Recently in Facilities and laboratories Category

Science: The US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, which works most of the year for the scientific community, was about to head to dry dock at the end of its 2011 run when it was called back into action. A freak storm in November left the Alaska settlement of Nome icebound, and the Healy helped break through almost 300 miles of ice so that a Russian fuel tanker could make a delivery to the town's icebound residents. The dramatic rescue may cause problems for researchers planning to go out on the ship in 2012, however. The Healy is now behind schedule for its annual maintenance, which could delay its return to sea by as much as 4–8 weeks. The Coast Guard is currently considering its options, including whether to reschedule the scientific teams or seek extra funding to shorten the ship's time in dry dock.

Reuters: Early Sunday a fire broke out at the Alikhanov Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, a nuclear research center in Moscow that houses a nonoperational 60-year-old atomic reactor. Although institute officials maintain that there was no risk of a radiation leak, Greenpeace Russia officials expressed concern. The fire, which broke out in a basement area of the facility, consisted primarily of smoke that came from an area housing power cables. The smoke was visible above the institute, and an acrid smell filled the air. About 30 emergency vehicles responded. Russian news agencies issued conflicting reports, including whether fire brigades were initially denied access and when exactly the fire was extinguished.

BBC: Yesterday an international team of astronomers and engineers succeeded in linking all four of the large telescopes that make up the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, located on Cerro Paranal in Chile's Atacama Desert. Each of the four has been up and running since at least 2000. However, when linked together via interferometry, they form the biggest ground-based optical telescope on Earth, which offers very high spatial resolution and zooming capabilities. "From now on we'll be able to observe things we were not able to observe before," said Frederic Gonte, head of instrumentation.

Science: The ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR), which will open on 6 February, is a new regional center for theoretical physics located in São Paulo, Brazil. It is a joint project of the State University of São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundation, and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. According to its website, the ICTP-SAIFR's goals are to conduct theoretical physics research at the highest international standards, provide an international center for schools and workshops, and support research in those South American countries where theoretical physics research is not yet well developed.

Gizmodo: Although NASA canceled its Constellation program, key research from the project could be put to use on future spacecraft. While developing the Ares 1 rocket, engineers discovered that it had a crucial flaw: During the final stages of a launch, the burning down of the solid rocket caused the entire vehicle to oscillate so rapidly that the crew couldn't read the digital display. Rather than involving a costly fix, however, the problem proved to have a relatively simple solution. After an extensive period of trial and error, the engineers decided that, instead of trying to fix the shake, they would make the digital display strobe in time with the vibration. In his article, Gizmodo staff writer Brent Rose describes his trip to NASA's Ames Research Center, where he got the chance to climb into the "driver's seat."

Science Daily: Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC accelerator laboratory used rapid-fire laser pulses to flash-heat a tiny piece of aluminum foil to about 2 million °C. The experiments used SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source, which is a billion times brighter than any other x-ray source, to both create and probe the sample. "Making extremely hot, dense matter is important scientifically if we are ultimately to understand the conditions that exist inside stars and at the center of giant planets within our own solar system and beyond, " said Sam Vinko, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University and lead author of the group’s paper published in Nature.

Nature: On 29 December 2008, chemistry research assistant Sheharbano Sangji suffered third-degree burns when the t-butyl lithium she was drawing from a bottle via a syringe burst into flames. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat, and her clothes caught fire. She died in the hospital 18 days later. In the wake of Sangji’s death, UCLA tightened its safety policies; but despite calls to improve academia’s safety standards across the US, there’s little evidence that bench scientists or laboratory heads outside of UCLA have changed their behavior.

The Los Angeles district attorney has now charged UCLA and organic chemist Patrick Harran with three counts each of “willful violation of an occupational health and safety standard causing the death of an employee.” Harran faces up to four and a half years in prison if convicted, and UCLA could be fined as much as $1.5 million on each count. UCLA notes in its statement that an earlier investigation by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health found “no willful violations on the part of UCLA”, and says it plans to fight the charges.

BBC: Next Tuesday, representatives of the two principal detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, will announce the results so far of their search for the Higgs boson. Rumors are flying ahead of the announcement. According to the BBC's Susan Watts, who interviewed CERN theorist John Ellis, the Higgs has shown up in both detectors at an energy between 120 and 125 GeV. What is not clear yet is the statistical significance. The evident joy that Watts witnessed at CERN, combined with the equally evident caution, suggests a significance that is encouraging but not conclusive.

Guardian: Hundreds of scientific experiments are being dropped by British universities because of budget shortfalls at ISIS, one of the UK's major research facilities, writes Ian Sample for the Guardian. Built in the early 1980s at a cost of some $625 million, ISIS is a pulsed neutron and muon source used to probe the structure and microscopic processes of condensed matter. But it currently operates at only two-thirds capacity because the UK government has balked at paying the approximately $4.5 million in electrical and other miscellaneous annual costs to keep it running. As a result, ISIS receives twice as many applications as it can accommodate, and many scientists have given up applying. "The damage to the research base in UK universities across a number of disciplines is out of all proportion to the cost saving," said Jon Goff at the University of London. "The saving comes mainly from electricity costs, and it equates in financial value to a single research grant to one group in a university. For this we lose a third of the science. . . . This substantially affects the international competitiveness of UK research."

Nature: After the controversy caused by September’s superluminal neutrino announcement, the OPERA collaboration has now conducted a second experiment that replicates the findings of the first. Some scientists had expressed concern about the length of the proton pulses that CERN used to generate the neutrino pulses that it sent to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in the earlier experiment. They thought the pulses were so long that the OPERA researchers could not know whether individual neutrinos received at Gran Sasso corresponded to protons early or late in the proton pulse, creating uncertainty around their travel time, writes Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. Hence, the OPERA team members were asked to shorten the proton pulses in their second run. They generated 3-nanosecond-long pulses, compared with the 10.5-microsecond-long pulses produced in the earlier test, and have now recorded 20 events that show a similar level of statistical significance to the first set of results. The team has published its findings on the arXiv preprint server.

CERN: Although the Large Hadron Collider has only been operating for a few months, CERN is preparing to significantly upgrade the infrastructure around 2020. After the upgrade, the LHC's luminosity will be increased to 5–10 times its current design value. “With the LHC colliding hundreds of millions of particles each second, some of the processes we’re interested in will happen just a few times a day,” said CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci. “With processes so rare, extra luminosity makes a big difference to our ability to make precision measurements and discover new things.”

Upgrading the LHC will require new superconducting technologies in a wide range of fields, including high-field magnets, radiofrequency cavities, and electrical transfer lines. CERN launched the first design phase of this upgrade at a European Commission–sponsored workshop that brought together scientists from 14 European institutions, the Japanese-led KEK collaboration, and the US LHC Accelerator Research Program.

