The Great Beyond

It's been a nice long and mercifully quiet winter break for those of us covering the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator. In case you've forgotten, the accelerator started up successfully in the fall of 2008 and broke down nine days later. After a year of hard work (and a baguette-related power failure), they got it up again in the fall of 2009. Collision hungry physicists got to see their first smashed protons in November and after a very brief run, the LHC went into a shut down period in mid-December.

Ok, now that you're all caught up, here's the news (HT to Cosmic Variance): Last week at a meeting in Chamonix, France, physicists from CERN, the big European particle physics lab (near Geneva and Chamonix both) announced their plans for the LHC. Starting in March machine will run for anywhere from 18-24 months at 3.5 TeV. That will be enough to generate 1 inverse femtobarn of data for physicists to look at. Inverse femtobarns (fb^-1 for those in the know) are the unit of choice for measuring the total luminosity (number of collisions) an accelerator has reached. Luminosity matters because the you need A LOT of collisions to find things like the Higgs particle, the particle which is believed to endow everything else with mass. It took Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator four years to reach fb^-1 (at lower energies), and now the LHC is looking to do it in half the time.

That's the good news. The bad news is that after it reaches the fb^-1 mark, the LHC is going into a very long shut down. It looks like the machine will be down for servicing for up to a year in order to make further repairs and install safety systems. The machine's magnets will also be "retrained", a process that will hopefully allow the machine to get up to its full energies of 7 TeV.

Obviously the shut down is going to be a disappointment for the thousands of experimentalists working on the LHC, but at least they'll have a whole inverse femtobarn of data to chew on until the machine is completely repaired.

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 01, 2010
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There's plenty of press today about the National Ignition Facility (NIF), an ambitious project to drive fusion energy using a massive array of super-powerful lasers. If this sounds like some sort of devious James Bond plot, you're not too far off: NIF's primary job is to verify that the United State's nuclear stockpile is working well.

But there's also hope it could advance the cause of fusion power. NIF will fire 192 lasers onto a tiny capsule of hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium). Scientists hope that the pressure exerted by all that laser light will cause the nuclei to fuse together, creating helium and a lot of energy.

This week, NIF announced a milestone: it successfully focused 0.7 megajoules of energy onto a test capsule. To hear some news outlets report it, you'd think this was the end of the quest for fusion energy. But scientists still must double the energy of the lasers and insert a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet into the machine before they can trigger a full fusion "burn". Even then, it would be a long way from that to a fusion power-plant.

Even then there's uncertainty: Nobody's exactly sure whether NIF can concentrate its energy tightly enough. And if it can, contaminants from the capsule wall could disrupt the fusion process.

A couple of fusion researchers I spoke to about the NIF announcement were optimistic, calling it "very encouraging". But for the most part they've still got their arms crossed—they'll have to see higher energies and actual fuel in the machine before they're convinced this US$3.5 billion gamble works as advertised.

If you'd like to learn more, I'd point you to the competition: Science's Dan Clery has done a better job than most laying out what the milestone means, and what lies ahead.

Image: LLNL

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on January 29, 2010
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Female school teachers anxious about maths pass that fear onto the girls in their classes, according to a University of Chicago study published this week in PNAS.

The researchers assessed maths achievement in the beginning of the school year, and after students were exposed to their teachers’ unease for months. The higher the teachers’ anxiety level, the lower the achievement of the girls — but not the boys. The study also says that teachers accomplished this by possibly enforcing stereotypes that boys are better at maths.

“It’s actually surprising in a way, and not,” lead author Sian Beilock told the AP. “People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn’t know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion.”

Despite caveats — e.g. “the effects reported in the current work, although significant, are small”—the study suggests teachers are undermining their students’ confidence, and gender is a reason.

Their data come from 17 urban, Midwestern women and the 52 boys and 65 girls they teach in the first- and second-grade. Teachers’ anxieties were evaluated using questions about how anxious different situations make them feel (e.g. “reading a cash register receipt after you buy something”). To measure gender biases at the beginning and end of the year, the researchers asked students to draw who they thought would be good at reading and who would be good at math. By the end of the year, “girls who pick up on that negative typecasting score lower on a math achievement test, on average, than girls who don’t” Science News writes.

But the team never measured male teachers’ anxieties and subsequent effects because they say over 90 percent of early elementary school teachers are females. Would a maths-anxious male teacher pass that on to boys and not girls? A hard question to answer, the researchers confess. Children “model behaviors they believe to be gender typical and appropriate,” the study says, concluding that teachers of either sex are responsible for many of the traits that characterize children.

The authors also admit “there are likely many influences on girls’ math achievement and gender ability beliefs” and perhaps girls are more observant and likely to pick up on their teachers’ negativities.

Posted by Janet Fang on January 26, 2010
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arXiv.org, the popular open access repository for physics papers, is seeking donations to help keep it running.

Since 2001, arXiv has been run by the library at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. But the library says it can no longer afford the US$400,000 annual operating costs. This week it is expected to ask the top 200 institutional users of arXiv to make voluntary contributions.

“The top 200 institutions account for about 75% of institutionally identifiable downloads,” says an FAQ on the plans. “... Cornell University Library is facing significant budget cuts and we are seeking ways to share the cost of this community resource. Cornell University Library will continue to provide 15% of arXiv's operating budget, an amount many times higher than the support we will request from other heavy user institutions.”

The arXiv team says it is committed to maintaining the repository as free to both users and those who submit papers. Since its foundation in 1991 arXiv has become a key resource for physicists, with many discoveries getting their first airing as pre-print papers on its website.

In the longer term, arXiv is looking at a number of models to make itself sustainable, but it says that it will remain committed to keeping its content free for researchers.

Image: the arXiv website earlier today.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on January 19, 2010
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If you ever go to Cambridge, UK, and find yourself being punted on the river Cam, along the backs of the colleges, it's possible that at some point you will be shown a tree by your guide, it doesn’t matter which but helps if it is near Trinity College, and told that it is the very tree from which an apple fell on Isaac Newton and inspired him to invent gravity.

Now anyone with half an ounce of sense will realise that this is a fib, meant to please tourists. Ah, but now, if you want to read the real story of what happened, and whether an apple fell on Sir Isaac's bonce, and where, you can thanks to the venerable Royal Society. In this its 350th year, the Royal Society has revealed a number of its old manuscripts to the public in digital form, with their Turning the Pages project.

Among these manuscripts is William Stukeley's 1752 manuscript, Life of Newton. Stukeley was an archaeologist, freemason, learned gentleman and Newton’s biographer.

The page where he recounts the apple incident is here and you can look at the entire diary here.

The way Stukeley tells it is as follows:

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees; only he and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways or upwards? But constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it…

The RS has kept Stukeley’s manuscript away from the public’s gaze until now – because those parchments are not likely to withstand much thumbing from interested readers. And these aren’t the only old scrawls you can get your hands on virtually. The project also so far includes Henry James’s fossil notebook, various drawings both anatomical and floral, and other scientific treats.

But Newton’s apple has been the thing to attract the eye of eager journalists (Guardian Telegraph, Canadian Press, Scientific American).

Image: Royal Society

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on January 18, 2010
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The Iranian government has launched a website extolling the virtues of its nuclear programme. Unfortunately for nuke lovers, the site is only available in Farsi, but Google Translate does a reasonably good job of translating the thing into English.

Articles include "Iran and the struggle against weapons of mass destruction", a neat little piece explaining how Iran deplores the use of WMD, in part because of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.

There's also a nifty little Google Map of Iran's declared nuclear facilities, along with some helpful descriptions (Natanz, the site of a controversial enrichment plant only gets about a sentence). There's also some photo galleries and the like with pictures of different bits of the atomic establishment (though no centrifuges). Oh, and the videos, from what I've seen, are a must watch.

But click on Iran's "nuclear programme goals" from the homepage and you're out of luck. "You are not authorized to access this page," the website says…Maybe I need a Tehran IP address.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on January 15, 2010
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The Department of Energy on 8 January granted Fermilab initial approval to begin work on the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which would study the shy, mysterious and chargeless particle that rarely interacts with matter and was only discovered to have mass (a tiny bit) in the late 1990s.

LBNE would generate a beam of neutrinos on the Fermilab campus and send it more than 1,000 kilometres away to huge detector vats at DUSEL, a proposed laboratory in an abandoned mine in South Dakota. The experiments could help explain why, after the Big Bang created nearly equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, matter dominates today. It could also reveal the interactions between three neutrino "flavors", which mix with each other as they travel over long distances.

The experiment is in keeping with the P5 prioritization report from two years ago, which recommended neutrino research as being important. It would extend the research begun by Nova, and compete with the T2K long baseline experiment in Japan. Fermilab, the traditional home of high-energy physics in the US, is trying to find a niche that will occupy its scientists now that the Tevatron has ceded the energy frontier to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and this would indicate that neutrinos will be Fermilab's bread and butter for some time to come.

But there's a sneaky way to use neutrino experiments to get back to particle smashing. Another goal for Fermilab is Project X, which would not only provide LBNE with a more powerful beam of neutrinos, but could also be modified to produce beams of muons, which are like heavier but more ephemeral electrons. If built a few decades from now (if built at all), a muon collider could be a way for Fermilab to reclaim the energy frontier from CERN.
Image: symmetry magazine

Posted by Eric Hand on January 14, 2010
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A ‘meta-material’ lens could herald the arrival of “a new class of optical devices”, say its creators.

Until now, say Nathan Kundtz and David Smith, lenses have been designed by grinding a surface to alter the path of light rays. Instead, they have been working on “a more natural—but usually less convenient” method using not just the surface but the whole volume of the lens.

What they came up is rather like a tiny set of Venetian blinds made of fibreglass etched with copper. It is the arrangement of the pieces rather than the properties of the material that bend electromagnetic waves.

In Nature Materials they report that their lens works with microwaves, giving a near-180 degree view. It demonstrates that what was previously theoretical can be made practical, they say (press release).

“This design may be of practical importance, but it also serves to underscore the fundamentally new devices that can be produced when control of the volume of a material is used. We expect that the techniques used in the design of this lens will be of importance in many areas of electromagnetic design,” write the researchers, both of whom work out of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

“At short wavelengths, they may be used to design replacement optical devices that have previously required the use of complex systems of many lenses. At longer wavelengths such systems are impractical because of the size and weight limitations, thus making the lens we have designed a fundamentally new tool.”

It should be possible to make a similar lens for visible light, say the team, although that will take a bit more work.

Image: the new lens / Duke University Photography

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 21, 2009
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Britain's main source of research money for hard-core physics has revealed which projects will get the chop as it attempts to balance its stubbornly problematic budget.

The Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) was formed in 2007 to oversee government spending on high-energy physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. It has been in financial trouble pretty much since day one.

Shortly after it was formed, the council announced that it had an £80 million hole in its budget. It managed to limp through 2008 by borrowing against future budget years and receiving extra money to pay for foreign subscriptions. But by 2009, its budget woes had caught up with it again, and it appeared to be short some £40 million.

Today's announcement of a five-year plan to balance its books comes at the end of a six-month consultation designed to put the council on a more sustainable track. In the near term, it calls for a 10% across-the-board cut to exploitation grants, and a 25% reduction in the number of new student fellowships.

Continue reading "British physics faces up to cuts" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on December 16, 2009
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In all the excitement over Copenhagen, you may not have noticed that there’s another important meeting going on at the moment: the 2009 fall American Geophysical Union. Here’s what Nature’s reporters there have noticed so far and written about on our In the Field and Climate Feedback blogs.

Day of the tsunami

The morning of September 29, 2009, was one Mase Akapo will never forget. Akapo is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and one of his jobs is to help prepare the islands for natural disasters. At 6:48 a.m. that day, he felt the ground shaking stronger than he’d ever felt before. When you’re an emergency manager, that means just one thing: get to work.

Arctic vegetation changes amplify warming

Chalk up another piece of dire news for the Arctic in a globally warmed future. Researchers have identified a previously unknown climate feedback effect suggesting that, as vegetation creeps northward, it will accelerate warming trends already in place.

California droughtin'

The GRACE gravity-hunting satellites have nailed another significant observation: Groundwater levels in California’s agriculturally rich Central Valley have dropped dramatically since 2003.

Capeless superheroes and rumbling shorelines

I started Fall Meeting bright and early Monday in the vast poster display hall, almost a city block long. The posters, like the oral sessions, cover a couple dozen broad areas of science, but climate change pops up in many of them: ocean science, environmental change, atmospheric science, and others. No one can cover it all, so a reporter depends a little on serendipity, that is, just stumbling onto the right presentation.

Looking for a future

Change is in the air this year at the fall American Geophysical Union meeting, and not just because of the gossip in the hallways about what might happen at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this week. No, the AGU changes are far more navel-gazing and concern the future of the 50,000-member society itself.

Food for thought

If it’s December, it’s the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. For the 42nd consecutive year, AGU has returned here, and each year more scientists participate, descending on the city from all around the world. It is the must meeting for researchers in Earth and space science, and especially for those studying climate change.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 16, 2009
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The Times (of London) has a big spread today, which reportedly outs the Iranian nuclear programme. Documents from "an Asian intelligence source" show that, in 2007, the Iranians were preparing experiments with uranium deuteride in order to develop a neutron "initiator" for a nuclear bomb. That would be four years after they claimed to have stopped their bomb programme.

Nuclear weapons are all about getting enough uranium into a small enough space to trigger a boom. The simplest nuclear bomb is a "gun type" device, in which a critical mass is assembled by firing a uranium plug into a doughnut-shaped ring at high speed (or visa vice versa). When the plug and doughnut are united, the bomb goes critical and explodes.

It works alright, but compression is better. Modern bombs use explosives to compress a sphere of Uranium-235 or (better still) Plutonium-239 until it reaches a critical density. Helping in the process is an "initiator" at the bomb's core, which sends out a burst of perfectly timed neutrons that trigger the explosion.

And that's where uranium deuteride comes in. The Iranian documents appear to call for a research programme into using uranium deuteride as a neutron initiator. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has a little graph explaining how this works:

This type of initiator works by the high explosives compressing the nuclear core and the initiator, producing a spurt of neutrons as a result of fusion in D-D [deuterium-deuterium] reactions. The neutrons flood the core of weapon-grade uranium and initiate the chain reaction. It does not boost the yield.

Initiators are important because if they don't work, your bomb might not either. The most widely described design uses combination of beryllium and polonium. Basically helium atoms (alpha particles) from the decay of the polonium trigger a big neutron flux in the beryllium. The US and others use more sophisticated initiators that slam tritium into a deuterated target, initiating fusion and, in the process, creating a precise pulse of neutrons.

UD3 is kind of an unusual material for an initiator. Where would Iran have gotten an idea? Hmm… Well as Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk points out, it might have been everybody's favourite nuclear smuggler AQ Khan. This photo, from the cover of Khan's own book, show's a pretty bomb design. And what did Khan have as the initiator? Why it's "Uran-Deuteride"!

ACW has a great discussion about how the Chinese fooled around with UD3 in the 1980s, and ISIS has posted the original documents from the Times story here. For my own offering of uranium deuteride trivia, I'll point out that the US apparently tested a bomb made entirely of the stuff back in 1953. The test was part of the Upshot-Knothole series, although it didn't have anything to do with initiators, so far as I can tell.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on December 14, 2009
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The row at Australia’s biggest scientific facility is growing faster than you can say ‘synchrotron’.

A significant number of scientists have now quit their advisory roles with the Australian Synchrotron in a row over the chairwoman of the facility’s governing board, Catherine Walter.

After the synchrotron’s director was fired and its staff went on strike the facility's Science Advisory Committee demanded Walter’s resignation over the ‘culture clash’ they blamed her for between science and business interests (see: Culture clash at Australian synchrotron).

However, Gustav Nossal, a biologist who was brought in to champion the synchrotron, says he will create a new scientific body to advise the board (The Australian).

Exactly how many scientists have resigned as a result of the continuation of Walter’s reign is unclear. ABC says three “plan to resign” and up to seven of the nine advisors “could leave” (it’s not clear why the other two couldn’t, if they wished, leave). The Age says “at least six” members have quit while The Australian says four have gone.

