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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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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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,

1. Particles can travel faster than light, completely re-writing modern physics and decades of previous research. Or,
2. 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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Ryan

If Your Bandage is Glowing, That’s Bad…

A polymer and fluorescent dye work together to cause a bandage to glow in the presence of infection.

A team of researchers at the University of Sheffield has developed an interesting way of detecting bacteria in a wound (I know, gross).

The researchers found that a polymer attached to a fluorescent dye on bandage can detect when bacteria or other harmful organisms come into contact with the wound. The polymer changes shape when the bacteria are present, activating the dye and emitting ultraviolet light.

The technique was mainly developed with military applications in mind. Being able to easily and quickly identify infected wounds on the battlefield could help significantly reduce the severity of injuries.

“If you know you’ve got infection it’s going to change how you treat your soldiers, it’s going to change how you’re going to treat those patients in the home,” Sheffield researcher Sheila McNeil said. [UPI.com]

At the moment, the technique has only been applied to artificial tissues. However, it currently takes several days to confirm the presence of infection, so there is quite an interest in expanding the technique to human trials.

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Ryan

Build Your Own Cloud Chamber!

Cloud chambers are nifty little tools which physicists used in the 1920s to 1950s to study ionizing radiation. They were responsible for the discovery of the positron in 1932, which garnered Carl David Anderson the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936.

After the 1950s, the Bubble chamber became the more useful tool to study radiation, but cloud chambers remain the simplest and easiest to build.

In fact, you can even build one yourself! Here’s a cool video demonstrating how they work and how you can build one:

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Ryan

Don’t Eat This Jelly…

A battery using a polymer jelly could make for cheaper, more efficient batteries.

Researchers from the University of Leeds have developed a new type of polymer jelly which could be used to make lighter, cooler (temperature wise) and more efficient rechargable batteries. They could be used in any application which currently uses a lithium battery, such as laptops, cell phones or tablets.

Professor Ian Ward from the University of Leeds went on BBC Radio 4 recently to discuss the new polymer jelly his research group has been working on.

This jelly, he says, could replace the current liquid electrolyte in most lithium batteries. The polymer jelly is supposed to be 10-20% cheaper but will not reach the high temperatures current batteries operate at during long usage times.

It would be regarded as safer because there is no excess solvent or electrolyte. All the solvents are bound into the polymer at a molecular level.

The group set out simply to make batteries safer. But as luck would have it, the design actually makes the batteries cheaper and more efficient.

It will certainly be cheaper because…the process of making batteries at the moment is generally rather laboruious. whereas we can do it in an instant step at a rather fast rate.

The batteries will also end up being lighter for doing similar applications as current electrolyte filled batteries, which will be particularly useful for military applications, says Ward.

This is one of those scientific advances which doesn’t seem too glamourous, but could directly affect all of us. Cell phones, tablets and laptops are ubiquitous now and battery life is a major consideration when buying a new device.

Anyone in the mood for PB&J now?

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REMINDER: This blog is moving! The new location is http://www.aquantumofknowledge.com/ 

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Ryan

Marty McFly’s Self Lacing Shoes Up For Auction

Nike is auctioning off 1500 pairs of Marty McFly’s futuristic shoes from Back to the Future Part II in order to raise money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research.

Bill Hader and Christopher Llyod star in the promo video:

If you want to bid on the shoes, you can go to http://nikemag.ebay.com/

But be forewarned, the shoes are going for $3000 – $4000. But hey, it’s for research right?

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Ryan

Realistic Simulation of the Formation of a Milky Way-Like Galaxy

The first realistic simulation of a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way has been generated by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich.

The simulation, called ERIS, took 1.4 million processor hours to complete. And that was on the 7th most powerful supercomputer in the world, NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, which runs at 1.09 petaflops per second.

The simulation follows the formation of a galaxy equivalent to 7.9 × 10¹¹ solar masses (1 solar mass is equal to the mass of our Sun) and has a total of 18.6 million particles.

The resulting galaxy has a radius of 2.5 kilo-parsecs (about 7.7 × 10¹⁶ kilometers). Previous attempts at simulating a realistic galaxy have failed, resulting in simulated galaxies which have too large of a central bulge. The finding of this study, which has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal, found that,

A high star formation threshold appears therefore key in obtaining realistic late-type galaxies, as it enables the development of an inhomogeneous interstellar medium where star formation and heating by supernovae occur in a clustered fashion. The resulting outflows at high redshifts reduce the baryonic content of galaxies and preferentially remove low angular momentum gas, decreasing the mass of the bulge component.

Another important result of this work is that it supports the idea that cold dark matter constitutes a large portion of the mass in the universe.

Vaccines (once again) Found Safe. Not That Anti-Vaxxers Care…

The Institute of Medicine has released a comprehensive report on the safety of vaccines. They looked at a wide range of vaccine types and various adverse affects known to be associated, and thought to be associated, with vaccines.

The report looked at claims which were submitted to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was setup in 1986 to compensate those who were injured by vaccines.

They then looked for a causal relationship between the administration of the vaccine and the adverse effect reported in the claim.

In short, the committee found that most issues with vaccines were rare and mild.

Additionally, evidence favors rejection of five vaccine-adverse event relationships, including MMR vaccine and autism and inactivated influenza vaccine and asthma episodes.

A summary of the report very aptly states:

Despite much media attention and strong opinions from many quarters, vaccines remain one of the greatest tools in the public health arsenal. Certainly, some vaccines result in adverse effects that must be acknowledged. But the latest evidence shows that few adverse effects are caused by the vaccines reviewed in this report.

Of course, this doesn’t sway the staunch anti-vax supporters. Age of Autism, a group which is hell-bent on rejecting any scientific evidence showing that vaccines do not cause autism, had this to say about the study:

The IOM report took two years to produce, mostly behind closed doors, and was paid for by the Department of Health and Human Services, the government agency which is also a defendant against the vaccine-injured in the government’s vaccine court

Their arguments are as predictable as the sun rising in the east. It is a government agency, therefore they don’t accept the research.

If people want to keep their heads buried in the sand that is one thing, but the problem is that it is children who end up suffering when people don’t accept the science behind one of the greatest medical advances in history.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Though that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed.

Physicists Discover New Particle!

Researchers at the soon-to-be-closed-but-won’t-go-quietly Fermilab, have confirmed the existence of the neutral Xi-sub-b baryon.

Baryons are particles composed of three quarks; quarks being elementary of particles. Other baryons include protons and neutrons. The newly discovered Xi-sub-b baryon is about six times more massive than the proton.

The Baryon Family. The Xi-sub-b baryon is the one highlighted in yellow. Image courtesy of Fermilab

The Fermilab press release states:

Combing through almost 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions produced by Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider, the CDF collaboration isolated 25 examples in which the particles emerging from a collision revealed the distinctive signature of the neutral Xi-sub-b. The analysis established the discovery at a level of 7 sigma. Scientists consider 5 sigma the threshold for discoveries.

Wow, 7-sigma! That’s a pretty high level of certainty.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of funding, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab will close operations in October of 2011. Way to go out with a bang guys!