The Agonist - Science

Beam circles 'Big Bang' machine

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:06:08 -0800

Paul Rincon | Large Hadron Collider | November 20

BBC - Engineers have sent proton particles all the way round the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine for the first time in more than a year.

But they still do not have a stable circulating beam; this step is expected to happen after 0600 GMT on Saturday.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel some 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.

It will smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Circulation of LHC Beams Could Resume in Earnest over the Weekend

The lab that operates the oft-delayed particle collider is ready to put it to work

Scientific American, By John Matson, November 20

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is drawing near to its long-awaited reboot. More than a year after the European collider's initial start-up was quashed by a helium leak caused by a faulty electrical connection, particle beams have been injected into the collider, known as the LHC, and may guided fully through its rings in the coming hours.

"We're hoping to have beam overnight in the LHC," James Gillies, a spokesperson for CERN, the European particle physics lab that operates the LHC, said Friday. "So all being well, we will wake up tomorrow morning and there will be circulating beams." By 3:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, a beam had completed a full lap of the tunnel in the clockwise direction, with a counterclockwise beam still to come, according to CERN's Twitter feed.

Proton beams have been run through segments of the collider's 27-kilometer underground circumference near Geneva this fall, but putting the entirety of the collider ring through its paces as is now under way will be a much truer test of the machine's fortitude. In September 2008, it was just nine days after beam circulation that the LHC experienced its crippling breakdown. Since that time the LHC's minders have been dealing with the fallout from the helium leak, painstakingly repairing, upgrading and recommissioning the machine to get it back in working order and to try to forestall a repeat incident.

If all goes according to plan, the LHC's operators could break new ground with the machine in short order. "One thing we didn't do last year was use the LHC as a particle accelerator," Gillies says. "Last year we injected beams and circulated beams before we had the breakdown, but we didn't accelerate them. So once we've got a beam circulating, we'll start testing the acceleration systems of the LHC."

Although the LHC is designed to accelerate protons to a whopping 7 TeV (tera-electron-volts), CERN has long said that it plans to work the machine's energy up over time. The initial target for accelerated beams will be 1.2 TeV, which would already surpass the current top dog among particle accelerators, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

Images from the LHC Restart.

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for

New Scientist, By Anil Ananthaswamy, November 11

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg's fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

Stem cells: the first human trial

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:20:51 -0800

Steve Connor | Nov 20

The Independent -

Revolutionary treatment using human embryos for patients with incurable blindness

People suffering from a form of incurable blindness could soon become the first patients in the world to benefit from a new and controversial transplant operation using stem cells derived from spare human embryos left over from IVF treatment.

Scientists working for an American biotechnology company yesterday applied for a licence to carry out a clinical trial on patients in the US suffering from a type of macular degeneration, which causes gradual loss of vision. They expect the transplant operations to begin early in the new year.

The development is highly controversial because many "pro-life" groups are opposed to using human embryos in any kind of medical research but scientists believe that the benefits could revolutionise the treatment of many incurable disorders ranging from Parkinson's to heart disease.

The company has applied for a licence from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is confident of its application being granted.

Scientists map corn genome, reveal surprising secrets

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:54:12 -0800

David Brown | November 19

WaPo - If a biologist had to pick one living thing as the textbook of how genes work, what would it be?

Corn seems to be a good answer.

Now the scientific world has at hand the complete genome sequence of corn, announced by researchers who have collaborated over the past four years and published their results Thursday. A package of 14 research papers in Science and PLoS Genetics accompanying the genome release suggests corn still has some useful secrets to reveal.

[...]

Studies over the last 60 years have revealed numerous hard-to-believe gene actions in corn that were later found to operate in higher organisms, including human beings. Mobile genetic elements -- the "jumping genes" that won corn geneticist Barbara McClintock a Nobel Prize in 1983 -- is perhaps the best-known example.

"The fact that example after example of these unexpected phenomena are also at work in mammals suggests that scientists interested in things like human diseases would be well served to pay attention to what's happening in plants, and in corn in particular," said Virginia Walbot, a molecular geneticist at Stanford University.

[...]

The diversity of traits has been largely maintained, despite a century of intensive breeding. Varieties of corn can have a greater genetic difference between them than what exists between human beings and chimpanzees.

New Data Shed Light on Large-Animal Extinction

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:29:41 -0800

Nicholas Wade | Madison, WI | November 19

NYT - Whenever modern humans reached a new continent in the expansion from their African homeland 50,000 years ago, whether Australia, Europe or the Americas, all the large fauna quickly disappeared.

