Quantummania

Fringy, science-stuff, maybe fact or fiction?

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User: NeutronNorman
Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.

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Home » September 2008
Tuesday, 30 September 2008

I got me a new, sweet cat!

 

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Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:50 | link | comments (4)

(09-29) 17:22 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- It's snowing on Mars and winter is icumen in - to misquote the Middle English paean to springtime.

Scientists studying the coded signals from the lander Phoenix on the planet's arctic surface detected the snow falling lightly from clouds drifting across the sky some 2 1/2 miles above the spacecraft, said James Whiteway, an atmospheric scientist from York University in Canada.

"Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before," he said.

Whiteway, whose team built the weather station aboard Phoenix, said the ice crystals appeared to vaporize before they reached the red Martian ground.

Not that snow was unexpected. Whiteway said his instruments have watched the clouds drifting across the horizon every morning after the sun rises. His Lidar instrument - an acronym for laser detection and ranging - on the spacecraft shoots a green laser beam up into the clouds 100 times a second, and the falling snow reflects brightly in each pulse.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists continue to decipher the signals sent back to Earth from Phoenix, now busy analyzing the soil and ice on the planet's surface.

In a telephone briefing for reporters Monday, the project's chief scientist, Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, said that five months of rooting around in the soft and dry soil of the landing site with the spacecraft's mobile robotic digging arm has confirmed that there's a "skating rink" of water ice a little more than 2 inches below the red soil.

That surface soil itself seems so dry remains a mystery.

Measurements of the ice indicate it has an alkaline level - known as pH - of 8.3, and is very similar to seawater, said Michael Hecht, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. There also appears to be plenty of calcium carbonate in the tiny particles of the icy soil, he said.

Additionally, there are signs of several clay minerals whose sheeted structures hold molecules of water vapor, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, whose miniature ovens aboard Phoenix heat the soil and ice to drive off identifying vapors.

"We can now begin rewriting the book of Martian chemistry," said Hecht.

The scientists must work fast now, for winter is indeed approaching. During the spacecraft's first three months on Mars, the sun never sank below the horizon, leaving plenty of solar energy for Phoenix to power all its instruments. Now, however, the sun sinks beneath the horizon for more than four hours every Martian night, according to Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager and chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's also getting colder, and that drains power from the instruments because they must be kept warm in order to operate, he said.

Before the end of October, Goldstein said, there won't be enough power left to keep the lander's robotic arm operating, so digging into the soil and scraping ice samples from beneath the soil will have to stop. By November, Phoenix will be standing rigidly in the pitch dark, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will encase it in ice like some otherworldly frozen mummy - at more than 150 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

That should make a weird picture, and Goldstein said the Phoenix team will ask NASA to have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high above send images to Earth of what it looks like.

There isn't much chance that Phoenix will recover once sunlight returns next year, Goldstein said. His engineers have created a "Lazarus mode" software program to wake the spacecraft up.

"But I don't really believe it's possible," he said.

 

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:42 | link | comments (2)

Saturday, 27 September 2008

RIP

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 17:30 | link | comments (9)

W.T.F. was she talking about?

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 12:41 | link | comments (5)

Our next potential president: (not bad and the music fits)

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 02:34 | link | comments (1)

Friday, 26 September 2008

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:32 | link | comments (2)

Thursday, 25 September 2008

I'm sure IML as well as everybody else will get a kick out of this post:

The attached video is of dolphins playing with air rings which they have the ability to make under water to play with.  It isn't known how they learn this, or if it's an inbred ability.
As if by magic the dolphin does a quick flip of its head and a air ring appears  in front of its pointed beak. The ring is a solid, donut shaped bubble about 2-ft across, yet it doesn't rise to the  surface of the water!  It stands upright in the water like a magic doorway to an unseen dimension. The dolphin then pulls a small donut from the larger one.  Looking at  the twisting ring for one 
last time a bite is taken from it, causing the small ring to collapse into a thousands of tiny bubbles which head upward towards the  water's surface.  After a few moments the dolphin creates another  ring to play with...  There also seems to be a separate mechanism for 
producing small rings, which a dolphin can accomplish by a quick flip  of its head.

An explanation of how dolphins make these air rings is that they are "air-core vortex rings".  Invisible, spinning vortices in the water are generated from the tip of a dolphin's dorsal fin when it is moving rapidly and turning. When dolphins break the line, the ends are drawn together into a closed ring.  The higher velocity fluid  around the core of the vortex is at a lower pressure than the fluid circulating farther away.. Air is injected into the rings via bubbles released from the dolphin's blowhole. The energy of the water vortex  is enough to keep the bubbles from rising for a reasonably few seconds of play time.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:23 | link | comments (6)

Chinese Say They're Building 'Impossible' Space Drive

By David Hambling EmailSeptember 24, 2008 | 10:29:00 AMCategories: Bizarro, Science!, Space  
Emdrive_2

Chinese researchers claim they've confirmed the theory behind an "impossible" space drive, and are proceeding to build a demonstration version. If they're right, this might transform the economics of satellites, open up new possibilities for space exploration –- and give the Chinese a decisive military advantage in space.