Headline watch
Advisers quit in perfect synch

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 10, 2009
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Left to Right: CMS and ATLAS had more collisions yesterday.

After over a year of down time, the Large Hadron Collider restarted late last month. Within days, it surpassed the Tevatron and became the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world.

But highest-energy does not equal most powerful. Although the LHC has successfully accelerated protons to 1.18 TeV, the overall number of it's smashed is tiny.

The ATLAS detector has a nice dashboard on its website, which sums things up rather well. In about a week, the detector has recorded 226 collisions. When the LHC is running at full strength, it will be producing 600 million collisions per second. To achieve that incredible collision rate, the LHC will circulate and smash 5616 tightly packed proton bunches. As of this weekend they've gotten up to eight.

There's good reason for starting off slow. Last year, the machine blew out a connection in one of its superconducting cables. The resulting electrical arc vapourized several tons of liquid helium used to cool the cable, and caused a massive amount of damage. The full-power beam, when it's commissioned, will carry as much energy as an aircraft carrier moving at 12 knots. If they loose that beam for any reason, then the mess they will have on their hands would make last year's catastrophe look like a blown fuse.

Needless to say things will move slowly for the moment. But by the winter break, which starts on the 18th, CERN physicists hope to have a good amount of experience running the accelerator. That should allow them to move on quickly to higher energies (and powers) early next year.

Credit: CMS/ATLAS

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on December 07, 2009
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A paper published on the arXiv pre-print website by Kenneth Libbrecht and Hannah Arnold says aerodynmaics are behind the phenomenon.

While most snowflakes are hexagonal, triangular forms have long been observed. When Libbrecht and Arnold grew snow crystals in the lab they found far more triangular forms than would be expected from mere random growth perturbations.

Air moving past a falling crystal will increase its growth, they note. A tiny factor – perhaps a piece of dust on the crystal – that causes a small change in growth of a perfect hexagon will also tilt the crystal, changing the way air moves past the crystal and – in their model – increasing the way the crystal grows at certain points and inducing a more triangular appearance.

“The end result is that an initial symmetry-breaking perturbation results in a growth morphology that becomes more triangular with time,” the paper says. “Only one initial perturbation is necessary, and no coordination intrinsic to the molecular structure of the crystal need be present.”

[Hat tip: Science News.]

Images: Ken Libbrecht

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 02, 2009
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Last week, we wrote about a funding crisis at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the main funding body for particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy in the UK. As we reported, the STFC is facing a £40 million shortfall in its 2010 budget, and it's going to make it up the hard way, by cutting back on programmes.

The details of exactly what STFC will do are still up in the air, pending the completion of a programmatic-wide review on 16 December, but already physicists are airing their concerns.

Nuclear physicist Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey is quoted widely today that he fears nuclear physics might be singled out for deeper cuts than astronomy or particle physics. Speaking to New Scientist, the Guardian and the Times, Al-Khalili says that his community is scared the cuts could "wipe out" nuclear physics.

Al-Khalili's fears are not unfounded. Nuclear physics is smallest of the three groups covered by STFC, and unlike particle physics and astronomy, they don't pay subscriptions to international projects like the Large Hadron Collider and the European Southern Observatory. But as he points out, the government is also making huge commitments to revive nuclear power right now. It would look bad for their nuclear renaissance if they eviscerated their university-based research programmes.

On balance, it's difficult to say how the cuts will play out. The STFC board will have the ultimate say, and until they release their recommendations, it's going to be a nervous time for all.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on December 01, 2009
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The Large Hadron Collider has today claimed the record for world’s highest energy particle accelerator.

CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, says the LHC has accelerated its twin proton beams to 1.18 TeV, smashing the previous record of 0.98 TeV held by the US Tevatron collider.

However, the LHC is still running with relatively few protons in the accelerator. In the coming the weeks this will be ramped up to increase the number of collisions when the beams are crossed.

“It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010,” says Rolf Heuer, CERN’s Director General (press release). “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”

The first actual physics at the LHC will hopefully begin next year, when two 3.5 TeV beams will be smashed into each other for a 7 TeV collision.

Image: CERN control room earlier today / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 30, 2009
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The Nuclear Power Corporation of India has ordered a probe into what it believes to be sabotage, after about 50 workers at its Kaiga plant in western India were exposed to radiation. The workers became ill on 24 November after drinking from a water cooler later found to be contaminated with tritium – a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

The Kaiga plant employs heavy water as a moderator and the used heavy water – which will contain some tritium generated as a by-product of neutron bombardment – is stored inside the plant for eventual tritium recovery.

Atomic Energy Commission chairman Anil Kakodkar says some of this tritium containing heavy water was possibly introduced into the cooler in a “malevolent act” by a disgruntled employee. All of India’s nuclear plants tightened their security after 16 November on being alerted by Washington on possible terror attacks.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 30, 2009
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Today saw the start of a new major new experiment in Japan that will beam neutrinos from one side of the country to the other. Neutrinos are neutral, elementary particles denoted by the Greek letter ν (hence the clever title), and they come in three types. The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment hopes to better understand how they oscillate, that is switch from one kind to another. They do that by firing neutrinos created by the 30GeV main ring of the proton synchrotron at JPARC in Tokai to a massive detector filled with 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water in the Kamioka mine in Gifu (neutrinos don't interact very often with the rest of the world, so it takes a detector that size to see anything).

Neutrino oscillations are an important detail in the Standard Model of particle physics, and T2K hopes to better pin down the exact nature of the oscillations.

Physicists in the United Kingdom played a big role in the T2K project. They designed the target that creates neutrinos out of protons at JPARC and wrote the data acquisition software for some of the detectors. All told, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) estimates it spent around £14.3 million on the project.

Unfortunately, many physicists are worried about the UK's continued participation in the T2K project. The STFC is currently suffering from a £40 million funding shortfall, and is reviewing major projects like T2K to decide which to keep and which to cut.

I wrote a story for this week's issue of Nature that discusses the STFC's situation in depth (although we didn't go into T2K specifically). It will be out tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Credit: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, Univ. of Tokyo

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 24, 2009
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The Large Hadron Collider has finally collided something!

Actually, given the woes that have beset the particle physics experiment, the LHC has probably been responsible for several previous collisions: between physicists’ heads and various walls at the CERN complex. But now it has begun the proper smashing – that of particles against other particles – by cross the beams of protons that have been circulating around the giant ring since last week.

In a statement, CERN said:

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 [yesterday] afternoon.

This image shows the first possible collision seen at the ATLAS experiment:

See also: LHC sees particles circulate once more

Image: CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 24, 2009
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It's Friday evening, time once again for the "refresh game", where I sit on the CERN website waiting to find out what terrorism/food/drink crisis will befall the Large Hadron Collider next (TGB's Daniel Cressey is putting his money on a badger from the future quantum mechanically tunneling his way into the beamline).

At the moment, though, it's all looking pretty good! Commissioning of the machine should be completed any minute now, and the physicists and engineers in charge of the LHC could begin injecting beams of protons into the machine tonight. Optimistically, we could be about a week or two away from collisions.

Well, unless the United Nations intervenes. A cleverly-named group of LHC critics called conCERNed (get it? Because the LHC is at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is shortened to CERN in French? And CERN is right there in the word? Oh never mind), have filed a complaint with the UN's Human Rights Committee warning that the LHC might destroy the world. If true that would, it seem, infringe on a human right or two.

conCERNed would like to see the formation of an agency similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to regulate particle accelerators. But I wouldn't necessarily expect this to stop collisions in the coming weeks. Given what I've seen of IAEA diplomacy, even if the UN decides to form such an agency, it will take most of the LHC's first physics run just to draw up an agenda for its inaugural meeting.

Stay tuned for more updates next week!

CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 20, 2009
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The LEP had its own food problems

It's Friday afternoon, and as ever, I'm hitting 'refresh' on the CERN website to see what terror/food related incident might happen next. While I'm waiting, last week's baguette story prompted my colleague, Declan Butler, to tell me another tale: The time two beer bottles were found inside of one of CERN's machines. The story is so incredible, and so reminiscent of the recent baguette debacle, that I think it deserves retelling.

The year was 1996 and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn't even exist yet. At the time, CERN physicists were working on another machine called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). The LEP occupied the same 27 km ring that now houses the LHC, but instead of accelerating protons, it accelerated electrons and their antiparticles, positrons.

Physicists were just completing an upgrade to the LEP that would allow it to better measure the W+ and W- bosons, which help to moderate the weak nuclear force. In June, they were just about to begin their run with the upgraded machine when they ran into an unexpected snag. Technicians were injecting beams, but it wasn't getting around the whole circuit. After careful investigation, they found the cause—a pair of Heineken bottles wedged into the beam pipe.

The LEP was much less powerful and far simpler than the LHC. Instead of using huge superconducting magnets to guide its beams around the ring, the LEP used regular old steel magnets. That meant that the central beam pipes, which circulated the electrons and positrons was much more easily accessible, and repairs could be made fairly quickly.

Nevertheless, the incident was considered serious enough that the police were called in to investigate the sabotage. I called CERN spokesman James Gillies for an update on the case. "We never found out who it was," he says. To this day, he says "we don't know whether it was malicious or not".

We're making Declan's original story available for a week. Have a look!

Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 13, 2009
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The American Physical Society (APS) has overwhelmingly rejected a petition by a group of physicists asking the organization to reverse its position on climate change.

The petition was signed by 160 physicists including Nobel laureate Ivar Giaever. If you don't feel like reading the thing, it essentially says that there has been a lot of natural variation in climate change over the past centuries, and that natural variation can explain the recent rise in global temperatures. The statement also points out what it calls the "beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals."

The group has been bullish on the hopes of changing the APS's minds. They even wrote us a letter in July, noting that they had prompted an APS review of its climate change position. "We hope it will lead to meaningful change," they said in the letter.

But no such luck. The society review, lead by nuclear physicist Daniel Kleppner from MIT, recommended that no changes be made, and on 10 November, the council accepted their recommendation.

As interesting as the petition is, there's an equally fascinating analysis of the signers that's doing the rounds. John Mashey, a computer scientist and APS member, has done a thorough analysis of who was involved. It's not the easiest to read, but it starts getting interesting around section 4 or 5. Mashey breaks down the signers by age, political contributions and geographic area. He also does some network analysis to show who was involved with the petition at different stages.

He finds that the signers tend to be predominately older and big contributors to the Republican and Libertarian parties. More interestingly the supporters seem to be centered around the Northeast, particularly Princeton University's department. Again, not surprising considering that one of the main organizersis Will Happer, a well-respected Princeton physicist and long-time climate change sceptic who, in 1993, was pushed out of his position at the Department of Energy after rowing with then vice president Al Gore over the significance of the ozone hole (see our rival for a little background).

The petition wasn't a total flop, the APS says its Panel on Public Affairs should "examine the statement for possible improvements in clarity and tone." Happer called the decision a "big victory" for the petitioners.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 12, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

The Russian Academy of Sciences has announced the death of Vitaly Ginzburg. Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel Prize for physics and was also known as one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, for which he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

“We thought at the time that we were working to prevent a monopoly on the atomic bomb – Hitler’s monopoly if he got the bomb before Stalin,” Ginzburg said in an interview published last week by Physics World. “The thought of what would happen if Stalin had a monopoly on atomic weapons somehow never entered my head. Scary thought.”

He also told Physics World that “I think that my biggest achievement in physics is connected with the theory of superconductivity.”

His Nobel Prize, shared with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett, was for this work.

“He was an outstanding physicist...one of the last physicists with an encyclopaedic knowledge,” said Gennady Mesyats, director of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RIA Novosti).

In his 2003 autobiography for the Nobel Prize, Ginzburg wrote:

…I am still inclined to believe in the radiant future of mankind. Today on the road to it there are many obstacles, first of all, the Islamic (terrorist) threat, poverty and the lack of education of great masses of population, AIDS and other diseases. But let us remember the situation, for example, in 1943, sixty years ago. Europe was under Hitler's heel, the USSR, though heroically resisting, was living under the Stalinist yoke. America was not so strong, and the world war was raging.

Was it easier and better than now? The forces of democracy have coped with it, saved the civilized society and nowadays both the Nazism and the communism have almost sunk into oblivion. That is why we can hope for the ultimate triumph of the democratic system and the secular humanism all over the world. The necessary conditions for that are the presence of historical memory and the development of science.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 09, 2009
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Earlier this week, an electrical short again sidelined the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator on the French-Swiss border. As the Register first reported, the cause of the short appears to have been a baguette caught inside a piece of electrical equipment that supports the machine.

CERN sources have confirmed the incident and blamed it on an errant bird. Under condition of anonymity, a CERN insider answered the Great Beyond's questions about the incident. Seriously, we did not make this up.

Any indication it might have been left on accident by a worker?
A short-circuit was thought to be caused by baguette carrying bird (not unknown for animals to cause this sort of problem). Workers were definitely not implicated.

Can we say anything about the contents of the baguette? Did it contain any tasty filling? If so what type?
Looks to have been a plain baguette - no filling observed. It was very soggy when found.

Is there any indication whether this is a French or a Swiss baguette?
It was a French site – But a frontier crossing bird is not ruled out.

Has anyone considered the possibility that the baguette came from the future to sabotage the LHC? Is there any indication that this is a futuristic baguette?
The possibility has been examined by theoretical physicists - considered unlikely as they feel baguettes will not play a part in future cultures.

Why is a bird considered the most likely theory?
Not unknown for birds to cause this sort of problem in outdoor electrical installations. The bird survived but lost breakfast.

Is this for real?
It is for real.

Will it have any impact on the CERN schedule?
There will be no impact on CERN schedule - full recovery has already taken place. It's similar to a power cut – procedures are in place to deal with this sort of thing.

CERN/Wikipedia/G. Brumfiel

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 06, 2009
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Immediate action should be taken to prevent plutonium leaks following a potential future earthquake at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was warned this week.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board says an earthquake could trigger a fire inside high-risk gloveboxes where work on plutonium takes place. Los Alamos sits on a fault line, so an earthquake would not be unexpected.

The consequences of an earthquake-induced fire in the lab’s plutonium facility exceed the Department of Energy’s guidelines by over two orders of magnitude, says the board.

“The board believes this situation warrants immediate attention and action,” states a letter to Chu dated 26 October (pdf).

According to the Project on Government Oversight, the energy department has been trying to delay the board’s report in order to deal with the problem before it became public. It claims that a glovebox fire could cause the public to be exposed to 100 times the recommended safe level of plutonium.

In a statement to AP and the LA Times, the lab said it was already taking action to improve fire safety at the Technical Area-55 facility.

“Protecting the health and safety of our employees, the public and the environment while conducting operations all across the laboratory, particularly at the plutonium facility, TA-55, is our primary concern,” it says.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 28, 2009
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Trouble's a-brewing at Los Alamos

There's been so much trouble between scientists and the law lately that I've decided to start a new category here on the blog: scientific lockdown. Here's the latest contribution.

Over the course of last week, it emerged that a former Los Alamos nuclear weapons physicist says that he is under investigation for espionage. The researcher, P. Leonardo Mascheroni spoke to the Associated Press on 21 October, two days after he says FBI agents raided his home. The FBI has confirmed an "ongoing investigation" into his activities.

Mascheroni worked in the lab's X Division from 1979 until 1987, according to the AP. Since then, he appears to have been working on a laser fusion project, for which he was seeking aid from Venezuela. According to the AP, he approached the Venezuelan government in the fall of 2007 to see about pursuing his work. In February of last year, he says a man from the Venezuelan government contacted him about starting a weapons programme. The two met twice at Los Alamos, according to Mascheroni.

Mascheroni says he supplied the man with a CD that contained unclassified information widely available on the Internet in the hopes that the Venezuelan government would help finance his fusion scheme. He claims he wanted around $800,000 for the information but was never paid. In a later article, he admitted to receiving US$20,000 in cash from his Venezuelan handler.

