In truly French fashion, the Large Hadron Collider has shut down by… a baguette. Zut alors!
According to Popular Science:
[A] bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
The overheating shouldn’t postpone the LHC’s reactivation at the end of the month, but all the delays and mishaps are adding to our paranoid, sci-fi suspicion: Is the LHC being sabotaged from the future? See this Cosmic Variance post for an authoritative take on such a possibility.
Related Content:
Discoblog: LHC Collisions to Commence Next Week…Hopefully
Discoblog: You Say Large Hadron Collider, I Say Sizeable Particle Crasher
Discoblog: While LHC Scientists Were Drinking Champagne, Hackers Were Attacking
Cosmic Variance: Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC!
Image: CERN
To honor the start of a new school year, we bring to you the following Fermi problem: How long would a physics lecture have to be to actually kill you?
Or more precisely, from Physics Buzz:
Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
The mathletes at the Buzz make a few assumptions about the classroom, but in a 16-foot by 16-foot classroom with a 10-foot ceiling, packed with 34 bleary-eyed students and one Red Bull fueled professor the answer is…2 hours and 51 minutes!
Of course you’ll probably be brain dead long before that point.
Check their math here and then tell us why they’re right or wrong, or if you’ve ever survied such a physics marathon.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Can Golfing Make You Deaf?
Discoblog: Boys: If You Want To Get Girls, Don’t Study Science
DISCOVER: Fairway Physics
Image: flickr / Rober S. Donovan
Scientist hoping to prove the existence of dark matter are bringing their search deeper underground, thanks to a lab that at certain points will reach nearly 8,000 feet below South Dakota’s Black Hills.
The laboratory is being constructed beneath an old goldmine, which itself was once the site of renowned physics research. The fact that it’s sheltered from cosmic rays makes it a great potential locale for the mysterious dark matter particles, which may make up a quarter of the universe’s mass and do not “feel” the electromagnetic forces that affect ordinary matter. According to the AP:
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
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Just a few hours ago, we reported that two political scientists from Columbia University analyzed the voting results released by the Iranian government, and that they found that there was only a 1 in 200 chance that a certain numerical pattern would occur in a clean election. Their analysis was based on examining the last digits of vote totals for each candidate from each province.
We’ve recently learned that the chances that the election was not tampered with are even lower than the 0.5 percent the researchers reported in their Washington Post op-ed. That was thanks to an emailed tip from Douglas Keenan, a former Wall Street mathematical researcher and financial trader who now studies independently—a correction that was confirmed by the Columbia political scientists.
Keenan found that there is only a .13 percent chance that, based on the numbers in question, Iran’s election was not rigged—significantly lower than the 0.5 percent originally reported. According to Keenan and the authors, a computational error led to the error.
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There’s something fishy going on with the vote counts from Iran’s recent election, according to two political scientists from Columbia University. In fact, they argue that the figures released by the Iranian government reveal that the election was fixed.
The political scientists did a little number-crunching; they examined, for example, the last two digits of the vote counts that the Iranian government released, which included 29 of the nation’s 30 provinces.
The result? The numerical patterns of the vote tallies would be extremely unlikely to occur in a fair election, according to an article in the Washington Post. Here are the article’s main points:
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Think your cheese grater consists solely of pure, unadulterated metal? Don’t be so sure. An investigation by Scripps Howard News Service revealed that thousands of common items, from shovels to elevator buttons, contain radioactive metals, thanks to a system that does not require potentially radioactive recycled metals to be tested or reported.
A few items that might set off your Geiger counter:
• Women’s handbags
• Tableware
• Fencing wire and fence posts
• Shovel blades
• Airline parts
• Reclining chairs
• Steel used in construction
But don’t encase yourself in lead just yet: Experts remain divided over whether continuous exposure to low levels of radioactivity poses a significant health risk. And don’t forget that plenty of other seemingly innocent objects are naturally slightly radioactive. That includes bananas, which contain a low level of a radioactive potassium isotope, and ceramic pots, because the clay they’re made out of is radioactive.
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Chances are you’ve received an invitation to enter a pool for the NCAA tournament. If so, be warned: Bracket picking is no simple game. If everyone else in your pool picks the top seeds, then you’ll end up smack in the middle, because those who predict upsets will score higher. With a 9,000,000,000,000,000,000-to-1 long shot at making perfect picks, the odds aren’t great for anyone.
Enter Bracketscience.com, a site that takes years of stats and uses it to analyze your March Madness picks for just $20.
The website’s founder, Pete Tiernan, has gathered game programs from the “pre-digital, short-shorts age” in an effort to build a database of the entire history of March Madness stats. He uses it to run a regression analysis of the stats against the official seed rankings to find out which teams tend to do better than expected. One portion of the site allows you to enter the factors you’re interested in, such as the year, seed, school, and conference, so you can use custom-made stats to fill in your bracket. If that’s not enough, bracketscience.com also provides 10 statistical models such as “from the gut” or “upset special,” and offers team analysis to forecast a team’s 2009 performance.
Tiernan shared some pointers for picking upsets:
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Kevlar is nice and all, but the next bullet-proof vest might be made of sticky goo. Colorado researchers are using specialized gels to fix knee injuries (and pretty much the rest of the human body). But a chemical engineering company called d3O lab has created the mightiest gel of all—one so strong that when an external force, such as a fist or the ground, hits it, the gel turns into a shock-absorbing material that hardens and soaks up the entire impact.
While the company has been testing the gel in sports equipment for athletes, the Ministry of Defense thinks the new goo may be capable of stopping bullets, so they’ve forked over $150,000 for testing.
The secret to how the gel works rests in chemistry (not magic), as inventor Richard Palmer explained to the Telegraph: “When moved slowly, the molecules will slip past each other, but in a high-energy impact they will snag and lock together, becoming solid.” So in this case, when a bullet hits the gel’s molecules, they bond together to form an “impenetrable” wall against bullets or shrapnel. But the solid state is only temporary—after the molecules absorb the shock and the impact stops, the gel becomes a gel again.
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Does simple arithmetic give you sweaty palms? Do you always show up late for appointments? Is it a nightmare to figure out the bill at restaurants? If so, you may have dyscalculia, sort of the mathematical version of dyslexia. People with dyscalculia often excel at languages or visual arts, but can barely pass middle school math. They have trouble with numerical concepts—specifically, with associating numerical quantities with their abstract representations.
Although it’s estimated that about five percent of people have dyscalculia, researchers disagree as to the cause of the disorder. The debate boils down to whether number sense is an innate or learned trait in humans. Some argue that we are born with the ability to understand exact numbers. Even babies, for example, will stare longer when they are shown two dolls moving behind a screen and then three dolls coming out, indicating they were expecting a different numerical outcome.
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Most normal people gauge the weather by checking online, hitting up the Weather Channel, or falling back on that old standby, looking out the window. But one group of physicists refuses to toe the line, instead predicting local temperatures to within 1°C by checking a particle detector that resides almost half a mile underground. Spending a lot of time way, way beneath the surface of the earth can do this to a person.
The detector, located in a former mine turned particle physic lab in Minnesota, was built as part of a project to study neutrinos, but it can also detect other particles known as muons. When high-energy cosmic rays from outer space collide with atoms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, particles called pions are created, which quickly decay into muons. Muons are negatively charged—sort of like heavier versions of electrons—and many have enough energy to penetrate underground. Muon levels drop in cool weather because cold air is denser, and pions are more likely to get destroyed by colliding with atoms before they have a chance to decay into muons.
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