Our human DNA has about 3 billion base pairs … so what would an organism with say … 150 billion base pairs look like? In fact it would look exactly like this …
Science and religion aren’t friends
Great article in USA Today by Jerry Coyne … picture in your mind an image of distraught believers splattering their breakfast out as they read this … Atheist books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith have, by exposing the dangers of faith and the lack of evidence for the God of … Read more
Confrontation vs. Accommodation …
Yesterday a debate took place between a few of my favorite folks … namely Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Victor Stenger, and PZ. I’m not going to get bogged down into a blow by blow description, but will instead pluck out a few words said by PZ, specifically because they pushed one of my hot buttons … Read more
Giant Crystal Caves – Stunning Image
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
Technology Twists : Friend of the Printer
Sometimes technology has very unexpected and surprising side effects. Not sure what I’m on about? OK, let me relate to you a real-life recent example. We all love Printers … but they run out of toner or ink, and until you order more, your need to render your beloved electronic text into flat-dead-tree format is … Read more
How to fix a particle accelerator.
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 …