Expensive Energy

As stated yesterday the LHC collisions are at 7 x 10^12 EV of energy at the moment, which sounds a lot until you realise a cup of coffee has 10^23 EV of energy, 10,000,000,000 times more energy than the LHC. The reason for the discrepancy is protons don’t have much mass so consequently not a lot of energy; particle accelerators however are a bit more complicated than Brownian motion producers. I.e. cups of coffee.

High Five for the Hadron

You'll be able to identify experimental physicists (Leonard's) right about now by the high fives they'll be giving each other and and the grin's on their faces. The LHC has just smashed protons at a nano slower than the speed of light at a record energy of 7 billion billion EV (electron volts) and its all been captured by ATLAS for the Sheldon's of this world to pour over the data and do what they do best, think.

Telegraph online piece:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sci
ence/large-hadron-collider/75 3 7979/Large-Hadron-Collider-cr e ates-record-for-high-energy-p a rticle-collisions.html

Atlas displays: http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas
/public/EVTDISPLAY/events.html

The Heart of the matter

At the heart of the Matter,” “She has such a big heart.” English is full of such phrases that use the word “heart.” All of them stress the importance of the heart, and rightfully so since it is the most important organ we have — without it nothing in the body will work. You Gotta Have Heart, as the song title goes.

The heart is a muscle the size of your fist that’s located in the center of the chest behind the breast-bone, or sternum. We generally say the heart is on the left side of the chest because about two-thirds of its mass is to the left of the sternum. Although, it is often referred to as the seat of the emotions, its function really is to pump blood through the body.

The heart is two pumps in one: one on the right side, the other on the left side of the heart. The right side takes in blood from the body, and pumps it to the lungs. There the blood releases carbon dioxide, and picks up oxygen. Then the left side of the heart receives the oxygen-rich blood back from the lungs and pumps it out to the rest of the body.

The familiar “lubb-dupp” sound of the heart is caused by valves closing. There are four chambers in the heart, two atria which receive blood, and two ventricles which pump blood out of the heart. In these chambers there are four valves that regulate the flow of blood into and out of the heart.

When the ventricles contract to pump, two valves close; this makes the first sound. When the ventricles relax, the other two valves close; this makes the second sound. Repeating its “lubb-dupp” cycle over and over, the heart pumps about nineteen-hundred gallons a day, at the rate of about five quarts a minute, for eighty years or more.

The Great Green

The largest island by area is Greenland at 2,130,800 sq/km beating New Guinea (785,753 sq/km) by quite a way.

N.B Australia is of course larger at 7,600,000 sq/km but as this is catagorised as a continent it doesn't count in the island stats.

Something for the Weekend

My main thing for the weekend this time is the Forrest Gump of periodic tables (you never know what your going to get out) every element in this periodic table when clicked reveals another and sometimes that reveals more information (click on Ma No80 for one on Mathematicians to see what I mean). At the bottom is a zoomer so you can get closer. Here is the link: http://www.keaggy.com/periodic table/ Second is a piece on 10 life lessons we can take from Albert Einstein for anyone in need of inspiration. http://www.dumblittleman.com/2 010/03/10-amazing-lessons-albe rt-einstein.html and finally and thirdly a CRACKED piece on 7 ways music affects the body, all of them interesting and surprising. http://www.cracked.com/article _18405_7-insane-ways-music-aff ects-body-according-to-science .html

Leaning in the lanes

A bowling pin needs a tilt of 7.5 degrees to fall.

What is Cancer?

Today’s factoid is posted in the spirit of information being power. Tomorrows will be a lighter one I promise.

Cancer is a term used for when normal cells divide without control and are able to invade other tissues. Cancer cells then spread to other parts of the body through the blood and lymph systems.

Cancer therefore is not just one disease but many diseases. There are more than 100 different types of cancer. Most cancers are named for the organ or type of cell in which they start - for example, cancer that begins in the colon is called colon cancer; cancer that begins in basal cells of the skin is called basal cell carcinoma.

Although different, all cancers begin in cells, the body's basic unit of life. To understand cancer, it's helpful to know what happens when normal cells become cancer cells.

The body is made up of many types of cells. These cells grow and divide in a controlled way to produce more cells as they are needed to keep the body healthy. When cells become old or damaged, they die and are replaced with new cells.

However, sometimes this orderly process goes wrong. The genetic material (DNA) of a cell can become damaged or changed, producing mutations that affect normal cell growth and division. When this happens, cells do not die when they should and new cells form when the body does not need them. The extra cells may form a mass of tissue called a tumour.

One thing that is important to understand is not all tumours are cancerous, some are benign. Meaning they are unlikely to grow or spread to other parts of the body. An example of this is a mole on your skin is a tiny tumour, but unless it changes is a benign tumour and harmless.

Cancerous tumours on the other hand are made up of very fast growing cells and can move or spread to places they do not belong, causing damage to our body’s it cannot cope with.

It is this which is defined as cancer and is the thing that so many tens of thousands of scientists and doctors around the word are fighting daily to treat, halt and eradicate.

Finally I’d like to stress, great advances have been made in this field in recent years and early detection is the key. So if I may make a plea, if you or a loved one has that nagging feeling something isn’t right. Do not delay, seek medical guidance and book that appointment today.

Thanks.

Here are a couple of good further information links:

. http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/i
ndex.htm for the UK.

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/
home/index.asp for the US.

Our simmering Sun

The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun.

Does the Fourth dimension have practical use?

The fourth dimension is part of our lives whether we like it or not. That’s because the fourth dimension is time. When you make a graph of position vs time, you have used the fourth dimension. Because our senses can only interact with one point in the fourth dimension though (the time we call now) we just don’t usually notice it.

Using the fourth dimension as it works in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity however is a little more involved, this is because time is affected by speed.

Basically the combined speed of any object’s motion through space and it’s motion though time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.

That’s right, everything. You, me, the computer screen you’re looking at, everything.

Everything is travelling through Spacetime: space (the three dimensions we experience) and time.

Adding the total movement through both space and time always equals light speed. Always. Always. Always.

Since you must travel constantly at exactly the speed of light, when you increase your speed through space, you decrease your speed through time.

So taking all the above in consider this.

Your head (and the rest of you) is travelling through spacetime at the speed of light. But, when you’re at rest (not accelerating) all of your head’s movement is through time, none of it is travelling (accelerating) through space. Every time your head moves (accelerates) through space; in a car, in a plane, in a spaceship… even nodding up and down, some of it’s movement in time is lost since it is now moving through space. Cool huh.

Ps. All hail to Brian Greene for the above analogy.

You never hear the one that hits you. or do you?

“You never hear the one that hits you” was the fatalistic saying on the front trenches of many wars (not to mention the song of the same name by the rock group Stiff Little Fingers).

Well, it turns out that the soldiers and the punk rockers had their physics spot on, a bullet travels faster than the speed of sound and will arrive at its destination before the sound of the gun firing gets there. So if you’re still standing when you hear the gunshot, congratulations you’re going to live!