To say that the "Emdrive" (short for "electromagnetic drive") concept is controversial would be an understatement. According to Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who developed the concept, the drive converts electrical energy into thrust via microwaves, without violating any laws of physics. Many researchers believe otherwise. An article about the Emdrive in New Scientist magazine drew a massive volley of criticism. Scientists not only argued that Shawyer's work was blatantly impossible, and that his reasoning was flawed. They also said the article should never have been published.

"It is well known that Roger Shawyer's 'electromagnetic relativity drive' violates the law of conservation of momentum, making it simply the latest in a long line of 'perpetuum mobiles' that have been proposed and disproved for centuries," wrote John Costella, an Australian physicist. "His analysis is rubbish and his 'drive' impossible."

Shawyer stands by his theoretical work. His company, Satellite Propulsion Research (SPR), has constructed demonstration engines, which he says produce thrust using a tapering resonant cavity filled with microwaves. He is adamant that this is not a perpetual motion machine, and does not violate the law of conservation of momentum because different reference frames apply to the drive and the waves within it. Shawyer's big challenge, he says, has been getting people who will actually look into his claims rather than simply dismissing them.

Such extravagant claims are usually associated with self-taught, backyard inventors claiming Einstein got it all wrong. But Shawyer is a scientist who has worked with radar and communication systems and was a program manager at European space company EADS Astrium; his work rests entirely on Einstein being right. The thrust is the result of a relativistic effect and would not occur under simple Newtonian physics. Many have dismissed his work out of hand, and British government funding has ceased. He has had some interest from both the United States and China. Now the Chinese connection with the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi'an seems to have paid off.

"NPU started their research program in June 2007, under the supervision of Professor Yang Juan. They have independently developed a mathematical simulation which shows unequivocally that a net force can be produced from a simple resonant tapered cavity," Shawyer tells Danger Room. "The thrust levels predicted by this simulation are similar to those resulting from the SPR design software, and the SPR test results."

What's more, Shawyer says, NPU is "currently manufacturing" a "thruster" based on this theoretical work.

"I could confirm that our mathematical simulation gives the results Dr. Roger Shawyer told you. Now we are submitting our result to a journal. It is now under the consideration of the editor," Professor Yang adds. "We also developed a tapered cavity and are preparing an experiment which will be completed at the end of this year."

Needless to say, independent confirmation is a big deal -- though many will want to see it published in a peer-reviewed journal. Even when it is, I doubt the controversy will subside. Prof. Yang has plenty of experience in this type of area, having previously done work on microwave plasma thrusters, which use a resonant cavity to accelerate a plasma jet for propulsion. While the theory behind the Emdrive is very different, the engineering principles of building the hardware are similar. The Chinese should be capable of determining whether the thruster really works or whether the apparent forces are caused by experimental errors.

The thrust produced is small, but significant. Shawyer compares a C-Band Emdrive with the existing NSTAR ion thruster used by NASA. The Emdrive produces 85 mN of thrust compared to 92 for the NSTAR (that's about one-third of an ounce), but the Emdrive only consumes a quarter of the amount of power and weighs less than 7 kilos, compared to over 30 kilos. The biggest difference is in propellant: NSTAR uses 10 grams per hour; the Emdrive uses none. As long as it has an electricity supply, the Emdrive will keep going.

The possibilities are phenomenal: Instead of going out of service when they run out of fuel, satellites would have greatly extended endurance and be able to move around at will. (We wouldn't have to shoot them down because of the risk from toxic fuel either.) Deep space probes could go further, faster –- and stop when they arrive. Shawyer calculates that a solar-powered Emdrive could take a manned mission to Mars in 41 days. Provided it works, of course.

What will China do with the technology? It may be relevant that professor Yang is not unknown in military circles, having published a paper called "Plasma Attack Against Low-Orbit Spy Satellites."

Meanwhile, what about the American interest? Shawyer told me that "the flight thruster program is on hold for the present. [O]nce the U.K. government had provided an export license for a U.S. military application, the major U.S. aerospace company we had been dealing with stopped talking to us. "

The company may have decided that the Emdrive could not work. If they're wrong, China has at least a year's head start in a technology that will dominate space and make previous satellites as obsolete as sailing ships in the age of steam.

(Picture: SPR Ltd)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:12 | link | comments (1)

Sunday, 21 September 2008

Science unveils hidden drivers of stock bubbles and crashes from PhysOrg.com
Many economists believe that investors make decisions rationally, weighing up corporate data and other pricing signals to evaluate gain or risk before buying or selling stocks.
[...]

