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!

Something for the Weekend

This weekends plaything is brought to you by Microsoft Research (don't worry Mac users it works on Macs too). Its a virtual telescope called World wide Telescope or WWT. It has tours and allows sky scanning at multiple wavelengths for the hardcore. Basically its like having access to Hubble for free.

Having played around with it for a bit, I recommend the tours they are excellent and there are loads of them!

http://www.worldwidetelescope.
org/ExperienceIt/ExperienceIt . aspx#

To get started all you need to do is press RUNWEBCLIENT in the top left.

Your brain and booze

Most everyone knows that alcohol impairs mental and physiological functions, but what actually goes on at the cellular level when you drink a beer?

Alcohol interferes with the normal function of your brain cells.

Under normal circumstances, each of your brain cells allows various substances, such as sodium, calcium and potassium to permeate its outer cell membrane.

Once inside the brain cell, these substances help give the cell stimulus it needs to function properly. Then they leave the cell and allow another set of these substances to begin the cycle again.

The millions of cells that make up your brain are continually allowing these substances to penetrate their membranes and then expelling these same substances later. All of this action allows the brain to interpret and transport messages.

Alcohol consumption prevents sodium from being able to cross brain cell membranes. Once even this part of the cycle breaks down, brain functions become impaired.

You can notice the affects of this break down aftera single drink. Even if you’ve had just one drink, your ability to respond to stimulus decreases and your reaction time slows down.

If you’re driving, you might see a car stop, and know that you need to slam on the brakes, but the pathway in your brain that processes this information and causes you to respond toit will be working in slow motion.

Pioneering Pangaea

It is Alfred Wegener, a German scientist, who first argued that the continents wandered about the globe.

In his 1915 paper The Origin of Continents and Oceans ( Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ), Wegener published the theory that there had once been a giant continent, he named "Pangaea" meaning "All-Lands" or "All-Earth" drawing together evidence from various fields.

He argued his theory and gathered evidence to support it until his untimely death in 1930 at the age of 50 on one of his many expeditions. Wegener died a hero losing his life in the snows of Greenland while trying to resupply a camp which desperately needed supplies to survive the winter.

Ultimately the New Earth conceived by Wegener was half a century ahead of its time. It wasn’t until the mid-'60s that geologists generally realized that he was, in essence, right.

Speedy Cernan

The unofficial lunar speed record is held by Gene Cernan who recorded a speed of 11.2mph (18km/hr) driving one of the three lunar rovers used on the moon during Apollo 17( our final visit to luna). The reason the speed is credited as unofficial is that A.no-one other than Cernan and is companion Harrison Schmitt can verify the speed they achieved and B. The lunar rovers top speed was supposed to be only 8mph, so technically they were speeding!

Copious Connections

A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain, one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all “talking to” each other.

What is Dark Matter and what does it do?

By definition, dark matter is any substance that behaves gravitationally like ordinary matter, but that is invisible to present-day telescopes and detectors. Its existence was first invoked a few decades ago, when astronomers made the startling discovery that the material in the outskirts of spiral galaxies is moving much more rapidly than anticipated from the gravitational pull of their gas and stars alone.

Countless comparisons between the amount of visible matter in astronomical objects and their masses inferred from motions under gravity have since been undertaken. Almost all of these experiments reach the same conclusions: nearly 90% of all matter is dark, and dark and luminous matter combined account for less than 1/3 of total energy density of the Universe (the rest stems from vacuum energy, or dark energy). Quite literally, then, there is much more to space than meets the eye!

While the nature of dark matter remains unknown, observations have revealed 2 of its key properties: First, dark matter is "cold": its characteristic speed must be much lower than that of light even in the very early Universe (otherwise, the smallest galaxies in the vicinity of the Milky Way and other larger systems wouldn't form). Second, dark matter is "collisionless": there are very few interactions among dark matter particles or between dark and luminous particles (in other words, dark matter is indeed invisible, or very nearly so).

The cold collisionless dark matter that pervades the Universe is therefore very different from ordinary matter. It doesn't even contain protons and neutrons, the particles that make up almost everything on Earth. Rather, leading dark matter candidates are exotic weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) expected from the supersymmetry theory of particle physics; experiments to test this hypothesis are underway.

Because the amount of dark matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies dwarfs the amount of ordinary matter they contain, it dominates most gravitational interactions on these scales. For example, the gravitational clustering of dark matter is largely responsible for the formation of galaxies and clusters in the first place!

