Evidence for cosmic inflation wanes | Science/AAAS | News

Evidence for cosmic inflation wanes | Science/AAAS | News: Now, researchers from the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft have shown that radiation from dust in our galaxy accounts for some, and possibly all, of the BICEP signal.

Cool your jets: NASA's quantum spaceship is doubtful - space - 06 August 2014 - New Scientist

Cool your jets: NASA's quantum spaceship is doubtful - space - 06 August 2014 - New Scientist: ...as Baez points out, this new device in question wasn't even tested in a vacuum! That's extremely important; assuming the measurements are real, the thrust seen could be due to air being warmed up and moving around.

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine

Don't Get Too Excited About NASA's New Miracle Engine: [The researchers] hook up a gizmo with all sorts of electromagnetic fields fluctuating around, then claim to measure an extremely tiny thrust (about the weight of a single grain of sand), which occurs even for the test article that wasn't supposed to produce any thrust at all.

Big Bang breakthrough team back-pedals on major result - physics-math - 19 June 2014 - New Scientist

Big Bang breakthrough team back-pedals on major result - physics-math - 19 June 2014 - New Scientist: The paper published today is significant because it is the first time the researchers themselves have dialled back on their original claims...

"It seems that real data from Planck is indicating that these dust models are under-estimates," says Pryke. "The prior knowledge of dust at these latitudes in our field of view has gone up and so the confidence in the gravitational wave component has gone down."

The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net

The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net: "For all the networks we studied, for each sample, we always manage to generate very close, visually indistinguishable, adversarial examples that are misclassified by the original network."
To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them. You can have two photos that look not only like a cat but the same cat, indeed the same photo, to a human, but the machine gets one right and the other wrong.

The Major Blunders That Held Back Progress in Modern Astronomy� — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium

The Major Blunders That Held Back Progress in Modern Astronomy� — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium: “A very common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce,” says Loeb...

In 1952, the Russian-American astronomer Otto Struve suggested that close-in planets may exist and would be easy to spot but his paper was ignored because of exactly the same prejudices.

Backlash to Big Bang Discovery Gathers Steam - Scientific American

Backlash to Big Bang Discovery Gathers Steam - Scientific American: Spergel also says the BICEP2 team evidently failed to factor in contamination from the cosmic infrared background radiation that comes from distant, dusty galaxies. “When you do that,” Spergel says, “it’s probably enough to account for the entire signal they’re seeing.

Blockbuster Big Bang Result May Fizzle, Rumor Suggests | Science/AAAS | News

Blockbuster Big Bang Result May Fizzle, Rumor Suggests | Science/AAAS | News: To subtract the galactic foreground, BICEP researchers relied on a particular map of it generated by the European Space Agency's spacecraft Planck, which mapped the CMB across the entire sky from 2009 until last year. However, the BICEP team apparently interpreted the map as showing only the galactic emissions. In reality, it may also contain the largely unpolarized hazy glow from other galaxies, which has the effect of making the galactic microwaves coming from any particular point of the sky look less thoroughly polarized than they actually are. So using the map to strip out the galactic foreground may actually leave some of that foreground in the data where it could produce a spurious signal, Falkowski explains.

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment:

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013...

Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers...

Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations...

 His detection technique, described in a study1 published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen...

Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.

New Measurement of Gravitational Constant Comes Up Higher Than Expected - Wired Science

New Measurement of Gravitational Constant Comes Up Higher Than Expected - Wired Science: The team, led by Terry Quinn, the former director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, used an updated version of Cavendish’s setup for one experiment. But they conducted an additional experiment, using a servo to counteract the twisting of the wire and figuring out the gravitational constant based on the voltage required to keep their apparatus from moving. Taken together, their tests yielded a new G value of 6.67545 × 10−11 m3⁄kg s2, which is higher than the current accepted value by about 240 parts per million.

Impossible material with world record breaking surface area made by swedish researchers

Impossible material with world record breaking surface area made by swedish researchers: While ordered forms of magnesium carbonate, both with and without water in the structure, are abundant in nature, water-free disordered forms have been proven extremely difficult to make...
A Thursday afternoon in 2011, we slightly changed the synthesis parameters of the earlier employed unsuccessful attempts, and by mistake left the material in the reaction chamber over the weekend. Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited...
After having gone through a number of state of the art materials characterization techniques it became clear that we had indeed synthesized the material that previously had been claimed impossible to make...

Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com

Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com: Many researchers consider a statistical power of 80 percent to be a desirable goal in designing a study. At that level, if an effect of a particular size were genuine, the study would detect it 80 percent of the time.

But roughly half of the neuroscience studies Munafò and colleagues included in their analysis had a statistical power below 20 percent. Those studies would fail to detect a genuine effect at least 80 percent of the time...