The whole thing has raised enough of a stink that even Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has weighed in to deny claims that his country wants nuclear weapons.

But proliferation worries aside, real question here is what the heck is going on with scientists these days? Three weeks ago, particle physicist Adlene Hicheur was detained by French authorities on suspicion of terrorism; last week Stewart Nozette was arrested for attempted espionage; and, oh yeah, a South Korean court has just given Woo Suk Hwang a (suspended sentence) of two years.

Of course Los Alamos is home to the original scientific espionage case, the long running drama between Taiwanese-born Wen Ho Lee and the FBI. Lee was accused of spying for China, but after a seven-year legal battle he was exonerated in 2006.

Credit: G. Brumfiel

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 26, 2009
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It's time for big number madness here on the Great Beyond.

The first number is 2^43,112,609-1. If you crunch that out you'll get a 12 million digit prime. Primes that can be written as a power of two (minus the one) are called Mersenne Primes, and this one was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a UCLA project to pin down the Mersennes. It was discovered last year, but this week it spontaneously generated a smaller but more useful number: $100,000. That's the money awarded to the GIMP's team by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of their cooperative computing award.

The second, even larger number, comes from a new paper on the arXiv preprint server (and via the always helpful arXiv blog):

That's the number of universes that could exist if a theory known as inflation is correct. According to inflation, the universe began as a frothy foam of different quantum states that, during a period of rapid expansion, became "frozen" in space. Andre Linde and Vitaly Vanchirum of Stanford University estimated the number of frozen states that could have been created. Since each state is now a separate region of space with its own laws of physics, they argue that they can now be thought of as "separate" universes.

Even if we could see other universes, and there's no reason to think that we can, the authors believe we couldn't take it all in. Our brains could only "observe" 10¹⁰¹⁶ universes in a normal lifetime.

Want more numbers? Watch this:

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 16, 2009
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I was at the newly formed House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting yesterday for the inaugural hearing. It was a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and I have to admit that my eyes started to glaze over a bit as they sometimes do at these hearings.

But then I heard the letters S-T-F-C and my ears perked up. STFC stands for Science and Technologies Facilities Council, which is the UK's main funder for particle physics and astronomy. The STFC also administers some of the most important user facilities in Europe, such as the Diamond light source and the ISIS neutron source, both at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

It was the MP from Oxfordshire, Evan Harris, who was asking some tough questions about the STFC's funding situation to Paul Drayson, the minister of state for science and innovation. Harris wanted to know why Diamond and ISIS were cutting back their operating times this year.

"The issue relating to STFC is a difficult one," Drayson told him. One issue Harris quickly focused on was the exchange rate. The weakness of the pound against the euro means that STFC basically has to pay more for physicists to participate in the Large Hadron Collider and astronomers to use the giant telescopes of the European Southern Observatory.

But Drayson told the committee that the STFC had been compensated for the currency exchange rates for the past two years. "If it's not exchange rates that's causing the pressure, then it must be the flat cash allocation," Harris said. Drayson denied that too.

"Do you accept that there are pressures that are not fully met in the budget?" an obviously frustrated Harris asked Drayson.

"Um… no…," the minister replied.

So what is the problem?

"This particular research council has projects where the budgets of these projects are getting significantly over spent," Drayson finally said.

Drayson didn't elaborate further at the time, but I collared him after the meeting to ask which projects he meant. "The ITER project is putting huge pressure overall," he said.

ITER of course, is the massive fusion project in the south of France. By coincidence I just did a story about how the Europeans hope to pay for it. You can read it here (with a subscription).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 15, 2009
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By Geoff Brumfiel and Declan Butler

The arrest by French police last Thursday of a particle physicist on allegations that he has links with Al Qaida has generated some potentially misleading statements and headlines.

Although French police have not officially released a name, the suspect is widely reported to be Adlène Hicheur, a 32-year-old physicist from the Swiss Federal Technical Institute de Lausanne (EPFL), who since 2003 had worked at LHC beauty (LHCb), one of four major particle experiments at CERN. According to French law Hicheur will be charged later today.

But wait? Did we hear the word "nuclear" and "al-Qaeda"? Cue the press. Coverage has been wide and varied, but for the best of the best, you have to the UK:

He's the “AL QAEDA-LINK NUCLEAR EXPERT,“ according to the Daily Express .

Well from what we can see, he appeared to specialize in the alignment of particle detectors and the complex theoretical physics surrounding the B-quark. That makes him kind of a subatomic expert, really.

The Daily Mail threw nuclear fusion into the mix, saying that “MI5 had been warned that the suspects are outstanding scientists who had been honing their techniques in nuclear fusion across the world.”

Again, we're a bit perplexed. Surely if al-Qaeda wanted to "hone their techniques" in nuclear fusion they could have sent their "nuclear expert" to ITER, the giant fusion experiment in the South of France.

But the prize goes to the Express, which boldly belted out the headline: AL-QAEDA SCIENTIST HELD AT NUCLEAR BASE

That makes CERN sound like some sort of criminal lair located beneath Antarctica (he wasn't arrested at CERN, by the way).

Honorable mention to the Daily Star for just running a picture of Tom Hanks and bigging up the Angels and Demons reference.

In a weird sort of way, that could be the most accurate angle on the story--LHCb is hoping to understand the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe. But they're not, so far as we're aware, trying to use this knowledge to destroy the Vatican.

To be fair, a lot of the UK press didn't go quite so over the top. The Guardian and the Times had pretty reasonable coverage (although he was a physicist, not an engineer).

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 12, 2009
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A physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider was yesterday arrested in Vienne, France on suspicion of terrorist links.

Europe’s premier high energy physics lab CERN issued a statement today saying the researcher was not a CERN employee but was working on analysis projects associated with the LHCb experiment, and had been doing so since 2003.

“His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism: CERN is a particle physics research laboratory whose research addresses fundamental questions about the universe,” says CERN. “None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 09, 2009
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This year’s physics prize has been awarded to Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith.

Kao takes half the prize for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication”. Boyle and Smith share the other half for inventing the CCD sensor.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies,” says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes. “They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration.”

Kao, who works at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, discovered how light can be transmitted over optical glass fibres, paving the way for today’s information to flow through fibre optic cables.

Boyle and Smith, both of Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, USA, invented the Charge-Coupled Device, a digital sensor found in just about every digital camera you might care to examine.

Collectively, the Nobel press release has dubbed them ‘the masters of light’.

The scores so far:

By country of residence
USA – 5
China – 1/2
UK – 1/2

By country of birth
USA – 2
UK – 1
Australia – 1
China – 1
Canada - 1

By journal paper
Cell – 2
Nature – 1
Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers-London – 1
Bell System Technical Journal – 1

Nobels 09
The first Nobel of 2009: Physiology or Medicine - Great Beyond
Chromosome protection scoops Nobel - Nature News

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 06, 2009
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Last night Cambridge’s clown school gave the world’s best and brightest the awards they deserved. Harvard University hosted its 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, where its Annals of Improbable Research recognized the usual combination of mad scientists and asinine leaders.

Pulling in the biology prize was a Japanese team that discovered pandas are more than just cuddly tax dollar vacuums — their poop packs a potent punch. The group isolated bacteria in panda feces that can reduce kitchen waste by more than 90 percent in mass. Good news, given that pandas produce about 40 pounds of poop a day — and as one might expect, it doesn’t stink.

The Ig Nobel prizes also continued their fascination with skivvies. Back in 2001 the biology prize went to the inventor of panties that filter out flatulence with a replaceable charcoal filter, and this year the public health prize went to the inventors of a bra that can be “quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander” — in this case that needy bystander was Wolfgang Ketterle, 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Continue reading "Panda poop, panties and more at the Ig Nobels" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on October 02, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Not so much following hot on the heels of the recent study on the spread of zombie infections, more shambling slowly and slightly aimlessly in pursuit, we have some new undead science for you.

But Davide Cassi, a physicist at the Università di Parma in Italy, might be slightly surprised to read this morning that he has published a paper about zombies. Cassi’s paper in Physical Review E – entitled Target annihilation by diffusing particles in inhomogeneous geometries – is actually about how long immobile targets will survive when they are being annihilated by “a population of random walkers”.

As he notes, this is of use to researchers exploring subjects such as how surface catalysts become ‘poisoned’ by molecules attaching to the catalysis sites (where your ‘immobile target’ is the catalyst site and your ‘random walker’ is the molecule sticking to it and not letting go).

This paper has now been press released with a zombie spin:

Though the paper itself does not specifically refer to fleeing from zombies, it describes "the survival probability of immobile targets annihilated by random walkers." The conclusions suggest that the people trapped in a mall in "Dawn of the Dead" may be better off than the folks stuck in a farmhouse in "Night of the Living Dead."

This is something of a stretch. First, it assumes that the potential zombie victim is immobile. Second, it assumes the zombies are engaging in a random walk, rather than their more normal behaviour of pursuing directly their next tasty brain. In other words, it’s rather reminiscent of the old joke about physicists assisting with milk production.

Still, if you happen to be chained to a wall and surrounded by randomly walking zombie you should hide in the mall not the farmhouse. Oh wait, you can’t get there: you’re chained to a wall.

Image: Mark Marek Photography.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 30, 2009
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With less than two weeks to go until the Nobel Prize winners are announced, the soothsayers at Thomson Reuters have rubbed their crystal balls and come up with a shortlist of favourites.

The contenders, as predicted by Thomson Reuters' citation analyst David Pendlebury, are based on the number of citations and high-impact papers published in Nobel-worthy fields of study. Since 2002, 15 'citation' Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, seven of which were tapped in the same year as their triumph, including last year’s chemistry champ, Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego.

This year’s frontrunners for physiology or medicine include the codiscoverers of telomeres, the repetitive DNA add-ons at the ends of chromosomes that have been linked to ageing and cancer as they shrink, the researchers who worked out cellular membrane trafficking, and the Japanese researcher who showed that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could track oxygen flow, making real-time brain scans and functional MRI possible.

Continue reading "Nobel nod" »

Posted by Elie Dolgin on September 24, 2009
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The last sector of the Large Hadron Collider, the worlds biggest, baddest particle accelerator, is beginning its slow cool down to near absolute zero.This is the final step before recommissioning of the broken accelerator can finally begin.

For those who don't obsessively follow particle accelerators, the LHC uses superconducting magnets to steer protons around the machine. Those magnets must be kept at just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero to work. Getting anything that cold takes a lot of refrigerant: 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and 120 tonnes of liquid helium are used over the entire machine. It also takes time, and the cooling process will take weeks to complete.

When it's all done though, LHC physicists can pick up where they left off last September. Hopefully we'll see collisions by Christmas!

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 11, 2009
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It's the big bang, in pop-up form! "7000 tonnes of metal, glass, plastic, cables and computer chips leap from the page in 3D pop-up, to tell the story of CERN’s quest to understand the birth of the universe," explains the facebook page of this little gem, devised by paper engineer Anton Radevsky, CERN writer Emma Sanders, and scientists at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector.

Aside from a pop-up peek at the birth of the universe, readers also get to build ATLAS - much as the CERN engineers did, Sanders notes, since the outer shell comes first before the detectors slide inside. Hat tip: Symmetry Breaking.

Voyage to the Heart of Matter: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN is out from November (published by Papadakis).

Images: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on September 02, 2009
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A big hat tip to Jef Poskanzer who’s posted the entire collection of Singing Science Records online. This six-LP series was published in the 1950s and early 1960s.

John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, in a recent interview with Nature (in print and on our podcast) cited the records as part of the cultural stew that has influenced their flamboyant style of geek pop over the decades.

The best evidence is their 1987 cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?” from the first in that series of records.

That track, Linnell says “has followed us like a golden ray of sunshine through our whole career pretty much.”

Nevertheless, in their newest release, an album for kids called Here Comes Science, They Might Be Giants present their correction to the song.

Old lyrics "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas"
New lyrics "The Sun is a miasma of incadenscent plasma"

Below the fold: previous songs about science

Continue reading "Songs about science XXIV: Singing Science Records" »

Posted by Brendan Maher on August 26, 2009
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Canada’s Globe and Mail indulges in an orgy of self-flagellation today with a front-page piece entitled 'How Canada let the world down'.

The hand-wringing is over the worldwide shortage of medical isotopes – the radioactive elements injected into patients during medical imaging procedures.

Nature has been following this story ever since the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor located in Chalk River, Ontario, was shut down on 18 November 2007 for maintenance. It’s been on and off ever since, causing patient procedures to be delayed or canceled and raising the prices of remaining isotope supplies. The Globe has doggedly followed every single twist and turn of this sorry tale – dwindling supplies, soaring costs, potential brain drain …

Chalk River was expected to reopen late 2009, but the latest news is that it will remain shut until spring 2010 (Reuters).

Continue reading "'How Canada let the world down'" »

Posted by Mark Peplow on August 14, 2009
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You knew it was just a matter of time before Fermilab -- the American counterpart to CERN -- provided a rap riposte to the Large Hadron Rap, the first particle accelerator rap (and, we were kinda hoping, the last). But on Tuesday, Funky49 dropped his 'Particle Business' rap for the first time, extolling the virtues of Fermilab's Tevatron with lyrical gems like "quarks, bottom to the top, they don't stop" and the catchy refrain, "Where the Higgs at?" I was hoping for some more trash talk between the two particle accelerator facilities, but Funky49 had his own nice-guy take on situation: "This be competitive collaboration baby." Nothing on YouTube yet, so you'll just have to imagine what his performance was like.

Below the fold: Previous songs about science.

Continue reading "Songs about science XXIII: The Fermilab rap" »

Posted by Eric Hand on August 13, 2009
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Who needs fancy journals anyway? That's the conclusion of a recent study, which looked at the advantages of ArXiv, the open-access preprint server, to the high-energy physics community. The study is published, naturally, on Arxiv, and the implications were reported on the Symmetry Breaking blog.
The authors found that articles submitted to the Arxiv and eventually published in a journal had an impact factor five times that of articles that were either just published on the Arxiv or in a journal alone. Since this could be a selection effect (i.e., a fair bit of wacky science gets thrown up on the ArXiv), the authors looked at the citations a bit more carefully. They found that the main advantage of the ArXiv is its immediacy. Some 20% of an article's total citations are accumulated before the paper is published in a journal. Even once both references -- to the Arxiv preprint, and to the journal publication -- exist side by side in the main high-energy physics database, more than 80% of scientists click-through to the ArXiv version of the paper. Journals may add the varnish of peer-review, but for scientific discourse, they are completely unnecessary, the authors conclude.

Posted by Eric Hand on August 10, 2009
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The Thirty-Meter Telescope, a leader in the new generation of mammoth telescopes, finally has a home: Mauna Kea, Hawaii (press release). To host the billion dollar project and what would be the largest telescope in the world, the Aloha State beat out its competitor, the remote peak of Cerro Armazones in Chile, based largely on Mauna Kea’s “atmospheric conditions, low average temperatures, and low humidity,” chair of the TMT board of directors Henry Yang announced 21 July.

On the northern slope of Mauna Kea, the TMT will join an impressive gathering of other sky-peepers, including the soon-to-be-dwarfed Keck telescopes which, with primary mirrors some 10-m in diameter, had been amongst the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes. While the Keck mirrors are assemblages of 36 six-sided mirrors measuring 1.8 m across, the TMT’s will be comprised of 492 1.44-m mirrors — giving it nine times the light-gathering capacity.

The TMT will also be the first telescope ever with “adaptive optics” built in from the beginning, a technique that senses corrects for atmospheric turbulence, giving the telescope “spatial resolution more than 12 times sharper than what is achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope”. The TMT will use all of this hardware to “detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics", says the press release.

Continue reading "Hawaii’s telescope collection gets a massive new addition — Chile spurned" »

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 21, 2009
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viXra.org is a new site that wants your papers. All of them. Regardless of quality, quantity or sanity, the organizers promise they will post your paper to their site.

