TIZER'S SCIENCE NEWS

[Tizer]

For another bit of exciting science read Mark Brinkley's latest blog article which is on thorium fuel nuclear reactors. Mark isn't a scientist, he's an ex-builder who now writes on house-building issues and has a strong interest in energy efficiency and sources. He's strongly independent and a born sceptic.
http://markbrinkley.blogspot.co.uk/2012 ... -fuel.html

[Stanley]

Good discussion on scepticism yesterday on 'In Our Time'. Excellent and focussed my mind on the difference between expressing doubt and opposing an idea. Well worth listening to.

[Bodger]

The most recent devlopments cannot get away from one of the most earliest
BREAKING NEWS: Global ZDNet is launching

Topic: Emerging Tech

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Higgs-like particles exist: the head scratching begins

Summary: CERN has discovered a Higgs-like particle. So what does that mean, and where to from here?

By Martin White, University of Melbourne | July 5, 2012 -- Updated 01:46 GMT (02:46 BST)
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Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, have announced the observation of a new particle, widely thought to be the elusive Higgs boson.

Announced via a live two-way video link to the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Melbourne, the result is the most significant finding in particle physics for decades, and is also potentially capable of solving a long-standing mystery concerning the origin of mass.

All matter in the universe is ultimately composed of subatomic particles, and the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics mathematically describes what these particles are and how they interact.

The physicists of the 1960s knew most of the details, but found that any attempt to give particles a non-zero mass broke the theory.

As any personal trainer will tell you, mass is a fact of life. It was not long before a handful of physicists developed an elegant solution: if the universe is filled with a particular quantum field, particles can interact with it to gain mass.

One way to envision this is to consider a small ant — it has little or no intrinsic mass and may thus be called mass-less; however, should this ant walk through some treacle, it feels a great inertia from its interaction with it.

Our particles have the same experience, except that some of them feel the treacle more strongly than others and, hence, are heavier. This "background of particle treacle" was christened "the Higgs field" after Peter Higgs, a key proponent of the idea. Experimental physicists commenced a 50-year journey to obtain conclusive evidence of the field’s existence.

By smashing particles together at high energy in giant colliders, scientists aimed to produce a particle associated with the field known as the Higgs boson, recognisable through the particular pattern of signals that it would induce in giant detectors, buried deep underground.

[Tizer]

..should this ant walk through some treacle, it feels a great inertia from its interaction with it.

I know the feeling!

By the way, Higgs is a northerner, born in Wallsend, so he knows about treacle.

[Stanley]

So we were on the right lines all those years ago investigating treacle on OG........

[Tizer]

Yes, and there was even someone referring to `celestial treacle' back in January in a discussion of the Higg's boson: LINK

[Stanley]

Fascinating item on R4 this morning about DNA testing. The site (LINK) reports that they have found a man, a Mr Ian Kinneard in Caithness who apart from two markers has the DNA of Eve. The full DNA scan is subsidised but still costs £200 for both male side and mitochondrial and I decided to spend the money but the site must be overloaded and it wouldn't respond when I got to the serious business of signing on. I shall look at it further.....

[PanBiker]

Can anyone tell me who DNA tested Eve or am I missing something?

[Tripps]

Take a cold shower Stanley - this has scam all over it. Just my first impression you understand.

[Tizer]

I wouldn't say it was a scam in the sense of the way all those emails from Nigeria etc are fraudulent scams...but I think it's much over-hyped, over-extrapolated, and over-promoted. They make assumptions rather like archaeologists are prone to do - a whole story from a smidgeon of dirt. There's no doubt they can make links by analysing our DNA but it's all the stretching of the deductions that bothers me. Take the Tom conti claim: "Tom has a common ancestor with none other than Napoleon Bonaparte!" Yes, but so what, there are probably loads of other people who would have the same result. Genes have had 100s, 1000s and millions of years to spread widely. The trick is that they can build exciting stories...it reminds me of someone I knew who took her surname, looked on Ancestry.com then claimed she was related to everyone she found who also had that same surname!

[Tripps]

I rest my case. That would fall comfortably within my definition of a scam. I wonder if the results from two identical samples would produce identical results? Reminds me of allergy, and intolerance testing. I can think of many better ways of spending £200, but if anyone thinks it to be a good deal, then go ahead.

[Bodger]

Re ancestry, i always remember my father saying to me that if i used a draught board, and put grains of sand in the squares to represent the ancestors, ie, i, 2, 4, 8 ,16, that by the time i got to the 64th square i wouldnt fit the grains in a wheelbarrow ?

