WASHINGTON D.C., March 6, 2015 -- The following articles are freely available online from Physics Today (www.physicstoday.org), the world's most influential and closely followed magazine devoted to physics and the physical science community.
You are invited to read, share, blog about, link to, or otherwise enjoy:
1) STIFF AND SUPPLE CARTILAGE SUBSTITUTE
Physics Today's Ashley Smart reports on hydrogels that mimic the tricky nature of cartilage thanks to magnetically aligned nanosheets.
"In the realm of bioengineering, hydrogels are something of an all-purpose material. Made up of networks of interlinked, hydrophilic polymers, they tend to be soft, biocompatible, and highly absorbent.... The new material mimics the articular cartilage that lubricates our joints: It can support a heavy load along one direction while stretching and shearing with ease in the others.”
MORE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2707
2) GIVING SPACECRAFT A SECOND LEASE ON LIFE WHILE HURTLING THROUGH THE COSMOS
Physics Today's Toni Feder reports on the innovative processes undertaken to repurpose various spacecraft in flight, including Kepler, Voyager, Deep Impact, Spitzer, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
“A comeback like Kepler’s is ‘not unique, but it’s unusual,’ says Derek Buzasi of Florida Gulf Coast University, who reinvented the Wide-Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) after it failed following its 1999 launch. ‘Spacecraft are built for a specialized purpose, so they are hard to repurpose. You have to come up with something they are capable of at the same time they are incapable of their original mission.’
Deep Impact’s original mission was to hurl a copper ball at a comet and watch the impact. In its continued form as EPOXI, the spacecraft went on to visit another comet and, on the way, served as an observatory for user- proposed targets.”
MORE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2713
3) CONGRESSMAN & FUSION RESEARCHER REFLECTS ON SCIENCE POLICY
Physics Today's David Kramer interviews Rush Holt, the New Jersey congressman who retired from office and this past December took the helm of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"PT: What do you consider to be your accomplishments in Congress?
HOLT: I focused a lot on science education. Our real problem is not that we’re failing to produce excellent scientists, because we are [producing them], but rather that we have failed to maintain an appreciation for and understanding of science in the general population. I was able to keep a spotlight on the need but wasn’t able to accomplish as much as I wanted. We got science included in the subjects emphasized by federal law. But we haven’t really improved teacher professional development and other things we need to do.”
MORE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2714
4) PARTICLE PHYSICS AND THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND
In this article, physics researchers John Carlstrom, Tom Crawford and Lloyd Knox discuss the fingerprints of the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations in the early universe, which may soon reveal physics at unprecedented energy scales.
"With its empirical successes, inflation is by consensus the best paradigm—notwithstanding some notable dissenting views—for the mechanism that generated the primordial density fluctuations that led to all structure in the universe. Its success has motivated physicists to search for the siblings of those fluctuations, the gravitational waves, via their signature in the polarization of the CMB. If discovered, that gravitational imprint would open up an observational window onto quantum gravitational effects, extremely early times, and extremely high energies.”
MORE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2718
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