With all the excitement about the imminent turning on of the LHC, people are forgetting that the Tevatron at Fermilab will be nipping at the LHC's heels for a while. Brian Winer, of Ohio State University, gave an update on the Tevatron and explained how the scientists there are using every trick they can think of to wring more sensitivity out of the machine, such as using artificial neural networks to combine information from two different detection experiments. Also, the Tevatron has been running long enough now, at high enough luminosities, that they are getting enough collisions to make interesting statistics.

As early as this summer, Winer expects that Fermilab will be able to to statistically rule out the existence of a 160 GeV Higgs boson, one of the theoretically likely masses for the so-called “God particle.” (Barring a positive detection, of course.) It will be a lot harder for them to detect a lower-mass Higgs boson before the LHC starts pumping out data. But who knows?

As a tantalizing treat, Winer put up a picture, a couple years old, of a detection of a particle that had the perfect characteristics of the Higgs. Only problem was, the particle was four times as likely to be noise.
Now, if they could only get four or five more detections in the same spot, then they'd be in business.
Winer repeated the exhortation of a colleague: “We're one good idea away from finding this thing.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I came across an interesting little poster the other day. John Stewart, a physics professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, decided to look at lexical trends in physics textbooks. He used a method developed by the late, great Don Hayes, a sociologist at Cornell University, who looked at trends in all sorts of texts -- from school books to SATs -- to explain both the dumbing down of America and the jargoning up of science and technology.

Stewart examined trends between two physics texts, Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition, published in 1988, and Halliday, Resnick and Walker, 7th edition, from 2004. The lexical difficulty -- a measure of the book's readability -- increased by almost a grade level. The newer edition was prettier -- the amount of blank space in the book doubled -- but the addition of another author may have made the textbook worse, something along the lines of too many cooks in the kitchen. Stewart's conclusion? "The old Halliday and Resnick was a better object to read," he says. "It's very noticeable."

Now I haven't seen the 7th edition, but I do remember Halliday and Resnick 3rd edition -- it was the physics textbook I used in college. And it was plenty tough to read. I didn't realize I had it so good.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:37 PM | Permalink

At APS, there are the invited talks, and then there are the talks that might affectionately be known as the “crackpot” talks. Any member of APS, regardless of their background or affiliation, can submit an abstract and give a 10 minute talk. Nothing is rejected.
So about once a day, there's a session with a coded title like “Unconventional ideas in XXXX.” That's where the weird ones go. Sunday morning, Sunil Thakur, with an affiliation of “Individual Research”, was scheduled to give a talk on the “Nature of Reality.” In the abstract, Thakur promised to explain that “how the reality is revealed does not depend only on the properties of the reality itself but also depends on the properties of the medium through which the object is manifested.”
It looks like last year, Thakur submitted an abstract on black holes, where he claimed that temperature affects the speed of light. But today he didn't show up, and the session ended early. Everyone filed out of the room, maybe a touch disappointed.
“I wanted to learn the nature of reality,” muttered one young physicist, not without sarcasm. “Now I have to find something else to do.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 12:54 AM | Permalink

Many physicists are still smarting from the blows they took after Congress slashed various high-energy physics programs in the fiscal year 2008 budget. In the main conference area on Saturday morning, five computers sat beckoning. They weren't for quick email checks, but for physicists to sign and send form letters to their representatives in Congress. The form letter calls for a total of $510 million in emergency supplemental appropriations: $180 million for the NSF, $30 million for the NIST Core program, and $300 million for the DOE Office of Science.

Many Washington insiders think chances of this happening are quite slim, but APS officials are still pushing hard.
They collected 1,753 signatures at the March meeting in New Orleans, and in the first morning in St. Louis, they had garnered 142. Don Engel, a science policy fellow at APS in Washington, DC, was giving out stickers that read "I support science funding" to everyone that signed the form letter. "You want a sticker?" Engel asked his latest petitioner. "Then we know not to bother you again."