This circumstantial evidence from the fossil record suggests that people’s first accomplishment upon reaching new territory was to hunt all its all large animals to death. But apologists for the human species have invoked all manner of alternative agents, like climate change and asteroid impacts.

A careful analysis of lake deposits in New York and Wisconsin has brought new data to bear on this heated debate. A team led by Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, has uncovered a critical sequence of events that rules out some explanations for the extinction of the large animals and severely constrains others.

[...]

Ms. Gill found a clever proxy for these disappearances. A fungus known as Sporormiella has to pass through the digestive system to complete its life cycle, and its spores are found in animal dung. By measuring the number of spores in the lake deposits, the Wisconsin team documented the steady disappearance of large animals from 14,800 years to 13,700 years ago, they reported in Thursday’s issue of Science.

[...]

The third suspect to be cleared is the people of the Clovis culture, which first appeared some 13,000 years ago, well after the extinction event. The Clovis people have long been considered the first inhabitants of North America, which they probably reached by trekking across the land bridge that joined Siberia and Alaska during the last Ice Age.

So, do the new data exculpate humans of the murder of the North American mammoth? Not exactly. Butchered mammoth bones some 14,500 years old have been found in Wisconsin. There were evidently pre-Clovis people in North America, and they could have hunted the large animals to death.

But Ms. Gill is not yet willing to declare people guilty. “At this stage it’s too early to completely eliminate climate change,” she said.

Sophisticated hunters not to blame for driving mammoths to extinction

Woolly mammoths and other giant ice-age mammals faced extinction 2,000 years before deadly speartips were invented

The Guardian, By Ian Sample, November 19

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.

The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce.

"Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.

Unrelated, but wicked cool: Fossil hunters unearth galloping, dinosaur-eating crocodiles in Sahara

The primitive crocodiles, which lived 100m years ago, were good swimmers but were also capable of galloping across the plains

Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of primitive crocodiles that "galloped" on land and patrolled the broad rivers that coursed through north Africa one hundred million years ago.

The skeletons of five creatures that walked with dinosaurs – and ate them – were unearthed in remote and rocky regions of what are now Morocco and Niger during a series of expeditions in the Sahara desert.

Three of the crocodiles are new species and include Kaprosuchus saharicus, a 6.5m-long beast with three sets of dagger-like tusks and an armoured snout for ramming its prey.

Another species, Laganosuchus thaumastos, was of similar length but had a pancake-flat head and is thought to have lurked in rivers with its jaws open, waiting for unsuspecting fish to pass.

I want one

You can cut back on alcohol

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:08:35 -0800

Shari Roan | Washington | November 16

LAT - Seventy years ago, Bill Wilson -- the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous -- declared his powerlessness over alcohol in a book by the same name. The failed businessman contended that, as an alcoholic, he had to "hit bottom" before changing his life and that sobriety could only be achieved through complete abstention.

For generations, Americans took these tenets to be true for everyone. Top addiction experts are no longer sure.

They now say that many drinkers can evaluate their habits and -- using new knowledge about genetic and behavioral risks of addiction -- change those habits if necessary. Even some people who have what are now termed alcohol-use disorders, they add, can cut back on consumption before it disrupts education, ruins careers and damages health.

In short, say some of the nation's leading scientists studying substance abuse, humans travel a long road before they become powerless over alcohol -- and most never reach that point.

"We're on the cusp of some major advances in how we conceptualize alcoholism," says Dr. Mark Willenbring, director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The institute is the nation's leading authority on alcoholism and the major provider of funds for alcohol research. "The focus now is on the large group of people who are not yet dependent. But they are at risk for developing dependence."

Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:35:46 -0800

Kenneth Chang | Moffett Field, CA | November 13

NYT - There is water on the Moon, scientists stated unequivocally on Friday, and considerable amounts of it.

“Indeed yes, we found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the principal investigator for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, said in a news conference.

The confirmation of scientists’ suspicions is welcome news both to future explorers who might set up home on the lunar surface and to scientists who hope that the water, in the form of ice accumulated over billions of years, could hold a record of the solar system’s history.

The satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross), slammed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole a month ago. The impact carved out a hole 60- to 100-feet wide and kicked up at least 24 gallons of water.

“We got more than just whiff,” said Peter H. Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator of the mission. “We practically tasted it with the impact.”

