We’ve covered the plans for some of the amazing buildings we might see in the Dubai area before, and when I heard about the plans for a new 1 kilometer high building, I went looking for more info. I then stumbled upon a website with a nice collection of future Dubai building projects, and they have some crazy ones in there, with lots of cool pictures.

Among my personal favorites are the Dubai Death Star, a giant building looking exactly like your favorite Imperial stronghold, and the Vertical City, a building with a height of about 2.4 kilometers… Gosh! If some of these buildings are going to catch on and start a trend in future architecture, our planet might look a bit different than we can imagine right now, sitting in our boring concrete boxes.

Well you should go check out the big list, and remember that there’s a dedicated page with more information about each of them.

Just a quick post about a laugh I had today at New Scientist reading their article on Nine of the oddest experiments ever. The author of The Mad Science Book, Reto Schneider, highlights (you’ve probably guessed it) 9 of the craziest scientific experiments ever conducted, and there are some goodies in there.

I can hardly believe that I’ve actually read this correctly, but apparently psychiatrists at the Friedmatt Sanatorium and Nursing Home in Basle, Switzerland in 1955 brilliantly fed spiders with urine from themselves and scizophrenic patients, respectively, in an experiment to diagnoze scizophrenia. Strangely no systematic differences where found, but it was concluded that spiders didn’t like human urine at all. I have a lot of question about the sanity of this experiment, but I guess you have to buy the book to get more info…

Anyway, go check out the list youself, and if you’re up to it, go make your own theories and conduct your own mad science experiments. In case you do, please let us know how bad it went, and how little you actually discovered!

There’s nothing like great news from a privately owned company to take the edge off a financial crisis. Privately owned space exploration company SpaceX has just (yesterday that is) launched their Falcon-1 rocket 500km off the surface of earth and hence into orbit. This hasn’t been without problems as this is their fourth try at launching this badboy (although to be fair some of them were classified as test flights), you may remember the much publicized failing of launch #3 , but it did not put a damper on their spirits and as i said, they now have successfully sent a payload into orbit. Their objective is to make spaceflight much cheaper, aiming to cut prices at least ten-fold.

Now you may be thinking “what’s the big deal, didn’t the x-prize winners do this years ago?”, and you would be partly right. Indeed SpaceX are not the first privately owned company to shoot stuff into space, and the X-Prize winners (now Virgin Galactic) did indeed send a person into space. They did NOT however, get anywhere near as far into space as SpaceX has. The original X-Prize flight was at around 100km altitude, and this latest one with SpaceX was 500km! It is however important to note that SpaceX was not sending people into space, and are not (as far as i know) in the space-tourism business. So you have two very different companies working on very different things, but both are doing extremely exciting work. I for one am a firm believer in private enterprise and couldn’t be more excited about these latest developments.

You might want to go over to SpaceX’s website and check out their video of the launch (both from ground and a camera attached to the actual spacecraft),

Well unless this is the only news site you read, you’ve probably heard about the LHC closing down for business due to a massive leak of liquid helium. The fact that you’ve heard about this is actually great news in my oppinion, as basically every news site in the world has reported on it, it is the first scientific experiments in a LONG time to get so much mainstream coverage. As Henrik pointed out a few articles ago, it may actually all be thanks to the doomsday people, i think most people have the good sense to ignore it for what it is (bullshit), but it’s gotten the experiment on their radar and now it is suddenly relevant news in every news outlet.

The bad news is however, that we’ll probably be devoid of any LHC news for over 8 months. You see, not only did the helium leak through, so now they have to go investigate and find out what was wrong and prevent it from happening again, but they also close down for the winter. If you read the thread on the somethingawful forums, that we posted a link to a month ago or so, you’ll remember that the LHC scientist there actually explained that they run off of nuclear power provided by the French. And since a nuclear plant more or less creates the same amount of energy all year long (regardless of usage), the LHC comes in and uses that excess energy during the summer to run, but it closes down during the winter (in part) to save on energy costs.

So it has closed it doors early this year due to damage, and then closes down for it’s planned winter hibernation, leaving us with many no-LHC-news months, lets just hope that the interest is still there when it fires up again and gets those particles flying.

A lot of good ideas are emerging for how to solve the problems associated with fossil fuel based power plants, such as the carbon dioxide footprint left in the atmosphere. One of the prime research areas is of course solar based power, ie. harvesting the energy from electromagnetic radiation from the Sun.

But conventional ground-based solar power has some disadvantages, such as atmospheric corrosion and the simple fact that no power is produced at night (and greatly reduced in cloudy weather). If we could put the solar cells into space at the right orbit, all of this could be avoided. But the problem remains essentially the same: There’s power in space that we want to use on Earth. With solar power sattelites, however, we have the advantage of controlling how to send the energy back to Earth, and we can simply choose the most efficient transmission frequency, so the atmosphere would interfere minimaly. Another advantage of putting the solar cells into space is of course that we can put them closer to the sun, not only avoiding Earths atmosphere, but also increasing the intensity of solar power in a given area.

