional piercers maintain that hygienic, precision piercing rarely causes complications.

via BBC NEWS | Health | Tongue stud ‘brain fatality risk’.

Powerful drug called Placebo reduces real pain

People who think a placebo treatment for pain is working in fact experience reduced pain signaling in their spinal cord, according to a new study.

A placebo is a treatment that is thought to have no effect and which is often given to study participants as a control, to compare the effects of “nothing” to the effects of an actual treatment. But studies in the past have shown that, inexplicably, placebos can have positive effects.

The new results suggest that the pain-related placebo effect may work by tapping into a pain-suppressing system already in place in the body, one that starts in the brain and relays down to the spinal cord.

Scientist know that when people experience a decrease in pain from a placebo, certain compounds, called endorphins, are released in their brains. But they don’t know exactly how the release of those compounds leads to pain reduction.

One idea is that the endorphins allow certain parts of the brain to “communicate with an evolutionarily preserved system in the brain stem,” one that controls pain by inhibiting neural activity in the spinal cord, said Falk Eippert, a researcher from the Department of Systems Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany.

Eippert and his colleagues tested this hypothesis in a group of 15 volunteers. The subjects were told they would receive a painful heat stimulation on their forearm, and during the stimulation, their arms would be treated with one of two possible creams – one which was an active, pain-relieving cream, (called a lidocaine cream) and the other which was an inactive control. In truth, both creams were inactive and were not designed to reduce pain in any way.

First, the researchers applied the full heat stimulation to the subjects’ forearms that had been treated with the control cream. But when they tested the so-called “lidocaine” cream, they reduced the heat temperature so the subjects felt less pain, a trick designed to make the volunteers think that the “lidocaine” cream actually had an effect.

“We wanted to induce a belief in the effectiveness of this treatment, the cream, although it doesn’t have an effectiveness, per se,” said Eippert.

Then, the researchers ran the heat-stimulation experiment again, but this time, they did not reduce the heat temperature during the “lidocaine” treatment. During the heat stimulation experiment, the team studied the volunteers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the spinal cord response.

The fMRI images can show the amount of oxygenation in the blood, which is an indirect measure of the spinal cord’s neural activity.

When the subjects were given the control cream, they reported a lot of pain, and showed strong activity in their spinal cord. But when the volunteers received the so-called “lidocaine” treatment, which they thought was real but which was in fact a placebo, they reported less pain and showed less activity in their spinal cord. This suggests that “there must be some inhibition [coming] from the brain,” said Eippert.

The researchers believe the placebo effect works by recruiting the ancient pain-suppressing system.

“What we can now show is that, in humans, this system is brought into play by psychological factors such as expectation of pain relief under placebo,” said Eippert. Moreover, it shows that the placebo effect is something very profound, he said, “It’s not just altered reporting behavior, it’s a very deeply rooted effect.” …

via How Fake Treatments Reduce Real Pain – Yahoo! News.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said. Bardwell estimates that he has refused to marry about four couples during his career, all in the past 2 1/2 years.

Beth Humphrey, 30, and 32-year-old Terence McKay, both of Hammond, say they will consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint.

Humphrey, an account manager for a marketing firm, said she and McKay, a welder, just returned to Louisiana. She plans to enroll in the University of New Orleans to pursue a masters degree in minority politics.

“That was one thing that made this so unbelievable,” she said. “It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

via Interracial couple denied marriage license in La. – Yahoo! News.

Tabloids duped by celebrity hoaxes

filmmaker duped some of the country’s top tabloid newspapers into printing fake stories about celebrities, including one about Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, he said on Thursday.

Chris Atkins and his team put in hoax calls to some newsrooms, including that one girl band singer was a physics wizard, only to see the details printed — unchecked — in the press the next day.

Among the celebrity ‘sightings’ they invented was a tale about how troubled singer Winehouse had been playing music with friends when the fuse blew and set fire to her hair in its trademark beehive style.

The story appeared in two major tabloid papers, before being splashed across the Internet, Atkins told the Guardian.

“We wanted to test how much truth there is in much of the celebrity stories that now completely dominate all areas of our news media,” said the director, who details the team’s two-year investigations in a new movie, “Starsuckers”.

“And we specifically wanted to see how much journalists fact-checked their stories. So in order to do this, we made some stories up.

“We made up a whole range of crazy tales of celebrity mishap and tried to see how easy it would be to get these into the tabloid press.

“On no account were any of the stories we sold and were printed fact-checked in any way. They could’ve been fact-checked and they would have shown to be the nonsense they were within minutes.”

In another incident, one of Atkins’ colleagues called a best-selling newspaper pretending to be the wife of a furniture removal man who said he had helped Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud to move house.

She detailed how the blonde singer had lots of books on quantum physics and a telescope at home, sparking headlines that “Sarah’s a boffin” and prompting a flurry of stories across the world.

Atkins insisted that despite being offered money for the stories, his team was never paid for their work — although he recommended selling fake stories to the tabloids as an easy way to make a quick buck during the recession.

via Tabloids duped by celebrity hoaxes – Yahoo! News.

Quantum computer chips now 1 step closer to reality

In the quest for smaller, faster computer chips, researchers are increasingly turning to quantum mechanics — the exotic physics of the small.

The problem: the manufacturing techniques required to make quantum devices have been equally exotic.