For those not up on the debate, viXra is an answer to arXiv.org, the popular physics pre-print server. For those of you who aren't physicists, arXiv is a place where many researchers post their work in advance of publication. There is no peer review, and the idea is that physicists can discuss their and improve their work in an open setting.

But there is a form of screening at the arXiv. Researchers must prove an academic affiliation in order to post their papers, and a moderator reviews each paper to see that it is of "refereeable" quality. This policy has created problems on at least one occasion: in 2002 a creationist sued the server over his right to post his series of ten papers on the origin of the Universe. More recently, others have alleged bias. Among other things, they accuses arXiv administrators of putting some of the more (how shall we say it) "out there" papers into the less popular "general-physics" category.

viXra is an alternative for researchers who feel that they've been "blacklisted" from the arXiv. According to PhysicsWorld.com, it was set up by Philip Gibbs, an independent physicist, who was ticked off with the arXiv system. On viXra's mission page, it says that the website is something of a parody as well as "an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv."

So far, here's what a sampling of what's gone up on viXra:

*Is Ratio 3:1 a comprehensive principle of the Universe?

*This Time - What a Strange Turn of Events!

*A Review of Anomalous Redshift Data

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on July 16, 2009
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Built in 1954, the Bevatron was “once the crown jewel of the lab, of the National Lab system and of the particle physics world” writes Wired. The discovery of the anti-proton at the accelerator worn a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain in 1959.

Physics Today says that at least three other Nobel prizes came out of Bevatron research. In true American fashion, it even inspired its own – albeit minor – superhero.

Now, thanks to some money from the US stimulus package, the Bevatron is finally being dismantled.

Continue reading "Bye bye Bevatron" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 10, 2009
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Today in Songs about science, we're learning how to make rare isotopes. And why we might want to. In rap.

This little ditty comes from the same team who brought us the Large Hadron Rap in the days before the LHC was broken. (below the fold)

Also below the fold, don't forget to take a trip down memory lane for Previously on Songs about science

Continue reading "Songs about science XX: isotopes, isotopes, baby" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 11, 2009
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The United States has accidentally published a top-secret, highly-classified, I'd-show-you-but -then-I'd-have-to-kill-you list of nuclear installations on the Internets.

OK, it's not quite that bad. What they've gone and done is published a "highly confidential" disclosure document that was meant for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This document is part of the US obligation under the IAEA "additional protocol"—a set of rules that requires America to provide the agency with a list of the location and type of civilian nuclear facilities currently on its territory. You can find the whole document on Secrecy News, the excellent blog of the Federation of American Scientists website.

The key word there is civilian. This list doesn't disclose anything about the facilities in which the US handles or dismantles its nuclear weapons. But it does have the addresses, details and sometimes schematics, of every other nuclear facility in the country (click the image for an example). Not exactly the sort of thing the government may have wanted to go public with in the post-9/11 world. The government is particularly sweating the publication of detailed information about the Y-12 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "That's of great concern," energy secretary Stephen Chu told a congressional committee.

Of course there's a silver lining, the document does show that the US is taking seriously its obligations to the IAEA.

UPDATE: Secrecy News has taken down the file, but nothing dies on the Internet. You can find it on WikiLeaks.

Image: Super-secret US archives/GPO

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 04, 2009
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Austria has stepped back from abandoning Europe’s most important particle physics lab.

Last week Johannes Hahn, the country’s science minister, said his country would withdraw from CERN, which runs the high profile Large Hadron Collider project. The decision was greeted with shock by Austrian physicists (see: Austria quits CERN after 50 years).

Now Chancellor Werner Faymann appears to have overruled Hahn, issuing a statement saying Austria will “remain a reliable partner in the CERN project”.

Reuters sees the u-turn as a spat between Faymann, a social democrat, and Hahn, a conservative. It notes that one national paper is running the story under the headline ‘CERN clash: government in a black hole’.

A petition against the pull out attracted over 30,000 signatures. Austria contributes around 20 million Euros to CERN.

Image: flags of member states fly at CERN’s Meyrin site / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 19, 2009
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Count Lennart Bernadotte of didn’t quite make it to 100. He died in 2004 at the age of 95, but not before ensuring that his life’s great project had a future. Great grandson of King Oscar II who presented the first Nobel awards in Stockholm in 1901, Count Lennart launched, exactly sixty years ago, the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, a pretty but very provincial town on Lake Constance. The original aim of the weeklong meetings was to encourage isolated and struggling scientists and doctors in post-war Germany by bringing them into social contact with great living scientists from around the world.

Over the next 55 years or so, not a lot changed, even though Germany was no longer isolated or struggling. The meetings – morning lectures, afternoon discussions, evening dances - were popular but remained anachronistically provincial. By the turn of the millennium that had become unsustainable. Laureates were becoming less interested in a long trip to speak with locals at meetings primarily conducted in German, however charming the location.

In 2005, the meetings were internationalised and thrust into the modern world (Nature 436, 170-1). Now 600 hand-picked students from all around the world mingle, discuss and dance with 20 or more Nobel laureates during summer.

To commemorate the centenary of Count Lennart’s birth on 8 May, the Meetings organisers set up a science-history project to digitalise selected lectures from their archives and make them openly available on their webpage (www.lindau-nobel.de). The first eleven selected lectures are now live, more will follow in phases throughout the summer.

The cleaned up voice recordings, accompanied by an introduction and charming black-and-white photos taken in Lindau, bring legendary scientists to life – be it Rita Levi Montalcini (Physiology or Medicine, 1986) pushing her human-rights agenda, Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) appealing to women to help solve social problems or simply the extraordinary plumminess of the British tones of Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915) and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964). A particular treasure is the lecture on the gravitational constant by Paul Dirac (1933, Physics). Dirac was renowned for being almost pathologically socially withdrawn. Despite this, he showed up to the first ten meetings in Lindau, where, they say, he remained almost silent aside from his lectures.

Coming soon – Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, James Watson and other stellar personalities.

Image: Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin (Chemistry 1964) and young researchers at
the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 1986.

Posted by Alison Abbott on May 11, 2009
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How do molecules, or nanoparticles, of many different shapes jostle together while nestling against a surface? Scientists from the University of Washington, St Louis Washington University in St Louis [press release], simulated such a situation using the seven tetrominoes of Tetris - an analogy that has been suggested before (F Cicoira and F Rosei, Surface Science Perspectives, doi:10.1016/j.susc.2005.10.063).

In the simulations (B C Barnes, D W Siderius and L D Gelb, Langmuir, doi:10.1021/la900196b) pieces from an infinite store were allowed to drop onto a flat board and shift around, but not to interact with each other (unlike real molecules). So the patterns generated simply reflect the system increasing its entropy (a measure of disorder). Even so, the scientists noted complicated clustering and that particular pieces fitted preferentially around each other - which they summarise by the old maxim "like attracts like".

Testing a number of combinations of shapes - from 'pure fluids' all the way up to a 7 component system - the researchers found that squares are easiest to surround (most 'soluble'), while rods are the hardest. "The results obtained to date may have some relevance to successful strategies for playing the Tetris computer game, but this has not been considered in detail," they say.

Ars Technica has more on this research. "Thermodynamically, how do they explain the spontaneous disappearance of a row once it has been completely, and continuously, assembled?" asks 'Vibedog'.

The researchers have been promised a show of Cossack dancing on completing their work.

Image: A four-component mixture of squares, rods, S shapes and Z shapes shows the pieces make little clusters rather than completely mixing together. Credit: Washington University, St Louis.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on May 07, 2009
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The Large Hadron Collider is finally complete again, after the last replacement magnet was lowered into the giant ring yesterday.

Work at the particle accelerator crunched to a halt last September when a connection between magnets failed, causing extensive damage and the removal and replacement of 53 magnets.

“This is an important milestone in the repair process,” says Steve Myers, the director for accelerators and technology at CERN, which runs the collider (press release). “It gets us close to where we were before the incident, and allows us to concentrate our efforts on installing the systems that will ensure a similar incident won’t happen again.”

Now the magnets will be connected alongside systems designed to stop any more mishaps. If all goes to plan the LHC will restart in autumn and bring on the science.

Image: the 15m long magnet is lowered into the LHC / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 01, 2009
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The Gran Sasso National Laboratory, a particle physics research centre 15 km from L’Aquila in central Italy, has survived intact the earthquake that destroyed the historic town on 6 April, and killed at least 180 people.

“Gran Sasso labs and experiments have not suffered consequences of the earthquake,” says Eugenio Coccia, the centre’s director. “But of course many staff have had their houses destroyed, like so many others who live in the region.”

Scientific experiments are being monitored, but no major experimental work will take place until after the Easter holiday, says Coccia. Normal scientific work will begin Tuesday 14 April.

The research centre investigates the properties of neutrinos and dark matter. Its large underground labs built deep inside the Gran Sasso mountain were designed to withstand powerful earthquakes. The epicentre of this one, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, was just 10 km west of the centre.

The main highway to the laboratories has been closed for safety reasons, as small quakes are still occurring. The centre has offered to shelter those left homeless by the quake in its surface facilities.

In the meantime, the centre has distanced itself from Giampaolo Giuliani who claims to have predicted the earthquake and says that his warning was ignored. Giuliani has developed and patented a radon detector which he says enables him to predict earthquakes by detecting the radioactive gas leaking from underground sources. However, earthquake and civil defence experts in Italy said that it is not possible to predict the time and location of an earthquake with that –or any other – method.

Giuliani is quoted in many media reports as being a Gran Sasso staff member, but Caccia says this is not the case. “He is a technician in a collaboration with Gran Sasso which is based in Turin (in northern Italy) - and his work on earthquakes is a hobby, nothing to do with the research project here.” Caccia says the research centre has been a “bit embarrassed” by the media reports.

Alison Abbott

Posted by Alison Abbott on April 07, 2009
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Would you Adam and Eve it? Robot scientists - named Adam and Eve - could soon be after your research jobs.

According to a new paper in Science, an autonomous robot can conduct its own experiments and has now come up with its first results. Ross King, of Aberystwyth University, and his colleagues report that their robo-researcher ‘Adam’ has “generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation”.

The team set Adam to work finding genes for “orphan enzymes”. These are as-yet undiscovered genes for enzymes thought to catalyze reactions that occur in yeast. King told the Times:

Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult for human scientists, but easy for robot scientists. Yeast is well understood. It’s been studied for over 100 years. We knew this enzyme must be there, but we didn’t know where.

Continue reading "Rise of the machines" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 03, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In early March, the National Ignition Facility fired up its lasers and emitted a 1 million joule pulse of highly concentrated light. The demonstration came ahead of schedule for the over-budget facility, which cost $3.5 billion--almost 3 times its original budget of $1.2 billion--to complete. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy gave its blessing for the facility to go ahead with regular operations, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The new facility, which is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has three planned missions: It will provide a way to nondestructively monitor the health of existing nuclear weapons stockpiles, and will be used to simulate early conditions in the Universe. But it's real glamour comes from plans to trigger controlled nuclear fusion, in which the lasers would heat a small core of hydrogen atoms until they fuse together and released more energy than the laser put in.

Controlled nuclear fusion has been a goal for physicists since the discovery of lasers, but is also the butt of decades of science jokes, since its proponents have been declaring it 'just a decade away' for decades.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday that current Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told an audience in 2006: "I'm going to skip (discussing) fusion because it will probably skip the 21st century."

If it does emerge this century, it may happen simultaneously in Europe: a similar French laser facility, called Laser Mégajoule, is slated to begin operations in 2010, according to a recent Nature story.

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 01, 2009
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Nature’s intrepid reporter Geoff Brumfiel (pictured right) has been hard at work in Pittsburgh at the American Physical Society’s March Meeting.

Here are some highlights.

Black holes in the lab
It’s not really the sort of thing that you’d expect to find at a meeting which is mainly about materials, but I heard an interesting talk about recreating black hole jets in the laboratory today. For those unfamiliar with what I‘m talking about, swirling material around the top of a black hole often gets ejected in a long narrow stream. The process is complex and guided largely by the behavior of the hot, ionized gas in the jet, known as plasma.

No limits imaging
Not many of the rules of physics are actually set in stone, but the diffraction limit is one of them. In imaging terms, the limit determines the smallest discernable feature you can make out through a microscope. It’s etched on this memorial to the 19th century German physicist Ernst Abbe, located in Jena (right). But as the Bible proves, rules set in stone are made for breaking…

Iron pnictides. WTF?
Pretty much anything with iron pnictides in the title is guaranteed to draw a crowd at this year’s meeting.

You can read all about his adventures over on Nature’s In the Field blog, where you can also find out what this diagram is all about:

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2009
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The Tevatron show at the 'ski meetings' in Europe continues. Last week, the collider's two main competing experiments, CDF and D0, united to identify a region of masses where the Higgs can't exist.
This week, the news is that D0 says that a strange excess of muons also doesn't exist -- which puts the experiment at loggerheads with CDF, which, in the fall, published its strange muon signal after it couldn't explain the signal away. Muons are a heavier cousin to the electron, and, if the signal is real, it could be a harbinger of new physics.
But the D0 result would put the kibosh on that. However, the D0 result is preliminary, says Quantum Diaries Survivor, who had the scoop. The experiments are very different and will take some time for D0 to exactly match what CDF filtered for, or for CDF to figure out why they've got an anomaly.

Posted by Eric Hand on March 18, 2009
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Posted for Philip Ball

Searching for the perfect putt to improve your golf handicap? It’s all just a matter of finding the right physics, according to Robert Grober of Yale University. In a preprint paper he says that the mechanics of a putting stroke for top golfers can be understood by assuming that the motion is that of a pendulum, driven by the force of the golfer’s body movements to oscillate at twice its natural frequency.

A putting stroke clearly looks like a simple pendulum swing. But it is a driven pendulum, propelled by muscle power rather than swinging passively under gravity. This force first creates a backswing, then a downswing to strike the ball. Grober has studied footage of some leading golfers, and finds that the movement has some constant characteristics: the putting head is moving at constant speed (not accelerating) when it hits the ball, the total duration of the stroke doesn’t really change much as the intended length of the putt increases, and the ratio of the duration of the backswing to that of the downswing is usually around 2.

All this, he says, can be understood if the club’s motion is that of a pendulum driven as indicated above. There’s no suggestion that golfers know any of this – they have apparently been led by experience and intuition to this type of movement.

But why does it make for a good putt? Grober thinks it is because the results are relatively insensitive to the driving force. That’s to say, because the motion is basically resonant, being governed by the mechanics of pendulum motion, variations in how the golfer controls the driving force throughout the putt don’t alter very much the velocity of the club head. What matters, at least in terms of the length of the putt, is how big the backswing is, not what comes after. This means that there’s less scope for error: even if you don’t apply quite the same force, the resulting stroke is much the same.

How do you develop a stroke like this? Grober explains: “one can get a feel for this tempo by continuously and repeatedly swinging the club back and forth at resonance, in exactly the same manner one would swing a pendulum. The duration of the actual stroke is exactly the amount of time it takes for this pendulum like motion to swing the putter half a cycle”. Now you know.

Image: by DeaPeaJay via Flickr under attribution-share alike 2.0 generic

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 17, 2009
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The launch of the European Space Agency’s GOCE probe has been aborted.

The countdown to the launch was stopped after a service tower failed to move clear of the rocket set to carry the probe into space from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia. GOCE had already experienced problems with navigation systems, which delayed the launch from last September.

According to media reports, there were only 7 seconds left on the clock when someone pressed what I imagine was a giant red button with the word ‘ABORT’ on it.

As reported in Nature last week, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer will measure Earth’s gravity field, providing data for oceanographers and climate modellers:

Over its expected lifetime of 20 months, GOCE will map tiny variations in Earth's gravity field that stem from the position of mountains and ocean trenches, and from small density variations in the planet's interior. Three pairs of cube-shaped accelerometers, in free fall inside the satellite, will make the measurements at five times the precision of GRACE, the US–German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment that has been orbiting Earth since 2002.

At the moment ESA is not saying much.

Image: launch tower holding GOCE / ESA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 16, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Declan Butler

Roll over Sartre. French physicist and philosopher, Bernard d’Espagnat, today picked up the £1 million Templeton Prize awarded annually by the John Templeton Foundation to “honour a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works".

