Daily non-political popular news in brief.

Racing Ahead at the Speed of Light

02-06-2008 · Brookhaven National Laboratory

Imagine trying to catch up to something moving close to the speed of light - the fastest anything can move - and sending ahead information in time to make mid-path flight corrections. Impossible? Not quite. Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle accelerator at Brookhaven Lab, have achieved this tricky task - and the results may save the Lab money and time in their quest to understand the inner workings of the early universe.

Keywords: racing, speed, light

« Previous | Next »

Similar news on "Racing Ahead at the Speed of Light":

Asymmetric ashes
11-30-2006 · EurekAlert!
Astronomers are reporting remarkable new findings that shed light on a decade-long debate about one kind of supernovae, the explosions that mark a star's final demise: Does the star die in a slow burn or with a fast bang? From their observations, the scientists find that the matter ejected by the explosion shows significant peripheral asymmetry but a nearly spherical interior, most likely implying that the explosion finally propagates at supersonic speed.
Similar news · Read more »
Iowa State physicist leads team designing detector for international particle collider
04-13-2007 · EurekAlert!
John Hauptman, an Iowa State University professor of physics and astronomy, is leading an international team that's designing a detector for the proposed International Linear Collider. The collider would be about 19 miles long and accelerate electrons and positrons to nearly the speed of light. The particles would collide at the center of the machine at extremely high energies. Collider detectors would record those collisions. Physicists expect the collisions to create new particles and help them understand how the universe works.
Similar news · Read more »
Researchers generate high-speed pulses of laser light on silicon, speeding data transmission
08-21-2007 · EurekAlert!
In the Sept. 3 issue of Optical Society of America's Optics Express, published online today, researchers announce that they have built the world's first "mode-locked silicon evanescent laser."
Similar news · Read more »
SDSC launches user-settable supercomputer reservations
09-05-2007 · EurekAlert!
Supercomputers keep growing ever faster, racing along at the blazing speed of nearly one petaflops -- 10 to the fifteenth, or one thousand trillion calculations per second -- equivalent to around 250 thousand of today's laptops. In contrast, the experience of a computational scientist can be anything but fast -- waiting hours or days in a queue for a job to run and yield precious results needed for further steps. The unpredictably of queues can impede the course of research, slowing progress with unexpected periods of waiting.
Similar news · Read more »
Safety measures for Grand Prix racing drivers haven’t worked
09-26-2007 · EurekAlert!
Most of the measures introduced over the past decade to boost the safety of Grand Prix motor racing have not cut death rates or curbed speed, as intended, suggests an analysis published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Similar news · Read more »
Radiation flashes may help crack cosmic mystery
12-03-2007 · EurekAlert!
Faint, fleeting blue flashes of radiation emitted by particles that travel faster than the speed of light through the atmosphere may help scientists solve one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics.
Similar news · Read more »
Safety measures for Grand Prix racing drivers haven't worked
09-26-2007 · EurekAlert!
Most of the measures introduced over the past decade to boost the safety of Grand Prix motor racing have not cut death rates or curbed speed, as intended, suggests an analysis published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Similar news · Read more »
Restoring sight, advances in fertility treatments and better visibility for pilots at FIO
08-23-2007 · EurekAlert!
Frontiers in Optics 2007, the 91st Annual Meeting of the Optical Society of America, will be held from Sept. 16-20 in San Jose, Calif. Following are a few of the many technical highlights to be discussed at the meeting: •Restoring Sight, One Pixel at a Time•Near-Infrared LIDAR Helps Pilots•Better, Stronger, Faster: High-Throughput Sperm Sorting •Detecting Malaria with Light•Gigantic Photoresponse Can Speed Up Optical Switches for Faster Internet Speeds •Explaining a 21st Century Version of Young's Experiment
Similar news · Read more »
Racing neurons control whether we stop or go
04-18-2007 · EurekAlert!
In the children's game "red light green light," winners are able to stop, and take off running again, more quickly than their comrades. New research reveals that a similar race goes on in our brains, with impulse control being the big winner.
Similar news · Read more »
Light seems to defy its own speed limit
08-16-2007 · EurekAlert!
It's a speed record that is supposed to be impossible to break. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have propelled photons faster than the speed of light. This would be in direct violation of Einstein's special theory of relativity, which states that nothing, under any circumstance, can exceed the speed of light. Researchers from the University of Koblenz, German, say they have tunnelled photons "instantaneously" across a barrier of various sizes up to a meter wide.
Similar news · Read more »