New York Times: A private–public project to build a fossil-fuel power plant that generates electricity and hydrogen without emitting carbon dioxide is in jeopardy, writes Matthew Wald for the New York Times. Called FutureGen 2.0, the project entails retrofitting an old oil-fired power station with technology that captures CO₂. Ameren, the Midwestern power company that is donating the power station, has told its other FutureGen 2.0 partners that it can no longer participate in the project because of Ameren's unfavorable financial situation. The directors of FutureGen 2.0 will meet next week to decide what to do next. One possibility is for the other partners to buy the power station from Ameren, but they'll need to act fast. The US Department of Energy promised to cover 80% of the project's $1.25 billion pricetag, but only if the money is spent by the end of 2015.

Daily Mail: One doesn’t usually associate farming with the Arctic Circle, but Nordic countries are beginning to vie for a particular type of farm—computer server farms. Facebook, which now has more users outside the US than inside, recently started scouting European locations that could serve as data traffic nodes. The more data centers a company has the better. Not only do they serve as backup in case of a failure, such as the recent three-day collapse of BlackBerry’s service, but they also provide faster connections for the users nearby. Facebook said it chose Lulea, Sweden, for its first data center outside the US partly because of the location's cold climate, which is crucial for keeping racks of high-performance computers cool. For about eight months of the year, the plant will be able to cool itself naturally by just using the icy outside air. In 2009 another internet giant, Google, turned a paper mill in Finland into a data center.

Los Angeles Times: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was started 75 years ago by a group of Caltech students who were assistants of Theodore von Kármán, a pioneer in aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics. Dubbed the Suicide Squad, Ed Forman, H. S. Tsien, Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Rudolph Schott, and A. M. O. Smith at first tested their homemade rockets on campus. But because of the loud and potentially dangerous explosions, they were forced to move their experiments away from Caltech to a dry creek bed, the Arroyo Seco. During World War II, working out of tarpaper shacks, the group developed rockets that were strapped to US Army aircraft to boost takeoff. Squad member Malina went on to become JPL’s director.

Guardian: After a 26-year career, Fermilab’s Tevatron collider is being retired. Completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million, the Tevatron was the highest-energy collider in the world for 25 years. It lost that standing, however, when CERN’s Large Hadron Collider began operations in early 2010. In an article for the Guardian, Mark Lancaster, a member of the High Energy Physics Group at University College London, reflects on his 15 years working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment at the Tevatron. He discusses how the Tevatron made novel use of superconducting materials in its magnets and how it required the construction of the world’s largest cryogenic facility.

Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) is reshaping how it makes investments in developing better energy technologies in order to have a more coherent and productive transportation program. The new regime, which will be unveiled in the 2013 budget presented to Congress in February, will also have more resources devoted to electric car development. The reevaluation comes from DOE's first-ever Quadrennial Technology Review, which calls the current R&D spending allocation "a bit unbalanced," said DOE undersecretary for science Steven Koonin at a briefing held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC.

Los Angeles Times: A team at CERN has announced that it has observed neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light—about 60 nanoseconds faster. Such an observation, if verified, would have enormous implications for our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of neutrinos speeding from an accelerator at CERN to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 724 km away. Nevertheless, they calculated the margin of error in their measurement to be 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. They are now asking the US's Fermilab and Japan's T2K to confirm the findings. CERN called a press conference at 10:00am EDT this morning. Physics Today's Steve Corneliussen discusses the coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post of CERN's findings.

Universe Today: Early this morning a Soyuz spacecraft returned three astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). After nearly six months in space, Alexander Samokutyaev, Andrey Borisenko, and NASA flight engineer Ronald Garan touched down safely in the southern steppes of Kazakhstan. For the next two months the ISS will be maintained by the three remaining astronauts, until the next three-person crew will arrive. Flights to and from the ISS were disrupted after a freighter carried by a Soyuz rocket crashed to Earth in August. Russia has been working to determine exactly how and why the rocket crashed.

BBC: The UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment and its Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have formed a partnership with the US Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF). The three labs will work together to develop a means for generating electricity from laser-powered fusion. The UK leads High-Power Laser Energy Research (HiPER), a European project aimed at moving laser fusion technology toward a commercial plant. Begun in 2005, HiPER is now in the midst of a detailed design phase. The primary goals of NIF, which has been in operation since 2009, are to achieve fusion with high energy gain and to study the conditions that prevail in hydrogen bombs. Speaking about the new partnership, David Willetts, the UK's science minister, said, "This is an absolutely classic example of the connections between really high-grade theoretical scientific research, business, and commercial opportunities, and of course a fundamental human need: tackling pressures that we're all familiar with on our energy supply."

New York Times: General Electric has been working with lasers to develop a cheaper and easier method of producing enriched uranium for use in nuclear reactors, writes William Broad for the New York Times. It has long been thought that the extraordinary purity of laser light could be used to selectively excite uranium-235 and thus ease the identification and extraction of the precious isotope. However, until now, the approach has proved too expensive and difficult. After two years of testing, GE is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that could make reactor fuel by the ton. Critics fear, however, that rogue states and terrorists could use the technology to make bomb fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is weighing that issue and has promised to give GE a decision by next year.

Chronicle: In a surprise move, IBM abruptly ended its contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide hardware for building the world’s fastest academic supercomputer. Started in 2007, Blue Waters became more complex and expensive than originally planned, according to officials at IBM. Nevertheless, university officials think they can still finish the computer on time, even without IBM’s unique and innovative Power7 series chips. The university has been given a few weeks to submit an alternate proposal to NSF, which has provided most of the project's funding.

New Kerala: Yesterday kicked off the 2011 International Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France. Results will be presented from all fields of research, including the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN. “So far we’ve collected as much data as was planned for the whole of 2011, and that’s already a great achievement for the LHC,” said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. “While it’s still too early for the biggest discoveries, the experiments are already accumulating interesting results.” Among the announcements to be expected at the conference are reports from the LHC collaborations on intriguing observations by the D0 experiments and by the Collider Detector at Fermilab in the US.

Nature: In 2001 the Japanese government launched an ambitious plan to build a world-class international research institute and graduate university in science and technology on Okinawa, one of the most southerly and remote islands in Japan. The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), which has no departments and no professorial hierarchy, promises scientists the freedom to pursue their own research. Since OIST is required to find 50% of its faculty and students from outside Japan, the institute’s new president Jonathan Dorfan, former director of Stanford University’s SLAC, has launched the biggest recruiting drive to date: Over three weeks in December 2010, 27 potential recruits visited the institute, 26 were offered positions, and 20 have accepted—11 of them physicists. Dorfan hopes that OIST will earn university accreditation this fall and can start accepting graduate students for 2012. In addition to attracting scientists, the institute has proven to appeal to other scientific professionals, such as Neil Calder, senior adviser in communication at OIST, who has written for Physics Today about the nature of science communication.

