science

Crowdsourcing – some further examples

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Yesterday I blogged about Galaxy Zoo. Thats the project that needs your help to process and categorize images of Galaxies captured by robot telescopes. As I explained, the motivation is that the very best pattern recognition engine known to humanity sits between your ears. However, what is also quite fascinating is that this is just … Read more

Galaxy Quest

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Have you ever wished you could make a valuable scientific contribution? Well, did you know that you can do so by sitting at home? Let me tell you a bit about Galaxy Zoo. Look up and you find billions upon billions of galaxy’s. Astronomers have utilized robot telescopes to capture images of many of these … Read more

Giant Crystal Caves – Stunning Image

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OK, lets first put this in context. A quick casual glance might simply solicit a “Nice, but I’ve seen rock crystals like that before” response. Well think again, because you have seen nothing like this … ever. Look carefully, those tiny little orange blobs are people … Ah yes, now you get it … the … Read more

How to fix a particle accelerator.

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Around the house you only need two items for carrying out necessary repairs. These are, a can of WD-40, and a roll of duct tape. Confused? OK, its like this …

  • If it moves, and it shouldn’t, you deploy the duct tape
  • It it doesn’t move, and it should, you deploy the WD-40

So that’s all you really need :-)

Ah, but does this model scale up? What if you are not at home, but instead are at work at say … Fermilab, and just happen to encounter an issue with the Tevatron particle accelerator, what then? Remember now, this is a complex multi-billion dollar machine that is about four miles in circumference and involves about a thousand superconducting magnets, which accelerate protons and antiprotons to super-sized energies. Also, these are not common magnets, they are cooled with liquid helium so that they consume only one-third of the power they would normally require. If you hit an issue, do you shut down for a week, and call in a team of specialists at considerable cost to pull it apart for repair, or do you instead get out your roll of duct tape and patch it up so that you can carry on with no outage?

And the answer is …

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2010 Nobel Prize Announcements … so far

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[Note: Updated on 6th Oct] The Nobel prize 2010 announcements are now trickling out , so far we have … Medicine: 4th Oct – The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization”. … details here Robert Edwards is awarded the 2010 Nobel … Read more