Earthightis: Creaking Hills and Wobbling Valleys

The hills and valleys of an impact factor.

Every year, the Institute of Scientific InformationR publishes its impact factor (IF) for thousands of scientific journals, and every year, editors, authors and reviewers alike wait with bated breath for the newest figures to be released. This bibliometric parameter has become the quintessential measure of a journal's status among its peers. In fact, scientific careers can even hang in the bala...

Inelastic Dissipation in Wobbling Asteroids and Comets

Asteroids and comets dissipate energy when they rotate about any axis different from the axis of the maximal moment of inertia. We show that the most efficient internal relaxation happens at twice the frequency of the body’s precession. Therefore earlier estimates that ignore the double frequency input underestimate the internal relaxation in asteroids and comets. We suggest that the Earth’s se...

Wobbling of What

A simple explanation for the symmetry of the genetic code has been suggested. An alternative to the wobble hypothesis has been proposed. The facts revealed in this study offer a new insight into physical mechanisms of the functioning of the genetic code. The wobble hypothesis, which was first proposed more than 40 years ago [1], can explain two events: 1) formation of the uracil­guanine pair as...

Rotation of triaxial nuclei: wobbling and chirality

Nuclear Wobbling Motion and Electromagnetic Transitions

The nuclear wobbling motion is studied from a microscopic viewpoint. It is shown that the expressions not only of the excitation energy but also of the electromagnetic transition rate in the microscopic RPA framework can be cast into the corresponding forms of the macroscopic rotor model. Criteria to identify the rotational band associated with the wobbling motion are given, based on which exam...