Disease-causing mutation disrupts movement of cell's 'power house'

New research shows how a mutation causes a common inherited neurodegenerative disease. The study shows that the mutation of a specific protein known to cause Charcot-Marie-Tooth disrupts the movement of mitochondria, the energy-supplying machines inside each cell. The regulated movement of mitochondria along nerve cell fibers is vital to normal communication between the brain and muscles.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

'Pac-Man' in space: 1980s video game icon glows on Saturn's moon Mimas

The highest-resolution-yet temperature map and images of Saturn's icy moon Mimas obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal surprising patterns on the surface of the small moon, including unexpected hot regions that resemble "Pac-Man" eating a dot, and striking bands of light and dark in crater walls.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

Can animal models of disease reliably inform human studies?

"The value of animal experiments for predicting the effectiveness of treatment strategies in clinical trials has remained controversial, mainly because of a recurrent failure of interventions apparently promising in animal models to translate to the clinic," say the authors of a new article in which they discuss the controversies and possibilities of translating the results of animal experiments into human clinical trials.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

Preventing road deaths: New research focuses on worldwide problem

A recent WHO report on inadequate road safety opened with some stark figures: 1.2 million deaths and up to 50 million nonfatal injuries occur every year on the world's roads.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

Compound screening for drug development made simpler

The identification of compounds that could be promising candidates for drug development has become easier following new research. Scientists have developed a series of "filters" that can be used to weed out those molecules likely to come up as false positives when screening a chemical library for compounds that could be useful in drug development.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

Clues to pregnancy-associated breast cancer found

Expression of inflammatory-related genes in breast tissue of women who have previously given birth may explain the aggressiveness and frequency of pregnancy-associated breast cancer, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 9:00 pm

Bat navigation: After the next sunset, please turn right

Despite the fact that bats are active after sunset, they rely on the sun as their most trusted source of navigation. Researchers found that the greater mouse-eared bat orients itself with the help of the Earth's magnetic field at night and calibrates this compass to the sun's position at sunset.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:00 pm

Dangerous custodians: Immune cells as possible nerve-cell killers in Alzheimer’s disease

Progressive dementia of Alzheimer’s patients is due to an inexorable loss of nerve cells from the brain. Neuroscientists have now shown that microglia may actually make a significant contribution to the loss of neurons associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:00 pm

Hyenas' laughter signals deciphered

Acoustic analysis of the "giggle" sound made by spotted hyenas has revealed that the animals' laughter encodes information about age, dominance and identity. Researchers recorded the calls of 26 hyenas in captivity and found that variations in the giggles' pitch and timbre may help hyenas to establish social hierarchies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:00 pm

Scorpion venom provides clues to cause, treatment of pancreatitis

A Brazilian scorpion has provided researchers insight into venom's effects on the ability of certain cells to release critical components. The findings may prove useful in understanding diseases like pancreatitis or in targeted drug delivery.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 6:00 pm

Glitches delay collisions at Big Bang experiment

GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists at the CERN research center delayed attempts on Tuesday to create mini-versions of the Big Bang after what they called minor technical problems blocked the launch of the marathon experiment.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:57 am

Island chosen for nuclear plant

Two of the UK's biggest energy providers announce plans for a new nuclear power station on Anglesey.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:55 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Rainy weather was forecast to persist throughout the Northeast on Tuesday as a storm system located off the Mid-Atlantic coast lifted northward to the New England coast.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:43 am

Toyota safety recall: Nasa called in

Space agency scientists with electronics expertise to help US traffic agency study unintended acceleration in Toyota cars

Nasa and the National Academy of Sciences are joining the US government's effort to figure out what caused the sudden acceleration problems that led to Toyota's massive recalls.

Nasa scientists with expertise in electronics will help the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study potential electronic ties to unintended acceleration in Toyotas. Nasa's knowledge of electronics, computer hardware and software and hazard analysis will ensure a comprehensive review, transportation secretary Ray LaHood said.

In a separate study, the National Academy of Sciences will examine unwanted acceleration and electronic vehicle controls in cars from around the auto industry, LaHood said. The National Academy is an independent organisation chartered by Congress.

The academy study, expected to take 15 months, will review acceleration problems and recommend how the government can ensure the safety of vehicle electronic control systems.

"We believe their outside expertise, fresh eyes and fresh research perhaps can tell us if electronics have played a role in these accelerations," LaHood said.

Toyota has recalled more than 8m vehicles worldwide, including 6m in the United States.

Toyota said in a statement it was "confident in our vehicles and in our electronics" and would co-operate with the government review.