That is, until now.

Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered a way to make quantum devices using technology common to the chip-making industry today.

This work might one day enable faster, low-power computer chips. It could also lead to high-resolution cameras for security and public safety, and cameras that provide clear vision through bad weather.

Paul Berger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and professor of physics at Ohio State University, and his colleagues report their findings in an upcoming issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters.

The team fabricated a device called a tunneling diode using the most common chip-making technique, called chemical vapor deposition.

“We wanted to do this using only the tools found in the typical chip-makers toolbox,” Berger said. “Here we have a technique that manufacturers could potentially use to fabricate quantum devices directly on a silicon chip, side-by-side with their regular circuits and switches.”

The quantum device in question is a resonant interband tunneling diode (RITD) — a device that enables large amounts of current to be regulated through a circuit, but at very low voltages. That means that such devices run on very little power.

RITDs have been difficult to manufacture because they contain dopants — chemical elements — that don’t easily fit within a silicon crystal.

Atoms of the RITD dopants antimony or phosphorus, for example, are large compared to atoms of silicon. Because they don’t fit into the natural openings inside a silicon crystal, the dopants tend to collect on the surface of a chip.

“It’s like when you’re playing Tetris and you have a big block raining down, and only a small square to fit it in. The block has to sit on top,” Berger said. “When you’re building up layers of silicon, these dopants don’t readily fit in. Eventually, they clump together on top of the chip.”

In the past, researchers have tried adding the dopants while growing the silicon wafer one crystal layer at a time — using a slow and expensive process called molecular beam epitaxy, a method which is challenging for high-volume manufacturing. That process also creates too many defects within the silicon.

Berger discovered that RITD dopants could be added during chemical vapor deposition, in which a gas carries the chemical elements to the surface of a wafer many layers at a time. The key was determining the right reactor conditions to deliver the dopants to the silicon, he found.

“One key is hydrogen,” he said. “It binds to the silicon surface and keeps the dopants from clumping. So you don’t have to grow chips at 320 degrees Celsius [approximately 600 degrees Fahrenheit] like you do when using molecular beam epitaxy. You can actually grow them at a higher temperature like 600 degrees Celsius [more than 1100 degrees Fahrenheit] at a lower cost, and with fewer crystal defects.”

Tunneling diodes are so named because they exploit a quantum mechanical effect known as tunneling, which lets electrons pass through thin barriers unhindered.

In theory, interband tunneling diodes could form very dense, very efficient micro-circuits in computer chips. A large amount of data could be stored in a small area on a chip with very little energy required. …

via Quantum computer chips now 1 step closer to reality.

Bumbling thieves steal rare goat-sheep in Volkswagen hatchback

THEIVES who stole a handful of incredibly rare goat-sheep were left red-faced today – when police said they would be stuck with them forever.

The mountain beasts – which look like a goat at the front and a sheep at the rear – are so rare there are only a few hundred left in the world.

And, because they are so unusual, every single one on the planet is easily identifiable.

A police spokesman in Dillenburg, Germany, said: “It’s very likely they weren’t professional rustlers because they used a Volkswagen hatchback to transport them.

“They will find them almost impossible to sell on because every single one of them is accounted for around the world.”

The shaggy coated Schwarzhalsziegen were originally bred to survive hard frozen winters in mountain farms around Germany, reports the Austrian Times.

via Daily Express | Odd News :: Bumbling thieves steal rare goat-sheep in Volkswagen hatchback.

Oh yes my friend, the Schwarzhalsziegen are quite real.

NASA spacecraft provides first view of our place in the galaxy

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The new view will change the way researchers view and study the interaction between our galaxy and sun.

The sky map was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations. The detectors measured and counted particles scientists refer to as energetic neutral atoms.

The energetic neutral atoms are created in an area of our solar system known as the interstellar boundary region. This region is where charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, flow outward far beyond the orbits of the planets and collide with material between stars. The energetic neutral atoms travel inward toward the sun from interstellar space at velocities ranging from 100,000 mph to more than 2.4 million mph. This interstellar boundary emits no light that can be collected by conventional telescopes.

The new map reveals the region that separates the nearest reaches of our galaxy, called the local interstellar medium, from our heliosphere — a protective bubble that shields and protects our solar system from most of the dangerous cosmic radiation traveling through space.

“For the first time, we’re sticking our heads out of the sun’s atmosphere and beginning to really understand our place in the galaxy,” said David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with a narrow ribbon of bright details or emissions not resembling any of the current theoretical models of this region.”

NASA released the sky map image Oct. 15 in conjunction with publication of the findings in the journal Science. The IBEX data were complemented and extended by information collected using an imaging instrument sensor on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Cassini has been observing Saturn, its moons and rings since the spacecraft entered the planet’s orbit in 2004.

The IBEX sky maps also put observations from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft into context. The twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, traveled to the outer solar system to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In 2007, Voyager 2 followed Voyager 1 into the interstellar boundary. Both spacecraft are now in the midst of this region where the energetic neutral atoms originate. However, the IBEX results show a ribbon of bright emissions undetected by the two Voyagers.

“The Voyagers are providing ground truth, but they’re missing the most exciting region,” said Eric Christian, the IBEX deputy mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It’s like having two weather stations that miss the big storm that runs between them.”

via NASA spacecraft provides first view of our place in the galaxy.