The award notes that the 87 year old d’Espagnat – professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and a former senior scientist at CERN – was a well known researcher in quantum physics from the mid-1960s through the early 1980's.

Continue reading "Schrödinger's God" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 16, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

Pop the champagne, everyone: Today is March 3, 2009 (or 3/3/09), and that means that some math-related partying is in order.

If you're tempted to suppress your inner geek, just remember that Square Root Day only happens nine times a century. The last one was Feb. 2, 2004, and the next one won't be until April 4, 2016.

"These days are like calendar comets," says Ron Gordon, a teacher in Redwood City, California [AP]. "You wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day - and poof - they're gone."

Gordon is giving away a $339 prize to whoever can host the biggest Square Root Day celebration.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on March 03, 2009
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Well, I don't know how surprising it is, but the Daily Telegraph reports that Israel has been engaged in a systematic effort to undermine Iran's nuclear programme.

The Telegraph article, which has been making the rounds in Israel and elsewhere, cites a lot of unnamed military sources, which say that Israel is using a number of tactics including assassinations of Iranian scientists, sales of faulty parts and other miscellaneous subterfuge. Such activities, the article points out, are better than bombing in the current political environment.

Of course sabotaging the Iranians is a favourite sport of the world's intelligence agencies. The CIA used a couple of Swiss engineers to do it. Hell, even the Dutch supposedly gave it a shot.

One place you won't read about this secretive Israeli plot? The Tehran Times, or IRNA. Both sites are keeping quiet about the Telegraph story (in their English versions anyway).

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 19, 2009
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Credit: Fermilab, P. Ginter


All anyone has heard about recently is the Large Hadron Collider, the giant, currently broken accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. But the world's most powerful, working accelerator is currently the Tevatron, at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Recently, the Tevatron has been saying they've got between a 50-50 and 96% chance of finding the elusive Higgs Boson, a key part of the mechanism by which other particles get their mass. We at the news team had a good head scratch about what "50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best" means, but regardless it seems like reasonably good odds.

Budgets have been tight recently at Fermilab, and there was some question of whether the Tevatron would be able to continue running in the near future. The recent economic stimulus bill should help with that; it gives a $1.6 billion shot in the arm to the Department of Energy's Office of Science. One can only assume that the extra dough will help keep Tevatron kicking.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 18, 2009
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One of America’s main nuclear weapons labs has been taken to task for losing a fairly large number of computers in the last year. Information on the losses only emerged after three were stolen from the home of one employee.

The non-profit Project on Government Oversight obtained a memo in which the government overseer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory notes that 13 computers have been stolen in the last 12 months and 67 are missing.

“The magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued …” says the memo.

Continue reading "The case of the missing computers" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 13, 2009
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Now that they can do no science till their giant particle smasher is fixed, the Large Hadron Collider scientists are finding other ways to keep people interested.

Sergio Cittolin, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, has been sketching the different elements of his equipment “in the style of Leonardo da Vinci”.

Although they seem to have only appeared on the CERN website at the end of January, some of these drawings were originally featured in Physics World last year. They also grace the CMS website and are too cool not to share here.

Dan Brown fans will surely be thrilled to find two of their author’s interests combined.

[Hat tip: Alexis Madrigal]

More below the fold.

Continue reading "The LHC, Da Vinci style " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 10, 2009
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Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and a central figure in a major nuclear smuggling ring, has been freed.

A brief order issued on 6 February by the Islamabad High Court released the 72-year-old metallurgist from house arrest. Khan had been confined since 2004, after confessing to selling Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.

Khan's freedom has gradually returned over the past year or so. While he remains a pariah in the West, he enjoys overwhelming public support in Pakistan, where he is revered as a national hero. He has given a few interviews in recent months, and even started his own website.

It's a little unclear what happens next. The government has asked Khan to let them know if he's planning any domestic travel, and there's no word on whether he'll be able to take trips abroad. In interviews he says he's done with smuggling and will devote the remainder of his life to education.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 06, 2009
Categories: Physics & Mathematics, Policy, Quotes of the day | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a little buzz out there on this paper which appeared a few days ago in the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper is from an Italian-led instrument known as PAMELA, which you may remember made headlines after discovering an excess of anti-electrons (aka positrons) flitting about space.

As Sean Carroll points out on Cosmic Variance, this is hardly new. It appeared on the popular preprint server arXiv back in October. Most theorists have already taken the constraints set by the paper into account when formulating their ideas.

The jury's still out on whether these theories are right, but there should be more data soon. The Fermi Telescope, which was launched by NASA last summer, should soon see gamma rays from the galactic centre, if, that is, dark matter is the cause of PAMELA's signal.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 05, 2009
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Physicists report [ArXiv] they’ve made a metamaterial that reverses the Doppler effect for sound – so that you’d hear sirens rising in pitch as they race away from you.

Metamaterials are structures whose unusual properties - such as controlling light or sound waves - depend on how their parts are arranged, rather than on the atoms they are made of. So-called ‘invisibility cloaks’ which hide objects from light by bending electromagnetic waves are the most famous examples. Chul Koo Kim, of Yonsei University, Korea, and colleagues have now created a practical acoustic metamaterial, a thin tube which manipulates sound. So far, though, it affects only sound waves traveling in effectively one dimension – that is, inside the tube.

The tube is segmented by tensioned elastic membranes, and punctured with side holes. The researchers placed a sound detector inside this tube and linked it to a loudspeaker. When they moved a sound source along the outside of the tube – approaching, passing, and receding from the detector – the acoustic vibrations set up inside the tube propagate with negative phase velocity, creating a tone-shift from low to high pitch.

Kim tells Physics World that the invention is a stepping stone to an acoustic cloak which could hide objects from sound waves. Acoustic superlenses – which could achieve subwavelength resolution in ultrasonic imaging – are also an option.

Continue reading "Naw-nee, Naw-nee: reverse Doppler alert" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on February 04, 2009
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The folks repairing the Large Hadron Collider have spotted more bad connections of the sort that led to last autumn's catastrophic accident. But this time, they've found and fixed the problem before it caused tens of millions of Swiss Francs in damage and months of delays.

As a brief refresher, the LHC uses finger-sized ribbons of superconducting niobium-titanium wire to move the thousands of amps of current that it needs for its superconducting magnets. In September, a bad splice between two sections of wire caused a section of the ribbon to loose its superconductivity and heat up very, very quickly. The result wasn't pretty.

In the wake of the accident, the LHC project team made a number of changes to try and catch bad splices before they failed. That's just what they seem to have done in another sector (Sector 1-2). They suspect another bad splice is lurking in Sector 6-7, and they're warming it up just in case.

They claim that all this work will not add further delay to the LHC restart, which is now scheduled for mid-summer.
image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on February 02, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Anna Petherick

Cambridge University opened a big black Physics of Medicine centre this week, inviting Nobel Prize winner Sir Aaron Klug along for the plaque-revealing ceremony.

The swish new centre is in the rapidly developing West Cambridge site, which also houses the William Gates Building computing laboratory. The Physics of Medicine building makes the next door Cavendish laboratory—where most of the university’s physics research happens—look rather short and 1970s-shabby.

Athene Donald, deputy head of physics, will run the new center. She was recently profiled in The Observer and on BBC Radio 4 after being made a laureate of the UNESCO/L’Oreal-sponsored Women in Science awards.

The centre aims to become the place to go if you want to research anything biophysical, from tissue scaffolds to the properties of the eye’s optical fibres.

Top image: The new centre, with Sir Aaron Klug in the far left. University of Cambridge/Philip Mynott.

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 19, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not everyday you see an intelligence-agency-backed study on the feasibility of using gravity waves for spying. But that's exactly what you'll find here: On the Federation of American Scientist's blog.

The report is by the JASONs, a semisupersecret group of academic scientists who consult for the Pentagon on technical issues. Apparently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates US spying, has been approached by a company called GravWave LLC, which claims that gravity waves can be used for secret communication and sneaking a peak at stuff.

The concept is at first glance intriguing: Gravity waves are waves in the fabric of space and time, and they certainly can pass through objects like the earth with very little effort. Moreover, the company's plan of converting gravitons, hitherto unseen gravity particles, into photons, light particles that you're seeing right now, is apparently not completely far-fetched.

Continue reading "JASONs shoot down research into gravity surveillance" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on December 17, 2008
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Brits and Kiwis got curious about the Large Hadron Collider this year, according to newly released search stats from Google. But nobody else did.

After a press-sweeping September debut - and an almost immediate breakdown from which rumours are still rippling - "large hadron collider" was the 6th-fastest-rising search term of 2008 in the UK, and came in 10th in New Zealand (fastest rising = largest increase in searches since 2007). It didn't make the top 10 list in any other country.

The LHC-equivalent 6th fastest riser for the US was "fox news"; for Canada it was "free movies".

No other science term made it onto the lists - unless you count "earth day", which was 4th for Hong Kong googlers (followed, for reasons opaque to me, by "alexander graham bell", "marc chagall", and "diego velasquez"). In Australia "underbelly" was 10th, but disappointingly, it's a popular TV show, not an epidemic of seedy corruption.

Posted by Anna Barnett on December 10, 2008
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Recent rumours that the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t be doing any colliding before 2010 were quickly quashed, although the presentation slides that triggered the rumour are still missing from the internet. Now a similar disappearing act has been pulled on the first photos of the damage that downed the particle accelerator.

Blogger and post-doc particle physicist Stephanie Majewski posted on Monday to say, “Finally, some photos of the damage to the LHC”, linking to an original post by fellow LHC blogger Seth Zenz. By yesterday morning the photos had been removed from the online version of a talk given at the LHC’s home in CERN, although you can still see them here.

As a comment on Majewski’s blog notes, “You’d think the organization that spawned the Web would do more to harness its power rather than engage in cover-up activity, especially in a time when openness would be better respected.”

In the meantime, here is a nice picture of them fixing the damage to the LHC, which are available for all to see. This is the first replacement magnet for sector 3-4.

Image: Maximilien Brice / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 03, 2008
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Because science is always evolving and changing, conventional school textbooks are often outdated, leaving students behind the times. The Virginia Board of Educators, fed up with their high-school physics books having misinformation (or no information) on string theory, nanotechnology and particle physics, is now working on a solution — a 'flexbook'.

Dozens of physics teachers were invited to fill in the gaps of outdated textbooks with chapters that will be posted online as free supplements to conventional textbooks. Chapter topics will include biophysics, quantum mechanics, relativity and new TV technology.

Continue reading "Virginia to get open-source online textbooks" »

Posted by Asher Mullard on December 02, 2008
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There are still a couple of weeks left to get your applications in to be the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

The post is currently held by Stephen Hawking, who is set to retire next year. But he won’t be leaving the world of theoretical physics behind him. No, the rumours (that The Great Beyond admits it took part in perpetuating) are true; Hawking has been tempted by ex-Cambridge colleague Neil Turok to head off to the land of moose and maples and join the happy Perimeter Institute folk.

Hawking will be a Distinguished Research Chair at the institute, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. But there also seems to be some cake here that is being both had and eaten, for Hawking will only visit the Perimeter Institute (press release) a few times – he’s going to hang on to the Lucasian professorship in an emeritus fashion.

What do the Canuck’s think of this? A brief survey of headlines reveals that The Canadian Press heralds the visiting prof as a coup for Canadian science whereas the Vancouver Sun goes all out for that special brand of Canadian humour with their “Hawking meets his Waterloo” pun. And the Globe and Mail have the brilliant “Waterloo institute’s big bang”.

Stay with The Great Beyond for regular updates on Hawking news:
Stephen Hawking to retire
Hawking 'mulls move to Canada'
A brief history of body art
Hawking to be cast in bronze
When theoretical physicists attack
Get us off this planet says Hawking

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on November 28, 2008
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Mathematician Kiyoshi Ito died this month in Kyoto, Japan.

The New York Times notes that his work on random motion and probability was used in fields from finance to biology. His maths for describing random processes is now called ‘the Ito Calculus’, it adds. “People all over realized that what Ito had done explained things that were unexplainable before,” Daniel Stroock, a mathematician at MIT told the paper.

The citation for his 1998 Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences says his theory “marked a new epoch in scientific research regarding random motion and stochastic phenomena in nature and society”.

Continue reading "RIP Kiyoshi Ito" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 27, 2008
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Update: James Gillies, CERN's spokesperson, is refuting the rumor. The slide in question was "one guy's speculation," he says. In fact, CERN is still aiming for collisions in mid-2009, although not at the full design energy of 7 TeV. A full report on the incident is expected soon.

The world's biggest, newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, may be out of service for the entirety of 2009.

The LHC was knocked out of commission earlier this fall, after an electrical fault caused extensive damage to one of its eight sectors. A substantial part of the damage was caused by the liquid helium used to cool the machine, which escaped its cryostat and vaporized--causing an enormous pressure build up.

A couple of blogs have taken note of a presentation given by Jörg Wenninger of the lab's beam department, in which he apparently claimed the machine may not restart until 2010. That would allow CERN's accelerator team to install pressure relief valves on the entirety of the LHC machine. 2009 might still be an option, but it would be later in the summer and at lower energies than originally planned.

For my money I'm guessing that most physicists would like to see some collisions next year. Even if they don't yield new discoveries, they can still be used to calibrate the detectors (and write a few theses).

It should be said that the actual plan is a little unclear. The slide shown here comes from the Resonaances blog, it does not appear in the current online version of Wenninger's presentation, although there's a blank page near the bottom where some say it should be.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 27, 2008
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More bad news from the Large Hadron Collider.

Repairing the damage from the electrical failure earlier this year will run to $21 million, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (AP). The original cost estimate for the repair was around $80,000, not including labour and the spares.

In addition, the particle collider will not be up and running before June. Previously it was suggested the particles could be whizzing round the ring by April (AFP).

“There is still a lot of work to do and we want to be sure that everything is in order before starting up,” says spokesman James Gillies (AFP / AP). “If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on November 17, 2008
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A paper that could explain the mysterious "ghost particles" inside one of the world's leading high-energy physics experiments has ignited a blog debate on who knew what and when.

Last week, we reported on the discovery of mysterious "ghost muons" by an experiment known as the Collision Detector at Fermilab (CDF). CDF is looking at proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. In a nutshell, it's seen higher numbers of muons than expected—a possible sign of some sort of new physics that nobody's seen before.

There's been plenty of blogging speculating on what this signal might mean. But there's also been a bit of a spat over whether some theorists had advanced knowledge of the findings. Specifically, the above paper by Neil Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed was posted on 6 October, about a month before the CDF announcement, and appeared to provide a theoretical framework that could explain the muon anomaly. That led physicist-blogger Tommaso Dorigo to accuse the theorists of trading insider information.

The exchange escalated until string theorist and co-author Arkani-Hamed weighed in with a thoughtful but firm refutation of what he described as "completely baseless and deeply offensive accusations". Arkani-Hamed pointed out that the work was not particularly compatible with the CDF results, and had instead been designed to support data from previous experiments, including a claim of excess anti-electrons (aka positrons) by an Italian space experiment called PAMELA. Many other bloggers have voiced their opinions on Dorigo's blog, and Seth Zenz at the US LHC blog even wrote his own post on what I'm going to start calling "muongate".

It's worth pointing out that PAMELA was itself the centre of a controversy in September, after two theorists published papers based on the experiment's unreleased data, which they photographed at a conference. Such is the brave new world of research in the digital age.

Image: CDF/Fermilab

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 10, 2008
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No matter how hard we'd like to forget about them, nuclear weapons just don't seem to go away.

Britain's Ministry of Defence is coming under fire for plans to refurbish its aging fleet of ballistic missile submarines. A report from the National Audit Office, an independent parliamentary watchdog, says that the MoD's current timetable has "little scope for contingency" and fails to account for possible cost increases due to currency fluctuations between UK shipyards and US parts suppliers.

