Cern Creates 10 Million Mini-Big Bangs In One Week
“Physicists at the CERN research center said on Wednesday they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of mega-power operations of their marathon probe into the secrets of the cosmos.
Spokesman James Gillies said the subterranean Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in which tiny particles of matter are smashed together at a fraction of a second under the speed of light, was functioning extremely well.
“It’s all looking pretty good. We are getting a mass of data for the analysts in laboratories all round the world to get their teeth into, even if it could take months or years for anything really new to emerge,” said Gillies.
Officials at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are keen to get through the first two weeks at high power, recalling that in 2008, an earlier launch of the LHC at a lesser power was halted by a major coolant leak after 10 days.
Scientists keeping watch over the LHC’s 27-km oval-shaped ring under the Swiss-French border near Geneva said collisions were now being recorded at 100 per second, twice as many as on the first mega-power day last week.”
Read more at Reuters
Possible New Human Ancestor Discovered
“Two 1.9 million-year-old skeletons found in a South African cave have added a new and intriguing member to the primate family.
Dubbed Australopithecus sediba, it has many features — including long legs and a protruding nose — common to Homo, the genus that eventually spawned humans. Other features, such as extra-long forearms and flexible feet, date from deep in our primate past.
Paleontologists disagree over whether A. sediba is a direct human ancestor, or just looks like one. But whatever their lineage, the fossils provide rare insight into a period shrouded in paleontological mystery.
“We feel that A. sediba might be a Rosetta Stone for defining for the first time what the genus Homo is,” said paleontologist Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand. “They’re going to be a remarkable window, a time machine.”
The skeletons, described April 8 in Science, were found — with a bit of help from Google Earth — two years ago in a South African cave, where they fell two million years ago.
On one side of that date in the fossil timeline are the various species of Australopithecus, the first great apes to walk on two feet. On the timeline’s other side is the genus Homo, the first creatures one would recognize — with all due respect to Lucy’s famous A. afarensis — as close to human.”
Read more at Wired.com
Friday Fun: Old Arcade Games Attack New York
PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Discover more animation and arts videos.
(Thanks b3ta)
Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface
“Devices with significant computational power and capabilities can now be easily carried on our bodies. However, their small size typically leads to limited interaction space (e.g., diminutive screens, buttons, and jog wheels) and consequently diminishes their usability and functionality. Since we cannot simply make buttons and screens larger without losing the primary benefit of small size, we consider alternative approaches that enhance interactions with small mobile systems.
One option is to opportunistically appropriate surface area from the environment for interactive purposes. For example, Scratch Input is technique that allows a small mobile device to turn tables on which it rests into a gestural finger input canvas. However, tables are not always present, and in a mobile context, users are unlikely to want to carry appropriated surfaces with them (at this point, one might as well just have a larger device). However, there is one surface that has been previous overlooked as an input canvas, and one that happens to always travel with us: our skin.
Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso). Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner. For example, we can readily flick each of our fingers, touch the tip of our nose, and clap our hands together without visual assistance. Few external input devices can claim this accurate, eyes-free input characteristic and provide such a large interaction area.
In the paper linked below, we present our research on Skinput – a method that allows the body to be appropriated for finger input using a novel, non-invasive, wearable bio-acoustic sensor.”
Read more at ChrisHarrison.net
Turning noise into vision
“A new technique for revealing images of hidden objects may one day allow pilots to peer through fog and doctors to see more precisely into the human body without surgery.
Developed by Princeton engineers, the method relies on the surprising ability to clarify an image using rays of light that would typically make the image unrecognizable, such as those scattered by clouds, human tissue or murky water.
In their experiments, the researchers restored an obscured image into a clear pattern of numbers and lines. The process was akin to improving poor TV reception using the distorted, or “noisy,” part of the broadcast signal.
“Normally, noise is considered a bad thing,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. “But sometimes noise and signal can interact, and the energy from the noise can be used to amplify the signal. For weak signals, such as distant or dark images, actually adding noise can improve their quality.”
He said the ability to boost signals this way could potentially improve a broad range of signal technologies, including the sonograms doctors use to visualize fetuses and the radar systems pilots use to navigate through storms and turbulence. The method also potentially could be applied in technologies such as night vision goggles, inspection of underwater structures such as levies and bridge supports, and in steganography, the practice of masking signals for security purposes.”
Read more at R&D Magazine
Nature by Numbers
A short film exploring the correlative patterns between mathematics and nature.
Enjoy!
Originally spotted over at the Atheist Media Blog
Sunderland
Three lovely nights in Sunderland. Great audiences and a lovely theatre. Thank you very much if you were there. After the fun with the broken mic and a cut finger the first night, the other two went pretty smoothly.