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 01:54 | link | comments

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses. Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures.

Let's just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that's more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of money would also pay for health care for every man, woman, and child in America for at least six months.

How did we get here?

That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.

This isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.

And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done slinging their gold card guts about the halls of congress, every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit.

Gramm didn't just make a fairy tale world for Wall Street, though. He included in his bill a provision that prevented the regulation of energy trading markets, which led us to the Enron collapse. There was no collapse of the house of Gramm, however, because his wife Wendy, who once headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took a job on the Enron board that provided almost $2 million to their household kitty. And why not? Wendy got a CFTC rule passed that kept the federal government from regulating energy futures contracts at Enron.

If John McCain gets elected and chooses Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, which many politico types see as likely, they will be able to talk about the good old days when Gramm was in congress and McCain was in the senate and they were in the midst of the Savings and Loan crisis.

The S and L scandal, which may look precious when compared to our present cascade of problems, isn't hard to understand, either. But it is impossible to take John McCain seriously on our current financial Armageddon since he was dabbling in the historic collapse of 747 S&Ls that occurred during Ronald Reagan's era. In the early 80s under the Republican president, congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in much the same way that Gramm made sure there were no laws hindering our current financial malefactors on Wall Street. S&Ls simply lobbied until they had less regulation and then began making rampant, unsound investments.

The guy who was going the wildest with financial freedom was Charles Keating, who headed up Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. Because the S&L industry had managed to get congress to increase FDIC insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 on deposits, the irresponsible investing of people like Keating began to put taxpayer insurance funds at great risk of loss. Keating placed money in junk bonds and questionable real estate projects and because so many other S&Ls started acting the same way the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) began to push for a regulation that limited these dangerous speculative "direct" investments to 10% of an S&L's assets.

And Keating didn't like it; he called on a private economist named Alan Greenspan, who promptly produced a study saying that there was no danger in "direct" investments.
But that didn't convince the FHLBB and as further scrutiny showed Lincoln Savings and Loan was making even more historically bad investment decisions, a federal investigation was launched.

So Keating called his home state senator John McCain.

McCain and four other US senators (known to history as the Keating Five) met with Edwin Gray, then chairman of the FHLBB. McCain had been hesitant to attend but had reportedly been called a "wimp" behind his back by Keating. The message to the FHLBB and Gray from the Keating Five was to lay off Lincoln and cool the investigation. Gray and the FHLBB did not relent but Lincoln stayed in business until 1989 when it collapsed with the rest of the S&L industry. The life savings of more than 20,000 elderly investors disappeared with the failure of Lincoln. Keating went to prison for five years.

Charles Keating was John McCain's pal. They met in 1981 and Keating dumped $112,000 in the McCain campaign bank accounts between '82 and '87. A year before McCain met with the FHLBB regulators, his wife Cindy and her father, according to newspaper reports at the time, invested about $360,000 in one of Keating's shopping centers. The Arizona Republic reported McCain and his wife and their babysitter took nine trips on Keating's private jet to the Bahamas to stay at the S&L liar's decadent Cat Cay resort. The senator didn't pay Keating back for the plane rides until years later when he was under investigation.

McCain wasn't found guilty of anything but bad judgment, which is an historic understatement. Republicans, who led deregulation of the S&L industry, delayed the bailout until after the 1988 election to make sure George H. W. won the White House. The cost to taxpayers for helping these 747 bad actors in the S&L industry was finally estimated at $1.4 trillion. If the bailout had begun in 1986 instead of after the presidential election, the cost would have been contained at $20 billion.

And now the Republicans who engineered our present crisis and got us into the S&L debacle of the 80s are before us saying the markets need regulation. No, actually, they don't need regulation. Why don't you Republican capitalists who believe in the free markets get out of the damned way and let them work and allow these various financial nuthouses be crushed by the weight of their own stupidity? When it is all over, we'll have sane and sober people create laws to make sure it doesn't happen again, assuming we survive this chaos.

Also, while you are handing out our tax money to idiots on Wall Street, save a little of the long green for the unemployed auto and construction workers and all of the other people who have lost their jobs because you were too stupid to notice what Phil Gramm was doing and you were convinced everything was going to be just fine because the markets work.

These, then, are the people -- the Republicans -- who want to run our government for four more years. John McCain isn't just one of them. He rides their jets. He takes their campaign donations. He makes them his campaign advisors. And he tells us to trust him.

He must think we are a nation of village idiots.

Hell, maybe we are.

From the Huffington Post

Written by James Moore

Posted September 18, 2008 | 12:46 AM (EST)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 01:25 | link | comments (2)

Saturday, 20 September 2008

17 years in pictures

This guy took a pic per day for 17 years while in prison.