“It was already clear that fMRI studies were almost always very underpowered, but this paper shows that just about everything except a set of studies described as “neurological” are also underpowered,” Pashler said.

Researchers at SLAC find too many taus decay from bottom quarks to fit Standard Model

Researchers at SLAC find too many taus decay from bottom quarks to fit Standard Model: Instead of the 20% frequency rate predicted for D mesons, the researchers found a 31% rate (and a 25% rate for D* mesons instead of the predicted 23%)...

To explain the differences between the theories and observed results the researchers suggest that perhaps another Higgs Boson is at work; SUSY suggests there may be as many as four, though research at CERN is still ongoing to prove that what was observed earlier this year was in fact an actual Higgs.

Pioneer Spacecraft Warmth Takes Heat off Relativity

Pioneer Spacecraft Warmth Takes Heat off Relativity: Pioneer 10 and 11 are slowing down due to a small-but-ever-present thermal recoil. Both spacecraft give off heat from their electronics and from the radioactive decay of their plutonium fuel, and that’s enough to impart the measured deceleration. The researchers liken it to photons from a car’s headlights pushing gently back on the vehicle. The analysis is in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Magnetic Cows Finding Disputed by Researchers

Magnetic Cows Finding Disputed by Researchers: Burda says that half of the Jelinek team's data should be excluded because some of the pastures are on slopes or near high-voltage power lines, for example, or because the images are too poor to make out cattle, or appear to contain hay bales or sheep instead. "One half of their data is just noise," says Burda.

In addition, Burda's group looked at herds as a whole, whereas Jelinek's team analyzed individual cows. "Of the data that were useable, they looked only at 50 percent of the cows. It's very subjective," Burda adds. His team's reanalysis of the Jelinek data actually does support the theory that cattle can magneto-sense, says Burda.

Largest cosmic structures 'too big' for theories - space - 21 June 2011 - New Scientist

Largest cosmic structures 'too big' for theories: Shaun Thomas of University College London (UCL), and colleagues have found aggregations of galaxies stretching for more than 3 billion light years. The hyperclusters are not very sharply defined, with only a couple of per cent variation in density from place to place, but even that density contrast is twice what theory predicts.

Rewriting the textbooks: Confusion over nuclear fission - physics-math - 24 May 2011 - New Scientist

Rewriting the textbooks: Confusion over nuclear fission: "Last year, these ideas were put to the test at ISOLDE, a facility for making rare radioactive isotopes at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, to predict the outcome of fissioning mercury-180. Dividing mercury-180 evenly gives two zirconium-90 nuclei, which just happen to have a magic number of neutrons and an almost magic number of protons. Given all that, says Phil Walker of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, to expect exactly that outcome is 'a no-brainer'.

Sadly, mercury-180 doesn't play by the rules. It divides asymmetrically into the distinctly unmagical nuclei ruthenium-100 and krypton-80 (Physical Review Letters, vol 105, p 252502).

'It's surprising that a process as basic as fission so obviously does not agree with what is expected,' says Walker."

Observations: Some supermassive black holes may not be so super after all

Observations: Some supermassive black holes may not be so super after all: "Kollatschny and Zetzl's analysis found that rotation is the primary driver of spectral line widening, allowing them to use the width of measured hydrogen lines to infer the velocity of the swirling gas and hence the mass of the object at the disk's center. Their method indicates that the mass of distant AGN black holes as estimated by other spectral methods is two to 10 times too high."

The Pioneer Anomaly, a 30-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery, May Be Resolved At Last | Popular Science

The Pioneer Anomaly, a 30-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery, May Be Resolved At Last | Popular Science: Using the telemetry data, the two scientists created an extremely elaborate “finite element” 3-D computer model of each Pioneer spacecraft, in which the thermal properties of 100,000 positions on their surfaces are independently tracked for the duration of the 30-year mission. Everything there is to know about heat conduction across the spacecraft’s surfaces, as well as the way that heat flow and temperature declined over time as the power of the generators lessened, they know. The results of the telemetry analysis? “The heat recoil force accounts for part of the acceleration,” said Turyshev. They wouldn’t tell me how significant a part. (Turyshev: “We’d like to publish that in the scientific literature.”) But according to Toth, “You can take it to the bank that whatever remains of the anomaly after accounting for that thermal acceleration, it will at most be much less than the canonical value of 8.74 x 10-10 m/s2, and then, mind you, all those wonderful numerical coincidences people talk about are destroyed.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Milky Way Is Square, According To New Galactic Map

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Milky Way Is Square, According To New Galactic Map: One conclusion is that the Milky Way has an additional spiral arm, not seen in previous surveys of the galaxy. The new arm is about 30,000 light years from the galactic core at a longitude of between 80 and 140 degrees.

But a bigger surprise is their conclusion that some of the arms in the Milky Way are not curved in the traditional way, but are straight instead. This gives the Milky Way a distinctly squarish look.