Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

90. Unidentified extended sources of gamma ray emission

Here is another open problem in astrophysics , as far as I understand… The H.E.S.S. system of telescopes in Namibia is among most successful instruments of its kind. In particular, it has very large field of view allowing to discover new sources of gamma ray emission. Many of discovered sources were identified with known objects [...]

89. First week of November on NEQNET

Below is the list of  what I wrote on this blog during the first week of November… not bad actually, it looks like with Agata’s birth I have become more productive, not less… Surprising In the mean time, the number of subsribers to this blog has hit the magic number 100 (and peaked at 108 [...]

88. Belavin and Zamolodchikov on 2D quantum gravity

Both people are among inventors of conformal field theory, string theory and the chapter of field theory that is called “integrable systems” nowadays, so naturally, one cannot help taking an hour of her time and learn what each of them has new to say. But if they are co-authors of the same paper, the probability [...]

87. Leptophilic dark matter

Recall the tempest in the physics blogosphere during the last two weeks – I mean, the one due to the CDF anomaly? As Jester at RESONAANCES said, whether we want it or not, it will essentially dominate model building for the next few months, and another confirmation to this statement is the recent paper by [...]

86. Life cycle of stem cells

Since it is a weekend, I am no longer going to bother you with technical posts, even branes like ours are supposed to have some time to rest Instead reading something (that probably seems rather boring at first sight), why not enjoy the following video of the life cycle of stem cells? When we learned [...]

85. Hard thermal loops: what is it?

Suppose that you are a person studying non-equilibrium diagrammatic methods. At some point you realize that in many situations (such as at the time scale of prethermalization in the quark-gluon plasma or soon after the end of preheating) brute-force perturbation theory breaks down, as breaks the description of the dynamics by means of a single [...]

84. Replication DNA in the cell

One of the most important processes that will ever studied by molecular biology is the process of DNA replication – copying a double-spiral DNA molecule in order to form two of them. Since each DNA spiral carries the same genetic information, both new molecules serve as perefect templates for the subsequent reproduction. Just have found [...]

83. Quintessence on the string theory landscape?

Nemanja Kaloper and Lorenzo Sorbo have recently released a paper explaining how the quintessence can be realized on string theory landscape. What is quintessence and why the question is important? As we know, currently the energy density in the Universe is dominated (in proportion about 70/30) by dark energy. The latter behaves almost like a [...]

82. Academia: is it really a cult?

After my rant (by the way, why do you think I was using exactly this word?) on switchers and global financial crisis one disappointed fellow Scandinavian reader wrote in comments: Tonight I was glad to see that neqnet was updating again after the fall hiatus – until I saw your “switchers” rant. Now I doubt [...]

81. Edward Witten’s talk on 3D gravity

Fascinating video of Edward Witten’s talk on 3D quantum gravity given at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.The picture that goes back to Deser, ‘t Hooft and Jackiw is the following. Since there are no dynamical (propagating) degrees of freedom in 3D gravity, the physics of the latter is completely defined by matter fields. Matter [...]