[Tripps]

It's quite a lot more than a barrow full Bodge. Take a look here.Rice on chessboard.

[Stanley]

Don't need a cold shower, I am as sceptical as the rest of you and am doing my research. I think Tiz is close to the truth, I have little doubt the markers will be accurate but the interpretation could be dodgy. I have an open mind and am consulting widely.

[Bodger]

Rice on chessboard.
If we follow the analogy, but use people instead of grains it would'nt take many generations for all people on earth to be related

[Tizer]

"Genetic ancestry testing is an inexact science, task force says", Scientific American, May 14, 2010...LINK

[Tripps]

Good link Tiz - says it all really - it's a scam .

Stanley - I think you had a narrow escape.

"I decided to spend the money but the site must be overloaded"

" I am as sceptical as the rest of you and am doing my research"

[Tizer]

Tripps, don't put him off, I'm eager to find out who he's related to! Will he be another of Boney's relatives or is Wellington more likely? Some troublemakers might suggest Karl Marx. Or could be the Marx Brothers, who knows, these scientists are clever you know.

[Stanley]

Don't worry. I am too old a dog to be scammed and am still interested in the right sort of genetic scan. Mind you, if the site had responded faster there is an outside chance I might have gone for it! Remember 'Blood of the Vikings'? I know that one of my paternal ancestors was born in Funen in Denmark......

[PanBiker]

As an aside but definitely science related, I have just lifted this off my youngest son's Facebook status:

Relativistic Baseball

[Stanley]

Ian, quite splendid! I like the fact that the batter has the right to advance to first base.... (if it was still there and he hadn't been vaporised)

[Tizer]

Ian, that's a gem, I love it! Thanks for the link. This is the way to get folk interested in science. That `front' of plasmised air in one of the graphics reminds me of the slow motion pictures of explosions on TV where the shock wave can be seen travelling outwards as an expanding hemisphere. Richard Hammond's video is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8569953.stm

[Stanley]

I've had my share of being subjected to blast waves and concussion but not as severe as this! The effects of a 17pdr firing were quite impressive, apart from the muzzle blast which was partially diverted to each side by the muzzle brake to cut down on recoil, the concussion made everything jump into the air around you. This was in the days before hearing protection and I've often wondered what it did to my ears, Could be part of the reason I have Tinnitus..... Mind you, I wouldn't have missed the experience of watching that tracer going down the range at over 2,000mph and hitting the derelict tank you had aimed at (we always hit them at 600 yards!), imagine the physics of what happened when it hit a piece of armour plate at that speed! The most obvious effect was a huge cloud of iron oxide, a good way of shocking rust off!
"We may be poor but we have seen life".

[Wendyf]

We have a bit of a problem with my Mum's house which I wonder if you can help us solve Tizer. It is a lovely bungalow which Mum & Dad had built in 1967 so she has lived there for 45 years. It is well built of block & brick and has no apparent damp problems. There is however a very distinctive smell which you don't notice in the house, but which gets into any fabric. It is a somewhere between mothballs & damp but not quite either. If I stay overnight my clothes need to be washed or hung out in the fresh air to get rid of it. My Dad was in the timber & wallboard trade, so the house is full of Formica, pretend wood panelling etc. Instinct tells me that the smell could be something to do with these products degrading. Is that possible?

[Tizer]

Wendy, I guess the first thing to consider is whether your Mum has been using moth balls. My Dad keeps his house sealed up all year round and the carpets and his clothes began to be eaten by moths, so we had to prompt him to use moth balls in his drawers (chests of drawers, that is!). Even after removing the moth balls the smell is very persistent and could absorb onto fabric which might account for smelling it when concentrated on clothes but not when it's in the the air. If it's not moth balls but smells a bit like them it may be a phenolic compound and that could link with your suggestion about the wood products if these were made with a phenolic glue. Phenol-formaldehye resin is, or was, used in making plywood, for example. Some of the people who put down modern, fashionable wood flooring get problems due to `off-gassing' of phenolic smells but this usually disappears in a few months. Has your Mum had any new carpets, furniture etc that could `off-gas'?

Identifying smells in houses is becoming more difficult with all the chemicals being used in products now, not just carpets and furniture but in things like washing powders. When you combine two or more smells the result can often smell completely different to the individual components - two pleasant smells can make an awful stink. Also, a smell `out of context' can disturb us. Think of our reaction to blue cheese compared to the smell of other foods which we don't expect to be mouldy.

Perhaps if you put a clean, odour-free towel in contact with the wood/Formica for a while you could then see if it smells compared with a similar towel placed where there aren't any of these products?