"These studies are just the kind of science-based examination we have been calling for. Bringing some sunshine to this subject is bound to separate fact from fiction, which will be good for Toyota, the industry and the motoring public," the company said.

LaHood has told Congress the department will dig deeply into what has caused hundreds of complaints of unwanted acceleration in Toyotas.

LaHood said he has asked the transportation department inspector general to review whether NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has what it needs to identify and address safety defects.

Some lawmakers have criticized NHTSA for failing to investigate Toyota complaints earlier and more thoroughly.

"Carmakers have entered the electronics era, but NHTSA seems stuck in a mechanical mindset," house energy and commerce committee chairman Henry Waxman said last month. "We need to make sure the federal safety agency has the tools and resources it needs to ensure the safety of the electronic controls and on-board computers that run today's automobiles."

Toyota has attributed the problem to sticking gas pedals and accelerators that can become jammed in floor mats, and has cited no evidence of an electrical problem. The company has noted that other manufacturers also have had reports of cars surging forward.

Consumer groups contend electronics could be the culprit, and dozens of Toyota owners who had their cars fixed in the recall have complained of more problems with their vehicles surging forward unexpectedly. Regulators have linked 52 deaths in Toyotas to crashes allegedly caused by accelerator problems.

Reviews of some recent high-profile crashes have failed to find a mechanical or electronic problem.

A police investigation of a 9 March accident in suburban New York involving a 2005 Prius found that the driver, not the car, was to blame. Tests following an 8 March incident in San Diego in which a driver reported the accelerator pedal on his 2008 Prius got stuck, leading to a 94 mph ride on a freeway, found that the hybrid's accelerator pedal, back-up safety system and electronics were working fine.

NHTSA's review of Toyota's electronic throttle control systems is expected to be completed by late summer. The safety agency, with NASA's help, is looking at electronic systems used in Toyotas and whether they have flaws that would warrant a defect investigation.

The National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council will review industry and government efforts to identify possible sources of unintended acceleration, including electronic vehicle controls, human error, mechanical failure and interference with accelerator systems.

The experts will look at software, computer hardware design, electromagnetic compatibility and electromagnetic interference. They will make recommendations to NHTSA in mid-2011 on how the government agency's rulemaking, research and defect investigations could help ensure the safety of vehicle electronic control systems.

The two studies together will cost about $3m (£2m), including the expense of buying cars that have allegedly had unintended acceleration. Both studies will be peer reviewed by scientific experts, the transportation department said.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:36 am

'Roadrunner' dinosaur discovered

One the smallest and most agile theropod dinosaurs yet discovered is unearthed by scientists in China.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:36 am

Geneva atom smasher set for record collisions (AP)

AP - The world's largest atom smasher was ready to start a new era of science on Tuesday, but problems delayed scientists seeking to collide the first beams of protons to learn more about the makeup of the universe and its smallest particles.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 3:05 am

Pearl Jam guitarist sees business key to climate (Reuters)

Reuters - While many people dream of becoming a rock star, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard says he is trying to be more of a businessman to help slow climate change.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:37 am

Green Room

The curious and complex case of the Kiwi hedgehog
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:33 am

Minor delays in collider's quest

Minor electrical problems delay operations of Europe's Large Hadron Collider as it begins its search for new physics.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:20 am

Fast machines, genes and the future of medicine

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO/LONDON (Reuters ) - Francis Collins, who helped map the human genome, did not get around to having his own genes analyzed until last summer. And he was surprised by what he learned.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:11 am

Fast machines, genes and the future of medicine (Reuters)

Reuters - Francis Collins, who helped map the human genome, did not get around to having his own genes analyzed until last summer. And he was surprised by what he learned.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 2:11 am

NASA to test Toyota electronics in safety probe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. auto safety regulators are turning to NASA scientists for help in analyzing Toyota Motor Corp electronic throttles to see if they are behind unintended acceleration, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 1:13 am

NASA to test Toyota electronics in safety probe (Reuters)

Reuters - U.S. auto safety regulators are turning to NASA scientists for help in analyzing Toyota Motor Corp electronic throttles to see if they are behind unintended acceleration, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said on Tuesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 1:13 am

Large Hadron Collider – Live!

The waiting is over. The world's largest, most powerful particle accelerator goes into action this morning. The hunt for new particles, forces and dimensions starts here.

11.16am: Beam at 2TeV. Cern DG just calling in to the lab.

