Physics and Astronomy

Mathematicians test simplified formula to predict winning baseball percentages

Is your local Major League Baseball team better than its record suggests? Math researchers are considering alternatives to the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball, devised by baseball statistician Bill James. Introduced in the 1980s, the “theorem” predicts the winning percentage of a baseball team based on how many runs the team scores–and how many runs it allows.

Websites, including ESPN’s, oft

Research by Young-June Kim, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, may help determine how a class of materials already used in electronic circuits could be used in optical, or light-based, circuits, which could replace standard electrical circuits in telecommunications, computer networking, and other areas of technology.

Kim’s research is focused on “quasi one-dimensional” cuprates, materials that contain copper and oxygen where the atoms ar

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are proposing to use a supercomputer originally developed to simulate elementary particles in high-energy physics to help determine the structures and functions of proteins, including, for example, the 30,000 or so proteins encoded by the human genome. Structural information will help scientists better understand proteins’ role in disease and health, and may lead to new diagnostic and therapeutic agents.

Findings offer clearer view of how to detect unseen matter in the universe

Astrophysicist Heidi Newberg at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her colleagues suggest that a “highway” of dark matter from another galaxy may be showering down on Earth. The findings may change the way astronomers look for mysterious cosmic particles, long suspected to outweigh known atomic matter.

The findings of Newberg and researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Utah h

An international team of physicists examining an extremely rare form of subatomic particle decay — a veritable golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack of 7.8 trillion candidates — has discovered evidence for the highly sought process, which could be an indication of new forces beyond those incorporated in the Standard Model of particle physics. That long-standing theory of all particle physics precisely predicts the rate of such decays to be half that observed by the experimenters although it is s

This 3D image shows a portion of the southern flank of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost volcano of the Tharsis volcano group.

The peculiar depressions which can be observed here, and on several Martian volcanoes, are so-called ’lava tubes’. The anaglyph image has been calculated from the nadir and stereo channels and it was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express, from an altitude of 271 kilometres. North is at the right. The 3D image requires stereoscopic (red/gree