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Long suspected and hotly debated, the wave function, treated as "merely" a useful mathematical tool since its discovery, has now been conclusively proven to be "real", ie, to accurately reflect the actual reality of how the universe works. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.3328.pdf

Venus to appear in once-in-a-lifetime event

Happy labour day/workers' day/spring day or whatever your excuse to celebrate this beautiful day might be. :cheers:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-super-earth-habitable-zone-nearby-star.html Another day, another exoplanet. This one wasn't even by Kepler.

For the uninitiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dillemma#The_iterated_prisoners.27_dilemma I wrote a python script that pits two IPD strategies against each other. Each is aware of its, and its opponent's current score and action history, and must decide whether to defect or...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/smallest-exoplanets.html I wonder how much longer Kepler will continue to revolutionize our understanding of how solar systems work on a weekly basis. Remember how we used to think our neighbourhood was littered with super-Earths and hot Jupiters?

Okay, my vector magic is running low here, some help would be appreciated. I'm trying to rotate a vector in the coordinate origin in Cartesian space with coordinates (x,y,z) by some angle about it's relative y-axis - that is, the axis that points at (0,1,0) when the vector is pointing straight...

Fork of http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=25723 for orbinauts from an orthodox/cultural orthodox background.

Probably only days left until the launch, and there's next to no news about it anywhere. Shenzhou 8 is an unmanned mission which will test automatic rendezvous and docking procedures with the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station module launched in September. China to launch Shenzhou-8 early...

First off, I'd just like to say I've decided not to post this in the other Jobs thread out of respect I have for the man as an innovator. However, I feel this needed to be said. First, thinking in the long term, Steve Jobs claims to be an avowed deathist, claiming death is "the best invention...

f.lux I've been experimenting with this for a week now and I'm finding it much easier to fall asleep after using my computer in the evening. There's considerable science behind this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14813043 EDIT: Full image: link

Consider the following scenario: One of your the neurons in your brain is replaced by a nanomachine with the exact same function as the replaced neuron. It's similar enough that your body doesn't even reject it as a foreign object. All of the neural connections and their weights are preserved...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14214573 This government apparently wants into the EU real badly.

In astronomy discussions, which do you prefer? For example, while the generic terms for the orbital apses are "periapsis" and "apoapsis", using planet-specific terms (eg, "Periareion", "Apocynthion", etc) can make a debate much clearer when discussing an interplanetary mission with several...

No words. :hailprobe:

So, an electron and a positron colliding at low energies (ie, relatively slow, not in a particle accelerator) tend to produce two photons at gamma-ray energy levels (511 keV). Could this reaction be leveraged for spacecraft propulsion? Consider the following, even a miniscule amount of...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/virgin_feather_test/

Because the other relativity debates came close to making my head hurt and produced no agreeable conclusion, can a theoretical physicist please clear this up: A starship headed for a star 100 ly distant accelerates up to a velocity of .9c relative to an Earth-based observer. At that velocity...