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 13:39 | link | comments (1)

Ancient Music
by Ezra Pound


Sing goddamn, damn. Sing goddamn!
Sing goddamn, damn. Sing goddamn!

Winter is i-cumin in,
Lhude sing goddamn!
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ram
Sing goddamn!

Skiddth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing goddamn.
Goddamn, goddamn, tis why I am goddamn,
So gainst the winter's balm.

Sing goddamn, sing goddamn, DAMN!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 03:26 | link | comments (2)

Wednesday, 17 September 2008

So, here's an exclusive! Here is Roma, in Italy talking Italian while on a little car cruise one Sunday afternoon:

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:12 | link | comments

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

My views on human life, this is a Cuban Lulaby, written many, many years ago (turn of the 19th. century).

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 17:46 | link | comments (3)

Monday, 15 September 2008

This is weird, it's an email i recieved from an ex-girlfreind: (I'm sure Limine will Snope this for me, she always does)

Disclaimer: I do not necessarily believe this stuff!

VERY INTERESTING-
1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq

2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization!

3. Noah built the ark in Iraq

4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq

5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in Southern Iraq !

6. Isaac's wife Rebekah is from Nahor, which is in Iraq !

7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq

8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which is in Iraq

9. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered the ten tribes of Israel

10. Amos cried out in Iraq !

11 Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed Jerusalem

12.. Daniel was in the lion's den in Iraq !

13. The three Hebrew children were in the fire in Iraq (Jesus had been in Iraq also as the fourth person in the Fiery Furnace!)

14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the 'writing on the wall' in Iraq

15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq

16. Ezekiel preached in Iraq ..

17. The wise men were from Iraq

18. Peter preached in Iraq

19. The 'Empire of Man' described in Revelation is called Babylon
, which was a city in Iraq !

And you have probably seen this one: Israel is the nation most often mentioned in the Bible.
But do you know which nation is second?
It is Iraq !
However, that is not the name that is used in the Bible
The names used in the Bible are Babylon , Land of Shinar , and Mesopotamia . The word Mesopotamia means between the two rivers, more exactly between the Tigris
And Euphrates Rivers ..
The name Iraq, means country with deep roots.

Indeed Iraq is a country with deep roots and is a very significant country in the Bible.

No other nation, except Israel , has more history and prophecy associated
With it than Iraq

And also, This is something to think about: Since America is typically represented by an eagle.
Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages ....

The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible)
Koran ( 9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah;
And there was peace.
(Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 23:31 | link | comments (2)

Sunday, 14 September 2008

THE SPIN:

Black teen pregnancies? A 'crisis' in black America .
White teen pregnancies? A 'blessed event.'

If you grow up in Hawaii you're 'exotic.'
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you're the quintessential 'American
story.'

Similarly, if you name your kid Barack you're 'unpatriotic.'
Name your kids Trig and Track, you're 'colorful.'

If you're a Democrat and you make a VP pick without fully vetting the
individual you're 'reckless.' A Republican who doesn't fully vet is a
'maverick.'

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer growing your organization from
a staff of 1 to 13 and your budget from $70,000 to $400,000, then become the
first black President of the Harvard Law Review,create a voter registration
drive that registers 150,000 new African American voters, spend 12 years as a
Constitutional Law professor,then spend nearly 8 more years as a State
Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, becoming chairman
of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, then spend nearly
4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of nearly 13
million people, sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs,
Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you are
woefully inexperienced.

If you spend 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town
with less than 7,000 people, then spend 20 months as the governor of a state
with 650,000 people, you've got the most executive experience of anyone on
either ticket, are the Commander in Chief of the Alaska military and are
well qualified to lead the nation should you be called upon to do so because
your state is the closest state to Russia .

If you are a Democratic male candidate who is popular with millions of people
you are an 'arrogant celebrity'. If you are a popular Republican female
candidate you are 'energizing the base'.

If you are a younger male candidate who thinks for himself and makes his own
decisions you are 'presumptuous'. if you are an older male candidate who
makes last minute decisions you refuse to explain, you are a 'shoot from the
hip' maverick.

If you are a candidate with a Harvard law degree you are 'an elitist 'out of
touch' with the real America . if you are a legacy (dad and granddad were
admirals) graduate of Annapolis , with multiple disciplinary infractions you
are a hero.

If you manage a multi-million dollar nationwide campaign, you are an 'empty
suit'.If you are a part time mayor of a town of 7000 people, you are an
'experienced executive'.

If you go to a south side Chicago church, your beliefs are 'extremist'.
If you believe in creationism and don't believe global warming is man made,
you are 'strongly principled'.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your
disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years with whom you are
raising two beautiful daughters you're 'risky'.

