My New Site!
The new site is up and running!
I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but the new RSS Feed is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AQuantumOfKnowledge
If you are reading this in Google Reader or some other RSS feed reader, you won’t get anymore updates from this feed, you’ll have to update to the new one.
Thanks for reading over the past year and I hope you enjoy the new site!
IgNobel Prize Winners!
Well, the IgNobel Prizes wrapped up not too long ago. Scicurious was live blogging the event and there was also a live webcast.
And the winners are:
A group from Europe won the Physiology award for demonstrating that yawns are not contagious in Red-Footed tortoises.
A group from Japan won the award for Chemistry by demonstrating the ideal amount ofwasabi to put in the air in order to wake people up. The purpose? A wasabi fire-alarm!
A couple of studies demonstrating how people make decisions when they really, really have to pee won the award for Medicine.
A group from Oslo won the Psychology prize for studying why people sigh.
The Literature prize was given to John Perry of Stanford University for his theory of “Structured Procrastination“.
The Biology prize was given to a couple guys hailing from Canada, Australia and the USA for discovering a type of beetle that mates with stubby beer bottles.
A bunch of loons (e.g. Harold Camping) won the Mathematics prize for predicting the world would end and being wrong.
The Peace prize was awarded to Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for driving over an illegally parked luxury car with an armored tank.
The Public Safety prize was given to John Senders of the University of Toronto for conducting a driving safety study by having someone drive down the highway and have avisor repeatedly hit them in the face.
And finally, (and most importantly!) the Physics prize was given to a group from France and the Netherlands for studying why discus throwers get dizzy, but hammer throwers don’t. Very important with the 2012 Olympics coming up!
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Ryan
Time-Lapse Auroras and Flyovers
Sometimes capturing things on video is the only way to truly express their beauty and magnificence.
And sometimes, its the only way to express the extent of their AWESOME!
This time-lapse video shows how circling the planet looks from the International Space Station:
The next one is a time-lapse of an aurora (my fav, as you all know) over Finland:
Aurora Borealis in Finnish Lapland 2011 from Flatlight Films on Vimeo.
The awesome is just…too much sometimes :)
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
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Ryan
Watch the IgNobel Prizes Tomorrow!
The 21st 1st (no typo) Annual IgNobel Prizes are tomorrow. What are the Igs, you ask?
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.
Awarded by Improbable Research, we will learn tomorrow whose real-life research is the weirdest, coolest, and funniest.
For example, last year’s physics prize went to
Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.
Here’s the reference to prove it!
To hear about it live, you can watch the webcast or you can watch Scicurious (one of my fav science bloggers) live blog the event.
It is always entertaining and reminds us all why we love science!
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
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Ryan
Scientists Can Be Funny!
Apparently this is a genuine abstract from the American Geophysical Union conference in 1991:
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
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Remember to update your subscriptions! This site will no longer be supported after September 30, 2011.
Thanks!
Ryan
Fermilab Double-Checking CERN’s (and their own) Math
- Detector used in the MINOS experiment at Fermilab.
Of course the big news of the past week is the OPERA experiment’s measurement of neutrino’s travelling faster than light.
The paper is up on arXiv. I’ve gone through it and nothing jumps out as to what they could have possibly done wrong. Chad Orzel on his blog Uncertain Principles has written a really nice summary of the paper and what the group actually did.
(Aside: I just read How to Teach Physics To Your Dog by Orzel, and I would definitely recommend it to a reader with a budding interest in quantum mechanics.)
Now it looks like the US based Fermilab is going to go over some old data to see if they can support (or contradict) the results of the OPERA experiment.
It was back in 2007 that Fermilab announced the results of their MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment. They also found neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, however they had a much larger margin of error than the OPERA experiment, so they did not receive much attention.
Now, they are going to go back over their old data, as well as add some new data, to see what they find.
“The MINOS experiment has plans to update their original 2007 measurement with a number of improvements, including 10x more data,” wrote MINOS spokesperson Jenny Thomas, a professor of particle physics at University College London in an email to TPM’s Idea Lab.
“We should have a result in 4-6 months as the data is already taken. We just have to measure some of our delays more carefully,” she added. [TPM]
So in 6 months (I know, science is slow!) we will hopefully add another chapter to this fascinating story.
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
The new RSS Feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AQuantumOfKnowledge
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Ryan
Faster Than Light Particles! So, Warp Speed Ahead, Right???
The OPERA detector at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy
I’ll have more to say about this story once I see the work on arXiv, but I feel I should comment now because this story is exploding.
The interwebs and blogospheres are abuzz with the news that researchers at CERN have measured the velocity of neutrinos which seem to be travelling faster than light.
Neutrinos are nearly massless subatomic particles which have been known to travel near the speed of light. But, like all other things in the universe, they are not supposed to be able to travel faster than light.
Basically the experiment involves the creation of neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and the neutrinos travelling 730 km to a laboratory 1,400 meters underground in Italy. There, an experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) detects those neutrinos and measures how quickly it took them to make the trip.
The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than they should have. This means they were travelling at a speed of about 299 800 km/s, which is slightly higher than the speed of light, which is about 299 792 km/s.
This discovery will rock the very foundation upon which modern physics is built. Seriously, this is like the discovery that the world is round or wave-particle duality; it’s a complete game-changer.
If it’s true.
Like a lot of folks out there, I am quite skeptical of this discovery. Think of it this way: which of these two scenarios is more likely,
- Particles can travel faster than light, completely re-writing modern physics and decades of previous research. Or,
- These guys made an innocent mistake.
Now, it is certainly possible that this discovery will turn out to be genuine. However, it is much more likely that there was some kind of error or misinterpretation which has led to this result.
I would like to point out that the researchers have revealed their work in the proper way. They are excited, but very skeptical themselves and are asking the academic community to review their work and try to find a flaw. Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and OPERA’s spokesman said in an interview
Whenever you are in these conditions, then you have to go to the community
THIS is science in action, folks! A group of physicists think they have discovered something awesome. But they haven’t started trumpeting their results like they have been absolutely confirmed, no emails were leaked suggesting the discovery, and they didn’t go to some rogue publication to get their work in print prior to peer-review.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
I am very hopeful this turns out to be a genuine discovery. I can’t wait to read the papers and hear the response from the scientific community.
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
Remember to update your subscriptions! This site will no longer be supported after September 30, 2011.
Thanks!
Ryan
Take THAT English Majors!
By tom Gauld
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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/
Remember to update your subscriptions! This site will no longer be supported after September 30, 2011.
Thanks!
Ryan
A Quantum of Knowledge 