The science behind RHCs liver thread

RIP poor mustelidae.

Hope Hawking and Higgs can live with themselves.

 

So it wasn't the Higgs Boson they found after all.
Just some weasel ****.

 

Yeah it dies explain how **** we were Thursday.

Weasel bit through cables

 

When I saw the headlines in the papers along the lines of "Weasel stuck in Hadron Collider" my immediate thought was RHC had asked the unit to leave and she had said "no" and stuck a weasel up his arse.

I then realised the truth was far less interesting/amusing

 

The 2016 physics season starts at the LHC
09 May 2016

Geneva, 9 May 2016. CERN1's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its experiments are back in action, now taking physics data for 2016 that will give us an improved understanding of fundamental physics.

On 25 March, the most powerful collider in the world was switched back on after its annual winter break. The accelerator complex and experiments have been fine-tuned using low-intensity beams and pilot proton collisions, and now the LHC and the experiments are ready to take an abundance of data.

Following a short commissioning period, the LHC operators will now increase the intensity of the beams so that the machine produces a larger number of collisions.

“The LHC is running extremely well,” says CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “We now have an ambitious goal for 2016, as we plan to deliver around six times more data than in 2015.”

“The restart of the LHC always brings with it great emotion”, says Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General. “With the 2016 data, the experiments will be able to perform improved measurements of the Higgs boson and other known particles and phenomena, and look for new physics with an increased discovery potential.”

This is the second year the LHC will run at a collision energy of 13 TeV. During the first phase of Run 2 in 2015, operators mastered steering the accelerator at this new higher energy by gradually increasing the intensity of the beams.

Beams are made of “trains” of bunches, each containing around 100 billion protons, moving at almost the speed of light around the 27-kilometre ring of the LHC. These bunch trains circulate in opposite directions and cross each other at the centre of experiments. Last year, operators increased the number of proton bunches up to 2244 per beam, spaced at intervals of 25 nanoseconds. These enabled the ATLAS and CMS collaborations to study data from about 400 million million proton–proton collisions. In 2016, operators will increase the number of particles circulating in the machine and the squeezing of the beams in the collision regions. The LHC will generate up to 1 billion collisions per second in the experiments.

“In 2015, we opened the doors to a completely new landscape with unprecedented energy. Now we can begin to explore this landscape in depth,” says CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen.

The Higgs boson was the last piece of the puzzle for the Standard Model – a theory that offers us the best description of the known fundamental particles and the forces that govern them. In 2016, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations – who announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 – will study this boson in depth.

But there are still several questions that remain unanswered by the Standard Model, such as why nature prefers matter to antimatter, and what dark matter consists of, despite it potentially making up one quarter of our universe.

The huge amounts of data from the 2016 LHC run will enable physicists to challenge these and many other questions, to probe the Standard Model further and to possibly find clues about the physics that lies beyond it.

The physics run with protons will last six months. The machine will then be set up for a four-week run colliding protons with lead ions.

The four largest LHC experimental collaborations, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, now start to collect and analyse the 2016 data. Their broad physics programme will be complemented by the measurements of three smaller experiments – TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL – which focus with enhanced sensitivity on specific features of proton collisions.

please log in to view this image

An image of a proton-proton collision taken in the ALICE detector during the commissioning phase of the LHC, with low-intensity beams (Image : ALICE)

please log in to view this image

A proton-proton collision recorded by the ATLAS detector during the commissioning phase of the LHC, with low-intensity beam (Image : ATLAS)

please log in to view this image

An image of a proton–proton collision taken in the CMS detector on 7 May (Image : CMS)

please log in to view this image

A display of a proton-proton collision taken in the LHCb detector in the early hours of 9 May (Image : LHCb)

 

Why is Jurgen throwing **** into that river?

 

How to trap sperm
Partial-protein coating lets microscopic beads mimic unfertilized eggs
BY
SARAH SCHWARTZ
8:39AM, MAY 12, 2016

please log in to view this image

BOUND Mouse sperm (left, red) flock to a polymer bead coated with the sperm-binding sections of a protein found around unfertilized eggs (illustration, right). Such beads could someday be used as contraceptives or a method for identifying healthy sperm, researchers report.

M.A. AVELLA ET AL/STM 2016

• please log in to view this image
  EMail
• please log in to view this image
  Twitter
• please log in to view this image
  Facebook
• please log in to view this image
  Reddit
• please log in to view this image
  Google+

SPONSOR MESSAGE
New sperm-catching beads could someday help prevent pregnancy — or enable it.

Researchers created microscopic polymer beads that mimic unfertilized eggs and trap passing sperm. The beads are coated in the sperm-binding section of a protein called ZP2. In mammals, ZP2 is found in membranes around unfertilized eggs; sperm must bind to the protein before entering the egg.

The beads could be used as short-term contraceptives, Jurrien Dean of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues report in the April 27 Science Translational Medicine. In the laboratory, human sperm attached to the beads within five minutes. The researchers then mixed 100,000 human sperm with 1.5 million beads and 28 mouse eggs containing human ZP2 proteins. After 16 hours, only one sperm reached an egg.

