Daily science stuff

[Asso]

[enterprikayak]

because of the quark-gluon plasma stage of the big bang

...of course...




(and I accuse Lee of using too many machinist terms)

[Entilzha]

The LHC is online now and the world hasn't ended

[Elessar]

The LHC is online now and the world hasn't ended

Not to defend the claims, but 'the things' that critics think will happen are a result of its maximum power collisions, which won't actually happen for awhile yet.

[Entilzha]

So doomsday is postponed

[Entilzha]

New Nano Device Detects Immune System Cell Signaling http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080903172412.htm.
Childbirth Was Already Difficult For Neanderthals http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080908203013.htm.
Astronomers Discover Missing Link For Origin Of Comets http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080904151635.htm.
Valley Networks On Mars Formed During Long Period Of Episodic Flooding http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080908185320.htm.
First Beam For Large Hadron Collider http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080910091627.htm.
Your daily fix of science

[Elessar]

THANKS Enty

Someone mentioned in the "LHC rap" thread that the science went over their heads - I think it does most people, so I'm going to break down some basics of it so the 'holy cow' ness of this can be appreciated. Cuz I'm holy cowing over here

To explain the energy significance to anyone curious, in numbers, they measure the impact power of particle accelerators in electron-volts, the energy necessary to push one electron through a 1-volt potential. Now you can create a particle accelerator yourself by just rigging up a 9-volt battery with each lead connected to a plate, the second plate being a grid such that the electrons will flow through it and not stop. This kind of accelerator is very basic and old fashioned and gets a few KeV (thousand) of electron-volts.

Apparently a lot of medical equipment (MRIs n such) produce beams of about 6-30 MeV, MeV=1,000,000 eV. The Stanford Linear Accelerator that was big in the 60's could produce 50-100 GeV (billion). I believe it peaked at 90 GeV when it first observed the Z-boson (mediator of the weak force).

Fermilab in Chicago has been up to today the most powerful accelerator in the world. It was capable of pushing up to 450 GeV until around 1989 when it was refitted up to 2 TeV (trillion). Before the LHC upgrade, CERN's LEP collider was capable of producing a max of 210 GeV.

There was also going to be an accelerator at Brookhaven National Labs in Upton, NY until Congress axed their funding as well - after spending like $200 million. Luckily they salvaged some of what they built and used it at the collider already there. ISABELLE it was called, was supposed to reach 20 TeV, but never got off the ground.

The LHC's new power is supposed to be a max of 14 TeV, where they expect to find some new stuff we've never seen before. In principle, there's nothing new about the collisions going on at the LHC that are being considered dangerous by the people who think they'll create black holes or strangelets - it's just that the beams they're shooting into one another are moving more quickly and hence with more power than ever before.

Actually, the United States was going to maintain our crown as holding the most powerful accelerator in world when we were going to build the Texas Supercollider, but Congress axed the funding even after they spent a few hundred million dollars digging HUGE trenches and building CAVERNOUSLY large complex buildings out in the middle of nowhere. They're contracting the buildings out now to the military to run exercises and eventually I think they hope to turn it into a data center. The Texas SCC was supposed to reach 40 TeV.

Basically, the higher the energy level of the collision you can produce, the "closer" the conditions you are creating get to the spark of the Big Bang and hence the closer you get to a unification temperature - or a temperature where the 4 forces all couple to one another and you get unified force mediators. A force mediator is a particle that communicates one of the forces in nature. The most every-day obvious one is the photon, light, which mediates electromagnetism. We don't always think about light, radio waves, static electricity, and lightning as all involving the movement of photons, but they do -- photons exchanged between electrons cause the energy transfer in all these phenomena. The same is true of the W and Z bosons for the weak force (which causes radiation of alpha particles) and of the gluon which mediates the strong force (holds protons/neutrons together in the nucleus). Physicists think something mediates gravitation, but haven't found its particle yet.

I believe they think that at high enough temperatures and energies, they're going to see higher dimensional behavior in the particles being produced, proving that gravitation IS united with the other 3 forces, but only at incredibly high energies and in extra dimensions. They have always wondered why gravitation is far weaker in intensity than any of the other forces, and they got the idea maybe 20 years ago that it might be because gravity acts over several more physical dimensions than we are aware of. Sort of like if you had a finite amount of jello to coat a square plate of glass with, it would be a certain thickness. If you had the same amount of jello to coat all 6 sides of a cube with, with each side one of those square glass plates, then the thickness of jello on each side would be a lot thinner. Same idea. Gravity acting in multiple dimensions makes it weaker in our 3.

[Entilzha]

First Picture Of Likely Planet Around Sun-like Star http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080915162420.htm

[Entilzha]

Transformer glitch shuts down biggest atom smasher http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080918/ap_on_re_eu/eu_big_bang.

[Elessar]

First observation of Earth-like planet FORMING:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2008 ... s_away.htm

And it's only 430 LY away . An antimatter probe at .66c would only take 650 years to get there .

Also, planet finding project could detect signs of habitable planets around Vulcan star :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 081331.htm

[Entilzha]

Already booking the next flight to Vulcan

[Asso]

Already booking the next flight to Vulcan

[CX]

The Large Hadron Collector now has two live webcams available for viewing any time of day.

[Entilzha]

There goes the world . Good one

[Reanok]

Here's some neat pictures of Space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour on their launch pads a rarae sight to see 2 shuttles at the same time. here's the link to several pictures of both shuttles and their engineering crew readying htem for launch link http://www.spaceflightnow.com/sts126/08 ... ndex2.html