If you're a black single mother of 4 who waits for 22 hours after her water
breaks to seek medical attention, you're an irresponsible parent,
endangering the life of your unborn child.

But if you're a white married mother who waits 22 hours, you're spunky.

If you're a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton, the right-wing press calls you
'First dog.'

If you're a 17-year old pregnant unwed daughter of a Republican, the
right-wing press calls you 'beautiful' and 'courageous.'

If you teach abstinence only in sex education, you get teen parents.
If you teach responsible age appropriate sex education, including the proper
use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
REMEMBER – IT IS MCCAIN WHO IS AT THE TOP OF THE TICKET AND WHO REALLY MATTERS IN THIS ELECTION.  HIS IDEAS AND POLICIES DIDN’T CHANGE WHEN HE CHOSE HIS RUNNING MATE.  NOR DID HIS AGE.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:09 | link | comments (7)

Thursday, 11 September 2008

Listen to this very carefully. It might take a couple of times to understand this. But I share the same scientific viewpoint. Is it the end of the world? I mean, will the hadron collider do it?

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 16:26 | link | comments (2)

All my freinds, go here and read this, please..www.afreeman.org/2008/09/11/and-absolon-has-kissed-her-lower-eye/#comment-4869

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:39 | link | comments (5)

Wednesday, 10 September 2008

Hawking Anticipates Collider’s Start

By Mike Nizza

Fears that the world might end because of a grand scientific experiment that begins on Wednesday have given way to something less urgent: Stephen Hawking may lose $100, or gain a Nobel Prize.

INSERT DESCRIPTION

Stephen Hawking (Photo: Miranda Mimi Kuo for The New York Times)

Those stakes are tied to the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to rev up for the first time on Wednesday at roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time following 13 years of planning, $8 billion in spending and immeasurable anticipation, chronicled by Dennis Overbye of The New York Times.

Dr. Hawking will be one of the many physicists watching in hopes of greeting answers to some of physics’ biggest questions when experimental data starts to stream from the collider. But he also has a dog in this fight. His 1974 theory on black holes could be experimentally proven — if the collider succeeds in creating black holes in the first place.

“If the L.H.C. were to produce little black holes, I don’t think there’s any doubt I would get a Nobel prize, if they showed the properties I predict,” Dr. Hawking told BBC Radio today. “However, I think the probability that the L.H.C. has enough energy to create black holes is less than 1 percent, so I’m not holding my breath.”

While some doomsayers feared that the world would be swallowed up if the collider succeeded in creating a black hole, Dr. Hawking said today that the new device was “absolutely safe.” His own theory has a lot to do with his conclusion, as Mr. Overbye wrote in April:

Most theorists will say the version of their theory that predicts black holes is extremely unlikely — though not impossible. But the chance that such a black hole would not instantly evaporate according to a theory famously propounded by Stephen Hawking in 1974 is even more weirdly unlikely, the theorists say.

Dr. Hawking’s theory is just one of many that will be tested by the collider, which is designed to circulate streams of protons around a 17-mile circular track buried below Switzerland and France and, by crossing streams running in opposite directions, produce collisions that illuminate particle physics in ways that are otherwise impossible to observe and measure.

One major hope for the collider is that it could establish whether the Higgs particle really exists, a goal that Dr. Hawking said ought to be well within the capabilities of the experiment, unlike his black holes. From an Agence France-Presse transcription of his remarks:

“The L.H.C. will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle,” Hawking told BBC radio.

“I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won’t find the Higgs.”

That he was betting against such a discovery demonstrated once again the limitless curiosity of Dr. Hawking. “”Whatever the L.H.C. finds, or fails to find,” he said, “the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.”

But is that worth the billions spent on the project? For anyone itching to post a comment to the contrary, consider the blistering argument of Dr. Hawking, who defended the collider and the space program at once.

“Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP,” he said. “If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn’t deserve the epithet ‘human.’ ”

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 15:40 | link | comments (3)

Tuesday, 09 September 2008

I heard In My Life quit teaching and became a train engineer. Here's a video of her driving Florida's Tri-Rail. She's always 'right on track.' In fact she doesn't need any. Notice how gracefully she closes the last coach's door. LOL

 

 

If I had children I think I would pick a more 'appropriate' inflatable  slide (I wonder what it is supposed to be):

A funny test, thanks to Low Rider:

 

StupidTester.com says I'm 0% Stupid! How stupid are you? Click Here!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:25 | link | comments (9)

 

'Water bears' are first animal to survive space vacuum

Tiny invertebrates called 'water bears' can survive in the vacuum of space, a European Space Agency experiment has shown. They are the first animals known to be able to survive the harsh combination of low pressure and intense radiation found in space.

Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are known for their virtual indestructibility on Earth. The creatures can survive intense pressures, huge doses of radiation, and years of being dried out.

To further test their hardiness, Ingemar Jönsson of Sweden's Kristianstad University and colleagues launched two species of dried-up tardigrades from Kazakhstan in September 2007 aboard ESA's FOTON-M3 mission, which carried a variety of experimental payloads.

After 10 days of exposure to space, the satellite returned to Earth. The tardigrades were retrieved and rehydrated to test how they reacted to the airless conditions in space, as well as ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and charged particles from space called cosmic rays.

The vacuum itself seemed to have little effect on the creatures. But ultraviolet radiation, which can damage cellular material and DNA, did take its toll.

Water bears, similar to the one pictured here, were sent to low-Earth orbit in an ESA satellite (Courtesy: Ralph Schill)

 

Dried out

In one of the two species tested, 68% of specimens that were shielded from higher-energy radiation from the Sun were revived within 30 minutes of being rehydrated. Many of these tardigrades went on to lay eggs that successfully hatched.

But only a handful of animals survived full exposure to the Sun's UV light, which is more than 1000 times stronger in space than on the Earth's surface.

Before this experiment, only lichen and bacteria were known to be able to survive exposure to the combination of vacuum and space radiation.

"No animal has survived open space before," says developmental biologist Bob Goldstein of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not affiliated with the study. "The finding that animals survived rehydration after 10 days in open space – and then produced viable embryos as well – is really remarkable."

This ability to survive in extreme conditions "might be important when we consider the habitability of other bodies in our solar system or beyond," says astrobiologist Gerda Horneck of the German Aerospace Center. But the results say little about how the animals might develop and reproduce in harsh environments, Horneck says.

The authors aren't sure what causes the animals to be as resistant as they are to the effects of ultraviolet radiation. They speculate their hardiness might stem from the same adaptations that enable tardigrades to bounce back from being dried out.

Journal reference: Current Biology (vol 18, p R1)

Astrobiology – Learn more in our out-of-this-world special report.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:19 | link | comments (2)

Monday, 08 September 2008

Ice cream soda

The ice cream soda, float (United States and East Asia) or spider (Australia and New Zealand) is a beverage that typically consists of scoops of ice cream in either a soft drink or a mixture of flavored syrup and carbonated water. The tiny bubbles of air present in the ice cream cause the ice cream to float and are nucleation sites for the formation of large bubbles of carbon dioxide. This gives the beverage a "foamy head" similar to a beer head. The beverage originated in the United States in the late 19th century, and was most likely created by either Robert M. Green of Philadelphia or Fred Sanders of Detroit.

My all-time favorite:

Root beer float

Also known as a "brown cow" or "black cow"[1], the root beer float is traditionally made with vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, but can also be made with other flavors.

In the United States and Canada, the chain A&W Restaurants are well known for their root beer floats. The Friendly's chain also had a variation known as a "sherbet cooler," which was a combination of orange or rainbow sherbet and seltzer water. (Presently, it is billed as a "slammer".)

The definition of a brown cow varies by region. For instance in some localities, a "root beer float" has strictly vanilla ice cream; a float made with root beer and chocolate ice cream is a "chocolate cow" or a "brown cow."

In 2008, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group introduced its Float beverage line. This includes A&W Root Beer and Sunkist flavors which attempt to simulate the taste of their respectful ice cream float flavors in a creamy, bottled drink.

 

My second-favorite:

Snow White

The Snow White is made with 7 Up and vanilla ice cream.

The origins of this dessert is unknown, but it is found in some Asian eateries

 

Yet to try:

Boston cooler

A Boston cooler is typically composed of ginger ale and vanilla ice cream. Variations abound, however, with club soda, sherbet, rum, vanilla vodka, milk, sugar, or even coffee sometimes added or substituted for the key ingredients. In Ohio, the root beer floats are also referred to as a Boston cooler.[citation needed]

The origin of the Boston cooler lies in Detroit, Michigan, the city in which Fred Sanders is credited with inventing the ice cream soda. Originally, a drink called a Vernors Cream was served as a shot or two of sweet cream poured into a glass of Vernors golden ginger ale. Later, vanilla ice cream was substituted for the cream as a Vernors float. Unlike a float however, a Boston Cooler is blended like a thick milk shake. In fact, both Sanders' soda fountains and the Big Boy restaurant chain used their milkshake blenders to prepare the drink (it was a signature menu item at Big Boy until its change in ownership in the 1980's). It is known that by the 1880s the Boston cooler was being served in Detroit, made with the local Vernors, an intense golden ginger ale, unlike the common modern dry ginger ales. Whatever the exact origins, the name almost certainly has no connection to Boston, Massachusetts, where the beverage is virtually unknown.

