BIG UPDATE!

Physicist Create a Fluid With Negative Mass

Physicists from Washington State university have created a liquid with negative mass meaning that when you push it, instead of accelerating in that direction, it accelerates backwards.

Matter can have a negative mass much the same way that particles can be negatively charged. Newton’s second law of motion (F=ma) tells us that mass will accelerate in the direction of the force so we can deduce that matter with a negative mass would do the opposite and accelerate against the force.

To create the conditions for negative mass, Peter Engels and his team started by cooling rubidium atoms to a Bose-Einstein condensate meaning they reached very near absolute 0. The researchers used lasers to trap the atoms in an area less than 100 microns across and allow high energy particles to escape cooling them further. Then to create negative mass, the physicists applied a second set of lasers to change the way atoms spin back and forth. They then removed the first set of lasers causing the rubidium to rush out and appear to hit some sort of invisible wall; behaving as if it had a negative mass.

What’s great about this is the control we have over the negative mass without any other complications. This gives us a new tool we can use to engineer experiments in astrophysics looking at neutron stars, black holes, dark energy and a lot more.

6 TED-Ed lessons to watch on International Women’s Day

Happy International Women’s Day! Here’s a list of TED-Ed Lessons to watch as you celebrate all of the world’s women, past and present.

The genius of Marie Curie: Marie Skłodowska Curie’s revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. But what did she actually do? Shohini Ghose expounds on some of Marie Skłodowska Curie’s most revolutionary discoveries.

The contributions of female explorers: During the Victorian Age, women were unlikely to become great explorers, but a few intelligent, gritty and brave women made major contributions to the study of previously little-understood territory. Courtney Stephens examines three women – Marianne North, Mary Kingsley and Alexandra David-Néel – who wouldn’t take no for an answer (and shows why we should be grateful that they didn’t).

Equality, sports and Title IX: In 1972, U.S. Congress passed Title IX, a law which prohibited discrimination against women in schools, colleges, and universities — including school-sponsored sports. Before this law, female athletes were few and far between, and funding was even scarcer. Erin Buzuvis and Kristine Newhall explore the significance and complexity of Title IX.

The true story of Sacajawea: In the early 19th century, a young Agaidika teenager named Sacajawea was enlisted by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to aid her husband Toussaint Charbonneau as a guide to the Western United States. Karen Mensing debunks some of the myths that surround the familiar image of the heroic woman with a baby strapped to her back and a vast knowledge of the American wilderness.

Why should you read Virginia Woolf?: How best can we understand the internal experience of alienation? In both her essays and her fiction, Virginia Woolf shapes the slippery nature of subjective experience into words, while her characters frequently lead inner lives that are deeply at odds with their external existence. Iseult Gillespie helps make sense of these disparities to prepare you for the next time you read Virgina Woolf.

The pharaoh that wouldn’t be forgotten: Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh during the New Kingdom in Egypt. Twenty years after her death, somebody smashed her statues, took a chisel and attempted to erase the pharaoh’s name and image from history. But who did it? And why? Kate Green investigates Hatshepsut’s history for clues to this ancient puzzle. 

The quest to crystallize time

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not.

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.

The name sounds like a prop from Doctor Who, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy — like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek proposed the provocative concept1 in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.

But there was a loophole — and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2 (see ‘How to create a time crystal’). “I would say it sort of fell in our laps,” says Monroe.

And a group led by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, independently fashioned time crystals out of 'dirty’ diamonds3. Both versions, which are published this week in Nature, are considered time crystals, but not how Wilczek originally imagined. “It’s less weird than the first idea, but it’s still fricking weird,” says Norman Yao, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author on both papers.

Continue Reading.

Since I get asked a lot about where to learn more about the human brain and behaviour, I’ve made a masterpost of books, websites, videos and online courses to introduce yourself to that piece of matter that sits between your ears.

Books

The Brain Book  by Rita Carter

The Pyschology Book (a good starter book)  by DK

Thinking, Fast and Slow  by Daniel Kahneman

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking  by Susan Cain

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  by Oliver Sacks

The Brain: The Story of You  by David Eagleman

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science  by Norman Doidge

This Is Your Brain on Music  by Daniel Levitin

The Autistic Brain by Richard Panek and Temple Grandin (highly reccomended)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  by Yuval Noah Harari (not really brain-related, but it is single handedly the best book I have ever read)

Websites

@tobeagenius (shameless self-promotion)

How Stuff Works

Psych2Go

BrainFacts

Neuroscience for Kids (aimed at kids, but it has some good info)

New Scientist

National Geographic

Live Science

Videos & Youtube Channels

Mind Matters series by TedEd

Crash Course Psychology

SciShow Brain

Psych2Go TV

asapSCIENCE

Brain Craft

Its Okay To Be Smart

Online Courses

The Addicted Brain

Visual Perception and The Brain

Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life

Pyschology Of Popularity

Harvard Fundamentals Of Neuroscience

Important Terms

For approaching Religious and Anthropological Studies:

Cultural Relativism:

“The ability to view the beliefs and customs of other peoples within the context of their own cultures rather than one’s own; or, describing another culture from its own point of view without imposing one’s own cultural values.” Look at what people BELIEVE, not whether or not what they believe is “true.”

Ethnocentrism (the opposite of cultural relativism):

“The tendency to judge the customs of other societies by the standards of one’s own; combines the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture with the practice of judging other cultures by the standards and values of one’s own culture.”

Harnessing ethnocentric ideas when approaching religious and cultural studies will hinder one from truly being able to learn and understand other peoples and their cultures. 

Luminol is a chemical that can be used to show trace amounts of blood by creating a light producing chemical reaction when mixed with hemoglobin.

Luminol powder is mixed into a liquid containing hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals. This mixture will then be sprayed over the area that is being examined.

The reaction of the Luminol spray mixing with the iron in blood will then produce a blue glow that can be seen in a dark room.

Other substances that can accidentally have the same reaction with Luminol are: bleach, urine, faeces & horseradish.

Unfortunately Luminol can destroy other crime scene evidence so it is usually used after other options have been explored.

We’re used to radiation being invisible. With a Geiger counter, it gets turned into audible clicks. What you see above, though, is radiation’s effects made visible in a cloud chamber. In the center hangs a chunk of radioactive uranium, spitting out alpha and beta particles. The chamber also has a reservoir of alcohol and a floor cooled to -40 degrees Celsius. This generates a supersaturated cloud of alcohol vapor. When the uranium spits out a particle, it zips through the vapor, colliding with atoms and ionizing them. Those now-charged ions serve as nuclei for the vapor, which condenses into droplets that reveal the path of the particle. The characteristics of the trails are distinct to the type of decay particle that created them. In fact, both the positron and muon were first discovered in cloud chambers! (Image credit: Cloudylabs, source)

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

– Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Climate Change