New York Times: The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has delayed the next set of experiments for six months to install new safety equipment. At NIF, 192 powerful lasers are trained on a pea-sized pellet of hydrogen isotopes, which is heated to more than 100 million degrees to fuse the atoms together and release nuclear energy. Among the challenges faced is the unanticipated presence of particles that clog filters designed to prevent the escape of radioactive material. Officials have proposed bypassing the filters for some experiments and venting radioactive particles directly into the air. Researchers have also discovered that more power will be needed for some tests than first thought. They propose nearly tripling the amount of laser power to 120 megajoules.

Nature News: The world's largest fusion experiment is finally beginning to take shape. Workers at a vast site in southern France have dug the 17-meter-deep pit that will house the ITER reactor, and will soon install 500 pillars of steel-reinforced concrete that should protect the machine during an earthquake. But even as they toil, a quake halfway around the world has struck a blow to the project.

The 11 March earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, one of seven partners in ITER, severely damaged key facilities for testing the reactor's components. Unless repairs can be made or work reassigned quickly, the damage could cause a delay of "perhaps several years," according to Osamu Motojima, ITER's director. Motojima says that he and his team are looking at ways to reduce the impact. "At present my target is less than one year's delay," he says.

Nature: When Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator shuts down in September it will have collected a staggering 20 petabytes of data. But, as Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature reports, Fermilab is only now developing plans for preserving that data hoard and for making it available to future researchers. The archival challenge is exacerbated by the impending diversion of computational resources away from the Tevatron's two principal experiments D0 and CDF. What's more, some of the oldest data from the Tevatron's 26-year lifespan reside on old magnetic tapes. Historically, particle physicists have been less ready than astronomers to archive data, but that situation is changing. In contrast to Fermilab, CERN developed an archive plan for the LHC before the accelerator came on line in 2009.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Duke University is building a branch campus in Kunshan, a city of 1.6 million people in East China's prosperous Jiangsu province. Although Kunshan is footing most of the bill, some members of Duke's faculty are skeptical of the prospects for the joint venture. As the Chronicle's Ian Wilhelm reports, doubts have arisen about how Duke will pay for its share of the campus, given that the current recession has forced the university to trim its budget. Also in doubt is whether Duke Kunshan University, as the campus is known, will be able to attract both international faculty and elite Chinese students, who prefer to study in the West. Under the current plan, Duke Kunshan University will begin offering MBAs in 2012 followed by a comprehensive range of graduate and undergraduate degrees.

Daily Mail: A super-resolution microscopy technique developed at Sandia National Laboratories is allowing researchers to study a cell membrane with extraordinary spatial resolution. The technique builds on super-resolution capabilities developed in recent years, but it goes another step by adding dual-color capabilities to the relatively new stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy, or STORM. Sandia researchers Jesse Aaron, Jeri Timlin, and Bryan Carson have been using the new technique to discover why a cell can defend against some invaders, such as Escherichia coli, while failing against others, such as the bacteria that cause bubonic plague. They have been able to view the clustering of receptor proteins—tasked with recognizing intruders—on the surface of immune cells when those proteins are confronted with lipopolysaccharides derived from E. coli; LPS derived from bacteria that cause the plague do not cause the same effects. Such studies could open doors to new diagnostic, prevention, and treatment methods. For more details, see Sandia’s press release.

Physics Today: A team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus at CERN has succeeded in trapping and holding atoms of antihydrogen for more than 15 minutes—roughly 10 000 times longer than before, writes Mark Buchanan for New Scientist. Because antimatter is annihilated when it comes in contact with matter, the researchers used a magnetic trap to isolate the antihydrogen. According to Eugenie Samuel Reich, who wrote for Nature about the ALPHA team's work last year, an antihydrogen atom comprises a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. Because antihydrogen is made entirely of antiparticles, it is believed to be stable, unlike atoms made of both particles and antiparticles. The researchers are counting on that longevity to compare the energy levels in antihydrogen with those of hydrogen to see whether antimatter particles experience the same electromagnetic forces as matter particles, a key premise of the standard model.

UPI: CERN's director of communications James Gillies has told the BBC that the leaked report of a possible Higgs detection originated from a small group within the large ATLAS collaboration. The report is genuine but premature in that it has yet to be endorsed by the ATLAS collaboration or subjected to rigorous testing and peer review. Publicized last Thursday, the leaked information set off an explosion of speculation, comment, and recriminations on physics blogs.

Nature: The next-generation XENON100 dark-matter search experiment at Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy did not see any dark-matter particles during a recent 100-day run, but the data collected may shed new light on fundamental physics, writes Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. In a paper published online yesterday, the XENON100 researchers report that they detected three events during last year's experiment. Although they did not see evidence of dark-matter particles, their results, if confirmed, contradict earlier findings from other experiments, place new limits on how strongly dark matter interacts with ordinary matter, and may help refine the particle-physics theory known as supersymmetry. However, several researchers have expressed skepticism regarding the XENON100 group’s findings. Juan Collar, a University of Chicago cosmologist who works on CoGeNT, said that a lot rests on the calibration of the XENON100 detector, which he will be looking to study in detail. "Previous attempts by the XENON collaboration to calibrate the response of their detector contained traceable mistakes in methodology," he said.

New Scientist: The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York, has created the heaviest form of antimatter seen so far—antihelium nuclei, which contain two antiprotons and two antineutrons. The most complex unit of antimatter discovered to date had been the counterpart of the helium-3 nucleus, which contains two antiprotons and one antineutron. However, "it doesn't take us nearer to the big question of why is the universe at large not full of antimatter?" said Frank Close of the UK’s University of Oxford. That question may be answered by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, scheduled to launch on the space shuttle in April.

CBS Minnesota: A $50 million physics laboratory operated by the University of Minnesota was threatened by a fire that started last Thursday in the Soudan Underground Mine State Park near Tower. The fire was believed to be burning between the 23rd and 25th levels of the mine. The Soudan Underground Laboratory is on the 27th level, near the very bottom. Also, because the power had been turned off, water, which would normally be pumped out, was draining into the bottom of the mine, potentially flooding the lab. As of yesterday, the fire was thought to be contained, and the lab appeared to be fine, but the source of the fire has yet to be determined.

Universe Today: High-energy particles called cosmic rays are constantly bombarding Earth from all directions, and have been thought to come from the blast waves of supernova remnants, writes Nancy Atkinson for Universe Today. But new observations from the PAMELA cosmic-ray detector show an unexpected difference in the momenta (per unit charge) of protons and helium nuclei, the most abundant components of cosmic rays. The difference is extremely small, but if they both come from the same kinds of accelerators, their spectra should be very similar. Oscar Adriani and his colleagues, who used data from the PAMELA instrument, say their new findings are a challenge to our current understanding of the acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays, which may be controlled by unknown and more complex processes. Their results were published in Science.

