the frig blig

Neutrinos are in the news. Scientists at CERN successfully repeated their recent experiment in which they measure the speed it takes these subatomic particles to go from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy.

Besides exceeding the speed of light, what’s interesting to me [a non-physicist and non-scientist] about this scenario is the following:

1. Neutrinos pass through solid matter.

2. Neutrinos are neutral [do not possess positive or negative charge].

Therefore I wonder wonder wonder how do scientists and/or technicians steer them? You can’t use mirrors, or magnets, or barrels. How they point those little critters in the desired direction in order to perform their measurements?

The first one who provides the correct answer gets a free beer.

If I were a genetic engineer dabbling in DNA I would definitely want to attempt mixing chromosomes of dogs and cats.

Of course it would not be easy, but if the resulting creatures lived and were able to reproduce, I would quickly patent them and begin marketing them to pet-lovers as super-pets, containing all the best and none of the worst qualities of each species.

This would certainly confuse many people, especially cat lovers who despise dogs and dog lovers who despise cats.

But it would appeal to the exotic pet crowd, and would eventually grow a legitimacy and constituency of its own.

The first person/company to successfully enter this market will make history, and a killing.

You heard it here first!

Natalie Angier, in her New York Times article ‘Save a Whale, Save a Soul, Goes the Cry‘ quotes biologists who equate the cetaceans’s mental and social abilities as being on par with people’s. Granting personhood to these creatures will not protect them from being ‘harvested’ by actual people, however, given how we kill our fellow humans with impunity. Call them communists or terrorists or islamofascist or just plain evil and they become worthy of slaughter.

Or just spew a few million barrels of oil their way and let’s see how smart they are. Whatever. The whales aren’t hiring.

Drinking coffee offers no real benefit as reported by Lewis Page in The Register.

He rests in peace for all mankind.

New Scientist posts First black hole for light created on Earth but if you read the article you learn that the black hole built by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at Southeast University in Nanjing works on microwaves, not light waves. “I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009,” Cui is quoted as saying in the article.

Based on research published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, this is a fascinating development of unexpected new technology. Who knew you don’t need massive gravitational fields to create black holes?

I expect I’m joining a cast of thousands of fellow baby-boomer bloggers all over this land (the boomersphere) in posting assorted personal recollections of this day 40 years ago.

I was 15 years old when I watched the Apollo 11 broadcasts with my family on our black and white TV. Since he died last week, Walter Cronkite isn’t present to add his recollections of the event — and just as well, since my memory of his comments might not jive with his (as if).

I distinctly recall, immediately after Neil Armstrong touched the lunar surface and said “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Walter screwed up his face and announced “What did Armstrong just say? One small schlep for a man, one flying leap for the moon?”

He kept this up for at least 20 minutes — “…or was it, ‘one small flip for a man, one mindful bleep for moon pie?…’” etc. It almost drove me bonkers since the words were perfectly clear to me.

And then the following year Jethro Tull’s album Benefit contained the cut ‘For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me’, a bitter-sweet ballad featuring one of the crew. As a space nut in the process of becoming a rock-and-roll nut, it was almost too much to bear.

Who knew that after the Apollo program ended, there would be no further manned space flights to the moon (or places further) in my lifetime? It seemed all about to begin.

… is a potential future one might imagine based on research reported in this Green Car Reports article. It’s so preliminary that it’s irresponsible to speculate at this point. But I’m powerless to resist such a compelling idea and image.

Curious and concerned after reading Kristof’s NY Times op-ed about the apparent link between widespread frog deformities and endocrine disruptors, I decided to learn more about the subject. I quickly discovered TEDX, a nonprofit organization with an educational website on the subject.

From the TEDX site: Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the communication system of glands, hormones, and cellular receptors that control the body’s internal functions. A relatively unique feature of endocrine disruptors is that they exert their effects at extremely low doses, even when higher doses exhibit no adverse effects. Disorders that have increased in prevalence in recent years such as unusual male gonadal development, infertility, ADHD, autism, intellectual impairment, diabetes, thyroid disorders, and childhood and/or adult cancers are now being linked to prenatal exposure to endocrine disruptors.

My next step is to compile a list of common chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors, and determine their presence in Seattle’s public drinking water. Stay tuned.

Also from the TEDX site: The National Pesticide Information Center at Oregon State University has a phone number for pesticide related questions from the general public: 1-800-858-7378.

Yesterday’s New York Times ‘Week in Review’ section features a front-page, top-of-the-fold story by Philip Taubman called The Trouble With Zero about the nuclear disarmament movement. On first read it appears like a straightforward-enough status report on that subject. But turning to the story’s continuation on page 4 I was immediately struck by the accompanying photograph — a picture of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb from 1945 ironically captioned ‘New Weapon’!

Why did the editor select a photo of a nuclear warhead over fifty years old, when there are thousands of more modern weapons in the U.S. arsenal? Photos are not hard to find — here’s one of the B61, a light weight, intermediate yield bomb with variable yield options, of which the U.S. has several hundred stockpiled. Or this one of the newer W87 intermediate yield strategic ICBM MIRV warhead. Or the beautiful photograph of neutron pulse tubes for the W76 undergoing testing at Sandia National Laboratories (which I’m using to illustrate this blog entry).

I can only guess that the editor’s motive in selecting an ancient history nuke instead of a contemporary one is to lull the reader into complacency, by portraying nukes as quaint and old rather than presenting a picture of current reality; viz. scores of thousands of modern high-tech weapons of much greater megatonage deployed in U.S. silos and submarines, ready to be used on command.