November 6th, 2009

Human x-ray machines: Coming soon to an airport near you

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 6, 2009 @ 5:00 AM

Categories: Canada, Congress, FAA, Government technology, Homeland security, Intelligence, International, Justice, Law enforcement, Privacy, Public health, Science, Security, Transportation, UK

Tags: U.S., Canada, Airport, Transportation, Security, Doug Hanchard

In the movie Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Gov. of California) runs through a security check point corridor operating using X-Ray technology. That film was released in 1990. Today that technology is being installed around the world at airports, border check points, marine ports and high risk security environments such as court buildings. They are currently being assessed or used in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Russia, Japan, and Australia. Some countries, such as India, have outright rejected them based on privacy and considered too offensive to passengers. Significant concern is being raised as to the long term medical impacts to humans going through the devices.

In Canada, the Canadian Air Transport Security Agency (CATSA) organization has completed some field trials at smaller airports (Kelowna, B.C.) and is looking to purchase a half dozen of the machines to continue further assessment. There are approximately 18 airports in the U.S. using them. In the U.K. several airports now have them including Manchester. Testing in several countries has been going since 2004. In the U.S. the Transportation Security Administration began field trials in 2007. The technology offers security details to process passengers quickly and determine if weapons or other contraband is on a person without doing physical body search. Such technology would significantly improve the detection of hidden materials. Read the rest of this entry »

December 28th, 2008

New photo proof of dark matter

Posted by Richard Koman @ December 28, 2008 @ 7:31 AM

Categories: Science

Tags: Photograph, Matter, Richard Koman

This is cool. The Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have captured images of galaxies colliding that confirm the existence of dark matter, The Scotsman reports.

The photo shows the movement of matter in the aftermath of the collision divided into pink and blue areas.

As the two clusters merged at millions of miles an hour, the picture indicates that the hot gas collided and slowed down, researchers said. But the dark matter did not, as shown by the wider spread of blue, they believe.

The separation of the pink and blue provides evidence for dark matter, and backs the view that particles of the matter react only very weakly with each other or not at all, apart from the pull of gravity.

The finding strongly supports the idea that the universe is filled with dark matter, which acts as a sort of infrastructure for planets, stars and galaxies.

November 17th, 2008

Expensive repairs for Large Hadron Collider

Posted by Richard Koman @ November 17, 2008 @ 1:02 PM

Categories: International, Science

Tags: CERN, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Richard Koman

So this Large Hadron Collider thing is a pretty sensitive piece of equipment. An electrical failure shut the great atom smasher down in September after only a few days on the job. It was supposed to be brought back online this month, but now, the BBC reports, the repairs will run to $21 million and take until next summer.

The fault occurred just nine days after it was turned on with Cern blaming the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections.

The collider operates at temperatures colder than outer space for maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to assess it. “Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections,” CERN spokesman James Gillies told Associated Press.

October 1st, 2008

Anti-LHC lawsuit lands in legal black hole

Posted by Richard Koman @ October 1, 2008 @ 8:32 PM

Categories: Courts, Science

Tags: Black Hole, Lawsuit, CERN, Richard Koman

A lame-brain lawsuit to stop the Large Hadron Collider is dead. U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor has dismissed the suit because U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over the world’s biggest atom-smasher based in Switzerland and France and built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, The New York Times reports.
The suit was filed by Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety officer, and Luis Sancho, a science writer and professor in Barcelona. They claim the collider could create a black hole that would destroy the earth. They sued CERN, the United States Dept. of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in federal District Court in Hawaii.
But with the U.S. government contributing just $531 million of the collider’s $8 billion construction bill, the judge held that U.S. involvement was too minor to give the court jurisdiction under the National Environmental Policy Act. Wrote the judge:

Neither the language nor the history of NEPA suggest that it was intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy objections to proposed federal actions.

September 28th, 2008

2^43,112,609 -1: Distributed computing finds largest prime yet

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 28, 2008 @ 11:01 AM

Categories: Science

Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Prime, Distributed Computing, Mersenne, Cloud Computing, Network Technology, Networking, Richard Koman

GIMPS – the distributed computing Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search – has found and confirmed the largest prime number ever: 2^43,112,609-1. It has 13 million digits and gives the GIMPS project a $100,000 award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Science News reports.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 22nd, 2008

LHC shuts down for 2 months over faulty wiring

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 22, 2008 @ 3:55 PM

Categories: International, Science

Tags: Magnet, LHC, Large Hadron Collider, Cable, Network Technology, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Networking, Richard Koman

Update: CERN now says the LHC won’t restart until April. The two-month delay moves the LHC to late November on the calendar, and the machine has to shut down for the winter to avoid huge energy bills. (via New York Times)

The Large Hadron Collider is shut down for two months after an electrical glitch between two 30-ton magnets failed caused a helium leak.

