Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
NASA - Let There Be Light
Endeavour pilot Terry Virts opened the windows of the newly installed cupola one at a time early Wednesday, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick an early look into the International Space Station's room with a view that they had helped install.
The cupola's fully opened windows look down on the Sahara Desert in this image that was 'tweeted' from space by JAXA astronaut and Expedition 22 flight engineer Soichi Noguchi.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Physicists Re-Create Conditions of the Big Bang - Sharon Begley
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Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.
Feb 16, 2010
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While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup%u2014quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.
The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot%u20144 trillion degrees Celsius%u2014that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.
The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers%u2014or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.
The behavior that has most intrigued the scientists so far is something called broken symmetry (of which there is a nice video here. Within the quark soup appear "bubbles" that violate a principle of physics called mirror symmetry, or parity. This form of symmetry means that events%u2014in this case, the collisions of particles and the spray of subatomic debris that results%u2014look the same if viewed in a mirror as they do when viewed directly. But one of the detectors monitoring the collisions inside RHIC observed an asymmetry in the electric charges of particles emerging from most of the collisions. Specifically, positively charged quarks seem to prefer to fly out of the collision parallel to the magnetic field, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction. This behavior would appear reversed if reflected in a mirror, with negative quarks traveling parallel to the magnetic field and positive quarks traveling in the opposite direction. Hence the violation of mirror symmetry.
The quark soup also seems to contain bubbles that violate another form of symmetry, called charge-parity invariance. According to this bedrock principle of physics, when energy is converted to mass or vice versa as per Einstein's E=mc2, equal numbers of particles and antiparticles%u2014matter and antimatter%u2014are created or annihilated, respectively. That may seem like an abstruse point, but it may hold the key to how structure and form emerged from the otherwise homogeneous quark soup. Such symmetry-violating bubbles in the nascent universe, cosmologists suspect, tipped balance in the sea of otherwise equal amounts of matter and antimatter toward a preference for matter over antimatter. If the amounts of matter and antimatter had remained identical, no one would be here to notice: when a particle of matter encounters a particle of antimatter, they go poof in an annihilating burst of energy. By now, almost 14 billion years after creation, every particle of matter would have been destroyed through this process, leaving a universe awash in radiation and nothing else, an ethereally glowing world of light without substance. By re-creating conditions that last existed at the birth of the universe, says Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, who oversees research at RHIC, "RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe."
Previous experiments have found violations of charge-parity symmetry (a 1964 experiment discovering such violations brought the scientists who conducted it a Nobel Prize), but in each case the effect was too small to account for the amount of matter in the universe today. What RHIC found is "consistent with predictions of symmetry-breaking domains in hot quark matter," said Vigdor. "Confirmation of this effect and understanding how these domains of broken symmetry form at RHIC may help scientists understand some of the most fundamental puzzles of the universe." For a field that has been in the doldrums (especially in the United States) since the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, and that seems plagued by gremlins (as when the Large Hadron Collider sprang a helium leak, particle physics really needed this one.
Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves andTrain Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.
� 2010
While I barely understand this particle physics stuff, the stories around it are fascinating!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Apple builds tablet buzz with silence, say experts
Apple Watch
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- Apple Tablet not necessarily on Verizon Wireless, analysts say
- Apple boosts 27-in. iMac shipping delay to 3 weeks
- 1-in-5 consumers likely to buy Apple tablet, poll says
Computerworld - Apple's ability to spawn massive interest in its still-unannounced tablet is based on a respectable track record and keeping its corporate mouth shut, experts said today.
"Success breeds success," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of strategy and analysis at market research firm Interpret LLC, when asked how Apple manages to build such serious buzz for a product no one has seen, and about which Apple has breathed not one word.
"Apple has a track record of delivering," he said.
Kathy Sharpe, the chief executive of the Manhattan-based digital marketing firm Sharpe Partners, agreed. "Apple keeps coming out with things that are game changing," said Sharpe. "People pay attention because they get it right, even if the product doesn't work in at first, like the original iPod and the iPhone."
Apple's San Francisco event tomorrow is expected to showcase a new device -- a 10-in. or 7-in. tablet -- but the company has said nothing other than to promise something new. "The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we're really excited about," said CEO Steve Jobs in a statement released just before Monday's earnings call.
"It's a great tool that's an integral part of their marketing," said Stephen Baker, an analyst with retail research company The NPD Group, talking about the vaunted secrecy Apple maintains prior to a new product launch.
"Silence fuels speculation, speculation fuels rumor," said Gartenberg. "But by saying nothing, they haven't promised anything, so they don't really have to deliver [on the rumors]." Even so, Apple faces some risk by letting others manage the message, even if, as some have claimed, the company judiciously leaks information to selected reporters.
"The danger is that the speculation is going to get ahead of what you're going to deliver," Gartenberg added.
The risk is small, countered Baker, who reminded everyone that it's not as if this kind of attention is commonplace. "This really only happens every two or three years," Baker said. "Even Apple can't do this all the time. You didn't see this when they put a video camera in the [iPod] Nano, did you?"
The last time anyone was able to hype a product announcement at this scale without saying anything was three years ago this month, when Jobs pulled the first-generation iPhone out of his pocket, Baker said.
Apple's secrecy and its ceding the table to rumors is good marketing, said Sharpe, because it gets consumers involved. "The secrecy makes it much easier for Apple to generate buzz. No one knows what this is, so it could be the next iPhone...or the next Newton," she said, referring to the MessagePad personal data assistant that Apple introduced in 1993 to much fanfare but lackluster sales.
"That's part of the mystery. Because we're all in the dark, it's a great equalizer. No one has the story first," Sharpe continued. "That makes consumers feel a little important."
Even after the tablet is unveiled, Apple won't have much to say in how consumers perceive the device, little more than it did when it kept its month shut leading up to the event, argued Baker. "Afterward, the majority of people [commenting on the Web] will be talking about what it doesn't have, what it doesn't do," he said. "There won't be a lot of accentuation of the positive. They want to keep [talk of the tablet] amped, and the way to do that is to go negative, after you've gone positive."
Speaking of buzz, Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub will live-blog Apple's Wednesday event.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at
@gkeizer, send e-mail to gkeizer@ix.netcom.com or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed
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Man, I dig the sh*t out of Apple gear! And I am, like so many others these days, PUMPED about tomorrow morning's announcement!