On smaller scales such as in the Solar System and on Earth, however, dark matter has a negligible gravitational effect. That's because the average dark matter density is much lower (a trillion trillion times lower, in fact!) than that of rocks, water and other substances typically found on Earth. So even though there is dark matter in the Solar System, the latter just isn't big enough for dark matter to play an important dynamical role.

So while dark matter reigns supreme throughout most of the Universe, here at home the protons and neutrons run the show!

Something for the Weekend

I’ve got a couple of things to share this weekend. One is a nice music video and the other a tale of what not to do if you happen to work at a particle accelerator.

The video is called The Poetry of Reality and features a whole host of science luminaries from Sagan to Dawkins and sums up what science is all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=9Cd36WJ79z4&feature=playe
r_embedded#

The don’t do this tale is titled “What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator?” which is exactly what Anatoli Bugorski did in 1978. What happened next isn’t what scientists expected. He lived! Here is the link to his story.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/
index.php/2010/03/what-happens
-when-you-stick-your-head-into
-a-particle-accelerator/

Ps. Have just been sent a flyover of Mars's Candor Chasma region using HI-RISE DTM data, its well worth a look. Will our children be doing this in an as yet unimagined Mars Flyer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=0WsjeJiAR4E&feature=playe
r_embedded

Big Baby Blue

Newborn baby blue whales are 25 feet long and weigh 6-8 tonnes (that's as much as an African elephant)

Super Sol

The Sun emits 400 million million million million watts, that’s a million times the entire power consumption of the US every year, in a second.

Superior Southern Skies

The three brightest stars in the sky, Sirus, Canopus and Alpha Centuri are all in the southern hemishere. The next three brightest Arcturus, Vega and Capella are all in the Northern. Go Australia !

Something for the Weekend

You may have heard of a group called OK-GO (if you haven't your missing out on some of the coolest music video's around, as these guy's specialize in making videos that require extreme precision) Well this time they have outdone themselves and created (with the help of engineering types from MIT) a Rube Goldberg machine that well, is just amazing. A tour de force of engineering.It took two months to build and covered two floors of an abandoned warehouse in Echo Park LA.

Without further ado I bring you OK-GO This too will pass. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=qybUFnY7Y8w

PS.Don't forget to check out the how they did it videos and if you haven't seen it already their breakout video Here it goes again (the one with the treadmills)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=dTAAsCNK7RA&feature=rela t ed

Finally a Dynamic Periodic Table to play with http://www.ptable.com/

Figuring out fire

Fire is a chemical reaction between oxygen molecules and some kind of fuel. This reaction releases the heat and light that we call fire. You might wonder how a chemical reaction like this turns into the colorful flame you see dancing on a candle. What are flames made of?

You can think of a flame as being like a kind of tent. Heat melts the candle’s waxy fuel, and turns it into a gas. This fuel gas floats away from the wick to fill the inside of the flame’s tent. Outside the tent are oxygen molecules from the air. Where these two gasses meet–at the surface of the tent–is where the fiery chemical reaction takes place. This is called the “combustion reaction zone” of the flame, and it glows a delicate blue color. Sometimes, however, the fuel molecules don’t burn up right away. They clump together to form particles called soot, which then swirl around inside the body of the flame without actually burning. As they swirl, heat from the reaction zone can make this soot begin to glow a bright orange or yellow color. The reaction zone at the surface of the flame’s tent provides the blue color of the flame. The yellow color comes from hot soot, churning around inside. Eventually this soot will probably enter the reaction zone and burn blue like the rest of the fuel. If the reaction zone is incomplete however, or not very efficient, the soot can escape the flame without burning at all. Outside the flame, the soot cools quickly to black and drifts away. What do we call this unburnt sooty fuel? You guessed it. Smoke.

Pioneering paper

Ts'ai Lin, a **** ( noun a castrated man, esp. one formerly employed by Oriental rulers as a harem guard or palace official) in the court of the Emperor Ho Ti, is credited with the creation of a paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree which was combined with bamboo fibres, hemp and flax around 105AD.

Rapidly Red

Your body is creating and killing 15 million blood cells per second.

Turning the red light green

What’s the best thing about having a rocket-powered car? If you go fast enough, the red lights look green!