It can be found most often in the Detroit region's many Coney Island-style restaurants, which are plentiful because of Detroit's Greektown district influence. National Coney Island is one of the few restaurant chains to list the Boston cooler in their menu. It is also found at the Detroit-area Dairy Queens and at Halo Burger, a mid-Michigan fast food chain.

Purple cow

In the context of ice cream soda, a purple cow is vanilla ice cream in Concord grape soda. The Purple Cow, a restaurant chain in the southern United States, features this and similar beverages.

 

Right now, I'm drinking vanilla ice cream and orange (sunkist) soda. Tastes like an orange cream-cicle.

And of course, the science lesson behind this:

Nucleation is the onset of a phase transition in a small region. The phase transition can be the formation of a bubble or of a crystal from a liquid. Creation of liquid droplets in saturated vapor or the creation of gaseous bubbles in a saturated liquid is also characterized by nucleation (see Cloud condensation nuclei). Nucleation of crystalline, amorphous, and even vacancy clusters in solid materials is also important, for example to the semiconductor industry.

Nucleation normally occurs at nucleation sites on surfaces containing the liquid or vapor. Suspended particles or minute bubbles also provide nucleation sites. This is called heterogeneous nucleation. Nucleation without preferential nucleation sites is homogeneous nucleation. Homogeneous nucleation occurs spontaneously and randomly, but it requires superheating or supercooling of the medium. Nucleation is involved in such processes as cloud seeding and in instruments such as the bubble chamber and the cloud chamber.

By decreasing the ambient pressure carbon dioxide bubbles build up at nucleation sites in a soft drink

By decreasing the ambient pressure carbon dioxide bubbles build up at nucleation sites in a soft drink

 

Examples of nucleation

Nucleation of carbon dioxide bubbles around a finger
Nucleation of carbon dioxide bubbles around a finger

 Homogeneous nucleation

Nucleation generally occurs with much more difficulty in the interior of a uniform substance, by a process called homogeneous nucleation. Liquids cooled below the maximum heterogeneous nucleation temperature (melting temperature), but which are above the homogeneous nucleation temperature (pure substance freezing temperature) are said to be supercooled. This is useful for making amorphous solids and other metastable structures, but can delay the progress of industrial chemical processes or produce undesirable effects in the context of casting.

The creation of a nucleus implies the formation of an interface at the boundaries of the new phase. Some energy is consumed to form this interface, based on the surface energy of each phase. If a hypothetical nucleus is too small, the energy that would be released by forming its volume is not enough to create its surface, and nucleation does not proceed. The critical nucleus size can be denoted by its radius, and it is when r=r* (or r critical) that the nucleation proceeds.

For example in the classic case[2] of a spherical cluster that liberates -Gv Joules per cubic centimeter during formation (here Gv is a negative quantity), but which must pay the positive cost of σ Joules per square centimeter of surface interfacing with the world around, the free energy needed to form a cluster of radius r is...

.

Graphing this as a function of radius shows that it costs free energy to add molecules to this cluster, until the radius reaches

.

Addition of new molecules to clusters larger than this critical radius releases, rather than costs, available work. In other words at that point growth of the cluster is no longer limited by nucleation, but perhaps by diffusion[3] (i.e. the supply of molecules) or by reaction kinetics instead.

As the phase transformation becomes more and more favorable, the formation of a given volume of nucleus frees enough energy to form an increasingly large surface, allowing progressively smaller nuclei to become viable. Eventually, thermal activation will provide enough energy to form stable nuclei. These can then grow until thermodynamic equilibrium is restored.

The spontaneous nucleation rate in, say, water changes very rapidly with temperature, so the spontaneous nucleation temperature can be quite well defined. 'Film boiling' on very hot surfaces and the Leidenfrost effect are both believed to be stabilized by spontaneous nucleation phenomena.

 Heterogeneous nucleation

In the case of heterogeneous nucleation, some energy is released by the partial destruction of the previous interface. For example, if a carbon dioxide bubble forms between water and the inside surface of a bottle, the energy inherent in the water-bottle interface is released wherever a layer of gas intervenes, and this energy goes toward the formation of bubble-water and bubble-bottle interfaces. The same effect can cause precipitate particles to form at the grain boundaries of a solid. This can interfere with precipitation strengthening, which relies on homogeneous nucleation to produce a uniform distribution of precipitate particles.

 Theory of the spinodal region nucleation

Phase transition processes can also be explained in terms of spinodal decomposition where phase separation is delayed until the system enters the unstable region where a small perturbation in composition leads to a decrease in energy and thus spontaneous growth of the perturbation. This region of a phase diagram is known as the spinodal region and the phase separation process is known as spinodal decomposition and may be governed by the Cahn–Hilliard equation.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:16 | link | comments (3)

Saturday, 06 September 2008

Yikes! It's Ike!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 13:44 | link | comments (7)

Friday, 05 September 2008

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider


By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

 

Scientists working on the world's biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where particles will begin to circulate around its 17 mile circumference tunnel next week, will recreate energies not seen since the universe was very young, when particles smash together at near the speed of light.