In another experiment, beads coated with mouse ZP2 delayed pregnancy when injected into the uteruses of mating female mice. Bead-free mice took just over 28 days, on average, to conceive and give birth; bead-treated mice didn’t have babies for nearly 73 days on average. The beads didn’t appear to cause swelling or damage, and treated mice were able to give birth again within five months.

The beads could also help combat infertility. In an egg-penetration test, researchers gently detached bead-captured sperm and pitted those sperm against a control batch of sperm that had not been exposed to the beads. More than half of eggs (mouse eggs with human ZP2) exposed to the bead-selected sperm ended up with three or more sperm attached to them; none of the eggs exposed to the control group snagged three or more sperm. In fact, the control group failed to penetrate 38 out of 50 eggs. So the beads could someday be used to select healthy sperm for assisted reproduction, the researchers say.

But it’s not clear if the ability to bind to ZP2 necessarily indicates a healthy sperm, says Andrew La Barbera, chief scientific officer of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Ala. “Sperm selection is a very complex undertaking because of the fact that sperm are very complex,” he says. “We don’t know what makes a good sperm.”

Contraception might be a more reasonable future use for the beads, although allowing fertilization of one in 28 eggs is underwhelming, La Barbera says. Birth control should be closer to 99.9 percent effective. “It only takes one sperm to fertilize an egg,” he says. Still, the beads’ performance at blocking pregnancy in mice seems promising, La Barbera says. Future experiments would need to determine if the beads are safe and effective in women, and how many beads are needed to prevent conception.

Dean notes that the study is a proof of principle. Many unknowns must be evaluated before using the beads for birth control, including the side effects of long-term use, he says. “Although promising, we are a long way from translating these basic laboratory observations into useful clinical applications that provide people with better reproductive choices.”

 

Dead thick question, Red, These protons gain weight as they move towards the speed of light, hence the massive energy needed to accelerate them. Is it weight or mass, and how much is it? (Just the percentage - I don't want the algebraic formula that I could never work out!).

Ta.

 

It's mass. Weight is a force (mass times gravitational acceleration).

The increase in mass depends on the speed. For the speed of light the mass would be infinite. For 99% the speed of light the mass increases by 7 times.

 

Cheers. Is it mass then or weight that bends/attracts gravity and spacetime?

 

Mass

Weight is a measure of the force of gravity on a particular object

 

weight is only really a force. mass x gravity. so your mass is "constant" and if you are standing on earth or on the moon your weight is different but mass the same.

its as things go faster two things occur...

1. they get shorter in the direction they are moving.... so in effect you see that star trek streaky think. that basically is their effort to show what foreshortening would look like.

2. they increase in mass and increase by mass x lorentz factor


both of these relate to the speed by something called the lorentz factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor

basically its

please log in to view this image

so its not a constant but increases rapidly as you get to speed of light. see how it goes vertical? the factor shown is 10 at close to c.. i dunno ut as it goes to c it gets to infinity.

actually the calculation of mass at speed is really easy its just mass at rest times factor = mass at velocity.

 

i'll be honest... there was a lad in uni i used to wind up.

when we were in library studying for exams in 3rd year i used to get an applied physics book out and read the theories of relativity rather than study just to annoy him so thats how i know.



that it committed wummery.............

 

Cheers for that. Just trying to work out what time is in my mind. Saw a vid on YouTube on the Lorentz factor the other night. When we say the speed of light, we really mean the speed of electro-magnetism - is that right? So you can never travel faster than EM, and the nearer you get to it, the slower time goes - BUT, you don't experience that slowing down - to you, in your reference point, everything seems 'normal'? So, is it just mass and energy (which are interchangeable) that is effected by spacetime?

I did see a vid that said that even though we travel faster on the outer arm of our galaxy than towards the centre, there is no difference between the time except when you get to the super-massive black hole at the middle. I must have got that wrong!

 

Is anything in this universe ever at rest? Doesn't the ever-expansion of spacetime mean EVERYTHING is constantly moving?

 

yeah... lights just vibration in that electro magnetic "flux" according to the guys before einstein (maxwell).

you got relativity right there. for you you don't experience time slowing down , nor the foreshortening nor the increased mass.... but someone looking at you sees it so its all about relative to the observer.

if you dont think of time as a separate thing but imagine space as space time then you have 4 dimensions well or 6 or whatever... every thing has length, breadth and depth but time is the 4 dimension that defines its position in the universe.

think of earth not as a sphere but as really long string and time is what makes it so. one end is in past, other end is in future and all you see in the instant is the sphere on the ball.

then theres the bending of this by mass

please log in to view this image

each object puches all of the space time around it so it bends. this is supposedly gravity but it is what people talk about when they say they proved einsteins theory of relativity during an eclipse.

light bends round the massive object so you can see stars shift position during an eclipse or in other words light bends round the sun.

 

probably. everything must experience relatistic effects as we have evidence in atomic clocks in space and doppler shifts on light from various stars

there are various theories of wheres the missing mass and things coming into existence constantly too.

 

oh yes.... its mass at rest relative to you the observer.

if you hold a tennis ball it has x mass. if you thow it fast enough it will get heavier and flatten to a dis, relative to you... to the tennis ball you are moving away and looking heavier

 

This **** is really cool.