We stayed in the Newcastle Malmaison, which was just fantastic. A bottle of champagne and a concerned letter were awaiting me from the Edinburgh management which had come across the blog. That was very sweet of them, and made me feel a bit guilty.
One of the many delights of the Newcastle hotel came in the form of an unnamed Martini. I sometimes like to request a chocolate martini, asking the barpersonage to make whatever he or she feels fits that term. Sometimes you get clear, subtle versions; sometimes thick gloopy brown lovelinesses. The fun is never knowing what you’ll get. You might like to try it. The talented and splendid Aoife brought back three wildly different versions which we all tried after our late soup and sandwiches. All three amazing. We decided on the brown version, and set about discussing names for the cocktail. I suggested a ‘Brown Maltini’, liking the name of a drink named after me. Understandably, the ‘Brown’ bit felt a little cloacal for a drink name. We couldn’t decide, so I suggested that I might open it up to my bright and enlightened blog followers to suggest a name.
The picture attached shows Aoife with the drink (after I had quoffed half of it), and she has kindly allowed me to share the recipe:
Aoife’s As-Yet-Unnamed-Martini
1 half (ah, may be one-and-a-half) shot Remy Martin
1 half (hmm, ditto) shot Kahlua
1 half (surely must mean just half) shot creme de cacao
garnish with choc powder
shake with ice and strain into martini glass.
Very tasty. Not a true Martini of course, of which I am very fond too, but a great, if outwardly girly, treat at the end of a long night.
If you have any suggestions for a name, please email alice.richardson@hotelduvin.com; you have about a week to bother them. No guarantees that any of the suggestions will make the menu, as it may have just been one of those 1am conversations that sounded like a good idea at the time. Rather like that small business you were going to start up with a friend. But they’re happy to take suggestions, and they’re the loveliest people.
Thank you, Newcastle Mal. Sting was staying there as well, apparently, which is pretty damn exciting in my book.
We’re now in Milton Keynes and I have my face in a big steam inhaler. Just had the 30 min call. Must dash.
x
PS I realised that in the blog about Bradford, when I said that in previous years ‘Dublin Olympia kept their bar open too’, it sounded like I was saying ‘as well as Bradford’. Poor and ambiguous wordage on my part, and apologies to St George’s Hall for not checking and re-wording. Meant only that Dublin left the bar open (understandable for what is really a music venue) as well as had people getting up to use the loo, which I had just been talking about. In fact the two go hand in hand…
Dublin will be extra fun this year anyway: a spanking new Grand Canal theatre we’re all eager to see. Ta-ta.
‘Oriental Yeti’ Captured
“A bizarre creature, dubbed the ‘oriental yeti’, has baffled scientists after emerging from ancient woodlands in remote central China.
The hairless beast was trapped by hunters in Sichuan province after locals reported spotting what they thought was a bear.
One hunter, Lu Chin, said: ‘It looks a bit like a bear but it doesn’t have any fur and it has a tail like a kangaroo.
‘It also does not sound like a bear — it has a voice like a cat and it is calling all the time — perhaps it is looking for the rest of its kind or maybe it’s the last one.
‘There are local legends of a bear that used to be a man and some people think that’s what we caught,’ he added.”
Read more at Times Online
Science and Religion – Global Atheism Conference Australia
If you weren’t able to make it to over to Melbourne, Australia for the Global Atheist Convention last month, the nice people over at All In The Mind have posted audio excerpts from some of the key speakers, including Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling and Peter Singer.
You can find them all here.
Scientists Discover First Multicellular Life That Doesn’t Need Oxygen
“Oxygen may not be the staple of modern complex life that scientists once thought. Until now, the only life forms known to live exclusively in anoxic conditions were viruses, bacteria and Archaea. But in a new study, scientists have discovered three new multicellular marine species that appear to have never lived in aerobic conditions, and never metabolized oxygen.
The discovery of the new species, which live buried in sediment under the Mediterranean seafloor, is significant in that it marks the first observation of multicellular organisms, or metazoans, that spend their entire lifecycle under permanently anoxic conditions. A few metazoans have been known to tolerate anoxic conditions, but only for limited periods of time.
The team of Italian and Danish researchers, Roberto Danovaro, et al., that discovered the new life forms has identified the creatures as belonging to the animal phylum Loricifera, the most recently described animal phylum. Loriciferans, which have a length of less than one millimeter, typically live in sediment. The three new organisms belong to different genera (Spinoloricus, Rugiloricus, and Pliciloricus), although their species have not yet been named.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
