The cargo capsule went awry after launching for the International Space Station last week.
via New York Times
There are advances being made almost daily in the disciplines required to make space and its contents accessible. This blog brings together a lot of that info, as it is reported, tracking the small steps into space that will make it just another place we carry out normal human economic, leisure and living activities.
To the naked eye, buildings and bridges appear fixed in place, unmoved by forces like wind and rain.
The post Magnifying vibrations in bridges and buildings has been published on Technology Org.
In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the event sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, mostly from flying glass from shattered windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a relatively small chunk of space rock—asteroid researchers think it was probably about 20 meters (66 feet) across—but exploding over a city made it a noteworthy event. It's probable many similar asteroids hit Earth on a regular basis, but most don't happen to fly over metropolitan areas; they fall into the ocean or over lightly populated regions.
However, Earth has played target in the cosmic darts tournament before. Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Tunguska impact in Siberia in 1908, and most famously the Chicxulub asteroid in Mexico (which played a part in the extinction of the dinosaurs) are just three of many known examples. That's why many people are looking at viable options for planetary defense: destroying or turning asteroids aside before they can hit Earth. And planetary defense is one reason the United States' National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) has given for not destroying some of its surplus nuclear warheads.
It's easy to be cynical about American nuclear weapons policy, especially now that we're decades since the end of the Cold War. Debates over nuclear winter, mutually assured destruction, and the like feel very distant. So reports that the US wasn't following the stated schedule for decommissioning nukes in the name of planetary defense triggered the skeptical radar, not least since The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other sources made it sound like the plan was to blow asteroids to smithereens.
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The world’s biggest particle smasher – in fact, the world’s biggest machine – is warming up for its
The post LHC: Crash course in physics has been published on Technology Org.
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The post Discovery unlocks ion conductor that is 100 times faster than all the others has been published on Technology Org.
CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer (centre) signs a US-CERN agreement at the White House (Image: Ken Shipp/DOE Photo)
A new agreement signed yesterday in Washington between the United States and CERN will pave the way for renewed collaboration in particle physics. The agreement, signed in a White House ceremony by the US Department of Energy, US National Science Foundation and CERN will enable continued scientific discoveries in particle physics and advanced computing.
The agreement - which will automatically renew every five years unless one of the signatories indicates a need to modify or end the agreement - aligns European and American long-term strategies for particle physics. This global relationship has already generated amazing results, through instruments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab.
CERN and the United States have a long history of collaboration: American physicist Isidor Rabi was one of CERN’s founders, and American scientists have been involved in CERN projects since the institution’s creation in the early 1950s. CERN provided equipment for US projects, such as Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – used for nuclear physics research – and European scientists were critical to the success of US-based particle colliders such as the Tevatron.
US physicists have participated in a wide range of experiments at CERN over the last 30 years, from the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) through fixed-target experiments at the Super Proton Synchrotron, all the experiments on the Large Electron-Positron Collider (L3, ALEPH, OPAL, DELPHI), heavy-ion experiments and ISOLDE. Following the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in 1993, many US physicists joined the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS, as well as ALICE and LHCb.