Across the pond, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated his belief that the US needs to develop a new generation of "more reliable" nuclear weapons. The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) would supposedly be built without testing, maintaining nuclear expertise in the nation's weapons labs and, ultimately, leading to a new generation of bombs that can last longer without being used.

The UK is also quietly mulling its own version of the RRW, which they call the High Surety Warhead, but in a hearing in the House of Commons, Defence Secretary John Hutton denied that any active design work was underway at Aldermaston, the UK's nuclear weapon's laboratory in Berkshire.

Image: Lockheed Martin

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on November 05, 2008
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Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is to fill Richard Dawkins’s professorial chair at the University of Oxford.

The university confirmed yesterday that du Sautoy will become the new Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science on December 1st. Dawkins, the first person to hold the position, resigned earlier this year.

“For me, science is about discovery but it is also about communication,” says du Sautoy (press release). “A scientific discovery barely exists until it is communicated and brought to life in the minds of others.”

Du Sautoy’s work concentrates on using zeta functions to understand symmetry and he also has a high profile media role, presenting television programmes and penning a ‘Sexy Maths’ column for the Times. He has a very musical website.

Continue reading "‘Sexy Mathematician’ is the new Richard Dawkins" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 29, 2008
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You might be worried that this blog is developing a Stephen Hawking obsession. Following on from the Stephen Hawking statue and the Stephen Hawking tattoo* comes the news of the Stephen Hawking retirement.

The BBC says:

The physicist, who has motor neurone disease, will give up his position as Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics next year.

The university said it was policy for holders of the title to retire at 67 and Prof Hawking will be 67 in January.

However it’s not bad news for Hawking fans, as a spokeswoman for the university told the Daily Telegraph he would continue to work, just as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. “The post is retiring but Hawking isn’t,” she said. “Nothing will change. It is merely a formality.”

If you fancy applying to be the next Lucasian Professor, the advert is now online. “Applications are invited from persons working on mathematics applied to the physical world, with strong preference for the broad area of theoretical physics,” it says.

* He was the subject, not the canvas

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 27, 2008
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The Large Hadron Collider has already been fired up and it has already broken. Yesterday the giant particle physics experiment was also formally inaugurated as Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from across the world met at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

In an obligatory nod to the world’s financial woes, Fillion said, “The financial crisis that is currently raging shows us the most destabilising face of globalisation. But the LHC is an example of its most promising aspect.” (AFP.)

Of course the machine is not working at the moment, after a massive amount of liquid helium leaked from its cooling system. This fact could hardly be glossed over and Raymond Orbach, US undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, told AP, “Frankly it was a surprise that it worked the first time without a glitch.”

However Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, added, “I have no doubts they'll get back into operation within three to four months.”

The Daily Telegraph is among papers to note that those attending the reception were treated to a banquet of ‘molecular cuisine’: “molecular egg curdle and ice-cream mixed with liquid nitrogen, created by two of the world’s best chefs Ettore Bocchia of Italy and Ferran Adria, who runs El Bulli restaurant in Spain”.

Liquid nitrogen? Let’s hope that none of that leaked...

Image: CERN control room / CERN

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 22, 2008
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CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, has released its report on what went wrong on 19 September, just as the Large Hadron Collider was firing up. Blame a bad electrical connection that led to the vacuum enclosure rupturing. The full report is a rather grim litany of engineering gone awry: "soot-like dust", it turns out, contaminated the beam pipes "over some distance".

The LHC (Nature special here) won't start working now until spring 2009 -- not a happy delay for the particle physicists who have waited for it for years.

Posted by Alex Witze on October 16, 2008
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Channel 4 News and the non-profit Nuclear Information Service have found new evidence of how last summer's intense flooding halted operations for a full 9 months at one of Britain's two nuclear weapons sites.

On 20 July 2007, the county of Berkshire was inundated by torrential rainfall. The Atomic Weapons Establishment's Burghfield site, where warheads are serviced and disassembled, had some 84 buildings affected by the flooding—including some areas used for assembling nuclear components. Water and highly-enriched plutonium don't mix—good ol' H₂O can make a pretty good neutron moderator, and could even lead to a nuclear chain reaction within a warhead. It wouldn't be a full-scale blast in a properly maintained modern warhead, but it could still release radiation.

Fortunately, there was no chance of that happening. The flooding occurred on a weekend, while the Burghfield site was locked up tight, and emergency crews followed the correct protocol. Still, the damage was so extensive that nuclear work at Burghfield couldn't begin again until the spring of 2009.

The UK's other main nuclear site at Aldermaston, where atomic research is done, was unaffected by the flooding.

The full report on the incident is here, and a nice summary by the NIS is here.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 15, 2008
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Stephen Hawking is getting a 3 metre high statue of himself cast in bronze. The $250,000 statue will be placed near his his Centre for Theoretical Cosmology office, reports say.

“The giant monument in Cambridge will depict the physics genius in his wheelchair upon a vortex and rising out of a mist of water, surrounded by a ‘black hole’,” says Cambridge News. A scale model has already been constructed by sculptor Eve Shepherd (model picture here and here).

Shepherd says the work will show the “power of Professor Hawking’s mind and the fragility of his body”.

“There’s so much personality and energy inside Stephen's mind but it is difficult to show that in a sculpture because his body doesn't reflect it,” she says (Cambridge News). “However I didn't want to ignore his disability, and Stephen agreed with that.”

Of course this is not the first statue of Hawking to grace Cambridge. A bust of him was unveiled last year. Can any other living scientist boast two statues of himself?

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 10, 2008
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Hot on the heals of a clean Nobel sweep for Japanese-born particle physicists, Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura says that Japan is ready to host the next generation of particle collider. The International Linear Collider, which would collide electrons rather than protons, is the big hope for high-energy physicists after CERN's Large Hadron Collider wraps up its work sometime in the next decade.

It's nice to see someone taking an interest. As myself and my Washington-based colleague Eric Hand jointly reported, the US and UK have withdrawn from the linear collider in recent months.

Image: artist's rendition of ILC particle event / Sandbox Studio

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on October 08, 2008
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Half of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".

The other half will be split between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

Nature News’s physics guru Geoff Brumfiel will have the full story for you soon...

Europe 3 : Japan 2 : America 1

More Nobel news
Nobel Prize week: and we’re off!
Virus discoveries secure Nobel prize in medicine

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 07, 2008
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Posted for Laura Starr

Europe’s potential billion pound laser fusion project HiPER was officially launched today, with a host of luminaries meeting at London’s Science Museum.

This new phase of the High Power laser Energy Research project is still a preparatory one, which will see 26 institutes from 10 nations develop a design for a laser that could produce the intense conditions needed to fuse deuterium and tritium and provide the ultimate environmentally friendly energy supply. (Project leader Mike Dunne calls it “The Holy Grail of energy sources”.)

The idea is to focus super-powerful lasers onto fuel pellet containing deuterium and tritium, forcing the isotopes together and resulting in a huge release of energy. At the moment though there are a host of hurdles to overcome. Not least the need for significantly more powerful lasers and the problem of actually capturing and extracting the energy generated. An initial ‘proof of principle’ demonstration isn’t on the cards until 2010 at the earliest.

Dunne told the Daily Telegraph:

HiPER is aiming to bridge the step between proving nuclear fusion is possible and a commercial power station. It should prove that a big enough laser can be built, with a high enough repetition rate and efficiency, which are the critical building blocks on the route towards fusion energy.

The Telegraph also notes the differences between HiPER and the more famous fusion project ITER. Where HiPER plans to use lasers to compress its fuel and achieve fusion ITER is hoping to do the compression with magnetic fields.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on October 06, 2008
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Posted for Philip Ball

Whereas you might expect that scientists in the CERN theory group have their hands full predicting what the Large Hadron Collider is likely to brew up once it is finally up and running, it seems that some of them are too busy firefighting lunatic scare stories. It wasn’t enough to produce a fat document dismissing the concerns that the LHC will generate planet-gobbling strangelets or black holes; now they have had to demonstrate that the liquid-helium cryogenic system is safe too.

Continue reading "Do the Bose-nova (or rather, don't)" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on September 30, 2008
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A story about an invisibility cloak is always guaranteed to turn a few heads. Another way to grab the attention of headline-skimming eyes is to mention tsunamis. So guess what? Now we have the ultimate headline-grabbing paper – it’s an invisibility cloak for a tsunami. (press release).

The paper is published in Physical Review Letters, and details theoretical and experimental results for a structure that would shield off-shore rigs, even small islands and possibly coastlines from the shock of a tsunami.

The structure is a compound dyke made up of obstacles arranged in such a way as to bend the tsunami round the object they’re surrounding invisible to the waves – analogous to the way an invisibility cloak can send certain frequencies of light waves in weird directions to hide an object.

The story, even with its trendy buzz-words – has picked up only a small amount of attention. But it isn’t quantity, it’s quality. New Scientist has a good explanation about how it actually works, suggesting that the circular arrangement of pillars acts as a kind of whirlpool, taking the tsunami’s force and sucking it into the circles.

Science Daily has the story, and it’s hit the blogosphere as well.
The paper is not just a theoretical proposition – the authors have actually made a small version to test their proposals, but it’s difficult to guess whether any oil companies, or governments will take the idea on board or not.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on September 30, 2008
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A U.S. District Court has thrown out the so-called "doomsday lawsuit" to shut down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The lawsuit was filed in March by Walter Wagner, a Hawaiian botanist-cum-physicist who himself was indicted in February on a charge of identity theft. Wagner claimed that colliding the LHC's 7TeV proton beams could inadvertently destroy the world.

In a 26-page ruling (made public via Cosmic Log), federal district judge Helen Gilmore dismissed the suit. Basically the decision came down to an issue of jurisdiction: Wagner and a co-plantiff made their claim under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). But NEPA only applies to "major federal actions," and the judge said that the US contribution to the LHC (US$531 million or about 10% of the overall cost) was too small to constitute a major federal project.

Judge Gilmore did believe that the debate was "of concern to more than just physicists", but she punted the issue over to the US Congress. It seems unlikely that much will happen there: America's economic meltdown means that Capitol Hill already has one end of the world to worry about. It won't have time to debate another.

Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 29, 2008
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Posted for Emma Marris

Don't you love sportscasters? They are always offering pearls of wisdom like "If they want to score, they've got to get that ball to the end of the field" and "What he really needs to do here is hit that ball."

For a more in-depth examination of what baseball players ought to be doing when they are racing to beat a ball to base or steal a base, we turn to Dave Peters, a mechanical engineer at the Washington University in Saint Louis – a sports crazy town if ever there was one.

Peters examines (press release) the age-old question of how to slide into base. Should one slide feet first
or

Continue reading "Stealing bases - head or feet first?" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on September 29, 2008
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A physicist has been arrested by the FBI on charges of illegally aiding China’s space programme.

According to the Department of Justice Shu Quan-Sheng, born in China but a naturalized American, violated arms control acts in helping the Chinese with their Hainan island space launch facility. A DOJ statement says:

According to the complaint, Shu has been involved in the PRC's systematic effort to upgrade their space exploration and satellite technology capabilities by providing technical expertise and foreign technology acquisition in the fields of cryogenic pumps, valves, transfer lines and refrigeration equipment, components critical for the use of liquefied hydrogen in a launch facility. Shu has also been instrumental in arranging for PRC officials to visit various European space launch facilities and hydrogen production/storage facilities.

Other allegations include attempted bribery and supplying data on hydrogen tanks and fuelling systems. Shu is the president, secretary and treasurer of the company AMAC International, headquartered in Newport News.

Continue reading "FBI swoop on ‘China space spy guy’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 25, 2008
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The Large Hadron Collider is running into problems again. And not just with people who don’t like its name.

Given the Hammer of the Higgs has only been switched on for a week it’s a bit embarrassing that so far it has been hacked into and one of its transformers has gone wrong. Now a problem with a magnet has sent helium from the cooling system leaking into the tunnels of CERN.

The Times says:

While a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week has now been replaced, as first reported by The Times, the magnet failure is potentially more serious. Supercooled helium that chills the LHC’s magnets to 1.8C above absolute zero was released into the accelerator’s 17-mile (27km) tunnel in the incident.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 19, 2008
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Posted on behalf of Amber Dance

What starts with 316, ends with 511, and has no factors besides itself and one?

The biggest prime number ever, that’s what.

Edson Smith of UCLA, in conjunction with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) will share a $100,000 prize offered by the Electronics Frontier Foundation (EFF) for the first 10-million digit prime. One of the 75 computers Smith manages (Scientific American), running GIMPS’ free distributed computing software that utilizes processor downtime, discovered the number on 23 August, but it took three weeks to verify. It was a photo finish — Hans-Michael Elvenich of Langfelden, Germany, discovered another 10-million-digit prime just two weeks later. While Smith’s number clocked 12,978,189 digits, Elvenich’s was a puny 11,185,272 digits long.

Mersenne primes, which fit the equation 2^n -1, are the (relatively) easiest to prove prime because there’s a “simple” test for their primeness. The first four Mersennes, 3, 7, 31 and 127, were discovered BCE, and mathematicians have been adding to the list since the 15th Century. Computers speed up the process a bit—in its 12 years GIMPS has been running, it’s discovered a dozen Mersenne primes.

Continue reading "Big prime nets big profit" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 19, 2008
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Unconvinced that Large Hadron Collider was a good name, the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to run a poll to find a something better. Leaving aside the shameless bandwagon jumping (surely this was a job for the Institute of Physics if anyone?) the slightly uninspiring choice of the public was ‘Halo’.

In a statement the RSC says:

Some reports say that the RSC is suffering from ‘professional jealousy’ [over the LHC]; far from it. The RSC congratulates the physics community with nothing but admiration for their amazing project - it just has a very boring name.

The name Halo was suggested by Aaron Borges of Black Mesa, Rhode Island, USA, who doesn’t seem to be deliberately plugging the Microsoft video game of the same name. Other popular entries were Deep Thought, The Particrasher, E=M25, The Big Banger and Big Bang Two Point Oh.

Sadly the RSC obviously has no power to rename the LHC, so LHC it will stay. “We’re flattered that the RSC should take such an interest in our public image, and we find the name Halo to be apposite. However, the LHC will not be changing its name,” says a spokesman (Daily Telegraph).

Jumping onto the bandwagon with their own bandwagon (and pushing my metaphor use to breaking point) is Wired:

No offence to Aaron, but I just can't get excited about this: Beyond the fact that Microsoft probably owns the word by now, it's a little too cute.

Wired Science is therefore proud to announce our own Large Hadron Collider Renaming Contest.

Black Mesa, another video game reference, is doing well, but ‘Chuck Norris's Roundhouse Kick Simulator’ is close behind. That may not mean anyone who doesn’t follow internet in-jokes.

If you still want more alternative LHC names, head on over to Digg for more discussion of the matter.

Image: cern

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 18, 2008
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In a strange twist to the start up of the Large Hadron Collider, it appears that the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the collider's two all purpose detectors, has come under attack from purportedly Greek hackers.

The hacking attack apparently took place September 9 and 10 in the lead-up to the official LHC switch-on. According to The Telegraph, the perpetrators identified themselves as the GST (short for Greek Security Team). The "team" says that it is 2600 strong, slightly larger than the CMS collaboration, but it doesn't appear to be related to the end-of-the-world paranoia surrounding the LHC's startup on 10 September.

The GST apparently got through to the metasystem that monitors CMS software as it takes data. That system was separated from the detector's main controls by a firewall, and physicists quickly cut off the attack. "No harm was done," CMS spokesperson Jim Virdee told me.
Image: CMS

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 15, 2008
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant particle accelerator outside of CERN, has only just started on its scientific adventure, and it's already got theorists fighting with each other.

Most physicists believe that the LHC is going to find something called the Higgs particle. If it exists, the Higgs would endow all other particles with mass, and it would help to complete the so-called standard model of particle physics.

But not everyone thinks the Higgs is there to be found. On Tuesday, famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking announced he was betting US$100 that the LHC wouldn't find the Higgs particle. What's more, he said it would be "more exciting" if physicists didn't find it.