Daily Mail: Designers at Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs in New Jersey have developed a tiny cube-shaped antenna that transmits signals without the need for huge unsightly towers. The pioneering technology could also create a seamless wireless network and eliminate internet “black spots.” The size of a Rubik’s cube, the lightRadio cube could be attached to lampposts, buildings, or telephone poles as single cubes or in clusters, connected to the cell phone network with optical fibers. The firm will begin trials of the cube with cell phone firms in September and hopes to make it commercially available next year.

Daily Mail: On the edge of the Yorkshire moors in the UK, in a lab more than a half mile below ground, astroparticle physicists work at the Boulby potash mine, which houses the Deep Underground Science Facility. Two pieces of experimental apparatus—a dark matter detector and a dark matter telescope—which cost less than £1 million to run are being used to search for the elusive matter. James Delingpole, writing for the Daily Mail, provides an in-depth account of the facility.

Guardian: Since 2008, the 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico has been collecting data for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's third and final map of the night sky. Yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, the survey's researchers released the map to astronomers and to the public. As the Guardian's Alok Jha reports, SDSS-III constitutes the most detailed map of a large swath of the night sky ever assembled. Each of the map's pixels contains data taken in five different wavelength bands.

New Scientist: Last year, it looked as though Fermilab's Tevatron collider would continue to hunt for the Higgs boson until 2014. An advisory panel had recommended the three-year extension in the wake of delays at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Yesterday, however, the US Department of Energy, which funds the Tevatron, announced that the extension would be cancelled. Unless new funding can be found, the Tevatron will cease operations later this year.

Daily Mail: Deep beneath the ice of Antarctica, the world’s strangest observatory has finally reached completion. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a gigantic telescope at the South Pole that is designed to detect elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos that travel through Earth at the speed of light. Although construction was not completed until 18 December, the telescope has been collecting data for several years. The Daily Mail’s Niall Firth writes about the science being conducted there and includes photographs and a diagram of the facility.

New Scientist: A new breed of electronic solar cells is being developed that can work after dark. The key to the new devices is their ability to harvest IR radiation, says Steven Novack, one of the developers of the technology at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls. Nearly half of the available energy in the solar spectrum resides in the IR band, and IR is reemitted by Earth's surface after the Sun has gone down, meaning that the antennas can even capture some energy during the night, writes Duncan Graham-Rowe for New Scientist.

Science: A plan to cover a budget shortfall for the ITER fusion reactor project in France appears to have fallen apart just two weeks before the end-of-year budget deadline, writes Daniel Clery for Science. The plan was for the European Union to use €1.4 billion ($1.9 billion) in unused 2010 budget funds to fill a gap in 2012–13 caused by the project's ballooning costs. ITER is a global project supported by seven partners: the EU, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the US. Now the European Commission, the EU’s executive agency, must go back to the drawing board.

New Scientist: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland produced a flurry of “mini big bangs” on 7 November. Instead of the usual proton–proton collisions, the LHC started smashing lead ions, which produced dense fireballs with temperatures of about 10 trillion kelvin. At those temperatures, the atoms’ nuclei melt and become a quark–gluon plasma. The resultant plasma fireballs will allow physicists using the ALICE detector at CERN to study the universe as it was about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

New Scientist: The International System of Units (SI), established in 1960 at a conference in Paris, set an international standard for core units of measure, such as the kilogram, meter, and second. The system was developed to improve accuracy and standardization around the world. On the 50th anniversary of the system’s adoption, New Scientist’s Alison George conducts a brief interview with Brian Bowsher, head of the UK’s measurement standards laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory.

Guardian: One of science's longest-running imaging competitions, the Nikon Small World awards, has announced the 2010 winners. Celebrating its 35th anniversary, the competition received entries from scientists in 63 countries. This year's first prize went to Jonas King, of the biological sciences department of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He used fluorescence microscopy to capture his close-up view of the heart of a mosquito (see image below). To see all the winning images, visit the Nikon Small World online gallery.

Photonics.com: American artist Josef Kristofoletti has created a three-story-tall mural of the ATLAS particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The mural, which is one-third the size of the actual detector, is located aboveground at the ATLAS experiment site, while ATLAS itself is in a cavern 100 meters below. The artist was inspired to produce the large work when he visited the detector; he was invited there by ATLAS collaboration members who had seen his smaller painting of it. “We were thrilled to learn that ATLAS and particle physics had found their way into popular art,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Michael Barnett, an ATLAS outreach coordinator. Because CERN and the LHC have attracted considerable interest from the artistic community over the years, the laboratory is developing an artist-in-residence program.

New Scientist: Designed to detect radio waves emitted when a high-energy cosmic neutrino interacts with the ice, the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), flying on a giant balloon, has instead detected ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Eric Grashorn of Ohio State University in Columbus and colleagues, who published their findings in Physical Review Letters, were at first puzzled by unexpected patterns of radio waves until they realized that the signals were generated by electrons produced when cosmic rays collide with molecules in the air. "They have actually found a new way to detect high-energy cosmic rays," said Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, who works on the IceCube neutrino telescope in Antarctica.

Computerworld: Since its founding as Xerox PARC in 1970, Palo Alto Research Center has been home to several of computing's most important inventions and technological advancements. Thousands of researchers and scientists from a wide range of disciplines have gathered at PARC over the past 40 years, sharing their theories on everything from how computers can better talk to each other to how clean technologies can be used to address critical manufacturing problems.

Computerworld takes a closer look at some of the breakthroughs at PARC that have had such an influential impact on the modern world.

The Tennessean: Arnold Burger and fellow Fisk University researchers have just made it easier for Homeland Security agents to tell the difference between a dirty bomb and a banana.

Fruit, such as a banana contains potassium, which can give off the same radiation signature as plutonium.

The Fisk researchers, in partnership with Radiation Monitoring Devices Inc, and Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, have developed a cheaper, easy-to-produce, new type of radiation-detecting crystal that is more accurate than most of the devices on the market.

The group has just won an R&D 100 magazine award, given to the 100 cleverest inventions of the year for their work.

Los Angeles Times: An appeals court in Washington, DC, ruled yesterday that the National Institutes of Health may temporarily resume funding research that involves human embryonic stem cells. NIH had halted research last month in response to a court-ordered injunction that stated that federal funds cannot be used for such purposes. "We are pleased with the court's interim ruling, which will allow this important, life-saving research to continue while we present further arguments to the court in the weeks to come," said NIH Director Francis Collins.

New Scientist: Despite having created some innovative technology, CERN has not attempted to patent its inventions until now. Responsible for the touchscreen and the World Wide Web, CERN is only now working with the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization to try to profit from its engineers’ innovations. In the past, CERN’s 20 European member states had avoided patents in order to avoid double-billing members to use the inventions in their own countries.

