Researchers break Newton’s third law — with lasers

image courtesy of ExtremeTech.com                                                         

Researchers have apparently managed to break Newton's third Law; by cleverly causing photons to interfere with each other just right, they have managed to get the massless photons to behave as though they did have mass, and even to behave as though they had negative mass. Negative mass is something that would generate the opposite of gravity, a repulsion of matter. Such a material would have strange properties, as it would repel matter, yet itself be attracted to the repelled matter (google "negative mass" and/or visit this site to see the funkadelic math this entails). If we used a block of this material, we could effectively accelerate without any energy input (which would also violate Newton's Third Law). And that is just what happens in this article!

 

 

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Astronomers at the University of Berkeley have purportedly discovered two new super-massive black holes each at the center of galaxies more than 300 million light years away. While at first it just seems cool (these monsters have event horizons that are "200 times the orbit of Earth, or five times the orbit of Pluto" (Sanders) ), they will also help us understand how these celestial bodies could grow so large, and can offer us clues as to how the universe would have looked like long ago.

The article by Robert Sanders can be found at:
newscenter.berkeley.edu

Spears Pre-dating Humans

   As my title suggests, stone-tipped spears were recently found at Gademotta, a stone-age site in Ethiopia (Viegas), that have been dated to 280,000 years ago, over 80,000 years before the first fossils of our species are dated to. This could mean that the spear had been used much earlier than scientists originally thought, and that a predecessor species had the intelligence and craftiness to fashion a spear before homo sapiens had evolved. According to the article, this could drastically change our evolutionary tree.

Link to the article by Jennifer Viegas on discovery.com

Currently, word puzzles and vitamin supplements are thought (at least to the mainstream) to stave off cognitive decay that comes with ageing. However, a new study challenges that popular notion, finding that when the elderly are enrolled in a 14-week (or a semester-long) course, the cognitive benefits outweigh those caused by doing mere puzzles.

Source

The study seems to be well structured, and if repeated on a large scale with the same findings, could change the way we combat mental decline.

Volume of nuclear waste could be reduced by 90 per cent

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/nuclear-research-sheffield-university-fukushima-1.324913

picture from ourenergypolicy.org                                                       

In this article, engineers from University of Sheffield found a way to reduce the volume of certain nuclear waste (plutonium contaminated waste). By taking the waste and mixing it with furnace slag at high temperatures, they are able to trap the radioactive plutonium in a glass and remove the non radioactive portions at the same time. They (the engineers) mention that the common wastes of this type are "...filters, used personal protective equipment (PPE) and decommissioning waste such as metals and masonry." (University of Sheffield). This means the main contribution to the volume of this waste is actually non hazardous materials, so just separating the plutonium from the materials would reduce the volume of waste.

Unfortunately, I notice that this seems to only apply to plutonium, and the test that these researchers did used Cerium instead of plutonium. So some nuclear waste can be made smaller, but there's no guarantee for other wastes, and they still need to test if their method works with actual plutonium.