Support the Show:

[asa default]B001CWXAP2[/asa]

• Grab the SciByte Audible.com pick, The Lost Fleet: Dauntless
• Purchase anything at Think Geek using this link

Higgs-Boson confirmation just around the corner?

• The low down
• The Higgs mechanism explains how most of the known elementary particles obtain their mass and would make up a field of particles stretching the entire universe
• The Higgs particle would be the carrier of that field, and is thought to give mass to other particles, and thus to objects and creatures in the Universe.
• The Higgs boson is a pivotal part of the standard model of particle physics
• The Standard Model concerns all interactions which control dynamics of known subatomic particles but does not incorporate the physics of dark energy nor of the full theory of gravitation
• Significance
• The Higgs theory has been around now for almost 50 years
• Finding the Higgs Boson was one of the main reasons of why the Large Hadron Collider was built
• Finding it would be an enormous scientific breakthrough for physics and would help explain why different particles have different masses.
• This year the LHC has generating 400 trillion proton-proton collisions, almost six times more than expected
• The tricky part is figuring out whether the tracks really are evidence of a Higgs boson – or just unrelated noise.
• Higgs Boson particle are thought to have a mass of between 114 and 185 GeV, gigaelectronvolts. A proton, the positively charged particle in the nucleus in an atom, is 1GeV.
• Reports in July showed tantalizing data spikes between 120 and 140 GeV suggest that the Higgs mass might lie in that range, but the data was not reliable enough to make any scientific claims
• Prior results from particle colliders had effectively ruled out a Higgs outside the range of 114 GeV to 141 GeV.
• On Dec 13, two Large Hadron Collider teams reveal the results of their research, highlighting ten candidates that had shown evidence of Higgs
• Those ten candidates were found from the remains of about 350 trillion collisions using the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detectors.
• * Of Note*
• Tuesday’s data will not be confirmed until they are able to produce repeated evidence in future experiments, the confirmation is expected to happen around summer 2012.
• Atlas and CMS said they see “spikes” in their data at roughly the
  same mass: 124–125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV; this is about 130 times as
  heavy as the protons found in atomic nuclei).
• 124GeV = 212 quintillionths of a gram (that’s period followed by 14
  zero’s thena 1)
• ATLAS has observed a signal of a Higgs particle at 125 GeV with a significance level of 3.5 sigma — with 3 being enough to claim evidence but 5 needed for a discovery — and that CMS has seen one at 2.5 sigma
• what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson
• A level of “five sigma” is required to claim a discovery, meaning there is less than a one in a million chance the data spike is down to a statistical fluke.
• The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
• Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
• Multimedia
• VIDEO : Large Hadron Rap @ YouTube
• VIDEO : NatureNewsteam : Hunting for the Higgs @ YouTube
• IMAGE : Restricting the mass of the Higgs @ nature
• Social Media
• CERN @CERNhttps://twitter.com/#!/cern/
• CERN-approved Android app
• Further Reading / In the News
• LHC: Higgs boson ‘may have been glimpsed’ @ BBC
• CERN physicists find hint of Higgs boson @ cnet
• Scientists Find Higgs Boson Clues, But ‘God Particle’ Hunt Continues @ pcMag
• Scientists excited over hints of finding an elusive particle @ PhysOrg
• Scientists About to Find The Force @ Gizmodo
• Physicists to Make Major ‘God Particle’ Announcement Next Week @ Space.com
• Scientists excited over hints of finding an elusive particle @ PhysOrg
• Has the ‘God Particle’ Been Found? Major Announcement Expected Tuesday @ FoxNews
• LHC to narrow search for Higgs boson @ PhysOrg
• Hints fade of elusive physics ‘God particle’ @ PhysOrg
• Could the Higgs boson explain the size of the Universe? @ PhysOrg
• CERN manages expectations around Higgs rumours @ nature
• Higgs hunt enters endgame @ nature
• Hunting season for Higgs ends @ nature

Tougher than diamond?

