Why, you ask?
Sure, it won’t actually come out for another 6 months or so. But still…SQUEEEEEE!!!!
May the Dragon Ride Again on the Wings of Time!
Rand al'Thor, done by John Seamas Gallagher
A schematic, called a Feynman diagram, of two virtual gluons from colliding LHC protons interacting to produce a hypothetical Higgs boson, a top quark, and an antitop quark. These in turn decay into a specific combination of quarks and leptons that is very difficult to fake in other processes. Collecting sufficient evidence of signals like this one may eventually allow ATLAS collaboration members to discover the Higgs boson.
In a press conference given today, scientists at CERN gave an update on the hunt for the Higgs boson.
Now let me be very clear. They did not find the Higgs boson. Not yet.
What they have found, are some “excesses which are intriguing” around the 124-125 GeV range in their search for the Higgs.
The “excesses” are only at a statistical certainty of about 2-sigma. In order to claim a discovery, the data must show a certainty at the level of 5-sigma. So they have a long way to go (I’ll put up a more detailed post later with what these terms actually mean).
A good thing is that two experiments at CERN, ATLAS and CMS, both show this fluctuation.
The excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot exclude anything at this stage,” said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the Atlas experiment. [BBC]
What happens now? Now we wait a few more months until they get some more data and this fluctuation in the data will be concluded to be the Higgs boson, or it will turn out to be nothing.
Traces of Cesium-134 and Cesium-137 have been found in a Japanese company’s baby formula.
The story was reported in The Associated Press, and the machine of churnalism has spread the story like nuclear fallout.
Traces of radiation spilled from Japan’s hobbled nuclear plant were detected in baby formula Tuesday in the latest case of contaminated food in the nation.
Major food and candy maker Meiji Co. said it was recalling canned powdered milk for infants, with expiration dates of October 2012, as a precaution.
The media has hit a gold mine with this one: radiation and babies!
Now, there’s no doubt about it: radiation is scary.
I mean, its invisible, it comes from nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, and can be very harmful to your health. There are many different types and it is hard to know how to protect yourself.
But radiation is everywhere. Even now, you are being bombarded with cosmic rays which are depositing a radiation dose into your body. Right, Carl Sagan?
But the funny thing is, the more we understand about radiation, the less scary it becomes in everyday life.
For example, those cosmic rays I was just talking about? Well they give an annual radiation dose of about 0.3 to 1 milliSieverts. (a Sievert is a unit of radiation dose; for a good explanation on dose units, check out this link)
How does this compare to other radiation sources? Well the Potassium in your body actually produces radiation as well, and gives a dose roughly equivalent to the yearly background radiation dose.
If you took all the natural sources of radiation, be it from your own body, cosmic rays or the air and soil, the total radiation dose you get every year is about 4 milliSieverts.
So now lets talk about radiation released in nuclear power plant accidents. If you lived within 10 miles of the Three Mile Island power plant during their little snafu, you received a dose of about 80 microsieverts (50 times less than normal background radiation).
The Chernobyl accident in 1986, the most famous and perhaps most catastrophic nuclear power plant accident in history, citizens who lived in highly contaminated areas near the plant between the years of 1986 and 2005 received a total dose of >50 milliSieverts (about 270 000 people).
Citizens in less contaminated areas received a dose of about 10 – 20 milliSieverts between 1986 and 2005 (about 5 000 000 people).
For comparison sake, the average radiation dose from normal background radiation from 1986 to 2005 is about 80 milliSieverts. The dose from a normal, whole-body CT scan is about 12 milliSieverts.
Ok, now we have some perspective, so let’s talk about this baby formula.
So the company that makes the product is doing this recall voluntarily. The amount of radiation detected in the baby formula was
well below government-set safety limits, and the company said the amounts were low enough not to have any affect on babies’ health even if they drank the formula every day.
So, just how much radiation did they find?
The levels of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in the milk were up to 31 becquerels per kilogram, which is below the government limit of 200 becquerels per kilogram set for milk.
