Physics Today News Picks

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by baguette

2009-11-06T21:59:37Z

The Register: A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational—it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month—the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically.

This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September.

Why so few East German Max Planck directors?

2009-11-06T21:57:02Z

Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.

But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.

Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.

For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift when entire preexisting eastern institutes were closed or cut to a fraction of their original size.

Iran may have tested advanced warhead explosives says IAEA report

2009-11-06T21:37:48Z

The Guardian: The International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, says the Guardian.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and the UK, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design.

A two-point implosion device, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than first generation warheads. It makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

Prosthetics do not give sprinters unfair advantage

2009-11-06T18:35:08Z

guardian.co.uk: Prosthetics worn by disabled sprinters confer no speed advantage, scientists have found. If anything, they may reduce the top speed a runner can achieve.

The research supports the case made by the South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who uses flexible carbon-fiber blades in races.

Pistorius has long argued that he should be allowed to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in races, but athletics authorities banned him from doing so in last year's Olympic games, claiming that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes.

But the new study by Alena Grabowski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the authorities may have come to the wrong conclusion.

Related Link
Running-specific prostheses limit ground-force during sprinting Biology Letters

Is there a future for JDEM?

2009-11-05T23:09:53Z

Nature News: The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM)—a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe's expansion—is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy, and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency.

In addition, scientists working on the JDEM designs have not presented a unified front, owing to disagreements over the best observational method to use at a time when an influential astrophysics panel is about to prioritize the next decade's best and most organized missions.

How did pre-Columbian societies extract gold?

2009-11-05T23:05:16Z

ScienceNOW: When Spanish conquistadors seized the Inca emperor Atawalpa in 1532, they demanded an enormous ransom of silver and gold that took weeks to collect.

Such an enormous stash suggests that the Andean people knew sophisticated metallurgy, but there has been little evidence to support this.

Now a team of geologists and archaeologists have found clues that may indicate that these indigenous people refined gold with mercury amalgamation, an important metallurgical technique that is still in use today.

How to keep planes from colliding with lasers

2009-11-05T21:02:38Z

Wired.com: Beaming high-powered lasers into the sky allows scientists to study changing weather patterns, pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere and even gravity on the Moon. But if one of those helpful lasers happens to cross paths with an airplane, it can temporarily blind or distract the pilot and potentially cause a crash.

The current method to avoid plane-laser collisions is decidedly low-tech: Federal Aviation Administration regulations require anyone who’s sending a laser up into the atmosphere to employ multiple human observers, called “spotters,” to watch for planes flying within 25 degrees of the laser beam. Now, researchers have created a radio-tracking device that can perform the same task as a pair of eyes, without the potential for human error.

The current reality of cyberwar

2009-11-04T17:29:26Z

NYTimes.com: Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former United States military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology.

Stopping leaks in quantum systems

2009-11-04T17:27:37Z

Nature: Quantum systems habitually leak information, limiting their usefulness for practical applications. By optimally reversing the leak, this information loss has been reduced to a trickle in the solid state.

Southern African Large Telescope hit by broadband problems

2009-11-04T17:26:41Z

guardian.co.uk: It can see to the edge of the observable universe. It can peer back in time to the aftermath of the Big Bang. Just don't ask it to send the secret of creation by email.

The R332 million ($40 million) Southern African Large Telescope (Salt) is an internationally renowned science facility with everything but fast broadband. Its astronomers have found download speeds so slow that they are forced to send their cosmic findings by road.

The problem is all too familiar to South African residents: painfully slow service delivery. Politicians have called on a telephone company to resolve the matter "before the country's standing as a credible international scientific partner is irreparably damaged."

Using satellites to improve wine

2009-11-04T17:23:49Z

The Daily Telegraph: Growers are using powerful cameras on board a satellite 500 miles above the earth's surface to take images of their vineyards, showing them where to plant vines and when to harvest the grapes.

The high resolution pictures are so accurate they can calculate the number of leaves per square meter which is directly proportional to the quality and yield of grapes.

Farmers will also be able to scan surrounding areas to see what land may be good for cultivation and so help the industry expand.

The technology known as Oenoview, is developed by Infoterra, a division of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, and has already been used in various wine-growing areas of France.

It works by calculating the density of foliage on vines by analyzing the light that reflects off them.

Space rock explodes in atmosphere

2009-11-03T15:39:26Z

SPACE.com: A space rock explosion earlier this month over an island region of Indonesia is now being viewed as perhaps the biggest object to tangle with Earth in more than a decade. On 8 October, reports from Indonesia told of a loud air blast around 11:00 am local time. One report indicated a bright fireball, accompanied by an explosion and lingering dust cloud, as the origin of the air blast. According to experts at the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office in Pasadena, California—Don Yeomans, Paul Chodas, Steve Chesley—the blast is thought to be due to the atmospheric entry of an asteroid more than 10 meters in diameter. Due to atmospheric pressure, the object is thought to have detonated in the atmosphere, yielding an energy release of about 50 kilotons.

Dark matter may have hit the Milky Way

2009-11-03T15:16:24Z

Usatoday.com: The most likely explanation for what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years appears to be a giant clump of dark matter.

The dark matter is suspected to consist of enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.

Left behind by this cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the "Gould Belt," which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia's University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

Uncertainty exists in aerosol climate modeling

2009-11-03T15:12:25Z

Science: Many aerosols cool the atmosphere (a negative forcing), whereas ozone and black carbon aerosol have a warming effect (a positive forcing).

There is thus a strong motivation for treating air pollution control and climate change in common policy frameworks, argue Almut Arneth and colleagues in Science.

However, changes in pollutant and precursor emissions, atmospheric burden, and radiative forcing are not necessarily proportional.

Drew T. Shindell and colleagues at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, report that current models do not capture many of the complex atmospheric processes involving aerosols and reactive trace gases.

As Arneth and colleagues state:

Changing aerosol burdens may alter local and regional cloud cover and precipitation, change the intensity or timing of the monsoon circulation, and even shift precipitation across national borders. Changes in cloud cover and precipitation will also feed back on the photochemistry and rainout of short-lived species. These issues must be considered if aerosol emissions are to become part of climate policy.

Given the toxicity of pollutants, the question is not whether ever stricter air pollution controls will be implemented, but when and where. The jury is out on whether air pollution control will accelerate or mitigate climate change. Still, the studies available to date mostly suggest that air pollution control will accelerate warming in the coming decades.

Large Hadron Collider to start up in three weeks

2009-11-02T20:55:24Z

The Observer: At first glance, the piece of metal in Steve Myers's hands could be taken for a harmonica or a pen. Only on closer inspection can you make out its true nature.

Myers, director of accelerators at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, is clutching a section of copper piping from which a flat electrical cable is protruding.

It looks unremarkable. Yet a piece of cable like this one was responsible last year for the world's most expensive short circuit.

More than $50 million-worth of damage was done to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most advanced particle accelerator ever built, a few days after its ceremonial opening.

It has taken Myers—and hundreds of other CERN scientists—more than a year to pinpoint the guilty piece of cable and repair the wreckage.

"It was a very small piece, but it did immense damage," he said. It remains to be seen whether Myers can fix CERN's tattered technological reputation in the process—when his team restart their great machine in a few weeks. "I am not a nervous person," said the 63-year-old Belfast-born engineer. "And that is probably just as well."