• Background
• Superhard materials, are used in many scientific and technological applications, the most famous and widely used of these are diamond and cubic boron nitride
• Both of those are however unstable at high temperatures, which limit their applicability
• Carbon nanotubes, Nanotubes were observed in 1991, are long, hollow structure with the walls formed by one-atom-thick sheets of carbon and are sometimes made of grapene
• Graphene, a material often used in carbon nanotubes is the densest two-dimensional material
• The low down
• Applying pressure to some carbon allotropes, different structural forms of the same element, can change the bonds
• That pressure results in different forms of carbon with novel electronic and mechanical properties
• Since the 1980s, scientists have been synthesizing newer allotropes, including carbon nanotubes, graphene, and fullerenes, all of which have had a significant scientific and technological impact.
• Directly compressing carbon nanotube bundles could synthesize novel metastable (long lived but not truly indefinite stability) carbon allotropes
• This compression results in different forms of carbon with novel electronic and mechanical properties
• Significance
• Scientists have discovered a new carbon polymer that simulations show is hard enough to crack diamond
• A material doesn’t have to be stronger than diamond to be able to crack it, it only need a higher compression strength.
• Compressive strength is the capacity of a material or structure to withstand axially, kind of like wood grain, directed pushing forces.
• The scientists are now using a recently developed technique called the Crystal Structure Analysis by Particle Swarm Optimization, a computational method
• * Of Note*
• Harder, stronger, and the ability to cut along specific axes of a material are all unique physical properties ering various compressed allotropes of carbon that defeat diamond in various ways and some have only been proven in simulation
• There is a long-standing puzzle in astronomy known as the ‘carbon crisis’ in interstellar dust
• Observations by the Hubble telescope reveal carbon dust distortions in light, deep red, that would require more carbon that we have previously thought was there
• Multimedia
• VIDEO : Graphene: Strongest Material on Earth @ YouTube
• IMAGE : T-carbon from different directions @ PhysOrg
• IMAGE : Prediction of a new form of carbon @ PhysOrg
• IMAGE : Superhard structures of carbon found in the calculations @ PhysOrg
• IMAGE : Views of supercell of bct-Carbon @ PhysOrg
• IMAGE : Folding and distorting Carbon atoms @ PhysOrg
• IMAGE : Rotating carbon nanotube gif @ Wikepedia
• Further Reading / In the News
• Superhard carbon material could crack diamond @ PhysOrg
• Structure of new form of super-hard carbon identified @ PhysOrg
• Researchers develop algorithm to predict new superhard crystals @ PhysOrg
• Researchers predict material ‘denser than diamond’ @ PhysOrg
• New carbon allotrope could have a variety of applications @ PhysOrg
• Scientists Discover Material Harder Than Diamond @ PhysOrg

*— NEWS BYTE — *

Tricking the eye in photographs

• The low down
• Humans can quickly detect photo fraud. They can do so in spotting lighting inconsistencies in a doctored photograph
• Significance
• A team at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign set out to extract the 3-D scene information from single images, to allow for seamless object insertion, removal, and relocation
• They created an algorithm that recreates the 3-D geometry and lighting of a scene for an artificial object to be inserted into
• The user defines walls, objects and light source
• The program then adds shadows and highlights to the object before converting it back to 2-D.
• The team can simulate lighting conditions so that the object looks realistic.
• The involves three phases luminaire inference, perspective estimation (depth, occlusion, camera parameters), and texture replacement
• * Of Note*
• Decorators might take a photo of a room and experiment with different furniture and object insertions.
• The entertainment and gaming industries could make use of this as well
• Multimedia
• VIDEO : Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs :
  @ YouTube
• VIDEO : Siggraph 2011 Showreel : @ YouTube
• IMAGE : Examples of the program @ PhysOrg
• Further Reading / In the News
• UIUC team will show can’t-tell photo inserts at Siggraph (w/ video) @ PhysOrg
• Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs
• University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign

Scientific papers from Hubble hit a milestone

• The low down
• Launched : April 24, 1990
• Mass : 24,500 lb / 11,110 kg
• Orbit height : 347 mi / 559 km
• Orbit velocity 25,000 ft/s [7,500 m/s]
• Orbit Period: ~96 min, 14–15 per day
• Obervational Wavelengths : visible light, ultraviolet, near-infrared
• Five space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble from 1993 to 2009 repaired various components of the telescope and upgraded it with ever more powerful instruments.
• Deorbit planned ~2013–2021
• Significance
• Hubble Space Telescope has accumulated 10,000 science papers based on its observations.
• Thousands of astronomers around the world in over 35 countries have been engaged in Hubble research
• The five top referenced science papers are, in order: the search for distant supernovae used to characterize dark energy; the precise measurement of the universe’s rate of expansion; the apparent link between galaxy mass and central black hole mass; early galaxy formation in the Hubble Deep Field; and the evolutionary models for low-mass stars and brown dwarfs.
• The 10,000th paper reports on the identification of the faintest supernova ever associated with a long-duration gamma-ray burst – an intense gusher of high-energy radiation following the death of a star.
• * Of Note*
• Hubble’s archive contains data from over 1 million exposures and the number of science papers written based on Hubble archival data has increased to the point where it has eclipsed the number of papers resulting from new observations.
• Multimedia
• VIDEO : This Week @NASA @ YouTube @ ~7:50
• IMAGE : Hubble Space Telescope Science Publications : @ Space.com
• Social Media
• Hubble @NASA_Hubble
• Further Reading / In the News
• Hubble Space Telescope @ NASA
• Hubble Space Telescope Passes Major Science Milestone @ Space.com
• Here are 10,000 reasons to be excited about deep-space exploration @io9.com
• Hubble Site
• Statistics about Hubble papers from refereed journals
• Hubble Space Telescope science site

