Category: Science

Hadron Collider breakthrough as beams collide

Posted by Nexus – 30/03/2010

[via cnn.com]

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a “new territory” in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The $10 billion research tool has been accelerating the beams since November in the LHC’s 17-mile tunnel on the border of Switzerland and France.

The beams have routinely been circulating at 3.5 TeV, or teraelectron volts, the highest energy achieved at the LHC so far, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

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Secrets of Antarctica’s 15-Million Year-Old Lake

Posted by Nexus – 19/03/2010

[via dailygalaxy.com]

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

Lake Vostok is located beneath four kilometers of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 250 km long and 50 km wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

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Mirrors and Masked Men

Posted by Nexus – 13/03/2010

[via APOD]

Click image for full-size picture (3008x2000)

Who are these masked men? Technicians from Ball Aerospace and NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center’s X-ray and Cryogenic Facility, of course, testing primary mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Scheduled for launch in 2014, JWST will be optimized for the infrared exploration of the early Universe, utilizing a primary mirror 21.3 feet across, composed of 18 hexagonal segments. Here, a group of JWST mirror segments are being prepared for tests to assure they meet the exacting mission requirements.

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‘Painless’ vaccine needle invented in Japan

Posted by Nexus – 07/03/2010

[via telegraph.co.uk]

The fear of a visit to the doctor for an injection will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a painless new vaccine delivery system that has been perfected in Japan.

Kanji Takada, a professor of pharmacokinetics – or the study of the absorption, distribution and fate of substances delivered to the human body – has developed a round vaccine “chip” measuring just 1.5 cm in diameter that contains as many as 300 micro needles. The device can deliver drugs to the body without breaking the dermis layer of skin.

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The Blade That Would Make Helicopters Almost Silent

Posted by Nexus – 26/02/2010

[via gizmodo.com]

Helicopters make a lot of noise because of a physical phenomenon called blade-vortex interaction. Eurocopter engineers have developed a new kind of rotor blade that attenuates this problem. It’s called Blue Edge, and—as you can hear—it works beautifully:

The new blade shape is combined with another technology called Blue Pulse, which adds three flaps to the edge of the rotor blades. These flaps move up and down at 15 to 40 times per second, using piezoelectric motors that also help to reduce the blade-vortex interaction.

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Record-breaking collisions

Posted by Nexus – 07/02/2010

[via mit.edu]

Workers examine a new Quench Protection System at CERN in January. Image courtesy of CERN

In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions.

This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.

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Big Blue demos 100GHz chip

Posted by Nexus – 07/02/2010

[via theregister.co.uk]

IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of ultra-high-speed transistor design, creating a 100GHz graphene-based wafer-scale device. And that’s just for starters.

The transistor that the researchers have developed is a relatively large one, with a gate length of 240 nanometres – speeds should increase as the gate length shrinks.

The field-effect transistor that the IBM team developed exploits what a paper published in the journal Science understates as the “very high carrier mobilities” of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms grown on a silicon substrate.

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Vegetative Patient Answers Yes and No Questions With His Brain

Posted by Nexus – 05/02/2010

[via gizmodo.com]

Raising questions about the definition of a vegetative state as well as what to do with people in them, a new study observed the brain of an unconscious patient responding to yes and no questions just like normal.

Of the 54 test subjects in the New England Journal of Medicine study, one man who had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state some five years earlier accurately answered yes or no questions. The answers came by way of a brain scan conducted by an MRI machine.

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Large Hadron Collider to jump to maximum energy

Posted by Nexus – 03/02/2010

[via newscientist.com]

The Large Hadron Collider is going to skip medium-energy proton collisions, jumping straight to its maximum energy in 2013, after it finishes collecting lower-energy data and has its circuitry upgraded.

The particle accelerator, located outside Geneva, Switzerland, has recovered from its 2008 accident. And in 2009 it broke the world record for particle collision energy when its two oppositely directed proton beams each reached 1.18 TeV, for a total energy of 2.36 TeV.

That made it slightly more powerful than its US competitor, Fermilab, which has been colliding particle beams with energies of 1 TeV, adding up to a total energy of 2 TeV.

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The Known Universe

Posted by Nexus – 21/01/2010

[via APOD]

What would it look like to travel across the known universe? To help humanity visualize this, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a modern movie featuring many visual highlights of such a trip.

The video starts in Earth’s Himalayan Mountains and then dramatically zooms out, showing the orbits of Earth’s satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanities first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars. As the distant surface of the microwave background is finally reached, radiation is depicted that was emitted billions of light years away and less than one million years after the Big Bang.

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