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:49 AM | Permalink

This is a bit of a homecoming for me; it has been almost exactly a year since I left the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And so I was feeling fairly nostalgic as I walked the streets of downtown on this blustery Friday evening. My mood wasn't brightened at all by the utter desolation of downtown. With the Cardinals out of town, the streets were deserted, save for an empty beer can rattling in the wind. Attention physicists! Get out of downtown! The charm of St. Louis is hidden within its neighborhoods and side streets. Hop in a cab and say "Lafayette Square" or "Central West End" -- the cabbie will drop in the right place, and you won't be disappointed. I also hear that Schlafly, the local brewmeister (in addition to the local brewmeister, Anheuser-Busch), has a "Repeal of Prohibition" festival going on Saturday afternoon, if anyone is already looking to play hooky. I'm willing to trade more St. Louis tips for story tips -- email me at e.hand@nature.com. Looking forward to the conference!

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:30 AM | Permalink

The meeting is winding to a close, and it's just about time for me to high-tail it to the airport. Thank goodness, too. It seems like every day here in New Orleans is at least 10 percent warmer than the last.

This conference let me catch up on some of the hottest fields, but new developments can happen so fast. I wonder if listening to the latest results at next year's conference will feel like it did this year -- getting blasted with a firehose full of new information. I guess I'll just have to find out. Hope to see you in Pittsburg.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 08:25 PM | Permalink

All you theoretical superconductor folks certainly seem to be good collaborators. I don't know about polite, but network analysis seems to indicate you have a pretty tight community.

With roughly 17,000 authors listed in 7,000 March meeting talks, it’s hard to imagine finding any order to it all. But science is a collaborative pursuit, and Jake Hofman thinks network analysis could say something about the various physics communities hidden in that massive list.

Hofman, a graduate student at Columbia University, downloaded the list when the abstracts came online a few months ago. He used the data to create a network, linking physicists who were listed as co-authors on a talk.

Many presenters were only connected with a handful of other physicists. But there was also a group of 6755 physicists (the largest connected component, for network nerds) who were all linked to each other in one way or another – think six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Hofman then ran an community-identifying algorithm he's working on to look for clusters of physicists that seem particularly closely linked.

To the right you’ll see the visualization he ended up with. It’s a little tricky to interpret (and also quite preliminary), but the basic idea is that each of the 6755 physicists is shown in order on both the x- and y- axis. Blue points indicate co-authors, and white points show no affiliation. Large clumps of blue show communities, most of which seem to correspond to particular subfields.

Hofman just started analyzing the data, but he’s already highlighted some particularly collaborative communities. The visualization also shows that there are multiple communities that focus on the same thing. There are, for instance, at least two fairly large graphene communities. Rivalry!

For the nitty gritty details on Hofman’s approach, check out his paper in the arxiv.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 07:01 PM | Permalink

Darkening a lecture room after a full day of sessions seems like a dangerous prospect. But Wednesday's Town Hall meeting on ultra-high pressures was actually pretty lively.

The basic idea? Squeeze hard on any element, ratchet up the temperature, and you end up with some unexpected new phases. At high enough pressures and temperatures, ordinary, transparent water becomes opaque. Push even further, and it becomes transparent. Dive down into Jupiter's atmosphere, and the pressures quickly become so high that even hydrogen becomes metallic.

This relatively small field of physics is expected to get bigger as the National Ignition Facility comes online, which might happen as early as next year. So the talks came with a request -- a call to arms for fellow physicists who might contribute.

"If as a result of this talk I infuriate you because I have overlooked some result or some phenomenon, then I have succeeded," said Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California, Berkeley, adding that his goal is to engage as many people to think about the subject as possible. But aside from the sheer excitement of mapping new phases of matter, what's the draw?

Continue reading "APS 2008: A high-pressure pitch" »

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 05:15 AM | Permalink

Graphene has been one of the hot topics at APS this year, consistently overflowing rooms. The atom-thick carbon sheets show lots of strange new physics, as well as the potential for exciting new technology.

