Physics news

[Henry J]

Re elecrons "or voted off the island?"

For their "shocking" behavior?

Henry

[lswot]

Re elecrons "or voted off the island?"

For their "shocking" behavior?

Henry

Of course!

[Rstegman]

Slightly off subject but still on science.....

From: "kathie morgan" <fishrap@earthlink.net>
To: "Rich SLICK (Korners)" <slickplus@lists.spunge.org>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 09:15:32 -0800
Subject: [slickplus] KATHIE'S KORNER

We are entering a new Dark Age. Science is striding backward faster than a drunk at the end of an angry husband's boot.
Some of the retreat results from courts being allowed to redefine words. I¹ve written before about the word SPECIES, which used to mean that group of individuals capable of producing offspring that could themselves reproduce. Poodles and spaniels, for example, being of the same species could produce mongrels capable of being fathers and mothers. Horses and donkeys, on the other hand, could produce mules, but the mules were barren. Horses and donkeys, therefore, were different species.
Then the courts stepped in to decide - to stick with the above illustration - that dogs mating in July are one species while those mating in December are another. Dogs giving birth in the fall are genetically separate from dogs dropping their litters in summer. Dogs from across the tracks are one species, across the river another, and still another the dogs that crawled under the fence into your backyard.
They haven¹t applied the definition to dogs, of course, because we all know too much about dogs to swallow it. Instead they¹ve applied it to fish, about which most of us know far less. But the principle is identical.
This could never have happened except that along the way other words were redefined. PEER REVIEW used to occur when a scientist, perceiving a new way to define fish species, published an article in a reputable journal of science. Other scientists in the field would then put their own reputations on the line and write equally scholarly articles in support of or opposition to the first. Eventually truth would emerge.
Now peer review is just another way of adding to the cost of everything without adding value. A scientist, perceiving a new way to define fish species, hands his paper over to his government bosses, who then shop around for a peer review firm friendly to the point of view taken by the manuscript. Money changes hands and voila! the paper is peer reviewed and set to change the course of science ... by throwing it into reverse.
This is how CRITICAL HABITAT for fish can include acres and square miles of dry land, how ESSENTIAL HABITAT for fish can go even beyond critical habitat.
It isn¹t just definitions. We have two rivers near where I live whose headwaters mingle far upstream. One scientific proposal would remove water from one river to RESTORE a species of salmon that was never established there in recorded history. Another proposal would increase flows in the other river, to RESTORE salmon there.
The same people support both proposals, but ask them to explain why fish will necessarily thrive in a dry river and yet cannot survive in a nearby river unless it runs at flood stage. They¹ll merely reply that both proposals were peer reviewed.
Pray for America!


--

[Xjmt]

The major problem as I see it is the information source is never properly identified.

First chocolate is bad for you but now it's good for you. The same with soy products. Past=good, current=not so good. MSG past=bad but then it became not so bad. That one was discovered to have come from the Gultimate Institute of America. A totally unbiased source I'm sure.

Then there's the American Auto Industry. Then=Hybrids are impossible to build and they wouldn't be reliabale. Now that SUV sales are sinking and imported Hybrids are selling well our American Auto Industry has Hybrids comming out of their......ears. In fact Ford had the rights and ability to build hybrid technology back in 1972. But then their buddies in the oil industry wouldn't have liked that.

The river/salmon thing? Probably some real estate agents in conflict with some environmentalist group so 'facts' are spread by both sides neither being properly identified by news reports.

It's reality TV on a slower level.

[Henry J]

Careful, your cynicism is showing!

[Henry J]

Hi-Yo Silver! FSU physicist helps discover an atomic oddity

Working with an international team of scientists, a Florida State University physics professor has taken part in an experiment that resulted in the creation of a silver atom with exotic properties never before observed. [...]
In the experiment, a cigar-shaped atom was created using a particle collider. To the scientists' surprise, this atom demonstrated a novel kind of radioactive decay by spitting out two free protons at the same time.

(I guess smoking was hazardous to its health?)

Henry

[lswot]

Two for the price of one?

More like two headaches for the price of one.

[Henry J]

Accumulator Ring Commissioning Latest Step for Spallation Neutron Source

The Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has passed another milestone on the way to completion this year--the commissioning of the proton accumulator ring. The accumulator ring is the final step in a proton's journey through the accelerator before it strikes the SNS's mercury target, "spalling" away neutrons to be used for research.

Henry

[lswot]

Where do they come up with these words?

[Henry J]

They do have a spallatious vocabulary, huh? (Whatever that means! )

Henry

[lswot]

Spallation: A nuclear reaction produced by high energy projectiles in which two or more fragments or particles, as neutrons or protons, are ejected from the target nucleus. (who knew?)

