Chaos. Nonlinear Dynamics

M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury: We analyze the time pattern of the activity of a serial killer, who during twelve years had murdered 53 people. The plot of the cumulative number of murders as a function of time is of  "Devil’s staircase" type. The distribution of the intervals between murders (step length) follows a power law with the exponent of 1.4.

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.

The chemistry of the cosmos today is not what it used to be. The stars and planets and interstellar gas around us are laced with carbon, oxygen, and many other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - the only substances to have existed for a few hundred million years after the big bang.

A hobbyist in Sweden is gaining notoriety after being arrested for trying to build a nuclear fusion reactor in his kitchen, according to news reports.

There are solar panels that generate electricity and those that absorb heat for hot water. And now researchers at MIT and elsewhere say they've made progress on using the sun's heat to make electricity.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week, European researches unveiled the world’s first flexible microprocessor made with organic semiconductors.

Where did Earth's oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago.

The hydrogen bond is a wondrous thing. It helps give snowflakes their hexagonal symmetry; binds DNA into a double helix; shapes the three-dimensional forms of proteins; and even raises water's boiling point high enough to make a decent cup of tea.

A mid-sized asteroid impact with the ocean could drastically deplete the ozone layer for many years, according to a team of US researchers. Such damage would expose the surface to levels of UV radiation up to three times more severe than anything currently recorded on Earth.

Researchers in the US have made the first high-frequency AC "supercapacitors" containing graphene electrodes. The devices, which are much smaller than conventional capacitors, could be used in applications like computer processing units and other tiny integrated circuits.