The Random Science Thread

I might have mentioned it before, but some scientists think apes are starting to enter their stone age:

 

Juno images reveal that Jupiter’s poles are unlike anything NASA imagined

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/juno-images-nasa/#ixzz4JdK0dDhW

 

This sounds incredible! I want to find out more and support it any way I can

 

That's beautiful, haunting, and a little terrifying.

 

So interesting.

Hopefully she's able to continue this research. The medical treatment industry is fraught with fraud, people siphoning money away from the cause, and millions upon millions of dollars changing hands in order to keep the status quo and protect their own interests.

 

That's what I'm worried about too. It's not in any pharmaceutical company's financial best interest to cure cancer when they can just treat it for years and years. If she gets the funding she needs, it will have to be from philanthropists that truly want to help people, because I don't believe any cancer research company really wants to cure cancer. They just want to treat it.

 

Agreed. Public funding may be the best way to do it. Honestly for people so close to finding cures, I am scared for them. Money doesn't give up easily.

 

Here's how physicists accelerate particles to 99.99% the speed of light

F*cking magnets.

ALI SUNDERMIER, BUSINESS INSIDER
15 SEP 2016

By now, you might be familiar with the concept of particle accelerators through the work of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the monstrous accelerator that enabled scientists to detect the Higgs boson.

But the LHC is not alone - the world is equipped with more than 30,000 particle accelerators that are used for a seemingly endless variety of tasks.


Some of these machines, like the LHC, accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light to smash them together and probe the fundamental building blocks of our universe. Others are used to seal milk cartons and bags of potato chips.

Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York is home to one of the world's most advanced particle accelerators: the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS II).

The NSLS II will allow researchers to do a wide range of science varying from developing better drug treatments, to building more advanced computer chips, to analysing everything from the molecules in your body to the soil you walk on.

When scientists accelerate particles to these crazy speeds in the NSLS II, they force them to release energy which they can manipulate to do a mind-boggling array of different experiments.

As electrons moving at nearly the speed of light go around turns, they lose energy in the form of radiation, such as X-rays. The X-rays produced at the NSLS II are extremely bright - a billion times brighter than the X-ray machine at your dentist's office.

When scientists focus this extremely bright light onto a very small spot, it allows them to probe matter at an atomic scale. It's kind of like a microscope on steroids.

Here's how the NSLS II pushes particles to 99.99 percent the speed of light - all in the name of science.

First, the electron gun generates electron beams and feeds them into the linear accelerator, or linac.

Ali Sundermier

In the linac, electromagnets and microwave radio-frequency fields are used to accelerate the electrons, which must travel in a vacuum to ensure they don’t bump into other particles and slow down.

Ali Sundermier

Next, the electrons enter a booster ring, where magnets and radio-frequency fields accelerate them to approximately 99.9 percent percent the speed of light.

Then they are injected into a circular ring called a storage ring.

Ali Sundermier

In the storage ring, the electrons are steered by an assortment of magnets.

The blue magnets bend the motion of the electrons, the yellow magnets focus and defocus the path of the electrons, and the red and orange magnets take outlying electrons and bring them into a closer path.

The smaller magnets are corrector magnets, which keep the beam in line.

Ali Sundermier

This is an insertion device in the storage ring. Insertion devices are magnetic structures that wiggle the electron beam as it passes through the device. This produces an extremely bright and focused beam.

Ali Sundermier

As the electrons go around turns in the storage ring, they decelerate slightly, losing energy.

The lost energy can be converted into different forms of electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, that are directed down beamlines running in straight lines tangential to the storage ring.

At the end of the beamline, the X-rays crash into samples of whatever material is the subject of the experiment.

Ali Sundermier

This is an X-ray spectroscopy beamline, where scientists analyse the chemical composition of materials by exciting the electrons in an atom.

Ali Sundermier

The circumference of the NSLS-II is so big, nearly half a mile, that many people working there travel around on tricycles.

Ali Sundermier

The NSLS II is still in the early stages of its development, having just taken over for its successor (the NSLS), in 2014. When it's complete, it will be able to accommodate about 70 different beamlines.



http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-...-like-the-large-hadron-collider-actually-work

 

"
New Evidence That Black Holes May Actually Be 2D Holograms
NASA
IN BRIEF
A team of theoretical physicists used Loop Quantum Gravity, string theory's biggest contender, and showed that the calculations are consistent with the idea that black holes have no insides, but that objects are stuck on their surface.

