The Large Hadron Collider will shut down at the end of 2011 to address design and safety issues.

Until then, it will run at a maximum of 7 trillion electron volts…instead of its designed max of 14 trillion.

The problem involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel.  The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a … gulp…”quench”.

Apparently where Large Hadron Colliders are concerned, there’s nothing worse than hot magnets.

I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more handiwork of  the Higgs-boson time travelers.

BBC News – LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns.

If half the things they say about Spray-on liquid glass are true, then it’s the best thing since sliced bread.  Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

MEDICAL APPLICATIONS: A year-long medical trial of the spray discovered many applications including coatings for equipment, medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.

NO MORE GRAFFITI: The war graves association in the UK is investigating using the spray to treat stone monuments and grave stones, since trials have shown the coating protects against weathering and graffiti. Trials in Turkey are testing the product on monuments such as the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara.

HAVE YOUR WINE BEFORE ITS TIME: Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites. Other vineyard applications include coating corks with liquid glass to prevent “corking” and contamination of wine.

NO MORE CHINESE SECRETS: The spray cannot be seen by the naked eye, which means it could also be used to treat clothing and other materials to make them stain-resistant.

BYE BYE DAWN: In the home, spray-on glass would eliminate the need for scrubbing and make most cleaning products obsolete. Since it is available in both water-based and alcohol-based solutions, it can be used in the oven, in bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and almost every other surface in the home, and one spray is said to last a year.

Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything.

A tactic familiar from insect behaviour seems to give viruses the edge in the eternal battle between them and their host.

New video catches viruses only a few hundred nanometres in size in the act of hopping over cells that are already infected. This allows them to concentrate their energies on previously uninfected cells, accelerating the spread of infection fivefold.

Viruses use ‘hive intelligence’ to focus their attack – life – 21 January 2010 – New Scientist.

If you open your mind too much your brain will fall out (Take My Wife)

YouTube – Tim Minchin – If You Open Your Mind Too Much….

Philematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly sure why humans started locking lips in the first place. The most likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies. The lip-to-lip contact may have been passed on through evolution, not only as a necessary means of survival, but also as a general way to promote social bonding and as an expression of love.

But something’s obviously happened to kissing since the time of the chewed-food pass. Now, it’s believed that kissing helps transfer critical information, rather than just meat bits. The kissing we associate with romantic courtship may help us to choose a good mate, send chemical signals, and foster long-term relationships. All of this is important in evolution’s ultimate goal—successful procreation. 

Why We Kiss: The Science of Sex – DivineCaroline.

In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century.

Tantalising glimpses of dark matter particles were picked up by highly sensitive detectors at the bottom of the Soudan mine in Minnesota, the scientists said.

Has dark matter finally been detected? | Science | The Guardian.

CERN announced early Monday that the Large Hadron Collider has become the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.

The LHC pushed protons to 1.18 TeV (trillion electron volts — GREAT SCOTT!!!), surpassing the previous record of 0.98 TeV.

But it’s not stopping there…eventually the LHC is heading towards a universe crushing 7 TeV!!!

Next, the intensity of the beams will be increased for about a week, and then collisions to calibrate the machine will be carried out through December.

Perhaps the time travelers that are supposed to be mucking up the works are on holiday this week.

Large Hadron Collider Sets World Record | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Was Einstein Wrong?

For decades, physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics.  Other forces of nature, like electromagnetic forces, can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons.  But when you attempt to work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton,  you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity.

But now Petr Hořava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.

Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.

The solution, Hořava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” Hořava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.

Can Hořřava gravity claim the same success? The first tentative answers coming in say “yes.”

Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein’s Spacetime: Scientific American.

Female water striders don’t like the bad boys and they don’t even have to reach the age of 30 before they wise up about choices in males.

Water striders are those insects commonly seen skittering hurriedly across the surface of streams but when it comes to romance, male water striders who played it cool mated with more females than did groups of aggressive males, according to a study led by Omar Tonsi Eldakar of the University of Arizona’s Arizona Research Laboratories.

Previous studies have found that more sexually aggressive males are the most successful at reproducing, said Eldakar, now a postdoctoral research associate in UA’s Center for Insect Science, but in the previous studies he says the females were not able to leave areas populated by sexually aggressive males.

By simulating a more natural situation, the current study showed that female water striders moved away from areas where they were being harassed by males. The females preferred to hang out in locations where the males did not pursue females relentlessly.

Date A Water Strider, Where Nice Guys Get The Girls.

Remember, remember,
The 5th of November,
Nineteen hundred and fifty five.
Dr. Emmet Lathrop Brown,
Fell down on his crown,
And his dream of time travel came alive.

Take a capacitor with flux,
The doctor did mux,
Add one twenty-one gigawatts of power.
Soon the good doctor  heeded,
A velocity was needed needed,
Of precisely eighty-eight miles per hour.

And so thirty years past,
Good fortune at last,
In a parking lot of the mall, pines twin,
The doctor succeded,
His Deloran indeed did,
Travel forward through time and back again.