This month’s posts are rather late, but nothing changed in our quality reporting :p You can read all of the exactly four good news of this April at the post here.
But in addition to Ph-news, every April also brings a honored tradition: April’s fools arxiv posts. Arxiv is the “pre-print server” where most scientific articles see the light of the day, shared by their authors before they are published in journals. And on April’s fools day this means theory articles that speak the truth about certain subjects that you are allowed to do so on only one day per year. Like how theories that have no connection to reality are becoming hotter and hotter research topics. (And yes, this is still in physics, not in economics or evolutionary psychology.)
In personal deeds, I was very glad to see an article of mine in print by none less than the Sky & Telescope magazine! “Alien Comets” is about exocomets – comets orbiting stars other than the sun. In the last years astronomers got to know more and more about them and I hope that this small article also helps astrofans learn that they do exist, giants snowballs traversing their stellar systems from close to their star up to the outer cool expanses.
In more hardcore stuff, there is my latest post over at the collective particle physics blog ParticleBites, “New detectors on the block“. Where I report on a new concept in the way that experiments are designed, which appeared lately and which tries to take advantage of the latest hip tools in scientific computing.
Let me say goodbye with the random links of the month, this time with stuff that I found kind of fascinating and having to do with the animal kingdom.
- Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action. Evidence of quantum physics affecting biochemical processes, in this case to sense magnetic fields.
- Crazy New Experiment Shows Human Brains Can Detect Earth’s Magnetic Field. It’s not only birds though, it’s probably also humans, whose brain activity seems to notice when ambient magnetism changes direction. Personally, I find that I sleep differently when lying E-W or N-S, I wonder if there is any truth in this.
- Scientists Find That Cats Love to Sit Inside Squares—Even Fake Ones. This. Have your mind blown.