A curious question which science has never adequately answered is how migratory birds are able to navigate their annual passages. In fact, research in this unlikely area abound and two potential advances in our understanding have recently been published.

One theory, suggested over 40 years ago, that the birds are able to navigate because of molecules which respond to the Earth's magnetic field, though until recently there has been no evidence of such molecules. Research out of the University of Oldenburg in Germany showed that light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes exist in the retinal neurons of migratory garden warblers. New research indicates that cryptochrome-like molecules are in fact sensitive to magnetic fields, prompting researchers to suggest this as a candidate for the navigation source.

The flaw in these models are that they require the spins of the ions in the retina to align much more quickly than physicists expect to be possible - in other words, the Earth's magnetic field is too weak to have a significant impact that would be noticed by the birds.

However, another new finding, out of the University of Crete, builds on their research that the quantum Zeno effect can be used to enhance a system's sensitivity to magnetic fields. Even a very weak field, in this case, would be able to align the spins of the ions in the bird's retina quickly enough to accomplish the proposed task.

The case is far from conclusive, and the debate rages on ... meanwhile, of course, birds continue to migrate unhindered by humanity's lack of understanding.

Related Articles:

• Nature - Chemical compass model of avian magnetoreception
• Quantitative Biology - Quantum Zeno Effect Underpinning the Radical-Ion-Pair Mechanism of Avian Magnetoreception
• New Scientist - Do birds see with quantum eyes?
• New Scientist - Birds can 'see' the Earth's magnetic field

See Also:

• Movie & Television Physics Books
• Realistic Physics Movies
• Book Review - The Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
• Book Review - Don't Try this At Home!: The Physics of Hollywood Movies by Adam Weiner
• Popular Science - PopSci's guide to Summer Sci-Tech Movies
• About Science Fiction

• Apr. 30, 1006 - The brightest supernova in recorded history, Supernova SN 1006, first appears in the constellation Lupus.
• May 3, 1892 - English physicist George Paget Thomson is born. The son of Nobel Prize winning physicist J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron particle), George Paget Thomson proved that electrons could undergo diffraction, a major contribution to the theory of wave particle duality, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1937.
• May 3, 1902 - French physicist Alfred Kastler is born. Kastler won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms," work which helped lead to the development of the laser and maser.
• May 3, 1921 - American physicist Arthur Leonard Schawlow is born. Schawlow won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on laser spectroscopy.
• May 1, 1930 - The (then) planet Pluto was officially named. In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
• May 3, 1933 - American physicist Steven Weinberg is born. Weinberg was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in combining electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force, three of the fundamental forces of physics, into a single framework called the Standard Model of quantum physics.
• Apr. 30, 1993 - The World Wide Web is invented at the European particle accelerator CERN.
• Apr. 28, 2001 - Space becomes a tourist trap as millionaire Dennis Tito becomes the first "space tourist" by buying passage on a Russian space launch, though he did perform several experiments and prefers the term "independent researcher."

When a quasar is oriented so that it points directly at the Earth, it is called a blazar. A team at Boston University has focused on the study of these blazars and announced some intriguing findings last week.

The question the team tried to address was why these entities form as a jet, as opposed to say just exploding or radiating in all directions. The solution, it turns out, is similar to the exhaust from jet engines. Instead of being focused by the mechanical structure of the jet engine, the blazar output is focused into jets by the spiraling magnetic field generated from the black hole. It is this process that causes the matter to be cast away from the black hole, as opposed to being sucked in by the intense gravitation.

Related Articles:

• Boston University Institute for Astrophysical Research - Blazar Research at Boston University
• Nature - Blazars: model behaviour
• Science - Follow That Cosmic Jet
• Scientific American - Black Hole Plasma Jet Spotted Tracing Corkscrew Path

Related Articles:

• ScienceDaily.com - Exotic Quantum State of Matter Discovered
• Princeton University - Princeton scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter
• Nature - A topological Dirac insulator in a quantum spin Hall phase (abstract available for free, full text for a fee or with subscription)
• Quantum Encryption Through Space
• Quantum Logic Gates Discovered

