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.

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Image: CERN

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.

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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.

Scientists hope to start construction on the two deepest labs by 2012 and open them by 2016. The projects are expected to cost $550 million.

Learning more about dark matter could help physicists shed light on the Big Bang theory and clue us in to whether the universe is growing or shrinking. Heck, if we’d known an underground lab could potentially do all that, we might have started shoveling a long time ago.

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Images: flickr / wolfpix

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.

To come up with the probability that the election was not rigged, the researchers used the Monte Carlo method, which uses repeated random computer simulations to calculate real-world probabilities. While an error was made in the original calculation, the bottom line of the analysis remains the same: It is very unlikely such numerical patterns would occur in a clean election.

For more details on the methods used, see excerpts of the emails below and check out the annotated version of the Washington Post article from the authors’ web sites [pdf].

An excerpt from the emails between Keenan and Bernd Beber, one of the Columbia University political scientists:

From Keenan: “I thought that it might be interesting to replicate your analysis…. For each test, I got the probabilities stated in your article: a little less than 4% and 4.2%. Then I combined the tests. I got 0.13%, rather than a little less than 0.5%. My conclusion, then, is that the evidence is even stronger than given in your article.”

From Bernd Beber, co-author of the study: “You’re correct. Since the last and second-to-last digits are independent…. the joint probability is simply the product of the marginal probabilities, so it’s quite a bit lower than .005.”

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Image: flickr / Pink Sherbet Photography 

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:

• In the last two digits of every vote count, you would expect to see each digit (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) occur about 10 percent of the time. But the digit 5 came up only 4 percent of the time, while the digit 7 appeared a whopping 17 percent of the time. A non-fraudulent election would produce these numerical patterns less than 4 percent of the time.
• People generate patterns of adjacent numbers more easily than those of non-adjacent numbers (for example, 34 instead of 28 or 47), research has shown. Non-fraudulent elections, of course, have no trouble generating non-adjacent numbers, and you’d expected seven out of 10 pairs to be distinct non-adjacent digits.  But in the Iranian results, only 62 percent of the pairs are like non-adjacent… the chances that an election would naturally produce these results is about a meager 4 percent.
• The bottom line: There’s only about a 0.5 percent chance that these two types of irregularities would occur in a fair election. That’s one in two hundred elections.

Those definitely aren’t odds we’d like to bet on.

UPDATE: Iran’s Numbers Even Fishier Than Previously Reported

Washington Post : The Devil is In the Digits

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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.

So if you’re planning on investing in a hazmat suit, you probably should’ve been wearing it all along.

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Image: flickr / dvortygirl

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:

1. Don’t pick any teams that are ranked below 13th.
2. Don’t pick a top seed.
3. Pick a team with “senior-led, guard-dominant” players. But make sure the team isn’t playing a favored team within 300 miles.
4. For second round picks, don’t choose teams with inexperienced coaches.
5. In the Sweet Sixteen round, only pick “senior-led dominant” teams.
6. But after the Sweet Sixteen, don’t pick upsets.

Meanwhile, three professors of the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech have another method to this madness. To pick the winners of the Final Four, the professors used a computer ranking system, the Logistic Regression Markov Chain (LRMC), to analyze certain aspects of the game like the scoreboard results, which teams are competing, who has the home court advantage, and what the margin of victory is.

This year their picks are almost identical to the NCAA’s predictions for the Final Four, with both holding that UNC will play the University of Pittsburgh. The profs, however, picked University of Memphis (not the NCAA’s choice, which was U Conn) to play the University of Louisville.

Computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson at the University of Illinois has some reservations about the seeding choices. After studying 24 years of past tournaments, Jacobson concluded that people trying to predict Sweet Sixteen teams would have just as much luck at predicting the winners if they simply flipped a coin.

And even NASA is getting in on the fun with its very own 2009 Mission Madness. For all you shuttle fans out there, it’s your chance to vote for your favorite of the 64 missions.

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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.

This gooey substance is pretty amazing stuff, and could have many uses, including absorbing the impact of a somersault—good news for amateur gymnasts everywhere. (Watch an animated demonstration here.)

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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.

But others argue that the concept of exact numbers is learned, and that we are born with only an “approximate number sense” that allows us to compare different quantities but not necessarily count them. While algebra might be indispensable in the modern world, researchers say an approximate number sense is really all you need to survive in the wild—allowing you to identify, for example, which tree bears more fruit but not the exact quantity.

Other studies suggest that our innate sense of numbers isn’t linear like a number line, but logarithmic. The Mundurucú people in the Amazon don’t use a number system and don’t even have words for quantities larger than five. When researchers asked them to place numbers on a number line from 1 to 10, they typically place 3 near the middle and 5 closer to 10. As New Scientist explains:

By the Mundurucú way of thinking, 10 is only twice as big as 5, but 5 is five times as big as 1, so 5 is judged to be closer to 10 than to 1. The team conclude that “the concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education”. With only limited tools for counting, the Mundurucú fall back on the default mode of thinking about number, the so-called “approximate number system.”

For now, dyscalculia as a learning disorder seems to be the more prevailing school of thought. Researchers say that different teaching methods may help those with dyscalculia grasp mathematical concepts.

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Image: flickr / Serge Melki

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.

Daily temperatures in the stratosphere, which affect weather in the lower atmosphere, can be tracked with the particle detector, the researchers say. Although some experts doubt that muon meteorology could challenge the precision of current weather forecast techniques (which rely on balloons and satellites), researcher Scott Osprey says bigger detectors would mean more precise predictions. “The only limitation is the size of your detector,” he says.

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