NASA: "Lightning-made Waves in Earth's Atmosphere Leak Into Space"

Full story at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/lightning-waves.html

"Now, NASA's Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite has detected Schumann resonance from space. This comes as a surprise, since current models of Schumann resonance predict these waves should be caged at lower altitude, between the ground and a layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere."

For more information on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances

Spiders vs Ants, sort of like Ninjas vs Pirates

As many of the readers here probably already know from personal study, Spiders tend to have problems with Ants, researchers have discovered that Golden Orb Spinner Spiders use a chemical irritant in their webs to deter Ants.

Article is from the Australian Geographic.

MIT discovery could lead to all-optical chips!

From Mass High Tech:

Ross, along with fellow materials science and engineering professor Lionel Kimerling and former students Lei Bi ’11 and Juejun Hu Ph.D. ’09, figured out that the fairly common gemstone garnet had the properties they needed to make the optical “diode for light” as it is both transparent and magnetic. The release cites Ross saying, “The whole system could be made using standard microchip manufacturing machinery.”

This is an impressive discovery in my opinion.  Here is Journal Nature Abstract.

This is deserving of Nobel Prize consideration in my opinion. Considering the fact that the system can be made with standard microchip manufacturing, it is an elegant and efficient solution as well.

Open Source Physics receives SPORE Award

Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE)

Open Source Physics (OPS) wins SPORE award.

Links to OPS summary and full article at Science.

Open Source Physics in their own words:

Computational Resources for Teaching
The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.