Peter Higgs, the man for whom Higgs is named, didn't find that very funny. As it's being widely reported, Higgs called Hawking's work "not good enough" yesterday during a press conference in Edinburgh.

Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that Hawking is a cosmologist and Higgs a particle physicist. Hawking has "gone to war" with particle physicists before, claiming for example, that black holes can destroy information. The particle physicist-come-string-theorist Leonard Susskind was so incensed that wrote a book about the topic.

I suspect that this is the first of what will be a lot of spats between theorists in the coming year or two. People's careers all depend on what the LHC finds, and as those findings draw near, the theoretical community will grow ever more agitated.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 11, 2008
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Putting out a science press release on the day the LHC takes over the world seems like a pretty bonehead play for a PR officer. Unless that is they’ve decided this a ‘good day to bury bad news’ (copyright the UK government).

Just in case this is their terrible plan, here are the stories they didn’t want you to read...

The winners of the Kavli prizes in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience have been presented with their awards in Oslo. “Let these prizes be a token of thanks and gratitude for moving us along the path of greater understanding of the human being, nature, and the universe,” says Fred Kavli, founder of the Kavli Prize.

Scientists from a whole host of institutes have come up with “a novel way to improve survival and recovery rate after a heart attack”.

Germany wants its young researchers to come home from the US. “The door to Germany is wide open,” says Matthias Kleiner, president of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German Research Foundation).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 10, 2008
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Nature’s leading blagger-of-foreign-travel Geoff Brumfiel is still over near Geneva blogging the LHC. The rest of the world is still going crazy for the smasher too, you know you’ve made it in geek-land when you’re the subject of an XKCD comic strip

So press play on the embedded video (Pop Goes the World set to a music video about the LHC) and read on...

Continue reading "LHC: License for Huge Coverage pt 2" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 10, 2008
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If you don’t like particle physics look away now. In fact, if you don’t like particle physics turn off all electronic equipment, burn your newspaper and go and sit in the bottom of a well for a least the next week because there is no escaping the Large Hadron Collider at the moment.

Nature’s leading blagger-of-foreign-travel Geoff Brumfiel is over near Geneva to witness the momentous turning on of the largest / most important / groundbreaking / awesome / sexy / amazing / powerful / expensive / etc / etc / etc experiment ever.

They’re all clapping and cheering over there right now, he says.

Here’s what the rest of the world says...

Continue reading "LHC: License for Huge Coverage" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 10, 2008
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The media feeding frenzy that is the British Association Festival of Science has kicked off. Katrina Charles is there for Nature and has thus far enlightened us about fossilised forests in Illinois coal mines and why science in science fiction films is a bit silly.

There’s far more to cover than one person alone can manage. Here’s a round up of the rest...

Continue reading "BA Festival of Science round up" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 09, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross posted from Geoff Brumfiel at In the Field

It's only a few days before the official "start up" of the LHC, and people everywhere are getting all excited. Unfortunately, a lot of that excitement is focused around a single, erroneous question: "Will the LHC destroy the world?"

The answer, of course, is no. Even the Sun, the silliest of British tabloids, knows that (although they do have some pretty good ideas about how to pass the end of days, think Super Mario Brothers).

Nevertheless, there's a vocal and determined group of folks who are doing their best to convince the public that there really isn't going to be a 11 September. Some of them will post shortly on this blog I'm sure, and fair enough; it's a free world. But others are going too far. In the past few days, reports have come out that a few physicists at the LHC are recieving death threats from hardest of the fanatics.

Enough is enough. Leave your case to the courts and stop trying to scare the poor physicists.

Image: cern

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 08, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nuclear incidents have been popping up all over Europe in August. Perhaps the reddest faces will be at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which managed to spread plutonium over a whole storage room earlier this month.

Of course those faces will be red from embarrassment rather than radiation poisoning as independent tests have no confirmed that no radioactive material was released to the environment when pressure build up caused a vial to burst. Still, Reuters says the leak at the Seibersdorf lab “raised a stir in Austria” which rejects nuclear energy as “fundamentally dangerous”.

The agency says:

According to the IAEA´s nuclear regulator´s assessment of the incident, the lab´s safety systems worked properly and successfully contained the contamination. The incident was rated as level 1 (anomaly) on the Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) of events. The INES scale has seven categories, the most serious being a ‘major accident’.

Belgium is dealing with its own nuclear problem after radioactive iodine gas leaked from a medical lab near the town of Fleurus. Reports last week said the problem was “worse than had initially been thought” and it was assessed as a three on the INES scale, locals were warned not to eat food from their gardens.

Continue reading "Europe goes nuclear" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 01, 2008
Categories: Health and medicine, Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Purdue University has reprimanded scientist Rusi Taleyarkhan for research misconduct, according to a statement released yesterday. Taleyarkhan will remain on the faculty but will lose his named professorship after a committee rejected an appeal against two findings of misconduct.

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008b/080827WoodsonTaleyarkhan.html
“In considering the sanctions to impose, I have been guided by the principle that the sanctions should address and be proportional to the specific findings of research misconduct,” said Purdue Provost Randy Woodson. “In my judgment as Purdue's chief academic officer, it is inappropriate for a faculty member who has been found guilty of research misconduct to hold a title of a named university professor.”

Purdue previously released a report stating that Taleyarkhan arranged for a student’s name to be added to a paper to “create the appearance that the student had witnessed the experiment reported in the paper” and he later claimed the paper as independent confirmation of his experiments on a tabletop fusion device using ‘sonofusion’, where fusion is created by sound waves collapsing bubbles.

Continue reading "Fusion scientist reprimanded for misconduct" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 28, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this month, we wrote about rumours that an Italian experiment called PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) had seen an intriguing signal. The cliff-notes version: PAMELA sees more positrons (anti-electrons) than expected, which may in turn be a signal from dark matter—mysterious stuff that floats around our cosmos and has never been seen.

PAMELA's results have been shrouded in mystery. So far, the researchers involved have only flashed their data on screen at a few conferences, for fear that the press would get a hold of the results before they were published in a peer-review journal. Such precautions are taken when submitting to journals like ours, but in this particular case, it's left a lot of physicists miffed.

Well now it appears that some enterprising individuals have scooped PAMELA. As reported by Jester on his popular physics blog Resonaances, somebody has "graphically extracted" the PAMELA data from their presentation at a conference last week in Stockholm. "Graphically extracted" is open for interpretation, but I'm guessing it means that they took a picture.

In any event, the new paper is here, and the cat, it would seem, is out of the bag.

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on August 27, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A Lego interpretation of what happens when particle physics goes wrong...

Below the fold: if the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t start up on time we’ll know why. They’ve all been too busy making rap videos...

Continue reading "Video post: particle physics in Lego and rap" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 29, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After encouraging you to vote up chemist Mendeleev in the ongoing Greatest Russian online poll, we have another question for you to ponder: Who is your favourite fictional mathematician?

Maths-mag Plus has compiled an impressive list of fictional number jockeys and currently leading the pack is Charlie Eppes from US cop-show Numb3rs, with 14% of the 150-odd votes.

Clearly a much better choice is A Square from Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, currently only one vote behind in second. A surprising percentage of people have voted Sherlock Holmes’s evil nemesis Professor Moriarty into third.

One commenter on the Plus blog points out a glaring omission though:

I have voted for 'The Square' but wonder if 'Count von Count' from Sesame Street should be included? He has certainly promoted the joy of numbers and counting to generations of kids around the world!

Sadly I have to report that Mendeleev is still languishing badly in the Greatest Russian’s poll, although Gagarin has moved up to 9th place. Take that Ivan the Terrible.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 23, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sir John Templeton, the Wall Street investor and philanthropist who used his millions to support research at the intersection of science and religion, died today. He was 95.

Sir John held research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science on the same level as studies of the human purpose and the power of prayer. He created the Templeton Prize, for progress in religion, in 1972, as a response to what he saw as a deficiency in the Nobel prizes. Honorees include physicists Freeman Dyson and Charles Townes alongside Mother Teresa and evangelist Billy Graham. Critics, however, often argued that science and religion are incompatible, questioning scientists who accepted the Templeton Prize.

Later Sir John established the John Templeton Foundation to foster “projects to apply scientific methodology to the study of religious subjects,” according to the New York Times.

Sir John grew up in a devout Tennessee home and showed an early interest in mathematics and astronomy, watching the skies from a telescope on the family’s roof, says the Washington Post. He paid his way through Yale with poker winnings and the sale of ad space in a student newspaper he founded.

The savvy investor was known for buying extremely low — some of his initial stock purchases were in bankrupt companies, says the Telegraph — and waiting patiently until he could sell high. His stock market ventures included the Templeton Damroth mutual fund, which specialized in nuclear energy, chemistry, and electronics. Money magazine called him “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century.” He sold his assets in 1992 to devote his time to philanthropy.

Sir John moved to the Bahamas and became a naturalized British citizen during the 1960s. Queen Elizabeth II recognized his philanthropic work with knighthood in 1987.

He died of pneumonia at a Nassau hospital.

Posted on behalf of Amber Dance

Posted by Alex Witze on July 08, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hundreds of California’s endemic plants could be driven out of the state by climate change, according to a new study.

Researchers calculated that two-thirds of the plants could have their range reduced by 80% by 2100. Changes in rainfall and higher temperatures will drive redwoods north and send oaks packing for the Oregon border, say the authors of a new paper in PLOS One.

“Part of me can’t believe that California's flora will collapse over a period of 100 years," says study author David Ackerly. “It’s hard to comprehend the potential impacts of climate change. We haven't seen such drastic changes in the last 200 years of human history, since we have been cataloguing species.”

The researchers looked at data from 16 state plant collections and used two climate models to see where Californian species would have to move to survive. They say we should prepare for the change by establishing corridors between several potential “refuges” for species, such as mountain foothills.

Continue reading "Californian plants can’t take the heat" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, have taken a bit of time off from trying to get their shiny new toy up and running to address concerns that it might inadvertently destroy the planet. Their conclusion? It won't.

For those in need of an reminder, Walter Wagner, a Hawaiian botanist-cum-physicist indicted in February for identity theft, is suing the LHC and its partners because, he says, the particle accelerator could destroy the earth any one of a number of ways. It might create microscopic black holes that could swallow us all. Or it could make particles called "strangelets" that will turn the entire earth into a big blob of "strange" matter.

The new report rightly points out that there are plenty of places in the universe where particles collide at far higher energies than they will in LHC. There are also collisions right here in our upper atmosphere caused by cosmic rays—high-energy particles from deep space. So far at least, none of this has caused the planet to vanish.

To physicists, this whole debate is pretty silly, but it's good that they're taking the time to respond. Wagner and his cronies have been getting a lot of press, and it's important that the public know that the LHC is the least of the world's problems.

Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 23, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The summer may be getting warm, but the Large Hadron Collider is cooling down.

The world's largest particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is entering the final testing phase of its superconducting magnets, which will be used to steer protons around the ring and smash them into each other at energies of up to 7TeV. In order to work, the magnets must be chilled to 1.9 Kelvin, and that requires a huge network of vacuum pumps, cryostats and electrical feedthroughs, all of which need to be made air-tight.

It's been slow going, but as you can see (right) the 32Km ring is finally approaching the requisite temperatures. Once there, each sectors' magnets will be powered up and tested further. Then it's off to the races!

If you want to follow how it's all going yourself, then check in here.
Image: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 13, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

UPDATE 2: It has emerged that, as per our prediction, Richard Dawkins did bid for the letter. "What surprises me is the extraordinarily low estimate the auction house originally gave," he says (Guardian). "In a way, I'm delighted that such a thing should be so highly valued."

UPDATE - The letter sold to an anonymous bidder for £170,000, over 20 times more than expected. With fees included the actual price is over £200,000.

Einstein’s often-debated views on religion look to have been made clearer by a document up for auction tomorrow.

“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” he writes in the 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind.

Bloomsbury Auctions, which is selling the letter, expects it to go for between £6000 and £8000 (press release). If you don’t have that much spare change, you can always read Einstein’s 1940 Nature article ‘Science and Religion’ (subscription required).

Continue reading "Einstein: ‘god is human weakness’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 14, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

Physicist John Wheeler died on Sunday aged 96.

“For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing,” says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NY Times).

His description of General Relativity remains one of the best there is: "mass tells space how to curve, space tells mass how to move".

Daniel Holz worked with Wheeler and has written a wonderful tribute at the Cosmic Variance blog. On Wheeler’s work he notes:

He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

He also notes what he was like as a person, with this my favourite detail:

He would always take the stairs. (‘ No time to wait for an elevator!’) He would hook his arm into the banisters, and swing around, practically leaping from one flight to the next. This was 1990; Wheeler was 79 years old.

More tributes below the fold as they come in.

Continue reading "RIP John Archibald Wheeler" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A surprising number of quite dramatic stories today – one big round-up post will have to do for them all.

Dextre, the Canadian space agency’s new robot, is meant to be helping construct the ISS. Instead it’s making outlandish demands:
In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at ‘Dextre the Magnificent.’ Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

Virgin and Google are going to Mars. They want YOU to join them (if you can score highly enough on their selection questionnaire that is).

Continue reading "A chemist, a physicist, and a biologist walk into a bar" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
Categories: Biology & Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics, Policy, Space and astronomy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of all the physics conspiracy theories out there, my current favorite concerns the Large Hadron Colldier (LHC), a proton-proton collider near Geneva, Switzerland that will hopefully discover some exciting new physics. Conspiracy nuts have suggested that it might also inadvertently destroy the Earth (or maybe even the entire Universe).

I'll spare you the details, which can be easily dug up with a little Googling, but basically the cranks think that the collider will also cook up either an exotic particle or a tiny black hole that will suck up everything around it. It's pretty much bunk, as others smarter than I have said (here for example).

But that hasn't stopped Walter L. Wagner, a botanist and self-proclaimed nuclear physicist, from filing suit in US District Court in Hawaii to stop the LHC before it destroys all we hold dear. Wagner wants a "full-scale safety analysis" to be conducted of the collider before its start up, hopefully later this year. A few years back, Wagner raised the same concern about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. But all it ended up doing was producing these pretty pictures (and some valuable science too).

Incidentally, Wagner's in a little legal trouble of his own. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, he and his wife were just indicted for allegedly taking illicit control of some property owned by the World Botanical Gardens, which he helped found.

I'm guessing not even the LHC can make his problems disappear.

Credit: CERN

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on March 28, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a story doing the rounds at the moment that Colombian rebel group FARC is planning to make a ‘dirty bomb’ out of uranium. This story first blew up last week and has been recycled ever since, and it’s not really true.

The government has seized 30 kg of “radioactive” depleted uranium according to a number of reports. Except depleted uranium is barely radioactive. It’s dangerous alright, but only when made into tank shells.

It is toxic, but so are most heavy metals. You’d be better off making a dirty bomb out of mercury than DU.

The head of Colombia's armed forces says a buried cache of uranium was found thanks to information from those close to an arms dealer whose name was found on a computer belonging to deceased rebel Raul Reyes (Bloomberg). “It’s exactly the same material listed on Reyes’ computer. Why the FARC were so anxious to obtain this material we still don’t know,” says General Freddy Padilla.

Pro-FARC news agency ANNCOL has rubbished the claims.

Below the fold are a couple of people who got it right about depleted uranium.

Continue reading "Colombian uranium nonsense" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 28, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is Pi day – in American nomenclature March 14th is 3.14. The official Pi day website is com-π-ling a list of people’s favourite Pi day activities, most seem to revolve around the remarkably obvious eating of pies.

Also celebrating pi day:

A remarkably indepth article from the BBC
Freep.com is running a Pi-themed haiku contest. Somehow they have missed the opportunity to call it a pi-ku contest. Fools!
The NY Times is also running a poetry of Pi competition, and offering a pi-rize
Rush-Henrietta Central School students smashed their maths teachers in the face with pies, which seems quite harsh (Democrat and Chronicle).
Nature article from 2007 on Pi day

Today is also international ‘Talk Like A Physicist Day’ – March 14th is Einstein’s birthday...

