{"id":1629,"date":"2007-08-03T09:27:02","date_gmt":"2007-08-03T09:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/03\/physics-news-bio-and-astro-1\/"},"modified":"2007-08-03T09:27:02","modified_gmt":"2007-08-03T09:27:02","slug":"physics-news-bio-and-astro-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/03\/physics-news-bio-and-astro-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics &#8220;News&#8221;: Bio and Astro"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I&#8217;ll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post lumps together some results from biophysics and astrophysics that didn&#8217;t make it into the previous posts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/backreaction.blogspot.com\/2007\/07\/gzk-cutoff-confirmed.html\">GZK cutoff confirmed<\/a>: from Backreaction, a report on new observations of highly energetic cosmic rays. These are subatomic particles with energy roughly equaly to the kinetic energy of a tennis ball on a volley that hit the upper atmosphere from time to time, producing showers of other particles that are detected by observers on the ground. Nobody&#8217;s quite sure where these things come from, but there&#8217;s a theory that says there ought to be an upper limit on their energy, otherwise they&#8217;d start scattering off microwave background photons. There were some preliminary observations that seemed to detect particles above that energy, but new observations suggest that there really is a cutoff.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/physicsweb.org\/articles\/news\/11\/7\/9\/1?rss=2.0\">&#8220;Tiny organisms move microstructures&#8221;<\/a>: Pretty much what it sounds like: a team at Drexel University figured out a way to tether bacteria to micron-scale pieces of epoxy, and make them drage the objects around. I&#8217;d like to think that there&#8217;s some sort of nano-scale Yosemite Sam sitting on the epoxy yelling &#8220;Yah, mule!&#8221;, but I suspect the reality is nowhere near that cool.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s about it for this week&#8217;s &#8220;news.&#8221; I should be back on Monday, tanned, rested, and ready for, um, whatever it is that I&#8217;ll be doing Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I&#8217;ll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post lumps together some results from biophysics and astrophysics that&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/03\/physics-news-bio-and-astro-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Physics &#8220;News&#8221;: Bio and Astro<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}