That's an old physics joke on the nature of light, here is more information on colour and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Light is electromagnetic energy, and it comes in waves. What we see as different colours is actually just different frequencies of these waves. The lower frequencies appear to us as colours down at the low end of the spectrum, such as red, orange, yellow. The higher frequencies appear to us as colours at the high end of the spectrum, such as green, blue, and violet.

Now, one neat thing about colours is that you can effectively change their frequencies by moving toward or away from their source. Think of it this way. Imagine that a line of evenly-spaced joggers is running toward you. If you stand still, they will run past you with a certain frequency, such as one jogger per minute. If you run towards them, you can increase that frequency; say to two joggers per minute or more.

It’s the same with light waves. A certain low frequency coming from a stoplight is perceived as red. If you raced towards the light very fast, you could increase the frequency you perceive until the color appeared to be green.

Now, it has to be admitted that to really do this you’d need to go twenty-thousand miles-per-second, much faster than any car, or even rocket, can at present move.

Also, you should never run a red light, but that’s taking the fun out of the joke.

Why Ice isn't slippery

Try telling someone who has just fallen on a patch of ice, that ice is not slippery and they’ll think you’re crazy.

But, in fact, ice itself isn’t slippery because it is a solid.

One quality of solids is that when two solids are together there is friction between them that will keep them from slipping.

So how can your shoe slip on ice? The answer lies in two peculiar properties of ice.

The first is that as water freezes, its molecules move farther apart. The molecules of most substances move closer together as they freeze, making them shrink at lower temperatures.

But water molecules move farther apart at temperatures below 39 degrees Fahrenheit, making water expand as it freezes. That is why frozen water pipes burst, and a tray of ice cubes will freeze over its top if you fill it too full.

The second peculiar property of ice is directly linked to its first peculiarity. When subjected to pressure, ice melts.

Remember that the molecules in ice are farther apart than the molecules in water; therefore ice molecules are vulnerable to pressure which pushes them closer together, causing the ice to change into water.

So when you step on a patch of ice, you exert pressure on the ice, which causes its molecules to move closer together. That makes them revert to their more dense state, which is water.

If you slip on a patch of ice, you are actually slipping on a thin layer of water that the pressure from your weight has created. And, unlike solid ice, water, as a liquid, is quite slippery.

Something for the Weekend

First things first, Earth. NASA has just released the most detailed whole planet pictures to date showing our small, mostly blue, ball in stunning detail. Can you pick out your location?

http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the
-most-accurate-highest-resolut
ion-earth-view-to-date?utm_sou
rce=feedburner&utm_medium=
feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+gi
zmodo/full+(Gizmodo)

(Just click to enlarge)

To go hand in hand with the new pictures is this animation showing plate tectonics and how our planet has evolved over the last 600 million years and our predicted future (this is from the Northern University of Arizona’s Geology dept)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=uGcDed4xVD4

Finally as a follow up to two weeks ago’s focus on STS130 here is a nice photographic record of the mission from the guys themselves.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/w
eblogs/photos/2010/02/space-sh
uttle-endeavours-missi.html

Internet security and Prime numbers

Ever wonder how websites like Amazon.com keep your personal information, like credit card or check numbers, safe from the internet bad guys? Well, here’s the how.

At the Amazon website you enter in your private info, press “send”, and your internet browser quickly encodes your data and sends it off to Amazon. To make sure no one but Amazon can view your info, each code has a lock that can only be opened with the correct key, which Amazon has.

This is where prime numbers come into play. Prime numbers are those divisible only by themselves and 1, like the numbers two, three, five, seven, eleven etc. Of course these are very small prime numbers, but there are infinitely many of them and they can get big; the biggest found so far is thirteen million digits long!

The lock on the code protecting your private info is a very big number which is the unique product of two prime numbers, and the key to this lock are exactly these two primes. As a small example, take the number fifteen.

If this were our “lock” number, then the two primes three and five would be our “key”; since both are prime and three times five is fifteen. Unlike the small example however for a larger “lock” number it is nearly impossible to find the two “key” primes if you don’t already know them.

The best computers in the world might take years to find the “key” primes of a “lock” number only three-hundred digits long. Thankfully websites like Amazon typically use “lock” numbers at least this big, thus making it nearly impossible for a bad guy to sneak a peak at your private info online.

All points north

Antarctica is 98 percent ice and 2 percent barren rock. The average thickness of the ice sheet is 7,200 feet. This amounts to 90 percent of all the ice and 70 percent of all the fresh water in the world. If the ice cap were to melt, the sea level would rise by an average of 230 feet.

