Entanglement between a photon and a trapped atom has been directly observed for the first time, offering a method for establishing links between quantum memories over appreciable distances. Entanglement--a sort of arranged marriage between two or more particles--has usually been directly measured between species of the same kind, such as all photons or all atoms.

[ Cool! -k]

Entanglement Between a Photon and A Trapped Atom

] The government announced Wednesday that it has issued the
] first license for a manned suborbital rocket, a step
] toward opening space flight to private individuals for
] the first time.
]
] The Federal Aviation Administration gave a one-year
] license to Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., headed by
] Burt Rutan. He is best known for designing the Voyager
] airplane that made the first nonstop, unrefueled flight
] around the world in 1986.
]
] "This is a big step," FAA spokesman Henry Price said.
]
] The Scaled Composites craft consists of a rocket plane,
] dubbed SpaceShipOne, and the White Knight, an exotic jet
] designed to carry it aloft for a high-altitude launch.
] SpaceShipOne, made of graphite and epoxy, has short wings
] and twin vertical tails. It reached 68,000 feet in a
] trial flight.

[ Very cool. One step closer to commercial spaceflight... -k]

Government licenses first privately built, manned rocket

] California -- NASA has made aeronautics history by
] launching an experimental jet that reached a record
] velocity of just over seven times the speed of sound.
]
] Fifty-seven years after test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the
] sound barrier, NASA on Saturday launched the unpiloted
] research jet, in a development some observers say could
] change the future of space travel.
]
] It is the first time a supersonic-combustion ramjet, or
] scramjet, which uses air for fuel, had traveled so fast,
] flight engineer Lawrence Huebner told reporters.
]
] Scientists hope such jets will make space travel more
] affordable and spur commercial ventures.

WOOOOOSH! -LB

NASA jet breaks speed record

] This guy here is Peter Tsou. He's a scientist at NASA's
] Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he's holding an amazing
] substance called aerogel. Aerogel is a solid, but it is
] 99.8% empty space. In fact, it very closely approaches
] the density of air. It practically IS air. It's still a
] solid, though, and you can even pick it up or set things
] on it.

Very neat.

[ I have always loved aerogel. I want a piece so much. But not enough to pay for it. ;) -k]

Hinterlands.cc - 03/26/04: Aerogel

In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Cell Biology, UC Berkeley molecular biologists describe a significant difference between the way normal and cancerous cells handle an enzyme called telomerase, which is critical to unrestricted cell growth. The enzyme maintains the telomeres that cap the ends of each chromosome, keeping them long enough so that DNA replication and cell division go without a hitch.

Funny, I didn't know that cancer cells treated telomerase any differently than normal cells did! Apparently they keep it active, all the time, when healthy cells segregate telomerase and only use it once per round of cell division.

Targeting Enzymes that Immortalize Cancer Cells

] City officials were so concerned about the potentially
] dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they
] considered banning foam cups after they learned the
] chemical was used in their production.
]
] Then they learned that dihydrogen monoxide - H2O for
] short - is the scientific term for water.

[ D'oh! -k]

sacbee.com -- AP State Wire News -- City falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made with water

] A thread of carbon nanotubes more than 100 metres long
] has been pulled from a fiery furnace. The previous record
] holder was a mere 30 centimetres long.

[ holy crap! -k]

100-metre Carbon Nanotube Produced

] The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky
] Way Galaxy is heftier than thought and rotates at an
] amazing clip, new research shows.
]
] For years scientists said the black hole contained about
] 2.6 million times the mass of the Sun. They now believe
] the figure is somewhere between 3.2 million and 4 million
] solar masses.
]
] And a new study suggests all that mass, confined to an
] area about 10 times smaller than Earth's orbit around the
] Sun, spins around about once every 11 minutes.

[ Damn... that's some serious angular momentum... -k]

New Twists on the Milky Way's Big Black Hole

] this piece by Richard Florida in the
] Washington Monthly, which explains how the Bush
] administration's anti-scientism (among other things)
] threatens our economic health.

very interesting. goto http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/index.cfm to read about the scientist's movement to stop the distortion of science by the bush admin....

[ there was a brief discussion of this as pertains to stem cell research the other day on our blog... aside from being deadly to the millions of current and future patients that stem cell therapy could help, the US is gonna miss out on a lot of the economic windfall that these therapies will generate, all out of a misguided, (IMO) hyper-religious, ideological stance.

It's clearly not limited to stem cells... -k]

TAPPED: Conservative Lysenkoism, Continued.

] When scientists learned last month that the word
] "evolution" had been removed from Georgia's proposed
] science curriculum for middle and high schools, some
] wondered what else might have been deleted.
]
] Some feared that the big-bang theory — the dominant scientific ]theory about the origins of the universe — would be absent.
]
]Their fears were well founded.
]
]The big bang had been eliminated from the science curriculum, and ]lessons on plate tectonics had been scaled back.

I swear, I may need to leave this state sooner than I thought..... Yeah, because the Bible is totally an authoritative source on this stuff......

[ Morons. We'll be sending burnt offerings to god before long. The fundamentalism in this country sucks, and i fear it's only going to get worse... -k]

Big bang busted in science class for high schools