As simple as it sounds, transmitting energy from space to Earth, especially in an efficient way, is a daunting challenge, and as the hard part is really just to send energy wirelessly at such distances in the atmosphere, it’s equivalent to sending energy from one place on the planet, to another. With funding from Discovery Chanel, this is exactly what John Mankin, an amarican scientist, has been doing, successfully transmitting energy some 150 km from one Hawaiian island to the other. While the effenciency is pretty bad at this stage, Mankin is positive about the future of space-based solar power. From the Wired article:

If they had been able to afford more solar panels, more phased array transmitters and a better receivers (the one they had could only receive in the horizontal direction), Mankins claims they could do much better– possibly up to 64% efficiency.

Mankin also believes that with the proper funding, working sattelites could be as close as 10-15 years. So I’m looking forward to following the development of these sattelites, and I only have one wish in addition to its success. Could there please be a spin-off research field that could take wireless power to the consumers so I can avoid carrying around all these power adapters for my laptops and other gadgets?

I was browsing through the pages of Nature’s webpage, and came across the editorial for the Nature Physics edition. Maybe it’s just because I’m a physics nerd, but I found it to be a riveting read. I’d always known that the Bell labs were prestigious and responsible for a myriad of physics breakthroughs, but i don’t think i ever realized the sheer magnitude of inventions and results that came from them.

Here’s a short list of what came from this legendary place:

Now this is by no means an exhaustive list, or a list of the most impressive feats, just a few I thought might ring a bell and give a nice cross-section to show the variety of fields they worked in and the magnitude of their effect on the world we take for granted today. In addition to all that, they have received no less then six Nobel prizes!

Sadly, as the title implies, their golden era may be over now. What made them so unique was that they were privately owned by the AT&T monopoly giant, and given LOADS of funding, and basically allowed to follow whatever path they found interesting in research. Today they answer to a much smaller company (Alcatel-Lucent) and they have decided to take the focus away from basic research and going more towards applied research, that is taking existing results and find ways to apply and exploit them for commercial needs. So it would seem safe to say that the days of Bell labs being at the forefront of new and exciting discoveries is over, but all good things must come to an end as they say (wasn’t there a star trek episode by that name?) and they certainly had a great run with some invaluable contributions to humanity.

I originally read about this in a nature editorial, sadly I quickly realized (when i got home from university, to finish this article) that they are of course subscription based and I could only read it because I was at school. So if you go to university you should be able to log in on a computer there and read the editorial. It is much better written then mine and sums up their history of innovation in a lot more detail, so I recommend checking it out. If you DON’T have access to a university connection though, you can also check out an article on the wired blog about the same thing. Also, the wikipedia Bell Labs page has a detailed timeline, noting the most important research they’ve done.

At Fermilab they have a project called MiniBooNE that detects the very elusive neutrino particles, a group of very light particles that hardly interacts with other particles, making them very hard to detect. Put simply, they just fly straight through everything, including you and me. If you make enough neutrinos, and you have a big enough detector, you might be able to stop a few of them though, and with time you can actually perform statistics about them.

This method has been used to figure out that neutrinos actually have a small mass, where they previously were believed to be massless like photons (the particles of light). It was also discovered that the three flavours of neutrinos, the electron, muon and tau neutrino, are able to oscillate between the flavours in a very random way. So what MiniBooNE has measured in their detector is that there is an excess of electron neutrinos if you go below a certain energy, something you wouldn’t expect if the flavours are mixed randomly. In fact, nothing in todays accepted models about the physical world is able to explain this measurement.

Luckily we already know that todays models can not tell the full story, as there are inconsitencies between two of the most succesful theories in their own domains, namely Quantum Mechanics at the atomic level, and General Relativity at the astronomic level. So some decades ago, people started thinking about theories that could unify these theories in a GUT (Grand Unified Theory) of everything. One single theory from which everything can be derived!
One of those theories that has developed and survived until today is what is popularly known as String Theory. String Theory suggests that the fundamental particles are made of small vibrating strings that are bound to the four dimensions of space and time we know and love. In this theory, however, the math simply doesn’t add up unless there exists (six, the last time I checked) more dimensions than these four, and in 2005 it was proposed that all this extra dimension stuff would increase neutrino oscillations at lower energy levels by having a fourth neutral neutrino that is free to travel all dimensions.

If I lost you somewhere, this is were the point comes in. At Fermilab they have been measuring an increased oscillation at lower energies, and string theorists claim that this is expected if String Theory is right. So at Fermilab they might actually be measuring the effects of extra dimensions, and the result suddenly becomes really interesting, if it ever wasn’t. At Fermilab they are currently planning even more precise detectors that will hopefully be able to remove any doubt about the result and come closer to the actual cause.