Science: An independent committee of researchers has recommended that Fermilab’s 25-year-old Tevatron particle collider keep running through 2014, rather than shut down in September 2011 as planned. Fermilab is the only US lab that stands a chance of beating its European rival, CERN’s newer Large Hadron Collider , to the discovery of the Higgs boson, the most coveted particle in high-energy physics. Fermilab’s director, Pier Oddone, however, is concerned that the lab’s other projects may be delayed without additional funding from the Department of Energy.

Science: Possibly unprecedented in its history, the National Institutes of Health yesterday ordered a shutdown of human embryonic stem cell experiments by researchers in labs on the NIH campus. According to Jocelyn Kaiser of Science, the message came from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman. The action was a response to a court-ordered injunction a week ago, which stated that using NIH funding to study human embryonic stem cells violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.

Nature: Cambridge Bay, a town of 1500 people on Canada's Northwest Passage, has been chosen as the site of the country's new $9 million Arctic research station. Experiments in geophysics, ecology, and marine biology are being planned for the station, whose location lies close to where water from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meets.

Physics Today: NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will lead a new initiative to determine how America's investment in science raises employment, improves health, and increases knowledge. The initiative is called STAR METRICS, which stands for Science and Technology in America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Science. To assess the investments, STAR METRICS will gather and analyze data from research institutions and funding agencies. Patents, business startups, and other kinds of data will be used to assess the payoffs.

Nature: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor could be getting a new director. ITER’s seven partners—Europe, Japan, the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and India—are reportedly troubled by a likely three-year delay in meeting the original 2016 completion date and by a likely doubling of the project’s cost to €10 billion (US$12.6 billion). According to Nature:

Osamu Motojima, a distinguished Japanese physicist, is being floated as the project's new chief. The appointment, if made, may trigger further changes for the project. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a huge shake-up in ITER management under him," said one fusion scientist familiar with the project.

symmetry: Business in the particle accelerator world is booming, as is business at Advanced Energy Systems, where Tony Favale is president. His company is doing research and design work for the next generation of accelerators, which will be employed in electron lasers for the Navy, radiation detectors for the Department of Homeland Security, and more efficient particle colliders at US national laboratories.

But of the seven positions he was advertising in November, three were still unfilled in mid-March because Favale can't find enough qualified accelerator scientists.

The Frederick News-Post Online: It is absolutely impossible that Bruce Ivins, accused of mailing anthrax and killing five people in 2001, could have created and cleaned up anthrax spores in the timeline and manner the FBI alleges, Ivins's former coworker said last Thursday.

The National Academy of Sciences brought in Henry Heine, a former microbacteriologist for the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, to explain spore preparation to the panel, which is tasked with investigating the science the FBI used to accuse Ivins, also a former microbacteriologist for USAMRIID.

And though Heine discussed only scientific methods and technologies before the panel, he said afterward he firmly believes Ivins did not and could not have grown and prepared the anthrax.

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Nature News: Overlooking Los Angeles, six small domes nestle amid the pine trees atop Mount Wilson. Individually, the 1-meter telescopes inside those buildings have no chance of competing with the biggest ground and space telescopes. But collectively, the Mount Wilson telescopes are producing some of the sharpest images ever made.

washingtonpost.com: At colleges and universities across the country, many graduate students who have babies work until their due dates and return soon after giving birth.

If they don't, they risk getting kicked off projects, falling out of favor with powerful faculty members and losing their student status, which is often required for visas, health insurance plans and student loan grace periods.

"Workplace balance is an issue in any workplace, but it can play a huge role in academics," said Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women. "They judge your research, but they also judge your collegiality."

Did you have any difficulty juggling the demands of academia and of home? Considering commenting or provide advice below.

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Smithsonian Magazine: Twice a day, seven days a week, from February to November for the past four years, two researchers have stepped outside a research station at the South Pole and walked nearly a mile in darkness to the South Pole Telescope. Their goal, trying to solve possibly the greatest riddle in the universe: what is most of it made of?

SPACE.com: A commercial company is offering researchers a chance to fly in a plane that simulates weightless and low-gravity environments like the Moon, Mars, and Earth-orbit.

Zero Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G) announced the new program, known as ZERO-G Weightless Lab, on Thursday.

The lab flights cost about $30,000 (plus tax) and are open to academic, corporate, and government-agency customers.

redOrbit: Unless you're interested in isotopic labeling, neutrons don't figure much into chemistry. Neutral in charge and a bit bigger than a proton, the neutron neither gives an atom its name nor determines much about its reactivity.

But neutrons have some unsung properties that make them useful for investigating matter. Because they are neutral, they can penetrate deeper into a sample than electrons can. Because they have mass and spin, they have a magnetic moment and can probe magnetism. Because they interact with nuclei rather than electron orbitals, they are sensitive to light elements and can even distinguish between hydrogen and deuterium. And they're nondestructive. These features are inspiring researchers to use neutrons to analyze a variety of materials, from coal and complex fluids to cell membranes and membrane proteins and including magnetic materials.

Times Online: The UK research councils (RCUK), which oversees the UK government’s spending on science and technology, has said it believes that many of the obstacles associated with producing fusion power are close to being overcome.

The RCUK wants to commit Britain to a 20-year research and construction plan that would see a fusion power station in operation around 2030. Didcot in Oxfordshire is among the sites under consideration for the European High Power laser Energy Research (HiPER) project: a facility dedicated to demonstrating the feasibility of laser driven fusion as a future energy source.

Tallahassee Democrat: Florida State University lured Mike Wetz away from the University of North Carolina with the offer of an assistant professor position in FSU’s highly regarded Department of Oceanography.

Wetz’s first day at FSU was 23 December 2008. Less than six months later, in June 2009, Wetz received a layoff notice.

Wetz had done nothing wrong, by all accounts. He was one of five faculty members in his 15-person department whose positions were being eliminated as FSU decided to merge oceanography, geological sciences, and meteorology in the wake of massive reductions in state revenue.

Two of his colleagues being terminated are tenured, which traditionally means their positions are secure.

Geological sciences fared even worse, losing 6 of 13 positions including four tenured faculty. No positions were eliminated in meteorology.

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APS Meeting: Physics Today: Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have discovered some additional experimental hints of why there is matter in the universe by replicating the conditions of the first microseconds after the Big Bang.

The results from RHIC's Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (PHENIX) and STAR detector were discussed at the April meeting of the American Physical Society yesterday and published in Physical Review Letters.

When the Big Bang occurred, according to the symmetry rules that govern the universe, equal parts of matter and antimatter should have been created leading to all matter being annihilated. But this was not the case: Why?

A hot start

To find out, you have to replicate conditions of the early universe. RHIC can duplicate the conditions of the first microseconds by colliding gold atoms together near the speed of light. The resulting collision is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons into a quark gluon plasma, according to the PHENIX's researchers.

