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Physics 342: Introduction to Research
Fall Semester 2008

Current Articles

Note that this page of links is assembled automatically via software algorithm and sometimes it gets a little confused. Also, this is certainly NOT a complete list of resources, its just some of the ones that are easy to retrieve online.

Recent Physics-Related News Articles

These links point to recent Physics-related news articles from the popular press and more "physics oriented" sites.

New York Times Science Section (Top 10 items)

  1. NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission (Fri Dec 5 3:27 am)
    NASA has pushed back the launching of the Mars Science Laboratory by two years because of lengthening delays and lingering technical issues, officials announced.
  2. Gene Test Shows Spain’s Jewish and Muslim Mix (Fri Dec 5 2:11 am)
    A study of genetic signatures has provided new evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries.
  3. The Energy Challenge: Energy Goals a Moving Target for States (Fri Dec 5 12:43 am)
    States’ struggles to satisfy energy mandates offer lessons for the next administration.
  4. European Court Rules Against Britain’s Policy of Keeping DNA Database of Suspects (Fri Dec 5 2:17 am)
    The unanimous ruling held that Britain’s policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects was a violation of the human right to privacy.
  5. H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82 (Fri Dec 5 2:53 am)
    Henry Gustav Molaison, or H.M., was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science.
  6. As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions (Thu Dec 4 12:13 pm)
    Farm emissions are being discussed during international talks on a new treaty to combat global warming.
  7. Proposal Ties Economic Stimulus to Energy Plan (Thu Dec 4 7:54 am)
    A stimulus plan being fashioned will likely include an energy-efficiency component costing $15 billion or more.
  8. Skin Deep: New Products Bring Side Effect: Nanophobia (Thu Dec 4 10:06 am)
    In a world where there are so many things to be afraid of, add one more to the list - tiny components engineered on the nanoscale that could run amok inside the body.
  9. Panel Seeks Changes in E.P.A. Reviews (Thu Dec 4 1:26 am)
    The Environmental Protection Agency must revise its approach to assessing environmental health hazards and other risks, an expert panel is reporting.
  10. Parents Torn Over Fate of Frozen Embryos (Thu Dec 4 2:06 am)
    Couples around the country are having difficulty deciding whether to discard or donate extra embryos created by in vitro fertilization.

New York Times Space and Cosmos (Top 10 items)

  1. NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission (Thu Dec 4 6:10 pm)
    NASA has pushed back the launching of the Mars Science Laboratory by two years because of lengthening delays and lingering technical issues, officials announced.
  2. Study Illuminates Star Explosion From 16th Century (Wed Dec 3 8:20 pm)
    A new study confirms that Tycho Brahe saw a common kind of star explosion that involves the explosion of a white dwarf star with a nearby companion in 1572.
  3. Endeavour Lands in California, Avoiding Florida Weather (Mon Dec 1 10:01 am)
    The shuttle landed in the Mojave Desert, diverted from a planned Florida landing by low clouds and high crosswinds.
  4. Arduous Space Mission in the Homestretch (Fri Nov 28 1:25 am)
    The shuttle Endeavour will separate from the International Space Station on Friday and will land as early as Sunday at 1:18 p.m., weather permitting.
  5. Observatory: Blanket of Soil May Hide Vast Martian Glaciers (Mon Nov 24 10:20 pm)
    New evidence suggests that pure ice in the form of glaciers may be buried under a thin layer of soil and rock on the red planet.
  6. National Briefing | Space and Technology: Space Station’s Purification System for Fluids Fails (Sat Nov 22 12:13 am)
    The new $250 million system for the International Space Station to turn urine, sweat and other fluids into drinking water is off to a shaky start.
  7. NASA Scales Back Flagship Mars Mission (Fri Nov 21 4:41 pm)
    NASA has decided to slash the storage bin from the Mars Science Laboratory’s payload in order to try and meet an October 2009 launch deadline.
  8. National Briefing | Science: Spacewalk Goes Well (Fri Nov 21 1:09 am)
    The second spacewalk during a mission of the shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station proceeded without mishap.
  9. National Briefing | Space and Technology: Tool Bag Is Lost During Spacewalk (Wed Nov 19 1:31 am)
    Astronauts ventured outside the International Space Station to do repair work, but lost a bag of tools they had taken along.
  10. Shuttle Departs With Gear for Space Station (Sat Nov 15 4:46 am)
    The space shuttle Endeavour lit the skies over Florida to begin a 15-day mission to the International Space Station.