“What we know indicates there was a faulty connection between two cables joining two magnets together that warmed up to the point of melting and that resulted in helium being leaked into the tunnel,” said James Gillies, a spokesperson for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the machine. (National Geo)

The problem delays the LHC for a full two months while the troubled section is warmed up, repaired and calmed cooled down.

The thing that went wrong [at the LHC] is not such a big deal,” said Mike Harrison, a high-energy physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, New York.
“The actual fix will be a day or two probably,” he said. “The problem is you have to warm it up and cool it down again. That’s what takes up time.”

All this pushes back the end of the world, which will occur when the LHC powers up sufficiently to generate stable black holes which will suck the earth inside out.

September 19th, 2008

Many UK teachers support creationism

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 19, 2008 @ 10:19 AM

Categories: Education, International, Science

Tags: Teacher, Marketing Research, Marketing, Richard Koman

After Royal Society education director Michael Reiss was forced out of his position over comments that creationism could be taught in science class, a new survey find more than a quarter of British teachers agree, The Telegraph reports.

In a survey by Southampton University, 36 percent of teachers said God was involved in humanity’s creation and 28 percent said the religious version of creation should be taught in school.

One science teacher told researchers: “Human beings were created by a divine being pretty much in their present form.”
Another said: “I would like students to respect and understand religious beliefs, and I would like those with belief to understand the importance of their beliefs, without the necessity for them to be scientific.”

A researcher interviewed 66 science and religious education teachers. What’s unclear, though, is where the two groups come down. After all, it wouldn’t be surprising that religion teachers would support teaching creationism. Unlike the U.S., Britain does have a state religion and apparently teaching religion is part of the school day.

September 18th, 2008

LHC ready for trial collisions

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 18, 2008 @ 6:19 AM

Categories: International, Science

Tags: Collision, Beam, Large Hadron Collider, Richard Koman

Let’s smash some atoms!

The Large Hadron Collider is back on track for trial collisions this week, after a glitch with the cooling system, Times Online reports.

Once the two beams had been inserted into the LHC ring last Wednesday, the next task was to “capture” them so that protons could be fired in neat pulses or “bunches”. One of the beams had been captured by Friday, but work was then interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero.
Laurent Tavian, head of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) cryogenics group, told The Times yesterday that the faults had now been fixed. Engineers could proceed with “capturing” the second beam, allowing for collisions within days. “The plan is now to capture the second beam, and once both beams are ready and captured we can start to do collisions,” Dr Tavian said.

September 16th, 2008

Royal Society educator resigns, advocated creationism in science class

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 16, 2008 @ 4:47 PM

Categories: International, Science

Tags: Education, Professor, Director, Society Educator, Michael Reiss, Richard Koman

Prof. Michael Reiss has been forced to resign his position as education director of the Royal Society, after making controversial remarks that creationism should be taught in science classes, the Times of London reports.

The Society originally stood by Reiss but eventually came to feel his comments had damaged the Society. It said in a statement:

“Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education — a part-time post he held on secondment. He is to return, full-time, to his position as Professor of Science Education at the Institute of Education.”

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September 14th, 2008

UK educator who called for teaching creationism should be fired

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 14, 2008 @ 9:38 PM

Categories: Education, International, Science

Tags: Sir, Winner, Richard Koman

When a clergymember is appointed as education head of Britain’s Royal Society and he then advocates teaching creationism in science class, is he just looking out for the best interests of children or is he trying to sneak religion into the classroom?

The latter, in the strong suspicion of two Nobel Prize winners who want Rev. Prof. Michael Reiss (pictured), a Church of England minister, sacked, reports the Guardian.

‘I warned the president of the Royal Society that his [Reiss] was a dangerous appointment a year ago. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn out to be,’ said Sir Harry Kroto, a Royal Society fellow, and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Sir Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on gene-splicing, was equally angry. ‘I think it is outrageous that this man is suggesting that creationism should be discussed in a science classroom. It is an incredible idea and I am drafting a letter to other Nobel laureates - which would be sent to the Royal Society - to ask that Reiss be made to stand down.’

Zoologist Richard Dawkins, a Royal Society fellow, said: ‘A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation - it’s a Monty Python sketch.’

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