Predictions made prior to RHIC's initial operations in 2000 expected that the quark-gluon plasma would exist as a gas. But RHIC's first three years of operation showed that the matter produced at RHIC behaves as a liquid, whose constituent particles interact very strongly among themselves. This liquid matter has been described as nearly "perfect" in the sense that it flows with almost no frictional resistance, or viscosity. Such a "perfect" liquid doesn't fit with the picture of "free" quarks and gluons physicists had previously used to describe the quark-gluon plasma.

In papers published in 2005, RHIC physicists laid out a plan of crucial measurements to clarify the nature and constituents of this "perfect" liquid. Measuring the temperature early in the collisions was one of those goals. Models of the evolution of the matter produced in RHIC collisions had suggested that the initial temperature might be high enough to melt protons, but a more direct measurement of the temperature required detecting photons—particles of light—emitted near the beginning of the collision, which travel outward undisturbed by their surroundings.

"This was an extraordinarily challenging measurement," explained PHENIX spokesperson Barbara Jacak. "There are many ways that photons can be produced in these violent collisions. We were able to 'eliminate' the contribution from these other sources by exploiting RHIC's flexibility to measure them directly and to make the same measurement in collisions of protons, rather than of gold nuclei. Thus we could pin down excess production in the gold-gold collisions, and determine the temperature of the matter that radiated the excess photons. By matching theoretical models of the expanding plasma to the data, we can determine that the initial temperature of the 'perfect' liquid has reached about four trillion degrees Celsius." At its hottest stage, the infusion may reach 7 trillion °C.

"This is the hottest matter ever created in the laboratory" and qualifies as the "highest temperature known in our present universe," said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, who oversees research at RHIC.

Breaking the universe's rules

Cosmologists have predicted that the solution to this dichotomy of why equal amounts of matter and antimatter were not created would be bubbles or local regions in which there would be a breakdown in the existing rules governing the behavior of particles in the universe.

The symmetry "rule" suggests that events should occur in exactly the same way whether seen directly or in a mirror, with no directional dependence. But STAR has observed regions in the quark-gluon plasma at the heart of the RHIC collisions in which asymmetric charge separations occurs.

STAR observed that positively charged quarks may prefer to emerge parallel to the magnetic field in a given collision event, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. Because this preference would appear reversed if the situation were reflected through a mirror, it appears to violate mirror symmetry.

"In all previous studies of systems governed by the strong force among quarks and gluons, it has been found to very high precision that events and their mirror reflections occur at exactly the same rate, with no directional dependence," said Vigdor. "So this observation at STAR is truly intriguing."

STAR data also suggest the local breaking of another form of symmetry, known as charge conjugation–parity or CP invariance. According to this fundamental physics principle, when energy is converted to mass or vice versa according to Einstein's famous E=mc² equation, equal numbers of particles and oppositely charged antiparticles must be created or annihilated. If CP symmetry had not been broken at some very early time in the evolution of our universe, the particles and antiparticles created in equal numbers in the Big Bang would subsequently have annihilated one another in pairs, leaving no matter to form the galaxies, stars, planets.

While some small violations of CP symmetry have been found in previous laboratory experiments, those violations are far too weak to account for the amount of matter remaining in the universe today.

"These new results thus suggest that RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles," said Vigdor.

The signs of possible local CP violation at STAR cannot completely explain the global predominance of matter in today's universe, but they may offer some insight into how such symmetry violations occur. CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which restarts this week, will eventually produce collisions 3 times more powerful than those at RHIC to see if this quark-gluon plasma actually does transition into a gas.

RHIC will be upgraded over the next few years to investigate these broken symmetry effects more closely but there could also be less sexy explanations for the observed charge separation, said Berndt Mueller, a theorist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to ScienceNOW's Lauren Schenkman. If more refined analyses do turn up conclusive evidence of parity violation, it would be like mining for silver and finding gold, said Mueller.

Paul Guinnessy

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In Brookhaven collider, scientists briefly break a law of nature New York Times
Particle collision puts twist in early universe ScienceNOW

Arizona Daily Star: These are heady times for solar astronomers, with the Solar Dynamics Observatory launched and accelerated funding found for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope situated on Haleakala Peak, on Hawaii's Maui Island.

But the new facilities come at a cost. The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope which has been based on Kitt Peak since 1962, could close as funding for other areas of solar astronomy face a tight squeeze.

Science: In the natural sciences, x-ray crystallography has clarified how the shapes of proteins and related complexes relate to their cellular function, and x-ray scattering has elucidated the structure and dynamics, mechanical properties, and intermolecular interactions of countless materials.

In Science, H. Cui and coworkers report a new twist in the application of x-ray scattering, where synchrotron x-ray irradiation, in addition to its usual role in probing structure, acts as a reversible switch for self-assembly from a disordered to an ordered state of bundled filaments.

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Nature Physics: A new detailed analysis of the melting point of diamond suggests that Neptune and Uranus could contain liquid diamond oceans.

Measuring the melting point of a diamond is very difficult because usually when it's heated to very high temperatures diamond changes to graphite. To get round this researchers applied extremely high levels of pressure to diamonds and blasted them with lasers to reach 50,000 degrees—similar to temperature and pressure conditions found in the outer planets.

When diamond is melted it behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms of diamond "icebergs" floating atop liquid forms.

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Wired.com: The long-distance scientific recordings of the blast wave from the first hydrogen bomb test have been rediscovered in a formerly classified safe at Columbia University.

On 1 November 1952, the US created a 10-megaton blast that set off a low-frequency sound wave, which was recorded halfway around the world at special listening stations designed by the Lamont Geological Observatory in Palisades, New York.

It was the first time a nuclear explosion had been detected from such a long distance and it marked the beginning of international test monitoring, a key element of nuclear nonproliferation plans.

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washingtonpost.com: The work of physicists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute requires such precise environmental controls that some of the more sensitive experiments have to be run in the middle of the night, when there is less traffic and fewer vibrations outside.

Soon, sleepy grad students will get some relief. The university has announced that it had been awarded $10.3 million in stimulus funds to build an underground laboratory for advanced quantum science.

Symmetry breaking: A Fermilab shipment of cavities to the Japanese laboratory KEK marks a major milestone in the advancement of US particle accelerator technology and the development of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC).

Fermilab has shipped two high-gradient nine-cell ILC-type cavities for use in the S1-global effort, a prototype at KEK of the ILC main linac.

Wired.com: The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project, a joint project between NASA and the German space agency, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt, had its first test flight last month over the Mojave desert.

The converted 747SP flies to a high enough altitude to get above 99% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, making the instrument ideal for carrying out infrared observations of the night sky. IR radiation is generally absorbed by water vapor.

“The biggest modification is that we cut a huge hole in the side of the fuselage” is what NASA spokesman Alan Brown said when asked about the airplane by Wired.com, “it’s about 15 feet long.”