Scientific American Physics Feed (Top 10 items)

  1. How GPS Units Work (Wed Dec 3 11:00 pm)
    This holiday season all kinds of products are coming equipped with GPS receivers to tell consumers exactly where on earth they are. The choices include dashboard navigators for cars, pocket navigators for humans, “golf buddies”...
  2. Turning Back the Cellular Clock: A Farewell to Embryonic Stem Cells? (Mon Dec 1 11:00 pm)
    When historians chronicle the stem cell research wars, Shinya Yamanaka will likely go down as a peacemaker. The Japanese scientist has helped send the field on a surprising end run around the moral debate surrounding embryonic stem cells, the...
  3. Triple Helix: Designing a New Molecule of Life (Mon Dec 1 3:00 am)
    For all the magnificent diversity of life on this planet, ranging from tiny bacteria to majestic blue whales, from sunshine-harv­­est­­ing plants to mineral-digesting endoliths miles underground, only one kind of “life...
  4. Nanomachines Powered by Light (Wed Nov 26 3:35 pm)
    Solar power is great for converting light energy into electricity. But what about harnessing light energy directly? After all, photons--discrete packets of light energy--exert force themselves, albeit on a pretty small scale. [More] ...
  5. Procrastination--And Other Stories from MIND (Tue Nov 25 11:00 pm)
    Oof. It was yet another “gotcha” moment for me working here at Scientific American Mind. Walking home from the train a few days ago, I was running through my mental to-do list. I realized that, yet again, I somehow had not gotten...
  6. Electronics with a Twist (Mon Nov 24 11:05 pm)
    [The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]Electronics come in all shapes and sizes--but there’s been a limit on their flexibility. Now, researchers say they’ve created electronics that can be shaped in virtually any...
  7. Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise (Mon Nov 24 11:00 pm)
    Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and...
  8. Ian Patrick Sobieski: From a Sound Invention to Sounder Investments (Mon Nov 24 4:30 pm)
    His finalist year: 1987His finalist project: Figuring out a way to keep submarines quiet [More]
  9. Magic and the Brain: How Magicians "Trick" the Mind (Mon Nov 24 9:00 am)
    The spotlight shines on the magician’s assistant. The woman in the tiny white dress is a luminous beacon of beauty radiating from the stage to the audience. The Great Tomsoni announces he will change her dress from white to red. On the...
  10. After the Crash: How Software Models Doomed the Markets (Thu Nov 20 11:00 pm)
    If Hollywood makes a movie about the worst financial crisis since the Great De­­pres­­sion, a basement room in a government building in Washington will serve as the setting for a key scene. There investment bankers from the...

American Institute of Physics News Update (Top 10 items)

  1. LEADER OF THE PACK. A new study shows why it’s sometimes better to stay out front. (Wed Dec 3 9:34 am)
  2. WHAT PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT PHYSICS. Nuclear and biological terrorism, energy, and climate are among the top topics. (Wed Dec 3 9:34 am)

PhysOrg.com Latest News Feed (Top 10 items)

  1. Yahoo Internet search exec defects to Microsoft (Thu Dec 4 4:56 pm)
    Microsoft on Thursday announced it has lured an Internet search executive from Yahoo to become head of its online services group.
  2. Review: MiBook is cheap, colorful e-book reader (Thu Dec 4 4:55 pm)
    (AP) -- Electronic books are the persistent wallflowers of the gadget world. Consumers have snubbed them again and again in favor of a 500-year-old technology: ink printed on paper.
  3. Gene packaging tells story of cancer development (Thu Dec 4 4:06 pm)
    To decipher how cancer develops, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center investigators say researchers must take a closer look at the packaging.
  4. Researchers solve piece of large-scale gene silencing mystery (Thu Dec 4 4:05 pm)
    A team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant...
  5. Smartphone sales slow down in third quarter (Thu Dec 4 3:51 pm)
    Worldwide smartphone sales grew by 11.5 percent in the third quarter of the year, the lowest rate of growth ever recorded for the devices, research company Gartner reported on Thursday.
  6. More shoppers bought online Monday but spent less (Thu Dec 4 3:50 pm)
    (AP) -- Online spending at U.S. retailers on Monday jumped 15 percent over with the comparable day a year ago to $846 million, comScore said Thursday, as consumers sought out bargains in a tough economy.
  7. Mix of taiji, cognitive therapy and support groups benefits those with dementia (Thu Dec 4 3:50 pm)
    Those diagnosed with early stage dementia can slow their physical, mental and psychological decline by taking part in therapeutic programs that combine counseling, support groups, Taiji and qigong, researchers report. Some of the benefits of...
  8. It's time to make sure all children have health care (Thu Dec 4 2:56 pm)
    The current economic downturn has many faces, including those of children. Economic indicators show that the worst of the recession may be yet to come and many economists are predicting that the unemployment rate will rise to as much as 9 percent...
  9. Trendy gadget gifts -- but just in case, hang onto receipts (Thu Dec 4 2:51 pm)
    Buying high-tech gifts is really hard. It's almost impossible to keep abreast of the latest gadgets and know which ones are getting long in the tooth.
  10. Probing Question: Did Shakespeare really write all those plays? (Thu Dec 4 2:35 pm)
    “Done to death by slanderous tongues.” So wrote William Shakespeare in his play, Much Ado About Nothing. Or did he? Even people who have never actually read Shakespeare have heard the theories: Shakespeare`s plays were written by Francis...