The bed of nails and how to do it the scientific way

Quite rightly the prospect of lying down on a bed of sharp pointy metal things isn’t something to be done lightly, because, lets face it, its going to hurt.

Or will it?

The bed of nails trick is, when taken apart by science, not as painful as you might first imagine.

Think of it this way. You can press your fingertip lightly on a nail without it hurting. If you put the other end of the nail on a scale and then press, you can see how many pounds of pressure you can put on one nail without it hurting you. Don’t press too hard!

Suppose the answer is one pound. You can press down on a nail until the scale reads one pound, and beyond that you don’t want to press any harder. Okay, one pound of pressure per nail is safe for you. So, if you weigh 200 pounds, you can lie on a bed with at least 200 nails on it and not be hurt. That’s because each nail is supporting only one pound and your weight is evenly distributed.

And there you go, how to lay on a bed of sharp objects without the need for any guru’s, incantations or other mumbo jumbo.

Lay carefully and evenly though if you don’t want to become a human pin cushion.

A spoonful of honey

It takes twelve bees a lifetime to make one teaspoon of honey.

Meteorological Mythology

Which area of science would you expect to find elves and sprites ?

Answer Meteorology - Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges high above a thunderstorm cloud. Elves, or ‘Emissions of Light and Very low frequency perturbations from Electromagnetic pulse Sources, are a glow caused by colliding electrons.

Recognizing Rhesus

Recent tests have shown that at six months a human baby can tell the difference between two Rhesus monkey faces just as well as two human ones. By twelve months this ability is gone, the baby can recognize the difference between the human ones, but the monkey faces all look the same. This is giving scientists an insight into how our brains are wired at birth with innate abilities, but our brain changes over time using a "use it or loose it" philosophy.

Measuring the Moon

The Moon is 27% the size of the Earth.

Radius of Moon = 1738 km

Radius of Earth = 6378 km

Comtemplating Casimir

Today's Factoid isn't so much a fact as an explanation.

The Casimir effect is a small attractive force that acts between two close parallel unchargedconducting plates. It is due to quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field.

The effect was predicted by the Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir in 1948. According to the quantum theory, the vacuum contains virtual particles which are in a continuous state of fluctuation. Casimir realised that between two plates, only those virtual photons whose wavelengths fit a whole number of times into the gap should be counted when calculating the vacuum energy. The energy density decreases as the plates are moved closer, which implies that there is a small force drawing them together.

The attractive Casimir force between two plates of area A separated by a distance L can be calculated to be,

π h c

F = ------- A

480 L ⁴

where h is Planck's constant and c is the speed of light.

The tiny force was measured in 1996 by Steven Lamoreaux. His results were in agreement with the theory to within the experimental uncertainty of 5%.

Particles other than the photon also contribute a small effect but only the photon force is measurable. All bosons such as photons produce an attractive Casimir force while fermions make a repulsive contribution. If electromagnetism was supersymmetric there would be fermionic photinos whose contribution would exactly cancel that of the photons and there would be no Casimir effect. The fact that the Casimir effect exists shows that if supersymmetry exists in nature it must be a broken symmetry

According to the theory the total zero point energy in the vacuum is infinite when summed over all the possible photon modes. The Casimir effect comes from a difference of energies in which the infinities cancel. The energy of the vacuum is a puzzle in theories of quantum gravity since it should act gravitationally and produce a large cosmological constant which would cause spacetime to curl up. The solution to the inconsistency is expected to be found in a theory of quantum gravity.

Some examples in practice

Since L is in the denominator, the bigger L gets, the smaller the force will be; and because the force goes as the fourth power of L , the drop-off with increasing distance will be really huge. So let's make L small--say, one micron--together with big one-square-metre plates:

π × 6.6 × 10 ^-34 × 3 × 10 ⁸ × 1

F = ------------------------------ newtons

480 × 10 ^-24

or 1.3 mN. Now, since the weight of 1 kg is about 10 N, then 1.3 mN is the weight of 0.13 grammes. Which is pretty small, but measurable, except that putting two 1 square metre plates a micron apart would be difficult in practice. But using smaller plates leads to smaller forces. For instance plates with area 1 square centimetre placed 1 millimetre apart would feel a force equivalent to the weight of 10 ^-17 grammes, which is vastly smaller!