Monthly Archives: October 2022

Since 1955, it has been assumed that the composition of stars in the universe’s other galaxies is similar to that of the hundreds of billions of stars within our own — a mixture of massive, medium mass and low mass stars. But with the help of observations from 140,000 galaxies across the universe and a wide range of advanced models, the team has tested whether the same distribution of stars apparent in the Milky Way applies elsewhere. The answer is no.

Stars in distant galaxies are typically more massive than those in our “local neighborhood.”

The increased mass might explain some of the dark matter for which we search.

From Science Daily

NASA on Tuesday said it had succeeded in deflecting an asteroid in a historic test of humanity’s ability to stop an incoming cosmic object from devastating life on Earth.

The fridge-sized Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor deliberately smashed into the moonlet asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, pushing it into a smaller, faster orbit around its big brother Didymos, said NASA chief Bill Nelson.

“DART shortened the 11 hour 55 minute orbit to 11 hours and 23 minutes,” he said. Speeding up Dimorphos’ orbital period by 32 minutes exceeded NASA’s own expectation of 10 minutes.

“We showed the world that NASA is serious as a defender of this planet,” added Nelson.

From Phys.org

Chris Taylor, director of the beverage management program in the University of Houston Conrad N. Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership, watched in awe as sales of White Claw skyrocketed seemingly overnight in the summer of 2019.

As a new entry in the relatively unknown hard seltzer category, it was completely unexpected and had virtually nothing to do with the company’s own marketing strategy. White Claw’s rapid success was due, almost entirely, to a social media influencer.

“He came up with a slogan, ‘ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws’, and it took off from there,” said Taylor, a Hilton College associate professor. “The last thing a company wants is their alcoholic product associated with law breaking, but it started selling out everywhere.”

The influencer, with millions of followers, flooded social airwaves with the slogan, even putting it on T-shirts. It created a fervor for a product that wasn’t on the radar of the beverage industry at all. Demand went through the roof and soon White Claw was selling out everywhere.

Taylor had never seen anything like it. Neither had anyone else, for that matter. He, along with Hilton College researchers Cortney Norris and Scott Taylor Jr., set out to research and explain this new phenomenon they dubbed “rogue marketing.”

According to the researchers, rogue marketing occurs when an unaffiliated individual creates and posts an informal message about a brand on social media that becomes viral.

But… how to make anything “go viral” is the challenge. And a report about a product can be negative as well as positive.

From phys.org October 5, 2022 by Bryan Luhn, University of Houston

Cornell University physicist N. David Mermin once described quantum entanglement as “the closest thing we have to magic,” since it means that disturbances in one part of the universe can instantly affect distant other parts of the universe, somehow bypassing the cosmic speed-of-light limit. Albert Einstein memorably dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” Today, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored three physicists with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on entanglement. Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger were recognized “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

When subatomic particles interact, they can become invisibly connected even though they may be physically separated. So knowledge about one partner can instantly reveal knowledge about its twin. If you measure the state of one, you will know the state of the other without having to make a second measurement because the first measurement determines the properties of the other particle as well.

From ARS Technica, by Jennifer Ouellette – 10/4/2022