But graphene guru Andre Geim isn't so keen on talking about the applications. At a packed lecture today, he prefaced a slide on what you can do with graphene disks with a parable.

On a trip to Florida, Geim said he was mesmerized by the graceful jumping of dolphins. It was all quite lovely until a little boy ruined the mood, shouting "Mom, can we eat that?"

In other words, asking about the utility of elegant basic research can be a bit of a downer. Despite his distaste, Geim proceeded to discuss how transparent, conductive graphene films might be useful in LCD and solar cell technology.

Then he got in a not-so-subtle dig. "In terms of applications, I didn't expect them to come so soon. But maybe they're not as exaggerated as other topics at this conference." There was hearty (maybe knowing?) laughter all around.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 11:13 PM | Permalink

Although the conference has now passed its middle point, I've met few physicists who've shown any visible signs of exhaustion. Perhaps it's the chummy receptions each evening, or maybe everyone has just gotten used to the overwhelming flood that is 120 sessions a day. Some folks I've spoken with admit they've been spending more than a little time outdoors, enjoying sunny days that top 22 C.

Still, the conference must go on, and interesting work keeps popping up. Following a press conference this afternoon, I caught up with Bodgen Dragnea who has been studying a crystal system composed of virus capsids and gold. Dragnea, a chemist at Indiana University Bloomington, studies virus proteins that self-assemble to form capsid shells. Ordinarily these shells protect a virus' key RNA or DNA, but last year Dragnea's lab reported they had created a system of virus shells with gold nanoparticles inside. Because these 'virus-like particles' are so uniform, they also self-assemble, forming a uniform lattice.

Since his last publication, Dragnea's lab has begun using Raman scattering to measure slight changes in the distance between gold cores on the lattice. Capsid shells may swell, compress, or denature entirely depending on the chemical properties of their environment. Those changes in the virus shell would then show up in measurements of the lattice. Dragnea says he should eventually be able to identify particular conditions that make for especially stable shells. "Then the next question is if there is a place in the cell that has that same environment," he says.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 04:37 AM | Permalink

Some physics experiments are just patently fun -- the science seems to sneak in by stealth, changing the way you view ordinary objects. Take crumpled balls, for example. An unassuming object with an extraordinarily complex shape. The path to get from an almost two-dimensional sheet to a three-dimensional object involves many energetic choices – whether it’s more efficient to fold in one direction or stretch in another. Understanding how crumpling happens has the potential to illuminate a lot of interesting physics about how folding happens in nature.

On Monday, Dominique Cambou presented the first results of a ostensibly simple project: mapping the 3D structure of a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. Cambou, a graduate student in Narayanan Menon's lab, systematically crumples balls and then subjects them to x-rays to image their internal structure.

Continue reading "APS 2008: Crumpled balls" »

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 01:17 AM | Permalink

This afternoon, I was blithely walking to a session when I found myself trapped between three very avid volunteers for the American Physical Society. All conference-goers caught in the cross-hairs were urged to sit down at a computer terminal to sign a letter calling for additional physics funding. It was an impressive example of technology meets advocacy. Fill out your contact information, click a few buttons, sign your name on a digital pad, and bang – letters to your local congresspersons are set to go.

Advocacy is a tradition at the March Meeting, but this year the stakes seem a bit higher. By the end of the day, it looked like every third physicist boasted an "I support science funding" sticker on their badge. The volunteers told me that sticker affords safe passage, the only way to avoid their cajoling the rest of the meeting.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 07:40 PM | Permalink

Posted on behalf of Rachel Courtland:

Greetings from New Orleans, which is likely jazzed to host the American Physical Society March Meeting, dedicated to all things solid state and condensed matter. Some conference-goers arrived over the weekend, enjoying sunny weather and steam-calliope music along the riverbank. But the weather turned cloudy this morning, driving everyone in to 40 early-morning sessions dedicated to everything from the latest results on graphene properties to the dynamics of shaking cat paws.