Continue reading "Thank God it’s π Day" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 14, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A Polish physicist and priest has won the annual million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”.

Michael Heller walks away with $1.7 million for investigating questions including whether the Universe needs to have a cause (press release). This is the largest annual prize given to an individual (just bigger than the $1.6m Nobel), and comes from the same foundation that has previously funded studies into whether prayer can heal the sick, and how a nun's religious experience looks under a brain scanner.

“I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence,” Heller told the New York Times.

According to the London Times:

His theories do not so much offer proof of the existence of God as introduce doubt about the material existence of the world around us. He specialises in complex formulae that make it possible to explain everything, even chance, through mathematical calculation.

Continue reading "Physicist-priest wins $1.7 million prize" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 13, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week an interesting maths press release popped up in my inbox. Despite the nice premise – researcher solves problem that has vexed community for 140 years – I didn’t cover it.

The reason for this was the actual research paper was nearly a year old. Who, I reasoned, would want to read about something a year old. Well plenty of people did cover it, and there has since emerged and interesting twist...

Science’s coverage adds a classic science bun-fight: a row over who actually got there first.

Continue reading "Who really solved 140-year old maths problem?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 07, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The troubled body in charge of a large chunk of UK physics funding has just announced what it likes and what it doesn’t. Faced with something of a budget shortfall (see Nature from December, January, January again, and again) the Science and Technology Facilities Council has now ranked its projects.

STFC’s new Programmatic Review document rates projects as high, medium-high, medium-lower, and lower priority. “Obviously those in the lower categories are those most at risk,” the document says, ominously (PDF).

So what does it seem UK physicists can do without? Here are some of the lower priority projects:

Gemini [ground based telescope]
UKIRT [“world’s largest telescope dedicated solely to infrared astronomy”]
Ground-based Solar Terrestrial Physics facilities
CLF lasers for science programme [provides lasers for science]
High Performance Computing Operations

Luckily for some of those about to get their marching orders, the STFC is quick to point out it’s not because they're not doing good science. It’s because some of the lower priority projects don't have “strategic fit to STFC”.

Continue reading "UK Physicists – check your job security here" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 04, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An intriguing paper in Physical Review Letters this week reports on an international team’s efforts to dig deep into the Standard Model of physics. The paper itself (PRL) is very technical (not to be attempted by the faint-hearted). But the Edinburgh University press release on the work (not available online, sorry) gets the quote-of-the-day prize for this succinct summary:

Professor Richard Kenway of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics said: “Although the Standard Model has been a fantastic success, there were one or two dark corners where experimental tests had been inconclusive, because vital calculations were not accurate enough. We shone a light on one of these, but to our enormous frustration, nothing was lurking there.”

According to the press release, the team used a supercomputer to compare recent experiments studying the decays of bottom quarks to be compared with earlier, strange quark experiments (that’s experiments on strange quarks, not strange experiments on quarks). The comparison result agrees with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics and implies that the particle-anti-particle asymmetry (technically known as "CP-symmetry violation") seen in these two different decay processes have a common origin.

In other words they confirmed the six-quark theory of particle-anti-particle asymmetry.

In other, other words they confirmed what they thought they knew about quarks, and didn’t find anything new. That may be disappointing to people looking to push the boundaries of physics, but I must admit to being a bit relieved: surely we have enough mysteries in the world of particle physics, thanks very much, without turning up new ones.

Posted by Nicola Jones on February 26, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, at least until science got involved. Rather than powering your floor lamps by nasty, carbon footprint increasing mains electricity why not use gravity?

That’s what Virginia Tech student Clay Moulton thought. So he designed the Gravia, a metre high lamp powered by a slowly falling weight that users would lift to the top. As the weight falls, the theory goes, it can be used to power LEDs – producing 600-800 lumens, about the same as a 40-watt bulb over a period of four hours (press release).

Although it hasn’t been built, Gravia even came second in a Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Websites praised it.

Then people started crunching the numbers…

One person noted on a Slashdot discussion:

The drop is 58" according to the plan [core77.com]. This gives about 0.022W at 100% efficiency.
For reference, the highest efficiency LEDs that I know of get 131 lumens per watt. If we're generous and allow them 150 lumens/watt, they still need 4W of power. This would require a drop of 255 metres using the 50lbs of weights he claims. Since we can't really go above 1.5m high, we'll need almost 4 tonnes of weights.

Later some estimates of the number creep up to 24 tonnes (ZD Net). It doesn’t seem likely this light is going to be in your shops anytime soon. We’re expecting a statement from Virginia Tech soon…

Read the university response in full below the fold.

Continue reading "Heavy work for green light" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 21, 2008
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted for Katharine Sanderson

It might have passed you by, but at the Grammys last week a bunch of mathematicians and their algorithms walked away with a gong. The award was for “best historical album”, and was a remastering of the only known bootleg recording of Woodie Guthrie, the American folk musician (press release).

The award went to Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, and engineers at Jamie Howarth’s company Plangent Processes who developed algorithms to remaster a particularly fragile and crackly tape recording of Guthrie performing in 1949 (buy it here).

Apparently the software developed by the team recreates the machine on which the original performance was recorded and so can cancel out the wobbles and strange speed delays caused by the flimsiness of the tape. Here’s an explanation of the process with sound effects and all on NPR – explaining that the acetate tapes break down into vinegar, which causes the warping we hear as a that rather disturbing wah-wah effect.

Or go straight to the before and after sounds of the Grammy winning Guthrie performance.

Congratulations to maths.

Image: Kevin Short holding the album and his Grammy medallion / Douglas Prince, UNH Photo Services

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 13, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s much excitement in the UK media over a story broken by New Scientist that nerves can be grafted over injured sections of spinal cord in rats.

At a conference in New York, John Martin of Columbia University described how he and his colleagues cut motor nerves away from the abdominal muscles they normally connected with. They then stretched the cut ends of these nerves down past injury sites on the rats’ spines and glued them in place, says the magazine (subscription required).

Later the researchers found their grafted nerves had begun to form connections with motor nerves below the injuries. “Zapping the spinal cord above the injury made the lower limbs of the rats twitch, showing that motor signals had begun once again to pass along the entire length of the spine,” NS reports.

Giorgio Terenghi, of the University of Manchester in the UK, told the BBC, “It’s a very good idea, but the key thing is how much function they will be able to restore using this technique.” The research has not yet been published in a journal.

How much function is being restored in rats, let alone humans, is unclear at the moment. Nevertheless it is predictably being hailed as a potential cure for victims of paralysis (eg, Daily Mail, Guardian, PA).

RelatedRecent Nature medicine paper on recovery after spinal injuries.
Great Beyond post on the above paper.

Image: Getty

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 07, 2008
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A new world record in human powered computing has been set by MIT students who used bicycles to power one of the institute’s supercomputers for 20 minutes. As part of the ‘Innovate or Die’ pedal-powered machine contest a nuclear fusion reaction was modelled by the sweat of the students’ brows.

More arithmetic calculations were computed “than were done on the entire earth up to 1960”, according to Techworld. A very energy efficient supercomputer was used though – a chip in the SiCortex machine apparently uses about 8 watts of power, compared to an average laptop chip that could draw 100 watts (Xconomy). Of course there is more than one chip in the supercomputer – Techworld says the “low-powered” system drew 1,200 watts.

“By harnessing the energy creation processes of the sun, our research opens the possibility of limitless energy. But we still need to do our parts individually, such as by using energy-efficient computers in our research,” says John Wright, a member of MIT’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center (Gizmag and Cycling News).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on December 20, 2007
Categories: Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And the Nobel goes to Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud and Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Centre for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (announcement). It's their second big prize of the year -- they took a share of the Japan Prize this spring (press release)

For updates see the full post.

For coverage of yesterday's Nobel for Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, see this post

Continue reading "Physics Nobel announced" »

Posted by Oliver Morton on October 09, 2007
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Scientists in the UK have made a major step in quantum computing by demonstrating that superconducting electrical circuits can be used to send information between two stores of quantum information (AFP, Reuters). The advance is detailed in two papers in this week's Nature – one by Silanpaa and colleagues and the other by Johannes Majer and colleagues.

Silanpaa and co connected their storage mechanisms for quantum information (qubits) via a cavity in which an electromagnetic wave had been established. Majer and co did a similar thing, but using ‘virtual’ photons (“weak perturbations of their cavity's quantum light field” according to an accompanying News and Views article, subscription required). As if quantum computing wasn’t difficult enough, another paper from last week’s Nature is also relevant, one authored by Houck et al. They detailed a ‘single-photon gun’ that can be used to generate and guide photons in an electrical circuit

What does this all mean though? Basically, for quantum computing to work we need to be able to transfer information stored in qubits to other qubits. Previously this had only been done between qubits that were (relatively) close to each other; this work shows it can be done over (relatively) large distances. Here’s what the News and Views piece makes of it all: “these papers represent confident steps towards the ultimate goal of a viable, large-scale quantum computer.”.

Yale, where many of these researchers are based, has a press release on this too.

Image: “coplanar waveguide cavity connecting two superconducting phase qubits at each end” / Michael Kemper

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 27, 2007
Categories: Neat technologies, Physics & Mathematics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The ‘true nature’ of dark matter could be revealed by new computer modelling work (BBC). The modelling, published in Science, suggests in a universe dominated by “warm” dark matter the first stars could have formed from fragments of filaments thousands of light-years long (study abstract, commentary). “The filaments would have been about 9,000 light years long, which is about a quarter the size of the Milky Way galaxy,” according to study leader Liang Gao of Durham University in the UK (press release 1, press release 2). “They would have fragmented in a huge burst of star formation, a spectacular event to contemplate.”

“What is new is we were first to show the properties of these first stars depended so crucially on dark matter,” co-author Tom Theuns, also at Durham, told Reuters. When simulations were run with cold dark matter – the particles of which are less energetic than their warmer brethren – the first stars formed in bunches, rather than in strings. This difference is important as observations could tell us which of the two scenarios is actually true. “If the first constellations can be mapped by future telescopes, the energy of the underlying dark matter may be deduced simply by reading the stars, telling us what dark matter is potentially made of,” says Joanna Baker, associate editor at Science magazine, in AFP’s coverage of the study.

Some of these stars could even be around today – larger stars have shorter life spans but the warm dark matter model predicts that some low mass stars would also be formed. These would still be, as Theuns puts it, “lurking in our galaxy”.

Image: / Science

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 17, 2007
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A giant X-ray machine in Oxfordshire is going to peer inside unopened manuscripts too fragile to unfurl. Tim Wess from the University of Cardiff has worked out that X-rays from the Diamond synchrotron can be used to image the writing on ancient parchments. Now he wants to look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have so far been deemed too brittle to read, he told the British Association Festival of Science in York (covered by the Daily Telegraph, Times, Daily Mail, Guardian, and the BA). “We’ve folded up a real piece of parchment and then done a process of X-ray tomography on it. We’ve been able to recover the structure where we can see the words that are written inside the document,” says Wess (BBC).

Collagen in animal skins used to write on turns to gelatine when wet, making the documents sticky and hard to read. Drying makes them brittle and equally, if differently, problematic. But iron in the ink used shows up on X-rays and, using computers, different layers of folded or rolled documents can be read. Wess is currently perfecting his technique on documents less valuable than the Dead Sea Scrolls and he believes in three or four years it will be good enough to read text in pamphlets and thin books. Unread works by Beethoven and Mozart would then be accessible (The Daily Telegraph, Times). So far his team has been able to read 80% of the text from 18th century legal documents they have been studying (Guardian).

This is actually the latest development in a great tradition of using X-rays to analyse valuable artefacts. They have previously peered under the surface of paintings to detect images hidden beneath, helped date and conserve sculptures and even detected fraud.

Image: unrolled parchment X-ray / Cardiff University

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 13, 2007
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A little mix-up over at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota gets a lot of ink today. Last week, a ground crew accidentally loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles onto a B-52 bomber bound for Louisiana. The plane arrived without incident, but as of this morning, a munitions commander was relieved of duty and several others had been suspended.

Several papers including the Edmonton Sun, Detroit News, and New York Daily News warned of the Air Force accidentally flying “live” warheads, but it’s pretty unlikely that was the case. The bomber was carrying W-80-1 warheads, which are some of the Pentagon’s more sophisticated weapons. They’re equipped with Permissive Action Links (PALs) which prevent the crew from using them without presidential authorisation. The PALs on these particular warheads maintain an actual physical barrier between the electrical systems of the warhead and the rest of the missile and could even be used to remotely disable it, so there’s no way the crew could have armed, fused or fired the missiles. Even if the plane had crashed, the warhead’s “primary” contained fire-resistant “insensitive” high explosives of the type that would be unlikely to detonate.

In fact things were a lot more dangerous in the good old days of the Cold War. In the early 60s, the Air Force kept nuclear-armed B-52s aloft twenty-four-seven. The programme came to an end in 1968 after one of the B-52s carrying four nukes crashed in Thule, Greenland. A succinct summary of the incident, and the Air Force’s nuke-flying history can be found here

The real issue here, as most of the coverage pointed out, is the inventory system the Air Force uses to keep track of its weapons. It should be quite difficult for a ground crew to load warheads in place of duds, and a thorough investigation will be needed to find out exactly what happened.

Credit: USAF

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on September 06, 2007
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Cries of “mine’s bigger than yours” will surely have been flying from US neutron physicists to their UK counterparts at the end of last week. For America has smashed the previous record for neutron source beam power. Basically this means that they have a more powerful device to smash neutrons out of a target and use these neutron to study materials. More importantly they have bragging rights (press release).

“If this is your field, if this is what you want to do, then this is where you want to be. There is no place in the world that can do what we can do with high performance computing, neutron, and with nano-science,” said Tom Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where the new-record holding neutron source is located (WATE).

The lab’s $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source works by throwing negatively charged hydrogen through foil, stripping the hydrogen electrons and thereby turning it into protons. Bunches of these protons are then hurled at liquid mercury, where they free up neutrons which can be guided in beam lines and used in experiments. Nature looked at the machine in detail back in 2005 (subscription required).

As AP points out, there is something of an arms race going on. The Oak Ridge neutron beam has reached 183 kilowatts, beating the UK record of 160. However the UK is going to double its capacity. But wait! The Oak Ridge machine isn’t even out of second gear yet and will eventually produce 10 times more neutrons than it is now.

"I like to be first. Tennesseans like to be first. ... My grandfather used to say aim for the top--there is more room there. What we see are some firsts,” said local senator Lamar Alexander (WBIR). The Great Beyond thinks a verse of one of the state songs is in order: “TENNE-, TENNE-, TENNES-SEE! Oh, how proud we are of thee!”

Posted by Daniel Cressey on September 03, 2007
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In ten years we will all be able to don suits giving us Spiderman like abilities, according to The Times. Unfortunately the new research from Nicola Pugno which The Times and others are reporting only shows theoretically that it could be done and rounds up previous research. We still don’t actually have even a prototype suit so ten years seems pretty ambitious to me.

Pugno, from the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy, has published an article in the Journal of Physics suggesting carbon nanotubes could be used to develop microscopic Velcro that could lead to human sticky suits. “However now that we are this step closer, it may not be long before we are seeing people climbing up the Empire State Building with nothing but sticky shoes and gloves to support them,” he says in the press release (a comment picked up with enthusiasm by UK tabloids The Sun and the Mirror). As the BBC notes, “Professor Pugno also outlined three properties which a real Spider-man suit must demonstrate. Firstly, and most obviously, it must be able to demonstrate strong adhesive properties. Secondly, the suit must be able to detach easily from a surface after it has stuck. Thirdly, the suit must, to some degree, be able to clean itself.”

Commenting on the story to Wired Ronald Fearing, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said: “We already know that if you take the performance of the gecko and scale it up to a person, you'd be all set," he said. "We don't know all the details of how the gecko works, however.” Scientists have been working on similar projects for years of course, but Pugno has pulled the various strands together in one article.

Of course, once you’ve gained super hero powers, you still have to put up with the same social problems – as Philip Ball explains in a recent Nature Muse.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on August 29, 2007
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