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Scientists: Nothing to fear from atom-smasher
By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer
Sat Jun 28, 2008


In this Feb. 29, 2008 file photo, the last element, weighing 100 tons, of the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) experiment is lowered into the cave at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland. ATLAS is part of five experiments which, from mid 2008 on, will study what happens when beams of particles collide in the 27 km (16.8 miles) long underground ring LHC (Large Hadron Collider). ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 2100 physicists (including 450 students) participating from more than 167 universities and laboratories in 37 countries.

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth's gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.

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Orbiter finds layers of ice, dust at Mars’ north pole
BY JOHN JOHNSON JR. Los Angeles Times

    Mars’ north pole, like a French parfait, comes in layers.
    Scientists analyzing radar images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft have found up to seven distinct layers of ice and dust beneath the north pole.
    Roger J. Phillips, a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said the layering probably was caused by changes in the planet’s orbit over the past 4 million years.
    When the planet tilts strongly on its axis, the surface ice withers and is covered by a layer of dust mixed with ice, Phillips said. Then, “every million years or so,” he said, the planet tilts less, meaning less sunlight falls directly on the pole. At that point, a layer of clean ice is laid down.
    The discovery, published Friday in the journal Science, comes as NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft closes in for a May 25 landing in the far north. Phoenix carries a drill to dig into the surface ice.
    The radar aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also shows the weight of the ice cap has not deformed the underlying Martian crust, Phillips said. For this to be true, the hard crust layer must be more than 200 miles thick.
    “This means the inside of Mars is colder than we thought it was,” Phillips said.
    That has implications for any rudimentary forms of life that might exist on Mars. Despite the planet’s hostile surface, some scientists have speculated that bacteria or some other primitive life forms might be able to survive underground, where heat from the planet’s core could produce layers of liquid water.
    Based on this new research, any such life forms must be deep underground, close to the core.

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Earth's Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever
Wed Apr 16,
Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery.

Now unexpected powerful tunes have been discovered in this hum. These new findings could shed light on the source of this enigma.

The planet emanates a constant rumble far below the limits of human hearing, even when the ground isn't shaking from an earthquake. (It does not cause the ringing in the ear linked with tinnitus.) This sound, first discovered a decade ago, is one that only scientific instruments - seismometers - can detect. Researchers call it Earth's hum.

Investigators suspect this murmur could originate from the churning ocean, or perhaps the roiling atmosphere. To find out more, scientists analyzed readings from an exceptionally quiet Earth-listening research station at the Black Forest Observatory in Germany, with supporting data from Japan and China.

Different types

In the past, the oscillations that researchers found made up this hum were "spheroidal" - they basically involved patches of rock moving up and down, albeit near undetectably.

Now oscillations have been discovered making up the hum that, oddly, are shaped roughly like rings. Imagine, if you will, rumbles that twist in circles in rock across the upper echelons of the planet, almost like dozens of lazy hurricanes.

Scientists had actually expected to find these kinds of oscillations, but these new ring-like waves are surprisingly about as powerful as the spheroidal ones are. The expectation was they would be relatively insignificant.

New thinking

This discovery should force researchers to significantly rethink what causes Earth's hum. While the spheroidal oscillations might be caused by forces squeezing down on the planet - say, pressure from ocean or atmospheric waves - the twisting ring-like phenomena might be caused by forces shearing across the world's surface, from the oceans, atmosphere or possibly even the sun.

Future investigations of this part of the hum will prove challenging, as "this is a very small signal that is hard to measure, and the excitation is probably due to multiple interactions in a complex system," said researcher Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig, a geoscientist at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Still, a better understanding of this sound will shed light on how the land, sea and air all interact, he added.

Researcher Dieter Kurrle and Widmer-Schnidrig detailed their findings March 20 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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Astronauts will assemble ‘monstrous’ robot in space
5 spacewalks will be conducted on 16-day mission
BY MARCIA DUNN The Associated Press