Conference organizers are waiting for registration to finish before declaring this physics conference 2008's largest (it's met with some rivals in recent years). But the program, which tops out at 665 pages, no longer has room to display short abstracts for each talk, an indicator there's lots of great physics to be discussed.

After a quick cup of press room coffee, I'm off for round two of sessions. Stay tuned for more as the conference gets into a groove.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:53 PM | Permalink

Well that's all from me from this year's April meeting as I pack my bags to leave Jacksonville. You can read more physics stories reported from the meeting, however, such as this online story by David Harris about the results from the Xenon10 dark matter experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy.
More stories will appear in Nature on Thursday, be sure to check back then.

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Experiment shows weakly-interacting particles must be very weak indeed.

The tiny, wimpy particles that might make up the Universe's dark matter must be even wimpier than some theories suggest.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Not what you normally expect at a physics conference. But now I’ve got your attention, we can talk NASCAR physics.

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a University of Nebraska physicist and NASCAR fan, gave a public lecture at the APS on Monday night, and did a good job mixing science and speed.

Why NASCAR? Well, as she puts it: “in what other sports do engineers have their own weekly TV shows?”

Leslie-Pelecky got interested in the science behind NASCAR when she saw replays of a high-speed car crash that appeared to have no cause – no collision, no engine failure, no tire blowout. In figuring out how NASCAR drivers maintain 190 mph speeds around 31-degree banked tracks she spent time 'embedded' with a racing team. Her behind-the-scenes investigation revealed that the best drivers know a lot of physics and that a crash can happen simply because of aerodynamics (bad turbulence or drafting) when the cars get close enough.

She also explained the science behind NASCAR’s “car of tomorrow”, which has been 7 years in development and making its debut this season. To prevent teams building a different car for every track NASCAR decided to develop one design for everyone to use. But the car of tomorrow does have two aerodynamic features that the teams can tweak – a rear wing and a front splitter. Developed using computational fluid dynamics the car’s aerodynamic features are designed to improve driver safety and to make it easier for the cars to pass each other, so making the race more exciting.

Not convinced? You can join the 35 million NASCAR fans who watch the races on TV and judge for yourselves.

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 03:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning David Spergel of Princeton University ran through the many achievements of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe for the assembled physicists in Jacksonville. This probe measures temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background – the oldest light in the universe. Since its launch in 2001 it has confirmed six predictions of the inflation model of big bang cosmology, including the fact that the universe is flat.

The next big quarry for the team is detecting gravitational waves in the WMAP data. They still have another two years of data from their five-year dataset to analyse before the mission ends in September 2009. Spergel is confident they will provide an upper limit on gravitational waves, even if they don’t discover them directly. After that we can expect the Planck mission, which will have three times the resolution and ten times the sensitivity of WMAP, to pick up the challenge.

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 11:42 PM | Permalink

Amory Lovins, leading energy conservation expert, appears somewhat less worried about conserving trees. He thrusts papers and books at everyone he meets. Ask a question at a press briefing and he chucks you a paper (fortunately he’s a good throw). So what’s the message behind the missiles?

It’s certainly hard not to be impressed by the facts and figures that Lovins has amassed. The Rocky Mountain Institute he founded in Snowmass, Colorado has documented in detail the inefficiencies of the energy sector, from waste heat at power plants to poorly designed consumer electronics that waste energy even when switched off. The engineering solutions RMI proposes for each energy challenge are equally impressive, from smart home insulation to ultralight cars made from carbon fibre composites.

But some of the RMI solutions make you wonder, why doesn’t everyone already do that? For me that's the hardest question to answer. Figuring out why humans make bad decisions, and continue to make bad decisions, in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence, may be as big a part of the energy challenge as finding the right technology.

As far as I can tell we’re just not very good at making decisions about lifecycle costs (energy savings from compact fluorescent light bulbs, say) versus the sticker price (cheaper incandescent bulbs). And technologies that need to be ‘pushed’ on the market, rather than being ‘pulled’ by what people want, are understandably less attractive to businesses. Perhaps there are marketing experts and social scientists out there with answers to those questions.