So 31 Becquerels per kilogram (31 bq/kq). Now, 1 Becquerel means that 1 atom in a sample undergoes radioactive decay in 1 second. Thus 31 Bq/kg means that in 1 kg of the baby formula, 31 atoms are undergoing radioactive decay in 1 second.
How does this compare to other foods? Well a banana has a radioactivity of about 15 Bq due to the presence of potassium-40 (bananas contain about 0.5 grams of potassium, and radioactivity of 1 gram of potassium is about 31 Bq). A banana has a mass of, oh let’s say 150 grams, so the radioactivity of bananas per kilogram is:
Bearing in mind, of course, that these are rough numbers, but some sources suggest that this is actually a conservative estimate.
Comparable levels of radiation can be found in carrots, potatoes, red meat and brazil nuts.
So while it is good to keep a close eye on radiation levels, particularly after an earthquake and tsunami hit a nuclear power plant, let’s try and keep everything in perspective.
If you are worried about radiation levels closer to home, Health Canada monitors radiation levels across the country on a regular basis. Since the Fukushima disaster, they have found
Health Canada’s data does not show an increase over and above the normal day to day fluctuations. However, very minute levels of isotopes in the radiation have been attributed to the release in Japan. The actual increase in radiation measured is in the order of 0.0005 µSv per day, which is so small that it is extremely difficult to measure against normal background radiation.
So an increase on the order of 0.0005 microSieverts per day. That’s an incredibly small amount and absolutely nothing for us to worry about.
Drawing conclusions from medical research is not as easy as you might think.
I received a wonderful breath of fresh air this morning.
I came into work, sat at my computer and immediately ignored the dozen emails in my inbox to read the news.
Now, The Globe and Mail is usually my first stop for Canadian news. The news sections are generally quite good, though I have sometimes criticized their science reporting.
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see this headline in the “Life” section:
The article discusses how scientific evidence, particularly medical studies, can be mis-construed and bastardized to prove pretty much anything the author wants.
By citing examples such as this review article claiming that cigarette smoking can increase running performance, the Globe article shows how we shouldn’t believe everything we read. (The review article in question was actually written as a joke to make exactly this point)
Common methods used by proponents of alternative medicine and pseudoscience, such as cherry-picking data, are succinctly explained and accompanied by real examples of these tactics in action.
It is a good introduction to thinking critically about studies discussed in the news, and how to defend yourself from getting suckered in by false claims. Give it a read.
I love the Muppets. But then, who doesn’t?
Well, this guy doesn’t.
Or these guys…
But everyone else loves the Muppets.
Now, since I also love physics I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that when I went to see “The Muppets” recently, I was delighted to see that Prof. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker had taken their leave of absence from performing to do research with the ATLAS detector at CERN.
Poor Beaker.
An idea so awesome, I only regret not thinking of it myself.
Chad Orzel, author of the blog “Uncertain Principles” is counting down the days ’till Christmas (also Isaac Newton‘s birthday) with an important physics equation every day.
An explanation, as well as some history of each equation will also be given. For example, today’s equation is the full form of Newton’s Second Law:
Why is this important? Because it’s the foundation of physics as a mathematical science.
The F=ma form that everybody learns in grade school (in an ideal world, anyway) is an approximation to the full expression, assuming an object with constant mass and low velocity. If you want to know how high you can throw a baseball, or how quickly you can stop a car, this is the form to use.
Should be an interesting month. This advent calendar could only be better if it had chocolate.
While debate about the Keystone XL pipeline rages on (I just read this very interesting piece on Scientific American about the project), the excavation of the Alberta oilsands has actually revealed some interesting science.
About two weeks ago, a machinery operator for Syncrude stumbled upon a nearly complete skeleton of a Plesiosaur.
Maggy Horvath, the woman who found the skeleton, said
As operators we always keep our eyes out for a find.
Can you imagine coming into work on the first day and you supervisor has to tell you to “be on the lookout for dinosaur bones”?
