At the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, the author, Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute and coordinator of the South African National Grid, called for making an AfricaGrid a reality. Here he outlines the reasons why now is the opportune time for work on this to be starting in earnest.
scientific american register Newsletters SA Digital Print Subscriber Services online sections News Features Mind Matters In-Depth Reports Fact or Fiction Extreme Tech Ask the Experts Edit This Slide Shows Image Gallery Videos 60-Second Science Podcast 60-Second Earth Podcast 60-Second Psych Podcast Science Talk Podcast Content Partners blogs Scientific American Observations Bering in Mind Extinction Countdown Solar at Home Expeditions Guest Blog scientific american magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features News Scan 50, 100 150 Years Ago Antigravity Skeptic Critical Mass Scientific American Perspectives Sustainable Developments Ask the Experts Recommendations Letters From the Editor Special Editions scientific american mind magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features Head Lines
In this issue we outline a desperate shortage of accelerator scientists; walk you through the process of making a discovery at the Large Hadron Collider; and debut an original science-fiction story written especially for SLAC. scientific american register Newsletters SA Digital Print Subscriber Services online sections News Features Mind Matters In-Depth Reports Fact or Fiction Extreme Tech Ask the Experts Edit This Slide Shows Image Gallery Videos 60-Second Science Podcast 60-Second Earth Podcast 60-Second Psych Podcast Science Talk Podcast Content Partners blogs Scientific American Observations Bering in Mind Extinction Countdown Solar at Home Expeditions Guest Blog scientific american magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features News Scan 50, 100 150 Years Ago Antigravity Skeptic Critical Mass Scientific American Perspectives Sustainable Developments Ask the Experts Recommendations Letters From the Editor Special Editions scientific american mind magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features Head Lines
People sometimes ask, “Is the universe a black hole?” Or worse, they claim: “The universe is a black hole!” No, it’s not, and it’s worth getting this one straight.
If there’s any quantitative reasoning behind the question (or claim), it comes from comparing the amount of matter within the observable universe to the radius [...]
I’m curious to know what the best-looking office is at CERN. (If you know someone or if you think your office would be in the running for that let me know and I can post a picture!)
From what I’ve personally seen, most offices here aren’t all that different from mine. A little cramped, but at [...]
The G-Zero experiment that measures the amount of strange quark contributions to the proton has found that there is a lot less strangeness than previous theories and experiments indicated.scientific american register Newsletters SA Digital Print Subscriber Services online sections News Features Mind Matters In-Depth Reports Fact or Fiction Extreme Tech Ask the Experts Edit This Slide Shows Image Gallery Videos 60-Second Science Podcast 60-Second Earth Podcast 60-Second Psych Podcast Science Talk Podcast Content Partners blogs Scientific American Observations Bering in Mind Extinction Countdown Solar at Home Expeditions Guest Blog scientific american magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features News Scan 50, 100 150 Years Ago Antigravity Skeptic Critical Mass Scientific American Perspectives Sustainable Developments Ask the Experts Recommendations Letters From the Editor Special Editions scientific american mind magazine Subscribe INSIDE THIS ISSUE Features Head Lines
Much of the press coverage of the LHC has discussed the search for the Higgs, but ALICE was designed for something completely different. We’re studying a hot, dense phase of nuclear matter called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).
What we’re doing is mapping out the phase diagram of nuclear matter. This is roughly what we know [...]
“If they could teach Koko the gorilla sign language, surely I could teach you rudimentary physics.”
-Sheldon to Penny (last Monday night’s episode)
Sure, they routinely throw up things like the Schrodinger equation and make references to things like quantum mechanics… and whether or not I may laugh periodically… I really dislike The Big Bang Theory (BBT [...]
The LHC team have thankfully created a live status page to show all beam plans for the near future. This is helpful to many of us who want to have some idea of what to expect when we’re on shift “babysitting” our detectors.
You can see at present the main goal is to “complete squeeze to [...]
The European MYRRHA is an experimental facility aimed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of nuclear waste transmutation in an accelerator-driven system. The main part of the accelerator will consist in a series of superconducting cavities.
Seven TRILLION electron volts! (7,000,000,000,000 eV) Or, 7 teraelectron volts. (7 TeV) Holy bug-zap
We had a great time last night at a panel discussion on extrasolar planets, right here at my very own institution of Caltech, sponsored by our very own Discover magazine, and hosted by our very own Bad Astronomer. The panelists included Gibor Basri, John Johnson, Sara Seager, and Tori Hoehler. They did [...]
The past few weeks have been really busy. Of course the flood of data and the prospects of an analysis are driving the work, so it’s a welcome change. I’ll also be heading over to CERN in about a week to go on shift. I’ll be there for about a month, and am excited to [...]