 
Hadron Collider
Hadron Collider: The final pieces slot into place

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---."

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

"They phone me and say: "I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe," said Gillies.

Emails also arrive every day that beg for reassurance that the world will not end, he explained.

Others are more aggressive. "There are a number who say: "You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world."

"I find myself getting slightly angry, not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk."

There have also been legal attempts to halt the start up.

The remarkable outpouring of concern about turning on the experiment, the most ambitious in history, comes as a new report concludes that it poses no threat to mankind.

Since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), dogged doomsayers have claimed that there would be a small but real risk that an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.

Many of the emails received by Gillies cite a gloomy book - Our Final Century?: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? - written by Lord Rees, astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society.

"My book has been misquoted in one or two places," Lord Rees said yesterday. "I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."

The new report published today provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that nature's own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group has reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be safe.

The report, 'Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions', published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to worry about the LHC, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth.

The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists."

The Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will pose no threat.

As the Group writes, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists." They also say that such microscopic black holes could not grow dangerously.

As for the equally hypothetical strangelets, the review uses recent experimental measurements at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, New York, to prove that they will not be produced in the LHC.

The collider is designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson responsible for making things weigh what they do, the possible source of gravity called dark matter, as well as probe the differences between matter and antimatter.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:50 | link | comments (5)

Thursday, 04 September 2008

Sudden death after arrest may be new syndrome

By Ben Hirschler Tue Sep 2, 1:05 PM ET

MUNICH (Reuters) - Young men who die suddenly after being arrested by the police may be victims of a new syndrome similar to one that kills some wild animals when they are captured, Spanish researchers said on Tuesday.

Manuel Martinez Selles of Madrid's Hospital Gregorio Maranon reached the conclusion after investigating 60 cases of sudden unexplained deaths in Spain following police detention.

In one third of the cases, death occurred at the point of arrest, while in the remainder death was within 24 hours, Selles told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

All but one of the casualties were male and their average age was just 33 years, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease.

"Something unusual is going on," Sells said.

Just why they died remains a mystery but he believes young men, in particular, may experience surges in blood levels of chemicals known as catecholamines when under severe stress.

Adrenaline is one of the most abundant catecholamines.

"We know that when a wild animal is captured, sometimes the animal dies suddenly," he said.

"Probably when these young males are captured it is very stressful and their level of catecholamines goes very high and that can finish their life by ventricular fibrillation (cardiac arrest)."

Selles compiled his study -- the first of its kind in any country -- by scouring Spanish newspapers for cases of unexplained death after police detention over the past 10 years.

Only sudden deaths with no clear causes were included and autopsy reports were checked to exclude the possibility of mistreatment or past serious medical conditions.

Twelve of the victims were drug users but Selles said this was not thought to have contributed to their deaths.

Jonathan Halperin of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who was not involved in the research, said the concept of a heart stress syndrome triggered by a flood of adrenaline or other chemicals was "a reasonable hypothesis."

"We all know stress is bad for you and this may be stress in the extreme," he said.

(Editing by Giles Elgood)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 06:46 | link | comments (4)

Tuesday, 02 September 2008

Month in a Century

Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.

The record-setting surface of the sun.
A full month has gone by without a single spot  (Source: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO))

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.


Sunspot activity of the past decade. Over the past year, SIDC has continually revised its predictions downward  (Source: Solar Influences Data Center)

Geomagnetic solar activity for the past two decades. The recent drop corresponds to the decline in sunspots.  (Source: Anthony Watts)

A chart of sunspot activity showing two prior solar minima, along with heightened activity during the 20th century  (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month.  Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero.   Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.

But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.

 

In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.

The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.

The paper's lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass.

But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the "sun's dynamo" is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.

This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark's "SKY" experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays -- which the sun's magnetic field partially shields the Earth from -- increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.

Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.

Other researchers have proposed solar effects on other terrestrial processes besides cloud formation. The sunspot cycle has strong effects on irradiance in certain wavelengths such as the far ultraviolet, which affects ozone production. Natural production of isotopes such as C-14 is also tied to solar activity. The overall effects on climate are still poorly understood.

What is incontrovertible, though, is that ice ages have occurred before. And no scientist, even the most skeptical, is prepared to say it won't happen again.

Article Update, Sep 1 2008.  After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point.  Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month.  So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 10:00 | link | comments

Monday, 01 September 2008

The real reason 'behind'McCain's choice for a running mate:

 

 

 

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:59 | link | comments (3)



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