I had a laugh today on Gizmodo when I read an article about some unexplainable object found in a Hubble picture. Something apparently appeard and dissappeared in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the Universe, and Hubble caught it. Because the light from it is not really behaving like anything we know, it’s hard to tell how far it actually is, but the astronomers have narrowed the distance all the way down to somewhere between 130 light years and 11 billion light years…

This is quite interesting for obvious reasons, and you should go read the Gizmodo article, as it sums it up quite nicely and have some pictures too. In the bottom they even have their own take on what was actually observed, namely an Imperial Star Destroyer reaching Warp 10. Most of us will probably have a hard time with that sentence, and I had to click the link to find out what the hell was going on. Turns out an american scientist that has done some work at the LHC have been able to misquote Star Trek and even attribute the quote to Star Wars, leaving even the most trusty LHC fans with a sense of fear about the future of the Planet.

I was a bit sad to have an insane working week last week as a lot of interesting things happened in the scientific world with the startup of the LHC at CERN. The whole week I’ve been getting questions about what was actually going to happen on the startup day but the absolutely most asked was of course: So when will they create the first black holes, and what will happen when they do?

It’s been really interesting to see how everybody, including people that wouldn’t normally be interested in science, and especially not the very basic science (as opposed to applied science) conducted at CERN, have been so curious about this project because it’s been all over the media for the last couple of weeks. It’s like people have actually turned all the doomsday talk into constructive curiosity and it wouldn’t suprise me if this will spur a lot of interest in science in general. So maybe it’s time to thank the doomsday crackpots for some free publicity. I know I’ve never before seen so many of my university professors in the news in just one week!

So what actually happened at CERN last week? September 10 was the anounced startup day, but as I suspected, they wouldn’t be colliding anything just yet. The goal of Sep. 10 was to get a stream of protons the whole way around the 27 km tunnel, and they did. In fact they managed to get a stream the whole way around in both directions, so the first day turned out very successful. As far as I understood it, they will now have to try to narrow the stream down so it can continue around the tunnel for a longer time, and finally they will have to slice the stream into a pulse of packets so they can do the controlled collisions we are all waiting for. With all this in mind, we probably won’t see any real experiments until later this fall (1.5-2 months), but the succesfull startup is definitely good news.

So when will they create the first black holes, and what will happen when they do?

Well first of all, as I pointed out above, they won’t be colliding anything just yet, and secondly it’s is not until early next year, after a winter shutdown, that they will be colliding with maximum energy. As we have no way of knowing exactly at what energy the cool new physics can be investigated, it’s impossible to give a time estimate, but even worse for the impatient, it will take years to gather enough data to draw any conclusions. The physicists estimate around 3 years for the confirmation of the Higgs boson and 1.5 years for supersymmetry particles, that is IF they find those things at all.

Similarly it’s impossible to say when they will be able to create black holes, in the unlikely event that they actually will. For them to create a black hole, the (brane world) theory that predicts them has to be right, and they will have to collide the protons in just the right way. If they however do, the small black holes will quickly evaporate (in a tiny fraction of a second) before being able to cause any damage, so you can be absolutely sure that the Earth will not be destroyed this time.

Assuming that you followed the Olympics at ALL, you probably saw one of the biggest events of the games, the 100m dash, where Usain Bolt of Jamaica beat his own world record of 9.72 seconds and ran it at 9.69s. But just how fast could he have gone? I’m sure we all remember him getting cocky with a few meters to go and just stop running basically and celebrating (chest thumping and all), so how fast COULD he have gone if he’d taken the entire race seriously? Norweigan physicists took the time to calculate it.

Now this isn’t exactly breakthrough science, in fact i dare say anyone who’s had basic physics and perhaps calculus in college should in theory be able to calculate these numbers with some chalk and long nights studying footage, in fact I’m beating myself up for not doing this, as i, like everyone else thought “damn i wonder how fast he would’ve gone”. It would have been nice press for the site. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and my Norweigan brothers were smart enough to do this.

So what’s the official estimate? According to them, it’s 9.55s within an error margin of 0.04s. That number is done assuming that his acceleration could have been 0.5m/s² higher then that of the runner-up, Richard Thompsons, acceleration (if he would’ve had the same acceleration the number would be 9.61 ± 0.04s).

You can check out the entire article here , and as you might have guessed it’s not the most serious one in the world, in fact the title is “Velocity dispersions in a cluster of stars: How fast could Usain Bolt have run?”, and it’s the first scientific article i’ve ever read that thanks a pizza guy for his contribution.

Second, we thank the pizza guy from Peppe’s who provided us with a very good half-n-half “Thai Chicken” and “Heavy Heaven” pizza on a late Friday night.

But this is news that is likely to get some publicity and i think any chance to get any kind of scientific thinking into the media is a positive thing, especially in a time when the only scientific journalism in most medias revolves around quoting crackpots on how the world is going to end due to the Large Hadron Collider.