Good grief - Yoda was right!...  

We may have found "THE FORCE".

This could be the announcement we've all been waiting for.
As soon as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revved up its supercooled electromagnets in 2008 -- which promptly "quenched" (read: broke down in a very expensive way) and then restarted the following year -- it's been the one piece of news the world has been eagerly awaiting: confirmation of the discovery of one of the Universe's most secretive particles -- the Higgs boson.
After gazillions of particle collisions and countless rumors of Higgs discoveries, we have... yet another rumor of a Higgs discovery. But this time, the rumor seems to be meatier than ever.
...
According to comments left on a number of particle physics blogs, the word is that the LHC is closing in on the Higgs.
The Higgs boson is theorized to be the "force carrier" of the Higgs field -- a field thought to permeate the entire Universe, endowing matter with mass. Only by using powerful particle accelerators like the LHC do we stand a chance of seeing these mysterious particles. [More]

I can't wait for Sheldon to explain it all on an upcoming The Big Bang Theory.

[Insert your joke here]

And also with you.

Sometimes Advil's not enough...

As someone who has tried vigorously to make it all the way through "A Brief History of Time" on several occasions, and has little understanding to show for it, the new ideas floating around quantum physics don't seem to fit into my skull.

Quantum physics is the study of the very small -- atoms, photons and other particles. Unlike the cause-and-effect of our everyday physical world, subatomic particles defy common sense and behave in wacky ways. That includes the fact that a photon, which is a particle of light, exists in a haze of multiple behaviors. They spin in many ways, such as "up" or "down," at the same time. Even trickier, it's only when you take a peek -- by measuring it -- that the photon fixes into a particular state of spin.
Stranger still is entanglement. When two photons get "entangled" they behave like a joint entity. Even when they're miles apart, if the spin of one particle is changed, the spin of the other instantly changes, too. This direct influence of one object on another distant one is called non-locality.
...


Last year, Dr. Gisin and colleagues at Geneva University described how they had entangled a pair of photons in their lab. They then fired them, along fiber-optic cables of exactly equal length, to two Swiss villages some 11 miles apart.
During the journey, when one photon switched to a slightly higher energy level, its twin instantly switched to a slightly lower one. But the sum of the energies stayed constant, proving that the photons remained entangled.
More important, the team couldn't detect any time difference in the changes. "If there was any communication, it would have to have been at least 10,000 times the speed of light," says Dr. Gisin. "Because this is such an unlikely speed, the conclusion is there couldn't have been communication and so there is non-locality." [More]

Say what?

 Which leads me to situations like this:



Pass the medicinal gin, please.

To kill a gram...

Something funny is going on with the kilogram. I blame the French. (Of course, don't Americans always blame the French?) Anyhoo, the Frogs are in charge of the Sacred Kilogram of Destiny - or whatever. And they screwed it up, of course.

About every 50 years, the national prototypes are returned to the headquarters of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France, to be compared with the International Prototype. During the first major comparison about 1950, scientists noticed discrepancies between the average masses of Le Grand K and its copies. They were concerned but could not discern a trend.

Science was already grappling with inconsistencies in other units and was trying to replace the pieces of metal and other artifacts that delineated the old world. The meter, for example, was changed in 1960 from two scratches on a platinum-iridium bar to a certain number of wavelengths of light emitted from a particular kind of krypton. In 1983, it was changed again to the distance traveled by light in a specific fraction of a second.

At the last major kilogram comparison done in and around 1990, some copies had gained as much as 132 micrograms. A few had lost up to 665 micrograms. The United States' No. 20 was 18 micrograms heavier.

There was no way to tell which was changing: Le Grand K, its copies or both.

Perhaps the platinum in the cylinders was sopping up mercury from the atmosphere. Maybe dissolved gas was escaping from the cylinders. One idea was that cleaning the cylinders with distilled water and ether had altered their weights.

"Nobody has a really good idea why," said Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. "It's all speculation." [More]

Personally, I think it is second-hand cholesterol. My theory is I gain weight just by passing a Long John Silver's, and this could solve the mystery of the fluctuating kilogram.

Of course, all this could have been avoided by using God-fearing ounces and lbs.