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 03:54 AM | Permalink

In a plenary talk this morning on his latest measurement of the electron's magnetic moment, Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard entertained the packed audiorium with a discussion of what he called 'perhaps the most obscure paper I've ever written'.

He showed a slide with the title of his PRL paper at the top: Stochastic Phase Switching of a Parametrically Driven Electron in a Penning Trap. And below it a clip from a February 2007 interview between Jim Carrey and talkshow host Conan O'Brien.

In a moment straight out of a parallel universe, Carrey tells Conan O' how much he likes reading about quantum physics before repeating verbatim the title of the Harvard paper. The contortionist star and the host both go on to discuss the physics of electrons in a Penning trap to much audience applause.

Before it was removed from YouTube the clip was viewed more than 90,000 times, try wrapping your head around that! You can still view the clip here: http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/video/index.shtml#mea=64956

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 10:49 PM | Permalink

I've been here less than 24 hours and what I've discovered so far (some of this without leaving the hotel lobby) is that Jacksonville is home to bitter Granny Smith apples, very sweet iced tea and the extremely lazy St John river. This river is the longest North running river in the United States and as you arrive at Jacksonville airport you can see it snaking its way lazily across the mud flats. For the next few days at least there will be pasty faced physicists jostling with tanned Floridians along its riverbanks.

Consider me your blogging companion for this April meeting of the American Physical Society. It's my first time at this meeting - I've been to the larger March meeting many times, but this year I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the small and large-scale topics that are the focus of the April gathering - from nuclear and particle physics all the way up to astrophysics and cosmology. I'm expecting lots of explosions.

Sarah Tomlin

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Join Sarah Tomlin at the APS April meeting in Florida. She'll be sending reports to our newsblog from 15-17 April.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 01:54 PM | Permalink

Alright blog readers, I'm off. I'll see you all next year!

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 09:30 PM | Permalink

The APS’s congressional relations people were out in force, trying to get physicists to write letters to their congress people,and implore them for cash. As a rule, the physics community is pretty good at making their funding voices heard. But condensed matter researchers appear apathetic: as of yesterday afternoon, just 900 of the roughly 7,300 people who showed up bothered to sign letters.

One thing that was clear in a session last night (in which I participated) is that physicists will need to speak much more loudly to the new congress if they want their voices heard over competing interest like Iraq, health care and education.

But, at this meeting at least, that didn't seem to grab people's attention. Maybe it’s the lack of big machines, or the fact that the field itself isn’t very cohesive. Whatever the reason, Mike Lubell, APS’s head of public affairs, says he hopes to boost participation next year.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 09:19 PM | Permalink

Last night, after the sessions were over, I found myself in a bar with two locals who work at a prominent Denver-area restaurant.

I asked them who, of the Denver conference circuit, were the best tippers. Surprisingly, they said that attendees of the annual sex business convention were most generous. Bible conferences tended to be the worst, possibly because they didn’t drink much.

Physicists, they told me, lie in the vast middle ground between the God-squad and the pornographers. But they do distinguish themselves in one way: they leave very precise tips. For example, they would leave a tip of $7.23, exactly 17% of a $42.50 bill.

The servers wanted me to ask all of you to start rounding, preferably up.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 04:47 PM | Permalink

Michael Deem of Rice University has an interesting vaccination strategy for HIV: vaccinate different parts of the body against different strains of the virus.

Deem claims that current vaccination plans have a weakness. If you vaccinate for one particular strain of HIV, the immune system will produce too many T-cells for that strain, while ignoring other dangerous variants. By injecting different vaccines into different lymph nodes (where T-cells get made), his mathematical calculations show that you could produce a more balanced immune response.

