Physicists Working On X-Ray Vision
“Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it’s possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.
The experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of Viewpoint in APS Physics by Elbert van Putten and Allard Mosk of the University of Twente.”
Read more at Science Daily
Woman Fails To Shut Down LHC
“A German woman has failed in a bid to force her country’s government to halt experiments at the world’s largest atom smasher which she feared would lead to the Earth’s destruction.
The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.
The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”
“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled.
CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.
Housed inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the collider was started with great fanfare in September 2008, only to break down after nine days for the next 14 months.
It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels which began last month.”
Read more at The Telegraph
All of life’s ingredients found in Orion nebula
The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.
By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their work produces can be seen in the image above. The peaks represent the presence of the molecule indicated.
The new data was collected by the Herschel Telescope, launched into space last year by the European Space Agency. Herschel’s HiFi instrument uses a new technique to do more-sensitive spectroscopy. It will enable scientists to better understand the chemistry of space.
The Orion Nebula is located about 1,300 light-years away. No very active star-forming region is closer to Earth. M42, as the nebula is also known, is 24 light-years across.
Wired (Thanks DG)
Da Vinci’s Huge Horse Statue Proven Feasible
“‘Il Cavallo,’ the huge equine statue Leonardo Da Vinci never got to make, wasn’t plagued by technical problems as was widely believed, a new multidisciplinary research has revealed.
On the contrary, Da Vinci’s plan for the largest equestrian statue in the world was a perfectly feasible project which, if completed, would have probably been his greatest legacy, more than ”The Last Supper” or any other work.
Commissioned in 1482 by Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, in honor of his father Francesco, the massive bronze horse took Leonardo 17 years of research, but was never completed.
Indeed, when the full-scale clay model was finally ready to be cast in a single operation in 1499, all the needed bronze was used to make cannons for an imminent war against the King of France.
The molds were lost and the clay model was reduced to rubble by the invading French soldiers.
Although Leonardo never stopped mourning the ‘horse-that-never-was,’ engineers have always believed the daring plan to make the largest single-pouring cast ever would have failed because of technical problems.”
Read more at Discovery News (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
Dark, dangerous asteroids found lurking near Earth
“An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth’s orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.
Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.
In its first six weeks of observations, it has discovered 16 previously unknown asteroids with orbits close to Earth’s. Of these, 55 per cent reflect less than one-tenth of the sunlight that falls on them, which makes them difficult to spot with visible-light telescopes. One of these objects is as dark as fresh asphalt, reflecting less than 5 per cent of the light it receives.
Many of these dark asteroids have orbits that are steeply tilted relative to the plane in which all the planets and most asteroids orbit. This means telescopes surveying for asteroids may be missing many other objects with tilted orbits, because they spend most of their time looking in this plane.
Fortunately, the new objects are bright in infrared radiation, because they absorb a lot of sunlight and heat up. This makes them relatively easy for WISE to spot.”
Read more at New Scientist
‘Near-Perfect’ Hydrophobic Surface Inspired By Spiders
“Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet. Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice.
The inspiration? Not wax. Not glass. Not even Teflon.
Instead, University of Florida engineers have achieved what they label in a new paper a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders.
“They have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic,” said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering.
A paper about the surface, which works equally well with hot or cold water, appears in this month’s edition of the journal Langmuir.”
Read more at Science Daily
Hangover-Free Booze Discovered
“Booze, for all its magical wonder, still has big drawbacks: You can’t sober up quickly, and you often get a hangover. Now Korean researchers have found a way of tweaking booze to limit the fallout — without cutting its strength.
Doctors Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University studied the properties of oxygenated alcohol – booze with oxygen bubbles added – which is a popular concoction in their country. In these drinks, oxygen is added the way carbonation is usually added to soda, and the scientists wanted to know if these oxygenated beverages affected people differently than non-oxygenated ones. The answer was a resounding yes.
They ran three experiments using 19.5% alcohol drinks, and measured the speed at which people’s blood alcohol dropped to 0.000%. In other words: How fast did they sober up?”
Read more at io9
Mercedes-Benz Museum Contains World Record Artificial Tornado
“The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany is now home to more than just automobiles. The museum has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records for creating the “strongest artificially generated tornado in the world.” The 34.4 meter high (that is 37.2 yards to those metrically challenged) vortex was not designed as an attraction, but to channel smoke out of the building in the event of a fire. The architecture wonderment that is the museum did not make use of any fire doors in the design (surely they would get in the way of the architect’s vision). In order to meet regulations, the building engineers had to determine a way to keep smoke from spreading beyond the fire level, the tornado is the resulting solution. The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building’s corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof. Check the gallery for photos of a carbon dioxide infused tornado demonstration.”
Read more at Autoblog (thanks, Chris)
James Randi Battles Bogus Bomb Detectors
“James Randi, a magician who goes by the stage name “Amazing Randi,” has waged a decades-long war on purveyors of the paranormal, pseudoscience and other hoaxes. But now his war on fraud is hitting up against the war on terror and, specifically, ineffective bomb detectors that are being shilled to military and police forces around the world.
Randi, who’s also the founder of the James Randi Education Foundation, has set his sights on “dowsing rod” bomb detectors being used — most famously in Iraq — to detect explosives. “All of these various devices, of all kinds, are made on the same principle,” he told AOL News. “There’s nothing inside, or some dummy device, like discarded circuit boards from a TV remote controller.”
At issue are a slew of reports about bomb-detecting devices that use a swiveling antenna attached to a small box. The devices operate similar to dowsing rods, which supposedly locate materials without the use any known scientific principle.”
Read more at AOL News
World’s Most Powerful Atom Smasher Restarts
“‘The LHC is on its way again. First beam of 2010 circulated in each direction by 04.10 CET (0310 GMT),’ said CERN in a tweet on its website on Sunday.
The 3.9 billion euro (5.6 billion dollars) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was shut down in December to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels. It was run for a few weeks after being successfully revived from a 14 month breakdown.
The particle collider — inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva — is aimed at understanding the origins of the universe by recreating the conditions that followed the Big Bang.
In the weeks before the technical shutdown in December, the collider achieved over a million particle collisions and accelerated proton beams to energy levels never reached before, according to CERN.
Collisions reached a world record energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV), already allowing scientists to gather data.
But CERN now wants to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate conditions close to the Big Bang, and run it at those levels for 18 to 24 months.”
Read more at Physorg.com
"
