Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Week in science: red giants, body scanners, and Jaz drives

Ars recaps the week's biggest science stories.

FDA sidesteps safety concerns over TSA body scanners: Some professors recently expressed concern about the safety of the TSA's new X-ray body scanners. The FDA wrote an eight-page response; unfortunately, it didn't address many of the key issues.

Jaz drives, spiral notebooks, and SCSI: how we lose scientific data: In this multipart series we take a look at why a simple principle—scientific data should be preserved and shared—turns out to be so hard to follow in the real world. Once you decide which data to keep, saving it all in a stable format—much less sharing it with the scientific community—isn't as simple as it seems.

Researchers harness chaos theory for new class of CPUs: A startup is trying to produce processors that can be repurposed on the fly by using gates that perform chaotic, nonlinear math.

CERN snags 38 antihydrogen atoms in magnetic trap: Given a few hundred million starting antiparticles, researchers have managed to produce and capture a few dozen anti-atoms.

A dark horse in the quantum computing race: the dark exciton: A group of researchers has found a way to create and manipulate dark excitons, and it turns out they may be suitable for quantum computing.

Researchers extract energy from information (if you ignore the hardware): Researchers have made a device that extracts energy from information, a real world implementation of Maxwell's demon.

Should we be planning for the end of cheap coal?: A commentary in Nature argues that our assumptions that coal will remain cheap and plentiful are misplaced.

Tarantulas in an MRI: how the brain responds to creepy crawlies: With a cleverly deceptive methodology, a new study shows that different networks in the brain respond to a threat, depending on its movements.

Is it now or never for dark matter WIMPs?: WIMPs, the leading candidates for dark matter, have proven elusive so far. But according to a review published in Nature, they have a limited time window to reveal themselves, or we'll run out of ways to look for them.

Planet discovered orbiting closely to old, post-red-giant star: Researchers have located a planet that is orbiting an old star that either survived being swallowed up during the star's red giant phase, or traveled from outside the galaxy to settle near it.

Listing image by JSW Art 2007

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