After reading everyone’s comments to my previous post, both positive and negative, let me first say thanks to those who took it with a sense of humor. And also, thank you to those who like to hear about the human side of doing science.
I will say my last paragraph there was a bit of a [...]
“This place eats relationships.”
Don’t get me wrong. Working at CERN gives a student many unique opportunities. This includes being able to live and work in a foreign country, to collaborate with scientists from around the world, and to help make discoveries on the cutting edge of physics.
Those advantages and others make it that much more [...]
Preface: the folks over at the ATLAS control room blog are doing a great job too, so don’t miss their posts if you want more up-to-the-minute LHC news!
A lot of people ask me when we’ll start announcing discoveries of new physics (or exclusions of new physics). It could take a while. Even I [...]
Pockets of dark matter litter roughly 25 percent of the universe like patches of static you hit while surfing the radio dial: definitely there but of unclear origin.
Through a process of elimination, Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics collaborators say they have found a way to use sound to tune in dark matter passing through [...]
Two new and independent studies have put Einstein's General Theory of Relativity to the test like never before. These results show Einstein's theory is still the best game in town.
A lightning researcher has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth. His findings show that when particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds.
The universe – stars, planets, nebulae, the Milky Way, black holes – in its entirety and infinitenes
I'm very pleased to see this flower (and always delighted to say the name out loud: Try it: Calla Lily.). (Click for larger view.) I discovered a patch of shoots growing in the shade of a tall tree some time ago, struggling against a thriving ground cover plant, and decided to clear some space for them and let them grow up, giving them a supply line off the drip system. That was a year ago. Now, they're nice and large, and [...]
Skip to content Asymptotia Inspiration and Dedication Occult Activity Tonight Awesome Published by Clifford on April 5, 2010 in fun humour miscellany and science education I’ve never been one for the naive Obama-gushing , you may have noticed , but I can’t resist this lovely tribute . It is the site called President Obama Looking at Awesome Things” a collection of photos” , and the example to the left is one of my favourites . Click for larger view . It is excellent use of certain looks he gets on his face when doing things like looking interested” at things . Isn’t photoshop great The site is here and be sure to look at currently all three pages worth , or jump to the Flickr photo set here where I learned that the series is a response to New York Magazine’s rather brilliantly captioned A
Aristotle said that the fourth dimension didn’t exist. Aristotle also said that women have a l
A Brave New World that has such ‘particles’ in it. As Miranda in The Tempest looks at the people tha
Today the world moved a step closer to discovering if the ‘God’s Particle’ or the
Superimposed circle shows the location and extent of the LHC God damn that shit is BIG! The 10 BILLI
(Golem.de) – Wissenschaftlern am Cern ist es gelungen, Teilchenstrahlen im Large Hadron Collid
It is an exciting day, with thousands of 7 TeV collision events flowing in. I watched the frustrating first failures from my laptop at home, in the middle of the night. Now that the sun is up, the scenario is much brighter – CERN just held a press conference in which the Steve Myers and [...]
Mike Lamont delivered a report on the commissioning of the LHC. The slides are here. Below I offer some notes from his talk. Problem: as discovered at the final stages of the hardware commissioning, the quench protection system (QPS) can be triggered erroneously due to a converter switch being turned off at the same time [...]
This weekend I read a superb paper by the CDF Collaboration (arXiv:1003.3146): Studying the Underlying Event in Drell-Yan and High Transverse Momentum Jet Production at the Tevatron This paper is written so very clearly that a very thorny and confusing phenomenon can be grasped with little effort. Even better, new results are presented which elucidate [...]
In honor of the recent news of the Large Hadron Collider’s successful run-up to 7.0 TeV collis
As a quick follow up to my recent post about the Large Hadron Collider, there is a new development: 
Today the ATLAS Collaboration posted their first physics paper on the archive (arXiv:1003.3124): Charged-particle multiplicities in pp interactions at √s = 900 measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC This is the third physics result from the LHC. The first paper was submitted by the ALICE Collaboration on 28-November (see my discussion here) and by the [...]
Here is a summary of accelerator operations last night: - 16:30 Started ramp without beam at 2 A/s - 17:38 Trip of Sector 78 during dry ramp to 6 kA. To be understood. - Dump during the ramp due to BLM (problem with optical link for BLM in pt1, fixed). - 20:45 Try a second [...]
**Addendum (3/22/2010): Shortly after I wrote the post below, it came to my attention that the proto
We were all rather down when the LHC magnet blew up in December 2008. Enough has been written about that. Quickly enough, the CMS Collaboration made the best of the situation and launched a serious campaign to commission the detector as much as possible using cosmic rays. The result is twenty-three scientific papers appearing as [...]