Physics Today (Top 10 items)

  1. Build Your Own I/O for LabVIEW FPGA with NI FlexRIO - Sponsored link (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    Learn about new NI FlexRIO hardware for PXI, which combines the same powerful LabVIEW FPGA technology found in other NI hardware targets and an open, user-customizable front end.
  2. Environmental consequences of nuclear war (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    A regional war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons would pose a worldwide threat due to ozone destruction and climate change. A superpower confrontation with a few thousand weapons would be catastrophic.
  3. Batteries and electrochemical capacitors (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    Present and future applications of electrical energy storage devices are stimulating research into innovative new materials and novel architectures
  4. Who is listening? What do they hear? (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    In communicating our science, have we put too much emphasis on the information we want to convey? Perhaps there is another way to think about it
  5. Physics Nobel Prize to Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    In particle physics, some symmetries are so severely broken that they?re hard to recognize. Others are so slightly broken that the imperfection is hard to find.
  6. The 2008 Nobel Chemistry Prize honors the development of a fluorescent tag for bioscience (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    Researchers can now program cells to make their own dyes, which illuminate the activities of proteins within a cell.
  7. X-ray light valve emerges as a low-cost, digital radiographic imager (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    The instrument combines the physics of amorphous semiconductors, liquid crystals, and the common document scanner.
  8. Physics update (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
  9. Japan aims to internationalize its science enterprise (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    Money and bows to other cultures, such as merit-based salaries and English in the lab, are cultivating good science and attracting leading scientists to spend time in Japan.
  10. Could ?green gasoline? displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? (Mon Dec 1 7:00 am)
    Researchers report advances in making renewable fuels that are compatible with the US petroleum infrastructure

Recent Peer-Reviewed Research Journal Articles

One of the things that sets science apart from many other fields of human-endeavor is that to prevent personal opinion from being represented as fact, articles that are submitted to scientific journals are "peer-reviewed", which means the paper is sent to a referee (possibly a scientific "competitor") who disects the article and makes sure its conclusions are valid based on the data presented. The process is not perfect, but it tends to drive a high level of scholarly quality in peer-reviewed journals.

USAGE NOTE: The symbol next to each feed item can be clicked in order to bring up the abstract from the article.

Physical Review Letters Latest Issue (25 Most Recent Items)