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The Guardian: What are chemists, physicists, and engineers working on in the quietest building in the world? The Guardian's Louise Tickle visit's Bristol University's new Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information to find out why improvements in energy efficiency using nanodiamonds require access to a quiet room.

washingtonpost.com: Civilization can now track the passage of time with an accuracy of three or four parts in 10 million billion, equivalent to gaining or losing no more than one second in 100 million years or so.

But for a host of urgent purposes from fundamental physics to neuroscience and defense applications that's not good enough.

So scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency responsible for the clock-tech that determines official US time, are busily trying out new ways to slice it into pieces that are hundreds of times smaller than today's smallest.

NYTimes.com: During the holiday season, many people place toy trains on circular tracks beneath their Christmas trees.

Last month, at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, physicists and engineers built tracks inside one of its fusion reactors and ran a toy train on them for three days.

It was not an exercise in silliness, but in calibration.

The modified model of a diesel train engine was carrying a small chunk of californium-252, a radioactive element that spews neutrons as it falls apart.

“We needed to refine the calibration technique to make sure we are measuring our neutrons as accurately as possible,” said Masa Ono, the project head of the National Spherical Torus Experiment.

CDMS group/Physics Today: The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment, located a half mile underground at the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota claims to have seen two events that may be dark matter. The evidence however, is not conclusive, but does limit the interaction range for seeing dark matter, and rules out some theories on how dark matter behaves.

A more detailed story will appear on the Physics Today Update section on the 28 December.

What is dark matter?

Astronomical observations from telescopes, and satellites, and measurements of the cosmic microwave background have led scientists to believe that most of the matter in the universe neither emits nor absorbs light.

This dark matter would have provided the gravitational scaffolding that caused normal matter to coalesce into the galaxies we see today. In particular, scientists think that our own galaxy is embedded within an enormous cloud of dark matter. As our solar system rotates around the galaxy, it moves through this cloud.

Particle physics theories suggest that dark matter may be composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Scientists expect these particles to have masses comparable to, or perhaps heavier than, atomic nuclei.

Although such WIMPs would rarely interact with normal matter, they may occasionally scatter from an atomic nucleus like billiard balls, leaving a small amount of energy that might be detectable under the right conditions.

Detecting WIMPS

The CDMS experiment uses 30 germanium and silicon detectors in an attempt to detect such WIMP scatters.

The detectors are cooled to temperatures very near absolute zero.

Particle interactions in the crystalline detectors deposit energy in the form of heat, and in the form of charges that move in an applied electric field. Special sensors detect these signals, which are then amplified and recorded in computers for later study.

A comparison of the size and relative timing of these two signals can allow the experimenters to distinguish whether the particle that interacted in the crystal was a WIMP or one of the numerous known particles that come from radioactive decays, or from space in the form of cosmic rays.

These background particles must be highly suppressed if we are to see a WIMP signal. Layers of shielding materials, as well as the half-mile of rock above the experiment, are used to limit the background "noise."

New results

The CDMS experiment has been searching for dark matter at Soudan since 2003. Previous data have not yielded evidence for WIMPs, but have provided assurance that the backgrounds have been suppressed to the level where as few as one WIMP interaction per year could have been detected.

The CDMS group is now reporting on a new data set taken in 2007-08, which approximately doubles the sum of all past data sets.

With each new data set, the CDMS group must carefully evaluate the performance of each of the detectors, excluding periods when they were not operating properly.

Detector operation is assessed by frequent exposure to sources of two types of radiation: gamma rays and neutrons.

Gamma rays are the principal source of normal matter background in the experiment.

Neutrons are the only type of normal matter particles that will interact with germanium nuclei in the billiard ball style that WIMPs would, although neutrons frequently scatter in more than one of our detectors.

Those calibration data are carefully studied to see how well a WIMP-like signal (produced by neutrons) can be seen over a background (produced by gamma rays).

The expectation is that no more than one background event would be expected to be visible in the region of the data where WIMPs should appear.

Since background and signal regions overlap somewhat, achievement of this background level required the CDMUS group to throw out roughly 2/3 of the data that might contain WIMPs, because these data would contain too many background events.

All of the data analysis is done without looking at the data region that might contain WIMP events. This standard scientific technique, sometimes referred to as "blinding," is used to avoid the unintentional bias that might lead one to keep events that have some of the characteristics of WIMP interactions but that are really from background sources.

After all of the data selection criteria have been completed, and detailed estimates of background "leakage" into the WIMP signal region are made, the CDMUS group must "open the box" and see if there are any WIMP events present.

In this new data set there are indeed two events seen with characteristics consistent with those expected from WIMPs.

However, there is also a chance that both events could be due to background particles. A strict set of criteria for determine whether a new discovery has been made, in essence that the ratio of signal to background events must be large enough that there is no reasonable doubt.

Typically there must be less than one chance in a thousand of the signal being due to background. In this case, a signal of about 5 events would have met those criteria. The CDMS group estimate that there is about a one in four chance to have seen two backgrounds events, so the CDMS group is not claiming to have discovered WIMPs.

Instead they say that the rate of WIMP interactions with nuclei must be less than a particular value that depends on the mass of the WIMP. The numerical values obtained for these interaction rates from this data set are more stringent than those obtained from previous data for most WIMP masses predicted by theories.

Such upper limits are still quite valuable in eliminating a number of theories that might explain dark matter.

What comes next?

While the same set of detectors could be operated at Soudan for many more years to see if more WIMP events appear, this would not take advantage of new detector developments and would try the patience of even the most stalwart experimenters (not to mention theorists). A better way to increase the sensitivity to WIMPs is to increase the number (or mass) of detectors that might see them, while still maintaining the CDMS group's ability to keep backgrounds under control.

This is precisely what CDMS experimenters (and many other collaborations worldwide) are now in the process of doing. By summer of 2010, the CDMS group hopes to have about three times more germanium nuclei sitting near absolute zero at Soudan, patiently waiting for WIMPs to come along and provide the perfect billiard ball shots that will offer compelling evidence for the direct detection of dark matter in the laboratory.

Vanityfair.com: Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless.

The LHC is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours.

It's also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The LHC is not merely the world's largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.

The goal--and it's a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty--is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.

In other words, it's one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.

Wired.com: Inspired by videos of renowned hacker Johnny Chung Lee who turned the $40 Nintendo Wiimote remote controller into a finger-tracking device and a touchscreen white board, physicist Rolf Hut of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has built a Wiimote wind sensor.

"It was just a bendy pole with an empty bottle on top with an LED light on the bottle," Hut said. "And it swayed in the wind."

The Wiimote can track just about anything: All that's needed is an LED light. Hydrologist Willem Luxemburg, also from Delft University of Technology demonstrated a hacked water-level sensor made from a Wiimote and a plastic boat at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Physics Today: The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider has posted on its website evidence of a record-beating series of proton collisions at 2.36 TeV (1.18 TeV per beam). The previous record holder was Fermilab's Tevatron (at 1.96 TeV collisions).

