LHC To Start Up Next Week, Vacuum Bubbles to Follow November 13, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science.Tags: LHC, Mini black holes, Physics, Vacuum Bubbles
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After helium leaks and birds dropping pastries shut down the Large Hadron Collider for months at a time, CERN says it’ll start it up again next week. Stand by for vacuum bubbles and/or mini black holes.
CERN is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider could circulate particle beams through both of its pipes in just over a week. If all goes well, the first collisions would begin soon after that.
The LHC has had a rough time since it first started up in September last year. Just a week after it started up, an electrical problem shut it down again. The first down-time estimate was a day or so, then it became months. And when the repair was just about finished, vacuum leaks in July set it back several more months. It has now been more than a year.
LHC Cools Down October 16, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science, Technology.Tags: Large Hadron Collider, Mini black holes, Particle Physics, Physics, Vacuum Bubbles
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The Large Hadron Collider has now reached its operating temperature of 1.9K. Can whirring protons be far behind?
Stand by for vacuum bubbles and/or mini black holes.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | LHC gets colder than deep space.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.
All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) – colder than deep space.
The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.
The magnets are arranged end-to-end in a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border.
The cool-down is an important milestone ahead of the collider’s scheduled re-start in the latter half of November.
The LHC has been shut down since 19 September 2008, when a magnet problem called a “quench” caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the LHC tunnel.
Large Hadron Collider: Sabotage From The Future October 15, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science, Technology.Tags: Higgs Boson, Large Hadron Collider, Mini black holes, Physics, Time Travelers, Vacuum Bubbles
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Oh, yes! Saboteurs from the future are keeping the Large Hadron Collider from starting up, since that will cause vacuum bubbles or mini black holes that could destroy the universe, and/or the earth, respectively.
Woohoo!! You go, time travelers. Stop in, we’ll have coffee and chat.
Big assist to William Gibson for this article found at Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future? – Large hardron collider – io9.
What if all the Large Hadron Collider’s recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.
The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider’s streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn’t bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.
Sunspots, At Last September 24, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science.Tags: Solar Activity, Astronomy, Sun Spots
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They’re back!
Photo: The Sun Gets Its Spots (Back) | Wired Science | Wired.com.
Two sunspots are visible on our star’s face for the first time in more than a year, possibly ending an unexpected lull in solar activity.
Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, so scientists thought sunspot activity would pick up some time in 2008. It didn’t. And this year has been quiet, too. No sunspots have been visible on the sun for 80 percent of the days this year.
Sunspot activity is correlated with the total amount of energy we receive from the sun. If the sun’s activity were to change remarkably, it would have an influence on global climate. So, in the context of climate change, the fact that the current solar minimum has been the longest and deepest in more than a century has been of special interest.
Thin-Film Solar Cells Near Production September 10, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science, Technology.Tags: Nanostar, Thin Film Solar Cells
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Wired froths over thin-film solar cells. I’ll see if Nanostar can deliver in volume production before passing judgement.
Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts | Wired Science | Wired.com.
A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry.
Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days.
Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.
Swine Flu Vaccine: Beware the Side Effects (Like Death) August 16, 2009
Posted by Joey in Economics, Medicine, Politics, Science, Unintended Consequences.Tags: H1N1, Swine Flu, Swine Flu Hysteria, Swine Flu Vaccine
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Doesn’t anyone, anywhere, remember the 1976 swine flu outbreak? That swine flu vaccine killed more people than the virus. Are we destined to repeat the same stupidity again here in 2009?
Probably.
A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter.
The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.
It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine.
Large Hadron Collider: Our Magnets Need Retraining August 3, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science, Technology.Tags: CERN, Large Hadron Collider, Particle Physics, Physics, Superconducting Magnets
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More woes at the Large Hadron Collider. Some magnets need retraining if the LHC is to reach the designed energy of 7 TeV.
The universe is still safe, for now, from vacuum bubbles and mini black holes.
Large Hadron Collider Fizzles, Adding to the Mysteries of Life.
All of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion electron volts before being installed, Dr. Myers said, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings’ eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.
In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.
Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy. “It looks like we can get to 6.5 relatively easily,” Dr. Myers said, but seven trillion electron volts would require “a lot of training.”
Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. If that were the case, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is on one of the CERN collider teams, “It’s not the end of the world. I am not pessimistic at all.”
For the immediate future, however, physicists are not even going to get that. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 trillion electron volts.
Hubble: I’m Back! July 24, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science.Tags: Astronomy, Hubble Space Telescope, Jupiter
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It’s alive, it’s well, it’s got a great picture of the Jupiter impact.
Hubble Takes Snapshot of Jupiter’s ‘Black Eye’.
A team of astronomers used the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to snap a picture of Jupiter’s new black eye on Thursday.
The spot, roughly 5,000 miles long, according to the Hubble team, led by Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., was formed when a small comet or other object crashed into the giant planet on Sunday. It was discovered Sunday night by an amateur astronomer in Australia, Anthony Wesley, who sounded an alert that has had all telescope eyes turning to Jupiter.
Thirty Meter Telescope July 21, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets, Science, Technology.Tags: Astronomy, Thirty Meter Telescope
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When civilizations build giant monuments to their professed prowess, you can expect that civilization will fall. Soon.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Thirty Meter Telescope.
Mammoth Telescope to Be Built in Hawaii.
Hawaii beat out Chile to become the site of the Thirty-Meter Telescope, which is scheduled to be completed in 2018.
The giant telescope will have a single primary mirror that measures 30 meters across and is made up of 492 segments, giving it nine times more collecting surface than the the biggest telescopes on Earth today.
The Thirty-Meter Telescope will surpass even the Hubble Space Telescope in some ways, giving scientists a new view of some of the oldest stars and galaxies in the universe, as well as planets orbiting nearby stars.
Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the site of the Keck and Subaru telescopes, was among five candidate sites selected based on a global satellite assessment of atmosphere and climate variables. After further studies, Hawaii and Cerro Amazones in Chile rose to the top of the list.
LHC: Destruction of the Universe Delayed July 20, 2009
Posted by Joey in Science, Technology.Tags: CERN, Large Hadron Collider, Mini black holes, Vacuum Bubbles
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The world’s largest boondoggle, the Large Hadron Collider, is leaking. Again. The universe is, therefore, safe until November from destruction from vacuum bubbles and / or mini black holes.
Party like it’s 1999.
Just as CERN finished repairing the damage last September’s Large Hadron Collider helium leak, a new problem cropped up.
Engineers discovered two vacuum leaks in areas of the enormous atom smasher that are supposed to be maintained at ultracold temperatures. They’ll have to warm those areas up to complete the repairs, which will set back the project another couple of months.
Now, it won’t be ready for new particle beams until mid-November. Late last year, CERN foresaw the LHC back up and running in July 2009. In February, the schedule was pushed back to September, and now we probably shouldn’t expect actual particle beams until late November.