Of course, that’s all a little abstract since there isn’t an HIV vaccine yet. But the same strategy could work for different strains of Dengue Fever (there are apparently four). Deem says that he will soon test his ideas on animal subjects.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 09:58 PM | Permalink

At a session at the meeting this morning, a group of government officials and nuclear weapons experts discussed the state of US strategic forces.

Everyone in the room seemed to sense that the US didn’t know quite what to do with the 10,000 nukes in its stockpile. US Strategic Command no longer considers the weapons its primary priority, according to Lt. General Robert Kehler. “We go days at a time without being involved in the nuclear weapons business,” he says.

The White House and other politicians seem similarly detached. Eminent physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell summed it up pretty well: “We need an answer to the question—what are nuclear weapons for?"

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 06:03 PM | Permalink

Non-invasive test can pick up the whiff of disease.

Physicists have developed a simple breath test that may be capable of detecting Type I diabetes.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

At our first press conference today, we learned how a mysterious set of formations on Mars known as “razorbacks” may be made by static cling, rather than water. Razorbacks are spikes in the Martian soil, about a millimetre wide and a centimetre high. Scientists had theorized that water flowing through fractures on the surface might have created these dainty peaks.

Not so fast, says Troy Shinbrot of Rutgers University. By sliding tiny glass beads down a table, Shinbrot created similar structures here on earth. The terrestrial razorbacks were built up by the static cling of the beads rubbing together. Shinbrot believes that a similar process could be at work on Mars, especially since the dry atmosphere would facilitate static build-up.

This isn’t the first water on Mars theory Shinbrot has debunked. In 2004 he showed that the low gravity of Mars could cause dust to flow like water, creating gullies similar to those made by streams here on Earth.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Can't make it to the American Physical Society meeting in Denver this week, or having trouble hitting all the sessions? Keep up with all the news and get behind the scenes with Geoff Brumfiel's diary reports, here from Monday 5 March.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 02:24 PM | Permalink

One of the challenges at any large conference is being in the right room at the right time - and then hoping that you can find a seat near the back in case the talk is not all it could be. It also helps if the speakers turn up - flu, problems with connecting flights and "a meeting in Washington" were three of the excuses on offer in Baltimore.

And one of the challenges for the organizers of any large conference is putting the right talk in the right room. Occasionally a speaker will find themselves speaking to a handful of people in a large hall, while, somewhere along the corridor, a 100 people might be trying to squeeze into a room with 64 chairs. A senior APS figure was overheard to speculate in Baltimore that the reason that some sessions were oversubscribed was because they were highlighted on the Nature site!

Posted on behalf of: Peter Rodgers, Nature Nanotechnology

Posted by Nicola Jones at 10:53 AM | Permalink

A few days ago, someone from the European Central Bank emailed Dirk Brockmann to ask for advice on how contaminated Euro notes might influence the spread of bird flu. Brockmann, who recounted this story in his invited talk today, explained that they’d made a common mistake in misunderstanding his work.

Back in January, Nature published an article by Brockmann and his colleagues that looked at how dollar bills travel across the United States. The paper is here. The idea was to study the dollar bills' movements as a proxy for how people travel. A model based on the dollar bills’ diffusion pattern could then be used in epidemiology, to help predict how diseases spread. But he was not, he emphasised, suggesting that bank notes themselves spread disease.

There’s another interesting aspect to this story, too.

The data for the study came from Where’s George?! - a website that collects sightings of marked dollar bills from enthusiasts across the United States. If you register, you get a small rubber stamp that says “Track me at www.wheresgeorge.com”. You mark your bills, throw them back into circulation (ie, spend them) and then watch to see where they turn up. People that really get into this call themselves “Georgers” and meet up around the country.

A few turned up at today’s session, to hear Brockmann speak. Before I took my spare dollar bills back to Britain, I went to talk to them…

Continue reading "APS: meet the Georgers" »

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was trying to decide which session to attend when John Wei, a physicist from the University of Toronto, shanghaied me onto a bus headed for DC.

I found myself among eminent scientists on a mission. We were going to Congress and our aim was to convince US politicians that physics deserves more financial support.