Phasers, anyone? Or should that be proton torpedos?

Sometimes this big dictionary comes in handy.......that is, if you really wanted to know what that word, meant.

[brian]

Spallation: A nuclear reaction produced by high energy projectiles in which two or more fragments or particles, as neutrons or protons, are ejected from the target nucleus.

Be sure and have your pets spallayed or neutered.

[lswot]

....that, too. Hi Brian......

[Xjmt]

From today's New York Times:

February 14, 2006
Commentary
Someday the Sun Will Go Out and the World Will End (but Don't Tell Anyone)
By DENNIS OVERBYE
I've always been proud of my irrelevance.

When I raised my hand to speak at our weekly meetings here in the science department, my colleagues could be sure they would hear something weird about time travel or adventures in the fifth dimension. Something to take them far from the daily grind. Enough to taunt the mind, but not enough to attract the attention of bloggers, editors, politicians and others who keep track of important world affairs.

So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was "not proven fact; it is opinion," and thus the word "theory" should be used with every mention of Big Bang.

It was not NASA's place, he said in an e-mail message, to make a declaration about the origin of the universe "that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

In a different example of spinning science news last month, NASA headquarters removed a reference to the future death of the sun from a press release about the discovery of comet dust around a distant star known as a white dwarf. A white dwarf, a shrunken dense cinder about the size of earth, is how our own sun is fated to spend eternity, astronomers say, about five billion years from now, once it has burned its fuel.

"We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun," said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, "I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system."

An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, "NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios."

Never mind that the death of the sun has been a staple of astronomy textbooks for 50 years.

Dean Acosta, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said the editing of Dr. Kuchner's comments was part of the normal "give and take" involved in producing a press release. "There was not one political person involved at all," he said.

Personally, I can't get enough of gloom- and-doom scenarios. I'm enchanted by the recent discovery, buttressed by observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, that an antigravitational force known as dark energy might suck all galaxies out of the observable universe in a few hundred billion years and even rip apart atoms and space. But I never dreamed that I might be frightening the adults.

What's next? Will future presidential candidates debate the ontological status of Schrödinger's cat? That's the cat that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, is both alive and dead until we observe it.

Apparently science does matter.

Dreading the prospect that they too may be dragged into the culture wars, astronomers have watched from the sidelines in recent years as creationists in Kansas and Pennsylvania challenged the teaching of evolution in classrooms. Never mind that the Big Bang has been officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church for half a century. The notion of a 14-billion-year-old cosmos doesn't fit if you believe the Bible says the world is 6,000 years old.

And indeed there have been sporadic outbreaks, as evidenced by the bumper stickers and signs you see in some parts of the country: "Big Bang? You've got to be kidding — God."

When the Kansas school board removed evolution from the science curriculum back in 1999, they also removed the Big Bang.

In a way, the critics have a point. The Big Bang is indeed only a theory, albeit a theory that covers the history of creation as seamlessly as could be expected from the first fraction of a second of time until today. To call an idea "a theory" is to accord it high status in the world of science. To pass the bar, a theory must make testable predictions — that stars eventually blow out or that your computer will boot up.

Sometimes those predictions can be, well, a little disconcerting. When you're talking about the birth or death of the universe, a little denial goes a long way.

That science news is sometimes managed as carefully as political news may not come as a surprise to most adults. After all, the agencies that pay for most scientific research in this country have billion-dollar budgets that they have to justify to the White House and the Congress. It helps to have newspaper clippings attesting to your advancement of the president's vision.

It's enough to make you feel sorry for NASA, whose very charter mandates high visibility for both its triumphs and its flops, but which has officers recently requiring headquarters approval before consenting to interviews with the likes of me.

The recent peek behind the curtains of this bureaucracy has been both depressing and exciting. So they are paying attention after all.

They should be paying attention, but I'm not looking forward to having to include more politicians and bureaucrats in my rounds of the ever-expanding, multi-dimensional universe (or universes).

I'll do it, but, lacking the gene for street smarts, I fear being played like a two-bit banjo. I'm even happy to go star-gazing with Dick Cheney, if duty so calls, but only if he agrees to disarm and I can wear a helmet.

[Henry J]

Progress in Quest to Use Hydrogen as Fuel for Cars and Electronic Devices

Chemists at UCLA and the University of Michigan report an advance toward the goal of cars that run on hydrogen rather than gasoline. While the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that practical hydrogen fuel will require concentrations of at least 6.5 percent, the chemists have achieved concentrations of 7.5 percent — nearly three times as much as has been reported previously — but at a very low temperature (77 degrees Kelvin).

Henry