    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a “monstrous” two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.
    Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.
    They’re also delivering the fi rst piece of Japan’s massive Kibo space station lab, a float-in closet for storing tools, experiments and spare parts. For the first time, each of the five major international space station partners will own a piece of the real estate.
    At 16 days, the mission will be NASA’s longest space station trip ever and will include five spacewalks, the most ever performed while a shuttle is docked there. Three of those spacewalks will feature Dextre, which is sure to steal the show.
    With 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet, the Canadian Space Agency’s Dextre — short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter — is more than a little intimidating, at least for astronaut Garrett Reisman.
    “Now I wouldn’t go as far to say that we’re worried it’s going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil or anything because we all know how it’s operated and it doesn’t have a lot of its own intelligence,” Reisman told The Associated Press last week.
    “But I’ll tell you something. … He’s enormous and to see him with his giant arms, it is a little scary. It’s a little monstrous, it is.”
    Dextre will be flying up aboard Endeavour in pieces, and it will be up to a team of spacewalking astronauts to assemble the 3,400-pound robot and attach it to the outside of the space station. That job will fall to Reisman, Michael Foreman and Richard Linnehan.
    “I feel kind of like dad on Christmas Eve, you know, opening up this present and trying to put it together for the son or daughter and going, ‘Whoa, what have I gotten myself into here with this some assembly required’ part of the space station,” Foreman said.
    Reisman, who will be moving into the space station, can’t wait to see Dextre rise from its shuttle transport pallet, rotating up “almost like it’s Frankenstein’s monster coming alive.”
    In reality, there’s nothing sinister about Dextre. The robot, in fact, was once in the running to be the Hubble Space Telescope’s savior.
    Following the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA canceled the last remaining Hubble repair mission by shuttle astronauts because of safety concerns, and considered sending Dextre up to do the job. The shuttle flight was restored after a change at NASA’s helm — it’s scheduled for late summer — and Dextre went back to being a space station assistant.
    Dextre — which cost more than $200 million — was created by the same Canadian team that built the space shuttle and space station robot arms.
    Equipped with a tool holster, Dextre is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and, ultimately, to take over some of their dangerous outdoor work.
    Dextre can pivot at the waist, and has seven joints per arm. Its hands, or grippers, have built-in socket wrenches, cameras and lights. Only one arm is designed to move at a time to keep the robot stable and avoid a two-arm collision. The robot has no face or legs, and with its long arms certainly doesn’t look human.
    Space station astronauts will be able to control Dextre, as will fl ight controllers on the ground. The robot will be attached at times to the end of the space station arm, and also be able to ride by itself along the space station arm’s railway.
    Canadian officials said they’re convinced Dextre could have pulled off the Hubble repair job, and should have no problems replacing old batteries and other space station parts.
    “It’s quite surprising what a robot like Dextre can do with its sense of touch and its precision,” said Daniel Rey, a Canadian Space Agency engineer who heads the project.
    Dextre has only three tools, for now, versus the more than 100 tools available to spacewalking astronauts, Rey said. It will probably take months to learn how to properly use the robot; its first real job could come next year.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS This illustration provided by the Canadian Space Agency shows “Dextre.” Astronauts bound for orbit this week will assemble the two-armed space station robot.

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Earth to play peekaboo with full moon and sun
Total lunar eclipse will reveal red ball, if the weather cooperates

By BRIAN NEARING, Staff writer  
First published: Tuesday, February 19, 2008

ALBANY -- With most television shows still in reruns caused by the recently settled writers' strike, the real prime-time show Wednesday will be in the night sky.
     
A silvery full moon will transform slowly to dusky red or orange by the time a total lunar eclipse reaches its peak at 10:26 p.m. The show then will reverse itself and be over just after midnight.
No special equipment is needed to view a lunar eclipse, although clouds could obscure the moon. The forecast from the National Weather Service calls for partly cloudy skies.
A good pair of binoculars will bring the moon into sharper focus. And for an even closer look, two local observatories offer a peek through high-quality telescopes.
Lunar eclipses are much more common than their solar cousins and can happen up to three times a year, although each phenomenon is visible from only a part of Earth, depending on how the moon, Earth and sun line up.
A lunar eclipse occurs only during a full moon, and only if Earth passes between the moon and the sun, with the moon passing through part of Earth's shadow. This shadow is composed of two cone-shaped parts, one within the other.
The outer shadow, called the penumbra, is a zone where Earth blocks a portion of the sun's rays. The inner shadow or umbra is the area where Earth blocks all direct sunlight from reaching the moon.
Janie Schwab, executive director of Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, said one of the last total lunar eclipses visible from North America came early on Oct. 28, 2004, just hours after the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. Boston fans took a special delight in the Sox-red moon hanging in the night sky.
Humidity and particulate matter in the air can affect the color of an eclipsed moon, Schwab said. Because no major volcanic eruptions have taken place recently, the moon probably will appear vivid red or orange during the total phase, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Web page on the event.
The next total lunar eclipse visible in the Capital Region will be Dec. 21, 2010.
Brian Nearing can be reached at 454-5094 or by e-mail at bnearing@timesunion.com.