  1. Thermotropic Biaxial Liquid Crystalline Phases in a Mixture of Attractive Uniaxial Rod and Disk Particles
  2. Confinement Effect on Interparticle Potential in Nematic Colloids
  3. Probing the Spin Polarization of Current by Soft X-Ray Imaging of Current-Induced Magnetic Vortex Dynamics
  4. Model for the Magnetic Order and Pairing Channels in Fe Pnictide Superconductors
  5. High-Field Pauli-Limiting Behavior and Strongly Enhanced Upper Critical Magnetic Fields near the Transition Temperature of an Arsenic-Deficient LaO_{0.9} F_{0.1} FeAs_{1-δ} Superconductor
  6. Magnetic Field Effects in π-Conjugated Polymer-Fullerene Blends: Evidence for Multiple Components
  7. Measurement of Temporal Correlations of the Overhauser Field in a Double Quantum Dot
  8. Spin-Orbit Coupling in Ferromagnetic Nickel
  9. Alignment-Induced Epitaxial Transition in Organic-Organic Heteroepitaxy
  10. Coherent Optical Control of the Ultrafast Dephasing of Phonon-Plasmon Coupling in a Polar Semiconductor Using a Pulse Train of Below-Band-Gap Excitation
  11. Observation of Resistive and Ferritic Wall Modes in a Line-Tied Pinch
  12. Generation of Large-Amplitude Coherent-State Superposition via Ancilla-Assisted Photon Subtraction
  13. Classical Trajectory Diagnosis of a Fingerlike Pattern in the Correlated Electron Momentum Distribution in Strong Field Double Ionization of Helium
  14. Is the Spectrum of Highly Excited Mesons Purely Coulombian?
  15. Khinchin Theorem and Anomalous Diffusion
  16. Fourier Transform Light Scattering of Inhomogeneous and Dynamic Structures
  17. Coordinated Chemomechanical Cycles: A Mechanism for Autonomous Molecular Motion
  18. Energy Equilibration Processes of Electrons, Magnons, and Phonons at the Femtosecond Time Scale
  19. Direct Observation of the Superconducting Gap in Phonon Spectra
  20. New Model System for a One-Dimensional Electron Liquid: Self-Organized Atomic Gold Chains on Ge(001)
  21. Reversible Phase Transformation and Doubly Charged Anions at the Surface of Simple Cubic RbC_{60}
  22. Orbital Mixing and Nesting in the Bilayer Manganites La_{2-2x} Sr_{1+2x} Mn_{2} O_{7}
  23. Measurement of Sub-Shot-Noise Correlations of Spatial Fluctuations in the Photon-Counting Regime
  24. Rotational Study of Carbon Monoxide Solvated with Helium Atoms
  25. Suppression Pattern of Neutral Pions at High Transverse Momentum in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt[s_{NN} ] =200  GeV and Constraints on Medium Transport Coefficients

Physical Review Free To Read Feed (25 Most Recent Items)

  1. Dynamical Model of Elementary Particles Based on an Analogy with Superconductivity. II
  2. Dynamical Model of Elementary Particles Based on an Analogy with Superconductivity. I
  3. Axial Vector Current Conservation in Weak Interactions
  4. Tomography increases key rates of quantum-key-distribution protocols
  5. Fingerprints for Spin-Selection Rules in the Interaction Dynamics of O_{2} at Al(111)
  6. Towards an Exact Treatment of Exchange and Correlation in Materials: Application to the “CO Adsorption Puzzle” and Other Systems
  7. Density-Functional Theory Study of Half-Metallic Heterostructures: Interstitial Mn in Si
  8. Sources of Electrical Conductivity in SnO_{2}
  9. First-principles investigation of Ag-Cu alloy surfaces in an oxidizing environment
  10. Influence of the Core-Valence Interaction and of the Pseudopotential Approximation on the Electron Self-Energy in Semiconductors
  11. Observation of ^{8} B solar neutrinos in the Kamiokande-II detector
  12. Observation of a neutrino burst in coincidence with supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud
  13. Solar Neutrinos. II. Experimental
  14. Synthesis of the Elements in Stars
  15. Attempt to Detect the Antineutrinos from a Nuclear Reactor by the Cl^{37} (ν [over ¯] , e^{-} )A^{37} Reaction
  16. The extraordinary phases of liquid ^{3} He
  17. Perovskite-type oxides—The new approach to high-T_{c} superconductivity
  18. Full Stabilization of a Microresonator-Based Optical Frequency Comb
  19. Precision measurement of the muon decay parameters ρ and δ
  20. Nobel Lecture: Manipulating atoms with photons
  21. Nobel Lecture: The manipulation of neutral particles
  22. Nobel Lecture: Fractional quantization
  23. Nobel Lecture: Laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms
  24. Nobel Lecture: Interplay of disorder and interaction in two-dimensional electron gas in intense magnetic fields
  25. Nobel Lecture: The fractional quantum Hall effect

Journal of Applied Physics Latest Issue (25 Most Recent Items)

