Monday, April 27, 2015
Nepal earthquake: Death toll rises above 4,000 people
My heart goes out to the people of Nepal after the devastating earthquake.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
LHC restart: 'Experimental' current blast fixes glitch
LHC restart: 'Experimental' current blast fixes glitch
'Like blowing a fuse'
The mercifully rapid repair was something of an experiment, according to the head of Cern's beams department, Dr Paul Collier.
After his team pinpointed the location of the fault - to within centimetres - using electrical signals, they "had a number of methods to explore", Dr Collier told BBC News.
One would have been to hose down the area with helium gas, which could be done remotely; another would have been to open the magnet up and send in an engineer. Maybe the safest mechanism would have been to warm up the machine and go in there and clean it out - but that would have been a very long process," Dr Collier said.
So instead they tried something new: passing nearly 400 amps of current directly through the short circuit, for just a few milliseconds - "in the same way you would blow a fuse".
Measurements made on Monday evening suggested the trick had worked, and this was confirmed when high voltages were put through the circuit on Tuesday.
"There's no short there now, even at high voltages," Dr Collier said, clearly pleased with the solution.
"We can't pretend this is the only fragment in the system; it could well recur in the future. But now we've got a mechanism to deal with it relatively quickly - much more quickly than we did this time."
A vast, subterranean "atom smasher", the LHC is famous around the world for pushing the boundaries of physics - including the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Its much-anticipated reboot will slam protons together with twice as much energy as ever before, which researchers hope will yield insights into huge, outstanding questions like the existence of dark matter and supersymmetry.
Actual collisions will still not recommence until at least May; the first big step is to send beams all the way around the machine's parallel pipes, in both directions - and this is now only days away.
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Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Higgs Boson Blues (Lyric Video) & Red Right Hand
Red Right Hand |
Take a litle walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms,
like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires,
in the humming wires
Hey man, you know
you're never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge,
past the mills, past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes
a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
a red right hand
He'll wrap you in his arms,
tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all the dreams
it took you a lifetime to destroy
He'll reach deep into the hole,
heal your shrinking soul
Hey buddy, you know you're
never ever coming back
He's a god, he's a man,
he's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat
is a red right hand
You ain't got no money?
He'll get you some
You ain't got no car? He'll get you one
You ain't got no self-respect,
you feel like an insect
Well don't you worry buddy,
cause here he comes
Through the ghettos and the barrio
and the bowery and the slum
A shadow is cast wherever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his
red right hand
(Organ solo)
You'll see him in your nightmares,
you'll see him in your dreams
He'll appear out of nowhere but
he ain't what he seems
You'll see him in your head,
on the TV screen
And hey buddy, I'm warning
you to turn it off
He's a ghost, he's a god,
he's a man, he's a guru
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
his red right hand.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The classic 60s song of the "Supremes" "I hear a Symphony" "The 5th Galaxy Orchestra" featuring the amazing vocals of Dianna Ross from the original recording..
Published on Jun 20, 2013
The classic 60s song of the "Supremes" "I hear a Symphony" totally reconstructed fromthe electronica-lounge band "The 5th Galaxy Orchestra" featuring the amazing vocals of
Dianna Ross from the original recording..
Visit them at Sound Cloud ~revised double take: Beautiful Tracks...
https://soundcloud.com/the5thgalaxyorchestra
http://5thgalaxyorchestra.net/#home.html
https://www.facebook.com/5thgalaxyorchestra
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYLKoEnwFPf3r1U2f17xefQ
http://www.myspace.com/vgalaxyorchestra
Monday, January 19, 2015
The Large Hadron Collider is being prepared for its second three-year run March 2015
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, has started to get ready for its second three-year run. Cool down of the vast machine has already begun in preparation for research to resume early in 2015 following a long technical stop to prepare the machine for running at almost double the energy of run 1. The last LHC magnet interconnection was closed on 18 June 2014 and one sector of 1/8 of the machine has already been cooled to operating temperature. The accelerator chain that supplies the LHC’s particle beams is currently starting up, with beam in the Proton Synchrotron accelerator last Wednesday for the first time since 2012.
"There is a new buzz about the laboratory and a real sense of anticipation," says CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, speaking at a press conference at the EuroScience Open Forum (link is external) (ESOF) meeting in Copenhagen. "Much work has been carried out on the LHC over the last 18 months or so, and it’s effectively a new machine, poised to set us on the path to new discoveries."
Over the last 16 months, the LHC has been through a major programme of maintenance and upgrading, along with the rest of CERN’s accelerator complex, some elements of which have been in operation since 1959. Some 10,000 superconducting magnet interconnections were consolidated in order to prepare the LHC machine for running at its design energy.
"The machine is coming out of a long sleep after undergoing an important surgical operation," says Frédérick Bordry, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology. "We are now going to wake it up very carefully and go through many tests before colliding beams again early next year. The objective for 2015 is to run the physics programme at 13 TeV."
The LHC experiments also took advantage of this long pause to upgrade their particle detectors. "The discovery of a Higgs boson was just the beginning of the LHC’s journey," said senior CERN physicist Fabiola Gianotti at the same press conference. "The increase in energy opens the door to a whole new discovery potential."
The Higgs boson, first mentioned in a 1964 paper by Peter Higgs, is linked to the mechanism, proposed the same year by Higgs and independently by Robert Brout and François Englert, that gives mass to fundamental particles. During its first three years, the LHC ran at a collision energy of 7 to 8 TeV delivering particle collisions to four major experiments: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. With the large amount of data provided by the LHC during this first period, the ATLAS and CMS experiments were able to announce the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson on 4 July 2012, paving the way for the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics to theorists François Englert and Peter Higgs.
By providing collisions at energies never reached in a particle accelerator before, the LHC will open a new window for potential discovery, allowing further studies on the Higgs boson and potentially addressing unsolved mysteries such as dark matter. The ordinary matter of which we, and everything visible in the universe is composed, makes up just 5% of what the universe is made of. The remainder is dark matter and energy, so the stakes for LHC run 2 are high.
CERN’s accelerator complex: Restart schedule
| 2 June 2014 | Restart of the Proton Synchrotron Booster |
| 18 June 2014 | Restart of the Proton Synchrotron (PS) |
| Early July | Powering tests at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) |
| Mid-July | Physics programme to restart at the ISOLDE facility and at the PS |
| Mid-August | Antimatter Physics programme to restart at the Antiproton Decelerator |
| Mid-October | Physics programme to restart at the SPS |
| Early 2015 | Beam back into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) |
| Spring 2015 | Physics programme to restart at the LHC experiments |
Chinese Man - 7th Street from The Groove Sessions Vol.2
Chinese Man - 7th Street from The Groove Sessions Vol.2
Suscribe Now: http://www.smarturl.it/chineseman
Suscribe Now: http://www.smarturl.it/chineseman
Saturday, May 5, 2012
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