March 24, 2005

BTW, the world was almost sucked in nothingness last week

Can someone explain to me why Seven would decide to pull what they have touted as the highest rating show in Australia (Lost) of the air for some stupid repeat of home-video nonsense called Wacky Weddings.

This week in science:
  • First off New Scientist lists 13 things that don't make sense in modern science, including placebos, homeopathy, and cold fusion
  • Americans face drop in life expectancy - touted somewhere as Natural Selection's answer to the US Social Security crisis; with rising trends in early death from obesity-related illness, scienctists are predicting a drop in the average Americans life expentancy - as much as 3.5 years in 30 years time (which is quite a bit) - n@n
  • Bacteria acts as glue in nanomachines - thats right, nanobots will be greased and held together by thetrapped lives of millions of microbes. BWAHAHAHAHAHA, the gods will be pleased. Okay, sorry about that - its not me (or even my species), so its funny -n@n
  • Oceans extend effects of climate change - "Even if the world stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow ... the sea level [would] keep rising" - and yet some countries aren't signing international treaties to cut down on fossil fuel emissions (or even keep them at the level they are now). Maybe they think with higher oceans comes more beach? - n@n
  • Utensils divulge dinner dates feelings - interesting. But I think maybe the reason why such geeks aren't successful with love is because they are hooking electrodes up to their dates cutlery. - n@n
  • Transgenic crops take another knock - it seems that anti-weed crops are hurting the birds and the bees, or at least the bees. By reducing weed population, bees and other insects that prefer, or even need, these weeds to survive, are dying. But one could argue if we'd developed some non-GMO anti-weed device the result would be the same. - n@n
  • DN-New (Artificial life) - A new artificial self-pairing base has been created in California, with teh potential for a whole new set of amino acids to be coded for. I'm not quite sure how this works (given the existing codon system is redundant), or even why you'd want to have new amino acids being thrown into our microbiological buddies (seeing as we have a hard enough time keeping them in chcek with the genes they have). - Economist
  • Heavenly light show caught on film - using a very fast camera (1000 frames/sec), the best footage of sprites (a weather phenomenom of pretty lights) has been taken -n@n
  • Biotechnology revisited - A look at genomics in a post-human genome project world - BMC
  • Cress overturns textbook genetics - when it comes to inheritence, Cress seems to do its own thang. The small plant has been shown to have the uncanny ability to "throwback" to the phenotype of its grandparent organism, if put under stress where its parents' genes don't seem to cut it. - n@n
  • Elephants do impressions - many people know that elephants (particularly Asian elephants) have a talent for the visual arts, with paintings being sold for thousands of US dollars to raise money for preservation - it seems African elephants too have a talent for the arts, but are more suited to the stage... with two adolescent females showing talent for mimicking noises in their environment. Particularly a neighbouring Asian elephant, and passing trucks -n@n
News of the week hails from New York, where scientists *accidentally* created an pretty impressive explosion, which according to the experts say has all the hallmarks of a black hole. Oh "Ooooops" indeed.

Story: "Lab fireball 'may be black hole'" - BBC

Just how the f*** do you explain that. Sorry, we almost started THE END OF THE WORLD!
We were taught chemists had dangerous day-jobs. I always thought physics was supposed to relatively safe.

PS - JOHNNY JETBACK

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3 Comments:

At Fri Mar 25, 11:43:00 pm AEST, Blogger ZayZayEM said...

Basically just write the add the link like a normal link and then add rel=tag inside the a href <> thing.

Then ping technorati.

After a while of regularity you don't need to ping them (or at least thats what happened to me now).


Adding your link to my template in a moment.

Other readers check out the Wench Insanity @ The Wench's Tavern (anything Wenchy has to be good, doesn't it?)

 
At Fri Apr 08, 03:42:00 pm AEST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Black holes aren't dangerous when they're small, due to Hawking radiation, which is roughly related to the surface area/volume ratio of a black hole times the magnitude of the gradient of the gravitational field at the event horizon. For any black holes with less than the mass of about a mountain, they radiate hawking radiation so quickly that they instantly explode in an enormous flash of gamma rays.

Since nuclear weapons convert only less one percent of their mass into energy, it would be about as much energy as detonating an entire range of mountains that consist solely of nuclear bombs.

A black hole at this critical mass has an event horizon about the size of the diameter of an atom. Like some small, hyperactive mammal, in order to survive, the black hole would need to consume its own weight in matter at a rate faster than it is radiating Hawking radiation. for something as small as an atom, that is clearly impossible without feeding the black hole matter so dense that it would likely already collapse into a black hole.

Now, if you believe that the particle accelerators in New York are able accelerate gold ions to an energy greater than billions of nuclear bombs, then you could believe that these researchers are in danger of destroying the whole entire earth through it being swallowed by a black hole. Indeed, before they made a black hole ever capable of sustaining itself long enough to consume the mass of the earth, they would probably make smaller ones that would destroy the earth in a giant fireball as it quickly decayed through Hawking radiation.

I actually read the article you were citing, and yes, the black hole is incredibly short-lived. I am a physics student myself (at Bethel University in Minnesota), and yes, physics is plenty dangerous. And, as my professor for my lasers class says, "Don't look into the laser with your REMAINING eye..." (he's known for shaving his armhair with our metal-cutting CO2 laser for fun) ;)

 
At Fri Apr 08, 03:43:00 pm AEST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Black holes aren't dangerous when they're small, due to Hawking radiation, which is roughly related to the surface area/volume ratio of a black hole times the magnitude of the gradient of the gravitational field at the event horizon. For any black holes with less than the mass of about a mountain, they radiate hawking radiation so quickly that they instantly explode in an enormous flash of gamma rays.

Since nuclear weapons convert only less one percent of their mass into energy, it would be about as much energy as detonating an entire range of mountains that consist solely of nuclear bombs.

A black hole at this critical mass has an event horizon about the size of the diameter of an atom. Like some small, hyperactive mammal, in order to survive, the black hole would need to consume its own weight in matter at a rate faster than it is radiating Hawking radiation. for something as small as an atom, that is clearly impossible without feeding the black hole matter so dense that it would likely already collapse into a black hole.

Now, if you believe that the particle accelerators in New York are able accelerate gold ions to an energy greater than billions of nuclear bombs, then you could believe that these researchers are in danger of destroying the whole entire earth through it being swallowed by a black hole. Indeed, before they made a black hole ever capable of sustaining itself long enough to consume the mass of the earth, they would probably make smaller ones that would destroy the earth in a giant fireball as it quickly decayed through Hawking radiation.

I actually read the article you were citing, and yes, the black hole is incredibly short-lived. I am a physics student myself (at Bethel University in Minnesota), and yes, physics is plenty dangerous. And, as my professor for my lasers class says, "Don't look into the laser with your REMAINING eye..." (he's known for shaving his armhair with our metal-cutting CO2 laser for fun) ;)

 

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