Bacteria in intestines play role key role in weight gain, study finds

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:29:34 -0800

Thomas H. Maugh II | St. Louis | November 12

LAT - A high-fat, high-sugar diet does more than pump calories into your body. It also alters the composition of bacteria in your intestines, making it easier to gain weight and harder to lose it, research in mice suggests. And the changeover can happen in as little as 24 hours, according to a report Wednesday in the new journal Science Translational Medicine.

Many factors play a role in the propensity to gain weight, including genetics, physical activity and the environment, as well as food choices. But a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated by Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis, shows that bacteria in the gut also play a key role.

Humans need such bacteria to help convert otherwise indigestible foods into digestible form.

Ninety percent of the bacteria fall into two major divisions, or phyla: the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes. Previous research had shown that obese mice had higher levels of Firmicutes, and lean ones had more Bacteroidetes.

Analyzing the genomes of the bacteria, Gordon and graduate student Peter Turnbaugh concluded that the Firmicutes were more efficient at digesting food that the body can't.

Animals that have a higher proportion of Firmicutes convert a higher proportion of food into calories that can be absorbed by the body, making it easier to gain weight.

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:30:26 -0800

New York Times, By Benedict Carey, November 9

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.

Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

[...]

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

[Another Scientist opines...]

“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.

Babies 'cry in mother's tongue'

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:22:32 -0800

Nov 7

BBC - The researchers studied the cries of 60 healthy babies born to families speaking French and German.

The French newborns cried with a rising "accent" while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, they say the babies are probably trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.

The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb.

_{Listen to babies crying from German and French speaking backgrounds at article link}

Great whites near shore more often than believed

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:26:55 -0800

Juliet Eilperin | Palo Alto, CA | November 4

WaPo - For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore.

We were wrong.

Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February foraging among elephant seals, sea lions and other prey, according to a new study published online Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The team of 10 California-based researchers determined that these sharks probably pass close to populated beaches and have been spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge.

"It shows you how wild it is off our West Coast of North America. This is Yellowstone," said Stanford University marine sciences professor Barbara A. Block, who co-wrote the paper.

By tracking their movements, scientists determined that the fearsome predators make such precise, regular migrations each year between the California coast and the Hawaiian islands that they have become genetically distinct from their counterparts on the other side of the Pacific.

The fact that "a major concentration" of great whites can ignore the humans who might have crossed their path there "shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering," said Stanford University post-doctoral scholar Salvador J. Jorgensen, the paper's lead writer.

Seafloor dynamics at work splitting continent

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:06:16 -0800

Jonathan Sherwood | Rochester, NY | November 3

Futurity - In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.

The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the study.

“This work is a breakthrough in our understanding of continental rifting leading to the creation of new ocean basins,” says Ken Macdonald, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “For the first time they demonstrate that activity on one rift segment can trigger a major episode of magma injection and associated deformation on a neighboring segment. Careful study of the 2005 mega-dike intrusion and its aftermath will continue to provide extraordinary opportunities for learning about continental rifts and mid-ocean ridges.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:47:32 -0800

Edward Rothstein | Paris | November 3

NYT - Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Also: The Influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Electrons at LHC firing up again...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:23:42 -0700

Observer.UK

It is a vast device the size of London's Circle Line but is engineered to a billionth of a metre accuracy. Ensuring that no flaws arise at scales and dimensions like these pushes engineering to its absolute limits.

Cern almost succeeded last year. Now it is convinced that it has got it right this time. "All I can say is that the LHC is a much safer, much better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Myers.

Most physicists believe he is right. "If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history," said one. "If not, we will have assembled the world's most expensive piece of modern art."

Equating The Scientific Method With A Herd Mentality

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:02:22 -0700

One of the more odious tricks conservative thinkers use is equating a consensus based on the scientific method with a herd mentality. For example, take this quote from the WSJ reviewing the hullabaloo over SuperFreakonomics:

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.

I wish I knew what the solution to this most post-modern ways of arguing things is--it's also anti-scientific and pre-Enlightenment--but I don't.

Evolution In The Muslim World

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:24:43 -0700

Apparently the recent discovery of Ardi, a female primate skeleton predating Lucy by 1.2 million years, proves that humans did not have a common ancestor with the apes. Or so says Al Jezeera. I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of monkeys in my life. I've had several crawl all over me. Every time I look into one's eyes I cannot help but to say, "wassup cuz?" I mean, who can't see the resemblance? And really, what's so insulting about having a common ancestor with the apes, anyway?

Regardless, the Christianists in America have more than a little in common with their fundamentalist brethren in the Muslim world. They should have a party. Maybe someone can bring some monkeys for entertainment?