[via 3 quarks]

Some of you lucky guys...

Have had tons of rain.

[via ScienceBlogs]

Cool water...

You think you know all about something and then you see this:

When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. [More]

Water is an amazing substance. How can we still keep learning new things about it?

One thing we do know, there isn't nearly enough of it in the Southeast.

Lake Lanier, the water source that serves a third of Georgia's residents, only has a 4 month's supply of water. Forecasters predict the drought could last months, and residents should look for news ways to conserve.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin says, the city has cut water use by not watering parks. She says maintaining water supplies for drinking and fighting fires is the primary concern. Atlanta commissioner for the Department of Watershed Management, Rob Hunter says Lake Lanier has a 121 day supply of water. He says reducing consumption is key. He offered residents several suggestions: take shorter showers, repair leaky faucets and pipes, and cut outdoor water usage. [More]

What happens when Atlanta runs dry?

You don't know nothing...

Not rude, poor grammar like it sounds. Twenty Things You Didn't Know About Nothing.

Example:

17 But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other in about 10-25 second.

18 So Aristotle was right all along.

19 These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn’t equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.

[via PreSurfer]

Raising the intellectual level...

Perhaps like some of us, you never really understood Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Afraid to admit it, weren't you? Well, good news, citizen. Here's an explanation in words of four letters or less.

Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay. Now, let's add the bed back. Your bed is with you in the void. But not for long -- it goes away from you. You don't have any way to get it back, so you just let it go. But so now we have a body in the void with you. So does the bed move, or do you move? Or both? Well, you can see as well as I that it can go any way you like. Flip a coin. Who's to say? It's best to just say that you move away from the bed, and that the bed goes away from you. No one can say who's held fast and who isn't. [More]

I'm glad we had this little talk.

Next week: how they get the cream filling in Twinkies.

A beginner's guide to polonium...

Jeez - you couldn't write a suspense novel any weirder than this. A former (?) Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was apparently poisoned with polonium-210. And now its showing up on British planes.

The case of the poisoned former KGB agent took a bizarre twist when British Airways said that traces of radiation had been detected Wednesday on jets that flew between London and Moscow, establishing a possible Russian link and indicating that more than 30,000 people may have been exposed to radiation.

The airline said tests found "very low traces" of radioactivity on one of three Boeing 767s that flew between London and Moscow days before Alexander Litvinenko fell ill from the radioactive poison that doctors say killed him. [More]

And everything you need to know about polonium.

¹⁰Po

Polonium-210 is an alpha emitter that has a half-life of 138.376 days. A milligram of ²¹⁰Po emits as many alpha particles as 5 grams of radium. A great deal of energy is released by its decay with half a gram quickly reaching a temperature above 750 K. A few curies (1 curie equals 37 gigabecquerels) of ²¹⁰Po emit a blue glow which is caused by excitation of surrounding air. A single gram of ²¹⁰Po generates 140 watts of power.^[9] Because it emits many alpha particles, which are stopped within a very short distance in dense media and release their energy, ²¹⁰Po has been used as a lightweight heat source to power thermoelectric cells in artificial satellites. A ²¹⁰Po heat source was also used in each of the Lunokhod rovers deployed on the surface of the Moon, to keep their internal components warm during the lunar nights. Some anti-static brushes contain up to 500 microcuries of ²¹⁰Po as a source of charged particles for neutralizing static electricity in materials like photographic film.^[10] The majority of the time ²¹⁰Po decays only by emission of an alpha particle, not by emission of an alpha particle and a gamma ray. About one in a 100000 decays results in the emission of a gamma ray[4], this low gamma ray production rate makes it more difficult to find and identify this isotope. Rather than gamma ray spectroscopy, alpha spectroscopy will be the best method of measuring this isotope.

The important detail is the part about being an alpha-emitter. Alpha particles are very large and consequently bump into other nuclei easily, so a sheet of paper can stop them. However, if an alpha-emitter is lodged in your lung or other internal organs, it will definitely be close enough to sensitive tissue to cause damage. This is also the problem with plutonium as well. But it needs to be inside you - not around you.

So don't worry about dying from radiation planted by Russian spymasters. Worry about them controlling the market for natural gas.

I'm just here to help.