CERN physicists create record-breaking subatomic soup

{credit}CERN{/credit}

The results come from the ALICE heavy-ion experiment (at right) — a lesser-known sibling to ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, which produced the data that led to the announcement in July that the Higgs boson had been discovered. ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, say that they have achieved a quark–gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record 4-trillion-degree plasma achieved in 2010 by a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which had been anointed the Guinness record holder.

ALICE spokesman Paolo Giubellino says that the team’s measurement is relatively uncertain and, moreover, they haven’t yet converted an energy measurement into degrees. But he says there’s no reason to suspect that the conversion won’t produce a number like 5.5 trillion degrees. “It’s a very delicate measurement,” he says. “Give us a few weeks and it will be out.”

Cancer drug in the works might double as reversible male contraceptive

The serendipitous finding that a potential cancer-fighting compound temporarily halts sperm production in mice has seeded new hopes for a reversible male contraceptive pill, explains Roxanne Khamsi in the Spoonful of Medicine blog:

A team led by Dolores Mruk at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research in New York has even reported in Nature Medicine on the discovery of a chemical compound known as Adjudin that can stop sperm-forming cells from adhering to the Sertoli cells that nurture them.

The new findings announced today also describe a non-hormonal drug for stopping sperm—but contraception was the furthest thing from the minds of James Bradner and his colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who initially developed the experimental compound.

More details in the post.

UKCSJ – UK Conference of Science Journalists

Scrabble’s Conference Cast blog features a guest post from Sallie Robins, the UK Conference of Science Journalists conference director. She offers her thoughts on putting together a successful conference:

The secret to successful conference organisation is to be almost invisible in keeping everything running smoothly. Delegates and speakers should be blissfully unaware of the highs and lows behind the scenes. So how do you achieve this? Well to be honest, by getting the right people on board early, plenty of elbow grease and by always having a plan B, and sometimes a C, D and E.

Continue to the post to hear more tips and advice from Sallie.

Heliophysics survey: small is beautiful

NASA/GODDARD/SDO AIA TEAM

Eric Hand explains in the News Blog that the last decade of heliophysics research helped in understanding how the Sun’s flaring, magnetically tumultuous behavior drives space weather. However, the next decade should focus on the near-Earth responses to those drivers, says Dan Baker, chair of the heliophysics decadal survey, which was released on Wednesday by the National Academies:

Toilet pioneers

Alyssa Joyce reports in the News Blog, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the winners of this year’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, handing over a US$100,000 first prize to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for work on a solar-powered toilet (right) that recycles water and generates hydrogen and electricity (see press release).

Toilets are a serious problem for the 2.6 billion people who lack adequate sanitation facilities, and for the 1.1. billion who have no access to them at all. Coming up with better ways to deal with human waste is a major priority for global development, as discussed in a recent Nature Comment, ‘The bottom line.’

Toilet design has not changed much since 1775, when flush toilets were first patented. But most of the world does not have access to the plumbing required for flushing — and even in developed countries, conventional toilets consume a lot of water and energy. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation challenged researchers around the world to rethink toilet design, to develop models that do not need centralized plumbing and treatment facilities and that are able to recycle wastes into energy and usable products. Eight universities stepped up to the challenge, and their prototypes and projects were showcased at a two-day event in Seattle, Washington, this week.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Learn more about the Reinvent the Toilet Fair in Alyssa’s post.

Neanderthal sex debate

An argument over sex that has been going on for more than a year is finally seeing the light of day, reports Ewen Callaway in the News Blog. This week, scientists at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, let the world in on a long-running discussion over whether or not humans and Neanderthals really interbred — and how you go about proving it:

{credit}WIKIMEDIA COMMONS{/credit}

In putting a date — 37,000–86,000 years ago — on human–Neanderthal relations, Harvard’s David Reich attempts to address a question created when he and his co-author Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, published a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome in 2010.

Just about every science reporter (see ‘European and Asian genomes have traces of Neanderthal‘, for example) led with the conclusion that Neanderthals and non-African humans had interbred.

But Pääbo, Reich and their co-authors said that there could be another explanation for their observation that all non-Africans surveyed (that is people with deep Asian and European ancestry) owed about 1–4% of their genome to Neanderthals, while African genomes contain no detectable Neanderthal DNA. 

Continue to the post to find out more.

#PhDelta

To tie in with the next Science Online NYC (SoNYC) event, which this month is held in collaboration with the New York Academy of Sciences,we are running a mini-series of guest posts on Soapbox Science all about the PhD.

So far we have already heard from a variety of contributors about how the current system works, where the gaps are, which additional skills they think PhD courses should incorporate and what their personal experiences have been. The latest post is by student Alejandro Grajales, he explains why he’s working towards his Ph.D. at a Museum:

The American Museum of Natural History is the only museum in the Western Hemisphere that can grant a Ph.D. The uniqueness of the Richard Gilder Graduate School or “RGGS” as we like to call it relies, in my opinion, on the flexibility of the program. RGGS students have the opportunity to design their own path through graduate school and this is only possible through very close interaction with the faculty members, as well as with the rest of the Museum’s staff. Another distinctive aspect of the program is its immersive approach.

Hear more of Alejandro’s thoughts in his post and follow and join in the conversations online using #PhDelta.

 Intimate Life of Mosquitoes