LHC down again!

From Dvice blog I read that the large Hadron Collider is again offline. However this is no magnetic ring losing containment no this time it was caused by something almost beyond comprehension!

Would you believe a piece of bread? I am not making this up, one of the world's most complicated machines was brought low by a bread crumb. Oh and it gets weirder! The crumb did not come from a careless workman, sandwich in one had and a welder in the other, no - said crumb was thought to have been dropped by one of our feathered friends.

From the article:

• The morsel found its way into the doomsday device's outdoor machinery, sparking a temperature differential that triggered an automatic shutdown sequence....

It shouldn't hurt the schedule too much, but it is going to take a couple of weeks getting the LHC restarted.

Humans almost went extinct!

CNN is reporting findings that were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, reporting that early human populations may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. It is estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000, reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently. Recovering from this population bottleneck seems to have brought about migrations to other parts of the world which appears to have begun about 60,000 years ago.

Are we missing a dimension of time?

From the Telegraph

A scientist has put forward the bizarre suggestion that there are two dimensions of time, not the one that we are all familiar with, and even proposed a way to test his heretical idea next year.
Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time. If it is confirmed, it could point the way to a "theory of everything" that unites all the physical laws of the universe into one, notably general relativity that governs gravity and the large scale structure of the universe, and quantum theory that rules the subatomic world.

click on the article title for the complete story

thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Shaun sends in this from the Guardian Unlimited science website

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. This will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming. A team assembled by Venter, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code. It is then transplanted into a living bacterial cell and in the final stage of the process it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form.

Nanothreads spun to create living tissue

From the online issue of Scientific American - Shaun Saunders sends in this story with this note:
"reminds me of the scene near the end of 'The empire strikes back' when skywalker is being repaired in a tank..."

Scientists using an electrically charged needle have electrospun nanosize threads of cells encased in plastic polymers to create living microfibers that promote tissue regrowth. Unfortunately, the electrical charge can hurt both the spun cells and the scientists doing the spinning. But now mechanical engineers at the University College in London have invented a way to spin nanothreads using only pressure and, with the help of medical colleagues, shown that they can create such nanothreads of living heart tissue, potentially revealing the way to weave an entirely new, healthy heart or even fresh, new skin. The researchers successfully used this method to spin tissue from smooth muscle cells from rabbit aortas with a special device comprising three concentric needles: an inner needle pushing out the cells, a second needle ejecting an encasing polymer, and a third, surrounding needle that applies pressure. By flowing the cells at a slow rate, the polymer at a slightly faster rate, and applying pressure researchers teased out a microthin, continuous thread. The technique may allow researchers to create living scaffolds of cells to deliver drugs as well as grow or regenerate the heart and other organs.

Computer to Read Minds

Our correspondent Shaun Saunders was perusing the LiveScience.com page and came across this little gem. As odd and funny as it sounds, these people are dead serious!

They're already predicting, mathematically, what you'll want to watch, what you'll want to wear, and who you'll want to vote for. Obviously, the next step is for computers to read your mind. Your computer won't be picking up details about your plans for the evening anytime soon. But researchers with the Human Computer Interaction group at Tufts have, thanks to a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, come up with a straightforward way for your computer to tell if you are overworked, under-worked or not working at all. The mind reading actually involves measuring the volume and oxygen level of the blood around the subject's brain, using technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The user wears a sort of futuristic headband that sends light in that spectrum into the tissues of the head where it is absorbed by active, blood-filled tissues. The headband then measures how much light was not absorbed, letting the computer gauge the metabolic demands that the brain is making.

For more click here

Is a 'naked singularity' lurking in our galaxy?