The North American “terrible (large) lizard”

• The low down
• North America’s biggest dinosaur has been unearthed
• Alamosaurus sanjuanensis, a cousin of the Diplodocus, once called New Mexico home.
• The Alamosaurus was one of many breeds of long-necked, long-tailed sauropods to roam the continent 69 million years ago.
• Significance
• Paleontologists stumbled upon the bones during a dig in the New Mexico desert back in 2004
• After the full bone had been freed, the trip back to the truck was the hardest part of the entire process, with only two people to move it the 1.2 miles.
• The Alamosaurus vertebra found puts the dinosaur in the same category as other Titanosaurus sauropods discovered in South America
• Titanosaurus was documented in a recent issue of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica published on Dec. 6.
• A full skeleton has yet to be found
• * Of Note*
• The name Alamosaurus comes from Ojo Alamo, the geologic formation in which it was found and which was, in turn, named after the nearby Ojo Alamo trading post
• New questions have emerged as to the behavior of sauropods in North America
• These dinosaurs are found primarily in the south, only getting as far north as Utah, leading some researchers to wonder about their preferred environment
• Perhaps they actually emigrated in from South America during this time, and maybe they just haven’t got as far north quite yet
• Multimedia
• YouTube VIDEO : Discover the Alamosaurus:
• YouTube VIDEO : Tour the MNS Fossil Prep Lab
• YouTube VIDEO : Taking Alamosaurus for a Walk
• IMAGE : A speculative representation on how the Alamosaurus sanjuanensis could have been @ en.wiki
• IMAGE : Researchers pose with the complete reconstruction of the neck vertebra of an Alamosaurus
• Further Reading / In the News
• JOURNAL OF PALEONTOLOGY
• Acta Palaeontologica Polonica
• A JUVENILE SPECIMEN OF THE SAUROPOD DINOSAUR ALAMOSAURUS SANJUANENSIS FROM THE UPPER CRETACEOUS OF BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK, TEXAS @ Journal of Palaeontology. 76(1): 156–172
• North America’s Biggest Dinosaur Unearthed in New Mexico @ FoxNews
• https://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/07/9282139-meet-americas-biggest-dinosaur

Polly want an explanation for how parrots talk

• The low down
• Parrots have neither lips nor teeth, but that doesn’t stop them from producing dead-on imitations of human speech
• Significance
• Part of the reason is that, like humans, parrots use their tongues to form sounds
• Scientists took x-ray movies of monk parakeets
• Parrots use their mobile, muscular tongues to explore their environment and manipulate food
• Those capable organs also help parrots utter greetings in words that even humans can understand.
• Multimedia
• YouTube VIDEO : X-ray movie of a vocalizing monk parakeet
• Social Media
• Twitter Results for [#]()
• Further Reading / In the News
• How Parrots Talk @ ScienceMag.org](https://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/scienceshot-how-parrots-talk.html?ref=hp)

Learning by the Matrix/Chuck way

• The low down
• Pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas
• The brain then fills in greater detail
• New research in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort
• Significance
• Researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks
• Think of a person watching a computer screen and have brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease
• This research is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance
• None of these studies directly addressed the question of whether early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning
• * Of Note*
• The approached worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning
• The decoded neurofeedback method might be used for various types of learning, including memory, motor and rehabilitation
• On the flip side the neurofeedback mechanism could just as soon be used for purposes of hypnosis or covert mind control
• Further Reading / In the News
• Learning high-performance tasks with no conscious effort may soon be possible (w/ video) @ Midical Xpress
• Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain, Matrix-Style @ PopSci
• Scientists say they’re getting closer to Matrix-style instant learning @io9

Lunar eclipse, with a twist

• The low down
• A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes behind the Earth so that the Earth blocks the Sun’s light from striking the Moon.
• This can only happen during a full moon when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are aligned exactly, or very closely so, with the Earth in the middle.
• This total lunar eclipse offered a rare chance, for most places in the United States and Canada, to see a strange celestial sight
• A sight that celestial geometry seems to dictate can’t happen
• Significance
• Selenelion, selenehelion, and occurs when both the sun and the eclipsed moon can be seen at the same time.
• Atmospheric refraction causes astronomical objects to appear higher in the sky than they are in reality
• When you see the sun sitting on the horizon, it is not there really.
• It’s actually below the edge of the horizon, but our atmosphere acts like a lens and bends the sun’s image just above the horizon, allowing us to see it.
• We end up seeing the sun for a few minutes in the morning before it has actually risen and for a few extra minutes in the evening after it actually already has set.
• The same holds true with the moon, as well.
• There was be a short window of roughly 1-to–6 minutes when it was possible to simultaneously spot the sun rising in the east-southeast and the eclipsed full moon setting in the west-northwest
• * Of Note*
• This was the last total lunar eclipse of 2011, and the last one until April 15, 2014 (SciByte 155)
• Multimedia
• YouTube VIDEO : “Impossible” Eclipse
• YouTube VIDEO : Impossible “selenelion” eclipse
• YouTube VIDEO : “Impossible” Eclipse
• YouTube VIDEO : ScienceCasts: A Super-Sized Lunar Eclipse
• Further Reading / In the News
• A Blood-Red Moon @ Universe Today
• Saturday’s Lunar Eclipse Will Include ‘Impossible’ Sight @ foxnews
• Total Lunar Eclipse On Saturday, Western States Get Rare View @ npr
• How to catch tomorrow morning’s lunar eclipse @ io9