How? Well, when we arrived at the venue, people were busy setting up fun physics demonstrations, from levitating magnets to balls that look like rubber but go thud instead of bouncing. Other displays used liquid nitrogen to cool superconductors, freeze flowers or shrink balloons. (A lot of work must have gone into organising this event. You don’t just drive up to the loading bay at Congress with tanks of liquid nitrogen!)

It was my first visit to the Capitol and I was looking forward to meeting some politicians. But I had trouble finding any. I went up to two men in uniform, who turned out to be physicists from the Naval Academy. Two others in suits were astronomers from the Naval Observatory.

Later, someone pointed out some House representatives, busy playing with the exhibits at the National Institute of Standards and Technology stand. They were laughing and enjoying themselves! Then we were treated to speeches from only two PhD physicists in Congress, Vernon Ehlers and Rush Holt.

They said that more scientists should be involved in politics. They’re right. We need to stand up for science education. One trip to Congress is probably not enough, but it’s a good start.

[Posted on behalf of May Chiao, Nature Physics ]

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 04:26 AM | Permalink

Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to a physics sing-along. I was one of about 50 people who turned up. Some loiterers in the lobby of the hotel where it was happening tried to warn me off. “It’s like a lecture at the conference,” they said. “They’re using an overhead projector.”

I went anyway. And although I didn’t expect to be saying this, I enjoyed it. I even sang. There were two musicians; one with a guitar, the other a bongo; a singer and a laptop to provide backing music.

So, altogether now, to the tune of Loch Lomond…

“Oh, you be the B field, and I’ll be the E field,
Let’s dance through the cosmos, my lover!
With the ether set aside, you and I can freely glide,
Supported on the wings of each other.”

The next verses weren’t quite so lovely, but I thought that this opening was sublime. It begins a poetic love song, sung by an electric (E) field to a magnetic (B) field, which pays tribute to their partnership in an electromagnetic wave. The rest of the words and a recording of The Love Song of the Electric Field are here.

The lyrics are by Walter Smith, an associate professor in physics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and the coordinator of last night’s event. He runs a website that collects physics songs. Apparently, it was common in the early 1900s for physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge to sing songs, which they had penned themselves, after dinner. More here.

For more funny lyrics from last night's karaoke session, relating to fraud and Nature, keep reading...

Continue reading "APS: the physicists sang along" »

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 01:15 PM | Permalink

What could be more relaxing after a day of brain-stretching physics than a bit of singing? Tonight we are to be treated to what the event’s website claims will be the first ever physics "sing-along / listen-a-long".

This evening’s entertainment has been heavily advertised around the conference. The posters read: “Come sing along to physics lyrics set to familiar tunes.” Then, rather worryingly, they reassured: “No singing ability required!”

I’m heading out to add my tuneless warble to the geek chorus. More tomorrow…

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 01:24 AM | Permalink

“Physicists forced to alter data?” asked the flyers handed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to delegates today.

There is deep concern among scientists in the US that, under the current Bush administration, political appointees have interfered with the reporting of scientific findings. The issue has made it into the news more than once over recent months – when climate scientist James Hansen said he was stifled by NASA’s press office, for example, and after Nobel laureate David Baltimore spoke out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis.

I visited the UCS stall in the exhibition hall to find out what response they’d got from the physicists here.

Michael Halpern, from the Scientific Integrity Program of the UCS, said that at some meetings people come up to the UCS table and look both ways before recounting some experience of their own. This time, he said, they’d heard fewer personal tales.

“We weren’t necessarily here to uncover tales of manipulation of science,” he says. Many of the delegates at this meeting work in fields that are unlikely to be politically sensitive.

Halpern said the goal of the UCS in being at the APS is to raise awareness. “Our view is that the scientific community needs to be engaged in a persistent and active way,” he said.

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 01:13 AM | Permalink

This morning I sat in a room that was full of confusion. The small group of physicists gathered for the session on “supersolids” was thoroughly perplexed.

