Solar Building Automatically Shades Itself From The Sun [pics]

The Devonshire Building is a very green building, that automatically opens and closes banks of shades on it’s south facing façade. The “intelligent” system tracks the amount of sunlight entering the windows, and takes into account the time of day and season.

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Parallel universes exist – study

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as “one of the most important developments in the history of science”.

The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.

In Everett’s “many worlds” universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out – in its own universe.

A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.

It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly – and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track.

Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Dr Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis, said: “This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science.”

According to quantum mechanics, nothing at the subatomic scale can really be said to exist until it is observed. Until then, particles occupy nebulous “superposition” states, in which they can have simultaneous “up” and “down” spins, or appear to be in different places at the same time.

Observation appears to “nail down” a particular state of reality, in the same way as a spinning coin can only be said to be in a “heads” or “tails” state once it is caught.

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by “wave functions” representing a set of multiple “probable” states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.

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Mysterious giant hexagon circling Saturn’s north pole

This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard Cassini reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the spinning six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible.

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Shrinking Kilogram Bewilders Physicists

A kilogram just isn’t what it used to be. The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight – if ever so slightly.

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