• Apr. 23, 1858 - German physicist & Nobel laureate Max Planck is born. Planck is credited as the father of quantum physics, because his solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe in blackbody radiation involved assuming that energy traveled in discrete packets, which he termed quanta. He derived a value, later called Planck's constant, which is crucial to performing quantum physics calculations. Out of this finding, Albert Einstein was able to explain the photoelectric effect and, subsequently, the field of quantum physics was born. He received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.
• Apr. 25, 1900 - Austrian physicist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli is born. Pauli is best known for discovering the "Pauli Exclusion Principle" and extensive work in the concept of spin in particle physics and chemistry. He received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, having been nominated for it by Albert Einstein.
• Apr. 22, 1904 - American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was born. Oppenheimer is sometimes called "the father of the atomic bomb" because he was the director of the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear bomb.
• Apr. 25, 1953 - Francis Crick & James D. Watson publish their paper describing the double helix structure of DNA, which was determined largely with the use of x-ray crystallography.
• Apr. 24, 1960 - German physicist & Nazi oppositionist Max von Laue died in Berlin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his work in discovering the crystial diffraction of x-rays.
• Apr. 21, 1994 - Astronomer Alexander Wolszczan announces the first discoveries of extrasolar planets (i.e. planets circling stars other than our Sun).
• Apr. 26, 1994 - Physicists announce the first evidence of the top quark, a previously theoretical subatomic particle.

Over a year ago, we told you about graphene nano-transistors which were about one-fourth the size of a transistor. About a month ago we spoke of graphene semiconductors, which allows super fast transitions between electrical states. Well, the growing use of graphene as the basis for miniaturized nanotechnology electronic devices continues as a team out of the University of Manchester develops even smaller nano-transistors based on graphene materials.

The transistors developed are only one atom wide and ten atoms long! This is significant because previous attempts to miniaturize semiconductors at the nano-level (less than 10 nanometers) has caused the semiconductors to oxidize and fail. This is the range at which silicon-based technology is anticipated to fail.

Part of the problem with any technological development on this scale is the inherent difficulty of cutting the materials. The Manchester team points out that they "relied on chance when making such small transistors." The ability to replicate the process in a mass production setting is, therefore, uncertain, which means that we don't know if we'll be seeing a sea of graphene supercomputers or laptops anytime soon.

Related Articles:

• University of Manchester - Graphene used to create world's smallest transistor
• Science - Chaotic Dirac Billiard in Graphene Quantum Dots (abstract free, full text costs)
• ScienceDaily.com - Graphene Used To Create World's Smallest Transistor
• Graphene
• Nanotechnology
• Transistor
• Nano-transistor - February 2007
• Graphene: A Super-Speed Semiconductor - March 2008
• Controlling Atoms - March 2008

Image: Artistic rendition of the smallest graphene quantum dot, from the University of Manchester.

• April 15, 1874 - German physicist Johannes Stark is born. Stark's work in discovering the doppler effect in canal rays and splitting of spectral lines in electric fields (known as the Stark effect) earned him the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• April 15, 1892 - The General Electric Company is formed. In the years since, GE carries out research which results in several technological and scientific advances.
• Apr. 20, 1902 - Pierre & Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
• Apr. 19, 1906 - French physicist Pierre Curie dies. Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, along with his wife Marie Curie, in studying radioactivity.
• Apr. 20, 1918 - Swedish physicist Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn is born. He earned the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow) for their work in spectroscopy.
• Apr. 20, 1927 - Swiss physicist Karl Alexander Muller is born. Muller received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in superconductivity in ceramic materials.
• Apr. 17, 1942 - French physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin dies. Perrin did extensive experimental work which helped to prove that matter was made of atoms, including work in confirming Einstein's theory explaining Brownian motion. This work eventually earned him the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics.

When superconductors were first discovered in the early twentieth century, it was only at very low temperatures. In 1986, however, the field of high-temperature superconductivity arose, though scientists have only been able to speculate why certain substances become superconductive in that situation. (It should be noted that "high temperature" here is really relative to the "low temperature" of absolute zero. High temperature superconductors still function at over -100 degrees Centigrade, which by most normal standards is still a low temperature.)

The most intriguing element of the Princeton University analysis is that in these high-temperature superconductors the electrons which are most likely to repel other electrons in non-superconductor situations become the most likely to "pair up" with another electron when they become superconductors. The inverse relationship with normal repulsion was not expected, but they were instead anticipating some sort of microscopic "glue" that could explain the properties which bound the electrons into pairs.

The hope of research like this is, ultimately, to fully understand what causes this superconductivity and how it can be used to develop materials which are superconductive at even high temperatures. The holy grail of superconductivity is a room temperature superconductor ... but whether this is feasible has yet to be determined.