Two years ago, researchers from Penn State University reported the first evidence for a supersolid – a strange new form of matter which is a solid but which, through quantum effects, can flow like a liquid.

Today we learnt that other groups have now repeated the result, but their experiments have also raised new questions.

Continue reading "APS: helium's special effects" »

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So you think quantum mechanics is hard? Try being a border patrol agent in today’s post-9/11 world. The US has some 360,000 vehicles, 5,100 trucks, 2,600 aircraft and 600 vessels entering at their legal checkpoints – every single day. The Department of Homeland Security wants to install some 2,400 radiation monitors at their border crossings to spot clandestine nuclear material, and they still have some way to go. But even now the system is overloaded with false alarms.

This biggest problem: innocuous kitty litter. Apparently the clay in cat litter gives off enough radiation to set off a gamma detector. And its emission signature is very close to that of highly-enriched uranium. The current high-purity germanium (HPG) detectors can’t tell the difference.

Barry Zink and colleagues at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, along with their Los Alamos collaborators, have developed a gamma-ray detector that has ten times better resolution than existing HPG detectors. It uses a transition-edge thermometer to record the temperature difference between a superconducting bilayer, and a tiny island of tin that absorbs incoming gamma rays. The sensitivity comes from cooling the sensor down to 100 millikelvin above absolute zero. Zink admits that 100 mK is a ‘somewhat challenging’ temperature to achieve, but says that cryogenic technology has vastly improved in the past decade.

How robust is it? In order to test their detector out on a range of nuclear materials Zink and co-workers drove their prototype 400 miles in a minivan to the National Nuclear Security Agency division at Los Alamos. The sensor survived the trip okay, and successfully detected one of the usual suspects for nuclear weapons: the plutonium-239 isotope.

Right now the biggest sensor array NIST has made has 16 sensors, but they plan to build a 100-sensor array. Although it will never be big enough for general screening of, say, entire vessels, the detector can help to analyse and verify nuclear stockpiles, and to screen suspicious material flagged by other techniques.

And it may help prevent some of those costly kitty-litter false alarms.

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 09:40 PM | Permalink

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Posted by Jenny Hogan at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last few days, I’ve had to hop between hotels. The process has left me confused about my constantly-changing room number. But I'm not the only one struggling to keep track.

After a session here at the APS, I met a similarly bewildered scientist. He was flitting between some of the many parallel sessions in the convention centre, and couldn't remember which room he was meant to be in next. Then he cried, “ah, but of course, it was room 314. I won’t forget that, it’s Pi.”

Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circles’ circumference to its diameter (and it begins 3.14159 26535 8979). Such are the advantages of being into mathematics… Unfortunately, I haven't been able to think of any fundamental constants that start 409.

Posted by Jenny Hogan at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The session on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism this morning could have been renamed the session on scary numbers. Invited speakers Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, Brent Park of LANL and Mike Carter of the Department of Homeland Security, did a good job at raising the audience’s personal ‘threat levels’ to Code Red.

Continue reading "APS: some scary stats" »

Posted by Sarah Tomlin at 09:31 PM | Permalink

Press conference number two was all about using materials to generate, or save, electricity.

Sarah Kurtz of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory gave a briefing on high-efficiency solar cells, which are now almost as efficient as conventional coal and natural gas power plants.

Mercouri Kanatzidis of Michigan State University talked about thermoelectric materials which can take waste heat, such as the heat generated by a car’s engine, and convert it directly to energy.

And Fred Schubert of Renssaler Polytechnic University said a few words on the next generation of light emitting diodes (LEDs), which will niftily reproduce the spectrum of natural sunlight using just a fraction of the power consumed by your average light bulb.

Of course, none of these technologies are quite ready for prime-time. Kurtz’s cells are a bit too expensive, Kanatzids’ thermoelectrics a bit too inefficient, and Schubert’s LEDs a little too early in development to really be useful. But taken together they offered a taste of how future materials could help the coming power crunch.