  1. Evolution of an electron energy distribution function in a weak dc magnetic field in solenoidal inductive plasma
  2. Magnetocaloric effect and Griffiths-like phase in La[sub 0.67]Sr[sub 0.33]MnO[sub 3] nanoparticles
  3. Time-resolved photoluminescence properties of AlGaN/AlN/GaN high electron mobility transistor structures grown on 4H-SiC substrate
  4. Wettability inversion induced by weak electron irradiation
  5. Composition dependence of field induced anisotropy in ferromagnetic (Co,Fe)[sub 89]Zr[sub 7]B[sub 4] and (Co,Fe)[sub 88]Zr[sub 7]B[sub 4]Cu[sub 1] amorphous and nanocrystalline ribbons
  6. High-frequency properties of a graphene nanoribbon field-effect transistor
  7. Microwave magnetoelectric effects in bilayers of single crystal ferrite and functionally graded piezoelectric
  8. Observation of persistent photoconductivity in bulk gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide samples at cryogenic temperatures using the whispering gallery mode method
  9. Erratum: ``Decoupling of silicon carbide optical sensor response for temperature and pressure measurements'' [J. Appl. Phys. [bold 102], 073111 (2007)]
  10. Microstructure of Cs-implanted zirconia: Role of temperature
  11. Suppression of photorefractive damage with aid of steady-state temperature gradient in nominally pure LiNbO[sub 3] crystals
  12. Key scattering mechanisms for holes in strained SiGe/Ge/SiGe square quantum wells
  13. Plastic deformation during indentation unloading in multilayered materials
  14. Temperature-dependent photoluminescence and photoluminescence excitation of aluminum monodoped and aluminum-indium dual-doped ZnO nanorods
  15. Holographic fabrication of photonic crystals using multidimensional phase masks
  16. Electron carrier concentration dependent magnetization and transport properties in ZnO:Co diluted magnetic semiconductor thin films
  17. Laser-induced magnesium production from magnesium oxide using reducing agents
  18. Secondary electron emission from freely supported nanowires
  19. Erratum: ``Interplay between stimulated emission and singlet singlet annihilation in oligothiophene dioxide thin films'' [J. Appl. Phys. [bold 100], 023530 (2006)]
  20. Mechanisms of efficiency enhancement in the doped electroluminescent devices based on a europium complex
  21. Optimizing the geometry of an in vitro tunneling magnetoresistance biosensor using an immobilized ferrimagnetic nanoparticle agent
  22. Effects of bias on cathodoluminescence in ZnCdSe quantum well light emitting diodes
  23. Visible luminescence mechanism in nano ZnO under weak confinement regime
  24. Revisiting atomic force microscopy force spectroscopy sensitivity for single molecule studies
  25. The roles of thermally evaporated cesium carbonate to enhance the electron injection in organic light emitting devices

Astronomical Journal Latest Issue (25 Most Recent Items)

  1. Rich, J. W.: Multi-Scale Clean: a Comparison of its Performance against Classical Clean on Galaxies Using Things
  2. Zwaan, M.: Are the Kinematics of DLAs in Agreement with Their Arising in the Gas Disks of Galaxies?
  3. Tamburro, D.: Geometrically Derived Timescales for Star Formation in Spiral Galaxies
  4. Bigiel, F.: The Star Formation Law in Nearby Galaxies on Sub-Kpc Scales
  5. Leroy, A. K.: The Star Formation Efficiency in Nearby Galaxies: Measuring where Gas Forms Stars Effectively
  6. Oh, S.-H.: High-Resolution Dark Matter Density Profiles of Things Dwarf Galaxies: Correcting for Noncircular Motions
  7. Trachternach, C.: Dynamical Centers and Noncircular Motions in Things Galaxies: Implications for Dark Matter Halos
  8. de Blok, W. J. G.: High-Resolution Rotation Curves and Galaxy Mass Models from Things
  9. Walter, F.: Things: the H I Nearby Galaxy Survey
  10. Collins, B. F.: LÉVY Flights of Binary Orbits due to Impulsive Encounters
  11. Howell, S. B.: Optical and Infrared Observations of Two Magnetic Interacting Binaries: Tau 4 (RXJ0502.8+1624) & SDSS J121209.31+013627.7
  12. Sosnitskii, S. P.: On the Orbital Stability of Triangular Lagrangian Motions in the Three-Body Problem
  13. Martell, S. L.: Deep Mixing and Metallicity: Carbon Depletion in Globular Cluster Giants
  14. Davidge, T. J.: And the Rest: the Stellar Archeological Record of M82 Outside the Central Starburst
  15. Qian, S.-B.: a New Photometric Investigation of the W Uma-Type Binary BI CVn
  16. Aarnio, A. N.: A Survey for a Coeval, Comoving Group Associated with HD 141569
  17. Tingay, S. J.: a High Resolution View of the Jet Termination Shock in a Hot SPOT of the Nearby Radio Galaxy Pictor a: Implications for X-Ray Models of Radio Galaxy Hot Spots
  18. Dottori, H.: Is J 133658.3-295105 a Radio Source at z >= 1.0 or at the Distance of M 83?
  19. Shen, Y.: Stability of the Distant Satel