NewScientist.com news service

Could a naked singularity, the bare core of a black hole, be sitting at the centre of our galaxy - an object so dense it would shred the known laws of physics? Singularities exist in the heart of every black hole, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity. When matter collapses under its own gravity, it forms either a point of infinite density. But each of these singularities is cloaked by a so-called event horizon – where light and everything else is inexorably sucked inwards. So we could never see one. Unless, that is, there are black holes that spin at extreme speeds. A spinning black hole drags nearby space around with it, and if it spins fast enough, then light and matter could escape from right by the singularity, (the Kerr Newman area. If you recall the story I read a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Baxter's Pilot. The story describes an encounter with a black hole and this area, check it out! pac) because they would be flung outwards by the dizzying rotation. This gravitational tornado would have no event horizon, and the singularity would be exposed. Astronomers could start looking for these naked singularities in the centre of our galaxy. It seems that even though they can't be viewed directly, the effects on the surrounding space would be very observable. Such immense forces would create what is called a "gravity lens effect" which would distort light from other stars or galaxies as it passes through the area.

Click here for the complete story

thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the post

Gone in 12 seconds: your rest break

Shaun just sent me this, and I can not believe that they are serious! Some things in science fiction are just so amazing that you can't imagine them ever becoming fact....then there are the strange little things that you hope you never see. Just because the world gets a bit bleaker if they do.

Now I have done telemarketing and I want to tell you I thought 30 seconds between calls was too little time. Here is an article that describes a scenario much much worse.

Shaun writes: You read it in my story 79.9 (in 2005, and now included in 'Navigating in The New World'), now read the actual occurrence in the 'real world'.....

Click here for the article

Big Brother is watching us all

Shaun A. Saunders writes....."Infopanels just around the next corner, somewhere in the 'Mallcity 14' zone:"

BBC News online's Humphrey Hawksley reports:
The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game. At Maryland University just outside Washington DC, where Professor Challapa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance. They are writing a program called Gait DNA. Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are. "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual." Since 9/11, some of the best scientific minds in the defence industry have switched their concentration from tracking nuclear missiles to tracking individuals such as suicide bombers. BBC's Hawksley
next travels to the Pentagon in Washington DC.
Click here for the complete story

The Fermi Paradox is Back

I found this article about Fermi's Paradox on the Slashdot blog.

Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's ought to exist. Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states that a number breakthroughs and have contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific problem.

(1)How we view and understand our galaxy and universe,
(2) Improved understanding of planet formation, composition and habitable zones,
(3) The discovery of extrasolar planets,
(4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth
(5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories"

So, where is everyone?"

Organic compound found in the stars

From Nature.com

Astronomers have found the largest (organic) molecule so far seen in interstellar space. The discovery, of an organic compound, suggests that the chemical building blocks of life may be more common in the Universe than had been previously thought. The discovery, along with that of three smaller organic molecules in the past year, opens up a suite of potential chemical reactions and products. It suggests that 'prebiotic' molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of protein, could form all over the Universe

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunder for the post

photo by NASA

RoboSnot

Yes, those brilliant minds at The University of Warwick in the UK have developed synthetic polymers that eerily imitate snot, and aid with machine scent detection like nobody’s business. The mucus improved the sensitivity of a conventional electronic sniffer five-fold, helped deliver results more quickly, and allowed the nose to distinguish between scents, such as milk and vanilla, that it never could before.

The Pioneer anomaly

Here is something I didn't know....hell didn't even suspect!

Launched in the early 1970s, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are drifting out of the solar system in opposite directions, gradually slowing down as the Sun's gravity pulls back on them.

Ok, that is clear enough. Though to be honest, I was under the impression that they were safely on a track and trajectory that would eject them from the Solar System and onward to the great beyond! Common sense now tells me that ummm duh gravity will slow them down some. Well that being said, the spacecraft are indeed slowing down, but the really spooky thing is that they are not slowing down as expected, or for that matter traveling in exactly the direction that was plotted. Something is causing the Pioneer space probes, both of them, to slow in odd and unexpected ways. Very strange. Click the article title for more or

click here for more

Thanks to Shaun Saunders for disrupting my day!