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

DAWN Spacecraft reachest closts orbit to the asteroid Vesta

• Vesta:
• Discovered: March 29, 1807 by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers of Germany (fourth asteroid discovered)
• Dimensions: About 578 by 560 by 458 kilometers (359 by 348 by 285 miles)
• Shape: Nearly spheroid, with a massive chunk out of the south pole
• Rotation: Once every 5 hours, 20 minutes
• About the length of Arizona, it appears to have a surface of basaltic rock – frozen lava – which oozed out of the asteroid’s presumably hot interior shortly after its formation 4.5 billion years ago, and has remained largely intact ever since.
• DAWN:
• Launch Date : Sep 27, 2007
• Mission will go through through July 2015
• Framing Camera (FC) : Scientific imaging system of the Dawn Mission to the two complementary protoplanets, 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta.
• Visible & Infrared Spectrometer (VIR) : Accomplishes the Dawn mission’s scientific and measurement objectives of producing spectral images. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft successfully maneuvered into its closest orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta today
• Gamma Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (GRaND) : Measures elemental abundances on the surface of Vesta and Ceres.
• Gravity Science : The team utilizes the radio link used for communications and carefully observe the Doppler shift in the link’s carrier frequency (when received at ground stations) due to
  gravitational forces acting on the spacecraft center-of-mass in the environment of Vesta and Ceres.
• Multimedia
• DAWN Media Gallery @ NASA
• Further Reading / In the News
• NASA DAWN website
• NASA DAWN website

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

• Dec 15 1612 – 399 years ago – A telescope meets the Andromedo galaxy : [Simon Marius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Marius, namer of Jupiter’s 4 inner satellites, is first to observe Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, but not the closest galaxy overall. The Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote a tantalizing line about it in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964, describing it as a “small cloud”.
• **Dec 14 1807 – 204 years ago – Meteorite gets scienced ** : In Weston, (now called Easton) Connecticut at 6:30 am, a meteorite was seen with an aparent size of 2/3 the size of the moon. Eyewitnesses reported three loud explosions, as it fell and broke apart to fall in at least six locations. This meteor became the first to fall in the New World to be documented, collected, and chemically analyzed and received much attention in the national and international press. The largest and only unbroken specimen weighing in at 36.5 pounds (16.5 kilograms) was recovered and made a hole 5 ft long and 4.5 ft wide (1.5 m long and 1.4 m wide) now resides within the oldest collection of meteorites in the United States. Out of the approximately 350 pounds of the meteorite that fell on the town of Weston, less than 50 pounds can now be accounted for. Yale Peabody Museum – Weston Meteorite
• **Dec 17 1903 – 108 years ago – The Wright brother fly ** : In 1903, the first powered flight was achieved by the [Wright brothers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights in the Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. That morning, the biting cold wind had a velocity of 22 to 27 miles an hour. As ten o’clock arrived, the Wrights decided, nevertheless, to get the machine out and attempt a flight. Orville Wright launched from a track, taking off into the wind. The aircraft covered 120 feet, aloft for 12 seconds. Thus for the first time, a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started. First flight photo

Looking up this week

• You might have seen …
• On Dec. 8th, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed an unusual event on the sun: An erupting cloud of plasma was eclipsed by a dark magnetic filament. VIDEO By studying how the light of the explosion is filtered by the foreground material, SDO mission scientists might be able to learn something new about dark filaments on the sun.
• Keep an eye out for …>
• Wed, Dec 14 : Orion is up in the east-southeast after dinnertime, and higher in the southeast later in the evening. IMAGE
• Thurs, Dec 15 : The Moon has a bright companion as it rises late this evening: Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the lion, sits to it’s upper left.
• Fri, Dec 16 : Mars is close to the upper left of the Moon as they climb into view after midnight, and looks like a bright star.
• Sat, Dec 17 : Last-quarter moon. Above it around midnight is Mars
• More on whats in the sky this week
• Sky&Telescope
• AstronomyNow<
• SpaceWeather.com
• HeavensAbove
• StarDate.org