From the Syncrude press release:
“This is a very rare find. It’s a long necked plesiosaur, which is a marine reptile with a very long neck, small head and short body. The last one that was recovered was 10 years ago; it was recognized as a new kind and given the name Wapuskanectes,” said Dr. Don Brinkman, Director of Preservation and Research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. “We are hoping that this is another specimen of this kind of plesiosaur. The new specimen is particularly important because it looks to be nearly complete.”
Plesiosaur on land
Well, that’s it. Now I have to go to the Royal Tyrrell Museum again and see me some dinosaurs!
(To the hardcore dino-fanatics: I know the plesiosaur is not technically a dinosaur, but damn it if it still makes me want to go see me some T-Rex skeletons)
Calgary is a cold place in the winter. And sometimes, it gets really, really cold. Like -30 degrees celsius cold!
But a few times a year, thanks to Calgary’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains, we get a reprieve from the cold and get to enjoy spring-like temperatures in the dead of winter.
This phenomenon is called a Chinook wind (or foehn wind). It happens when warm air from the mountains blows eastward and drastically increases the temperature. It is a wonderful day when this happens.
Adiabatic warming of downward moving air produces the warm Chinook wind.
Incidentally, this also creates some pretty fantastic cloud formations.
Chinook "arch" over Calgary, Alberta (2003).
Unfortunately, some people have problems with Chinooks. They say that when a Chinook occurs, they get migraines more frequently.
The mechanism for this is thought to be the rapid change in barometric pressure brought on by the warmer air.
However, a headline on the CTV website today suggests that this may be all in their head. The headline reads “Study Debunks Link Between Chinooks and Headaches”.
The study they are referring too was published online in September in the journal Pain Medicine and is entitled “The Influence of Chinook Winds and Other Weather Patterns upon Neuropathic Pain”.
The study found that
Chinooks were not associated with individual acute exacerbations in [neuropathic pain].
But wait a minute! What type of neuropathic pain did they study? Well the news article itself says
[The authors] tracked almost 100 pain sufferers over four years and looked specifically at patients who suffer from sciatica (pain in the lower back, buttocks and legs), pinched nerves or nerve pain associated with diabetes.
In other words, the study had absolutely nothing to do with migraines.
In fact, previous studies have found that chinooks actually do increase the chances of migraine onset.
To be fair, the studies are generally small and the correlation of migraines with chinook winds do not necessarily mean the chinooks are causing the migraines.
But the point stands that my 2 minute literature search results completely contradict the headline of this article. But, if you read a little further down in the news article, you will see that it says
Previous migraine studies suggested lower barometric pressures and higher temperatures during chinooks could increase the risk of triggering an attack.
So not only did the authors know that this study had nothing to do with migraines, they knew that the literature suggests chinooks do indeed correlate with migraines.
A headline that completely contradicts not only the science, but the text of one’s own article shows some pretty poor journalistic integrity.
The lesson here being to always read the full text of the article, and be sure to check the facts. I guess promoting proper science is not nearly as important as drumming up readership.
“Houston, we have a problem,” indeed.
Now you can own a piece of (failed) space exploration history. This is astronaut Jim Lovell’s Lunar Module Activation Checklist that he used to power up the Lunar Excursion Module when an explosion crippled the Command Module of the Apollo 13 mission.
For the low-low price of $45,000 (that’s the current bid as of 9:20 AM MST) you can be the proud owner of this piece of NASA nostalgia.
But hurry! Internet bidding has closed, and only floor bidding is now allowed.
Or, you can just go watch the “Apollo 13″ movie again. It was awesome!
This is a really good comic about the scientific validity of acupuncture.
Click on the image to read the whole thing:
The study of acupuncture efficacy is a classic example of mis-interpreting results, making the placebo effect out to be something its not and poor coverage by the media.
Acupuncture is no better than placebo (in fact, poking people with toothpicks gives the same effect), is not entirely safe, and is just another alternative medicine out to get your money.