BLACK HOLE: NOT BLACK, AND NOT A HOLE
There’s a lot in our universe we don’t completely understand, such as dark matter and dark energy. Indeed, in the bizarre world of quantum physics, ideas are constantly shifting and changing regarding the true nature of the (somewhat mysterious) forces that govern our universe.

This is what’s happening now in the debate over what black holes really are.

Renowned theoretical physcist Stephen Hawking has previously stated that, given enough time, black holes will evaporate. And now, a new calculation by a team of theoretical physicists supports the idea that black holes are not even holes at all—that they are flat, two-dimensional holograms projecting a three-dimensional illusion.

Interestingly, this comes shortly after reports of a behemoth black hole, 600 million times the mass of the Sun was uncovered.

THE MATH IS RIGHT.
The new model makes sense of the inconsistencies between Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum physics, particularly the black hole information paradox. If the previous belief that everything a black hole absorbs gets destroyed is true, then it clashes with the theory that information, like energy, cannot be destroyed.



Physicists suggest that the reason we can’t understand what a black hole is, is because we’re trying to make sense of it in a three-dimensional perspective. Some advocate that black holes have no insides and that everything that a black hole allegedly sucks in is actually just stuck on its surface, with all the information preserved until the radiation emissions or Hawking radiation leaks it back out into space.

Physicist Daniele Pranzetti from the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany and her team came up with calculations consistent with this idea using an approach called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG).

“We were able to use a more complete and richer model compared with what [has been] done in the past … and obtain a far more realistic and robust result,” says Pranzetti. “This allowed us to resolve several ambiguities afflicting previous calculations.”

While there is currently no way to definitely prove (or disprove) the idea, this might help theoretical physicists generate more models to cross-check with the hypothesis. For now, only one thing is absolutely certain: Quantum physics is very strange.
"

 

"Off World

It’s Official: We’re Going to Mars
NASA/JPL-Caltech

IN BRIEF
A bipartisan bill was passed by the U.S. Senate committee that oversees NASA space projects. The bill would allocate $19.5 billion in funds to NASA in 2017, but it has a critical mission for the space agency: send men to Mars.

FUNDS ARE ON THE WAY
It looks like Republican and Democratic senators alike are keen on safeguarding America’s space programs. With the potential chaos of a new president on the horizon, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation passed a bipartisan bill giving NASA $19.5 billion to continue working on a mission to Mars. It also includes support for the continuation of the program to send astronauts on private rockets to the International Space Station (ISS) from American soil no later than 2018.

“We have seen in the past the importance of stability and predictability in NASA and space exploration – that whenever one has a change in administration, we have seen the chaos that can be caused by the cancellation of major programs,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz, lead sponsor of the bill, commented. “The impact in terms of jobs lost, the impact in terms of money wasted has been significant.”

The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2016 includes an overall authorization level of $19.508 billion for fiscal year 2017, but it still needs to be passed by the Senate as a whole, of course. The budget allotted is the same as what was approved by House appropriators and a bit more than the version released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The Obama administration, likewise, proposed $19 billion in funding for NASA.


Credits: NASA
MAKING IT RAIN, NASA-STYLE
The Senate is not giving NASA money just for the sake of exploration. It is also a challenge, a mandate, actually. The bill requires that NASA make it an official goal to send crewed missions to Mars in the next 25 years.

The bill allocates funds for different components: $4.5 billion on exploration, nearly $5 billion for space operations, and $5.4 billion for science. It also does not scrap NASA’s controversial plans to send men on asteroids and collect samples by 2021. It does, however, require the space agency to regularly send progress reports to Congress, justifying its $1.4 billion cost.

“Fifty-five years after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon, the Senate is challenging NASA to put humans on Mars. The priorities that we’ve laid out for NASA in this bill mark the beginning of a new era of American spaceflight,” said an optimistic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, senior Democrat on the Commerce panel.

The bipartisan support behind the new bill shows that space exploration is an issue that all parties can agree is vital to our growth as a nation and a species. Now we just have to wait to see if it passes the Senate.
"

http://futurism.com/its-official-were-going-to-mars/

 

^Yes! Finally.

 

My first thought

 

Of course they hate him. Why would anyone want loose weight hanging off them? That's kind of gross.