The collider became the world's most powerful accelerator on 29 November. Since then CERN staff have been increasing the beam intensity, which in turn increases the number of potential collisions that can occur.

The speed at which the LHC is becoming operational has only been surpassed by the speed at which the first LHC paper using collision data was prepared and submitted by the ALICE collaboration. The paper was accepted by the European Physical Journal C on December 1.

The LHC is scheduled to shut down on 18 December for a two-week winter break. Early next year the beams will be increased in energy, first to 2 TeV and then up to 3.5 TeV, roughly half of the final operational energies the machine is expected to run at later in its lifetime.

One unknown side effect to the delays the LHC has faced this year is how expensive running the LHC during the winter will be to CERN. In past years high-energy experiments were shut down for winter, partly to conduct maintenance but also because electricity rates are 45% higher than in the summer.

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Paul Guinnessy

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.

latimes.com: A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to "major deficiencies" in the nuclear weapons lab's safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.

The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to "execute both immediate and long-term actions."

USA Today: Ever since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which gave federally funded university researchers the right to license their inventions as a way to spur innovation and economic growth, technology transfer offices have sprung up all over, with steady growth.

In 1991, US universities filed 1,335 patents and received $130 million in royalties. In 2005, they filed 9,306 patents and received $1.8 billion in royalties.

At some universities, the policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university.

But contracts researchers have with industry may be worded slightly differently and state an inventor "will assign and do hereby assign" his or her rights to the funder, which can lead to court cases arising over who owns the innovation rights.

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Various: No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says the New York Times.

...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.

They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...

Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos scientist points out that some of the extra care concerning explosives may be unwarranted. LANL used to blow up old explosives on a frequent basis in the area close to the dump, and Rofer suspects that:

...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.

Various: In a talk entitled Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us, given to science writers attending the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual symposium, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin gave his opinion of what the LHC will discover.

The LHC will eventually attain sufficient energy to produce the Higgs boson, he says, but evidence of supersymmetry is a much more speculative possibility.

"If the Congress had not had the imbecility to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider [in 1993], it would have been discovered long ago here in Texas," says Weinberg in comments reported by Tom Siegfried of Science News.

"Many of us are terrified that the LHC will discover a Higgs particle and nothing more," Weinberg said. That would just confirm the standard model, which everybody believes already. It would not point the way to further progress in solving a deeper problem that physics faces—how to add gravity to the unified theory of the other forces.

Peter Woit of "Not Even Wrong" says that what he found interesting about Weinberg’s talk was that, "whatever Weinberg’s views on more speculative theories in physics such as extra dimensions or string theory landscape, he decided not to mention these at all in his talk."

"As a result, both questioners wanted to ask Weinberg about string theory, which he hadn’t talked about, not about the solid science he did talk about," says Woit.

String theory or superstring theory, is one of the candidates for unifying all the forces in the universe into one theory.

If the LHC creates new particles generated by supersymmetry, then clues to what makes up the bulk of dark matter in the universe would be found, which may give some tangible evidence to whether string theory is correct.

But string theory to this point has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence. Weinberg said:

"It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress... I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think that supersymmetry is the most likely place to look."

"One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work... I mean I couldn’t say that it was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect."

"I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because... I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics... and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enough…"

Physics Today: The next generation of energy efficient houses appeared in Washington this week as part of the Department of Energy's 2009 solar decathlon competition (pdf).

The competition, held on the Washington Mall, judged 20 homes based on aesthetics, functionality and energy measurements.

The University of Minnesota's 565 sq. ft solar home called ICON cost half a million dollars to build and came 5th in the competition.

Student's have to design in factors such as is there enough solar thermal hot water for the big and small dishwashers in the kitchen and the clothes washer in a cabinet next to the small bathroom? Was the temperature in the house just right? What about the humidity? Exactly how much power would the appliances, along with the lights—mostly LEDs—draw from the photovoltaic cells that covered the roof and south-facing wall?


"We build [ICON] specifically for the Minnesota climate," said Shona Mosites, a senior studying interior design at the University of Minnesota.


Like all of the houses in the competition, the Minnesota house is compact—about the size of a large house trailer. It is extremely energy efficient, producing more electricity during the day than it uses and feeding the excess into the regional power grid. At night, when the sun is down, the house draws from the grid, but less than it feeds into the system during the day.

And like all of the other houses, the ICON house makes extensive use of green materials.

"The sliding panels are made of recycled material, and the maple flooring is two-thirds reclaimed wood," Mosites said.

A difficult road trip

At the other end of the Mall, the team from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was struggling. The team was in last place, and were struggling to get the house's sliding doors to move smoothly on their tracks. Their house, valued at $485,000, had tabletops made out of pressed paper and cashew shells and the ability to warm up just from the heat of the people inside.

But its last-place standing reflected a 3-inch problem in the design.

"The west end of the house was 3 inches too tall to go through Indiana [on the transport trailer]," said Eric Davis, the project's chief engineer. "So we had to go down through Illinois, then cross Kentucky."

There was another height regulation problem when they got to the edge of Washington, and it took another 20 hours to finally get their structure to the National Mall. While the other teams were fine tuning their home's systems, the Wisconsin team was still wearing hard hats and putting their house together.

"We missed the metering contest, so our score is down," Davis said.

The houses that make up the high-tech Solar Village are mostly from universities, shipped in multiple pieces from around the world. Germany, Spain and two teams from consortiums of Canadian universities also have entries in the competition. And the event is drawing crowds, with long lines of people waiting to tour the houses.

"About 2,000 people come through our house each day," said Thomas Rauch, media liaison and team member of Penn State University's Natural Fusion house.

The energy produced by these small structures, each limited to 800 square feet, powers all of the lighting, appliances and air conditioning within. And on sunny days, when the houses produce more electricity than is needed, they pump the extra energy directly into the regional electrical grid that powers the metro area.

The German team's house often gives back twice as much energy as it uses—enough in one day to light 400 incandescent light bulbs for one hour.

Home improvement

US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu helped to kick-off the event on Oct 8 (see picture left. Chu is on the right. Photo credit: DOE) by describing his own home-improvement experiences while working to make his home more energy efficient. "I started doing this long before I knew about climate change. And I have to confess the only reason I was doing that is because I'm fundamentally cheap," he said.

Chu said that during his time at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California he became convinced that houses could be made 75 or 80 percent more efficient in terms of energy usage—before adding any solar panels. He also announced an additional $87 million in DOE funding to further the solar research on display in the homes.

Several of the houses are smart phone-enabled—the interior lighting and temperature can be changed remotely with an iPhone application. Others adjust interior conditions automatically, using sensors that monitor time and weather data to tint electrochemical windows and dim light levels.