11.15am: Emptycan: For the larger part, the British scientists at Cern seem to have faired quite well, but others, such as the nuclear physicists, are in very real trouble. Across the board cuts are probably coming to science. Lord Drayson still talks of a budget ringfence for science, but universities are cutting PhD studentships already. The Chancellor announced £600m of cuts to higher education and research budgets last year. We have to wait for the CSR to know for sure, but it does not look good, and probably won't be good whoever gets in. The Tory science spokesman has talked of science cuts being inevitable.
I suspect the US and Singapore are looking very attractive to young, mobile British scientists right now.

11.10am: tinylittlebear: Indeed. But on Friday I was speaking to woman who recently left Cern to work on particle beams for cancer treatment in Oxford. Charged particles dump their energy in tissue at a defined point, so by being tricksy, you can fire particles at a tumour and get them to dump their energy (heat) into the tumour and frazzle it. So what nearly did for Bugorski is a life extender (I'm not sure life saving is possible) for loads of people. Another example of how pushing tech and science with projects like the LHC lead to full on benefits for broader society.

11.07am: jacktatum: there are Higgsless theories, for sure. Some break electroweak symmetry using extra dimensions. Quick thing on electroweak symmetry breaking. Before it's broken, there are four bosons that are all massless and carry the electroweak force. They are the photon, W+, W- and Z bosons. After symmetry breaking, the Ws and Z become massive but the photon remains massless. That separates the two, because the photon, being massless, can still act over infinite distance. Because the W & Z get so heavy, they make sure the weak force can only act over a tiny distance. It's so short range, it basically acts only on contact.

11.02am: CuriousJohn: How would we recognise evil incarnate against LHC backgrounds?
An aside.: when I was a student I asked Martin Bell (he of the white suit) if he believed in true evil. Turns out he does (or did back then). Like it's an entity. One for the philosophers I suspect.
Back to reality:
Ramping up of the beams is going on now. They expect to be at top energy, 3.5TeV, in 25 mins. The energy right now is 950GeV (billion electron volts). They began from 450 GeV.

10.58am: Someone asked: What if the LHC doesn't find anything.
Frankly, it'd be a disaster. But. The LHC absolutely should find something. Somewhere in the energy range it covers (up to 14TeV) there must be something that explains something called electroweak symmetry breaking. This is the process that separated the electromagnetic force (which allows us to see) from the weak force (that plays a role in sunshine production) a picosecond after the big bang. The process is thought to have been caused by the Higgs field, which in breaking the electroweak symmetry, gives mass to certain bosons (force carrying particles) and also the quarks and electrons that make up normal matter. Finding the Higgs boson (which could weigh the equivalent of 115 - 140 billion electron volts) will suggest that Higgs's ideas about the origin of mass are correct.
But still. What if it finds nothing?
That really would be a disaster for particle physics. Because I can't see governments readily funding another collider (for example, a giant linear collider) if existing theories have not been pruned back to reveal some promising avenues of discovery.
Someone else asked about the giant size of these machines. I couldn't agree more. They are the most high-tech things we have, yet still seem a bit Space 1999. This machine, if you pulled it up from the ground and stood it up, would reach 5 miles into the sky. Whatever happened to miniaturisation"?
Progress is at hand. Physicists are working on ways of accelerating particles to huge energies over short distances. One technique, uses "plasma wake fields" to get particles "surfing" along a plasma wave at incredible speeds. It'll be a while before a collider built on this technology is built though.

10.50am: jacktatum: A good point - there is indeed stable dark matter. There could well be a whole family of dark particles, some stable, others not so. All of the particles we know of are the ones that either make us up, or interact with the ones that make us up. A guy called James Wells at Cern speaks well on this - and talks about particle physics being to anthropocentric. There is no reason why we should have a privileged view of the universe; that we should be able to see all, or even the majority of particles and forces at work in the universe. We might be privvy to a minority reality. It's all fun stuff.

10.45am: Lyn Evans, head of the LHC, speaking. They're going for ramping up in 1 minute.
More to come from the DG Rolf Heuer.

10.35am: SirTachyon: Bear in mind that around a billion protons will be colliding every second when the LHC is up and running. The detectors will look for different things, but there is plenty of overlap too. You can hunt for known particle decays-so the Higgs might decay into quarks of certain energies. But, so many other things can do that too, that you have to record a huge number of collisions before you can be sure you're seeing something on top of what you'd expect without a Higgs existing. This isn't the kind of experiment that gives you an answer within hours or days or even weeks. You collect data and watch the statistics of different collisions. If a certain decay process happens more than is predicted, then it could be something new being created. The particles that are created are all unstable - otherwise we'd be finding them down the back of our sofas all the time. So unstable particles decay soon after being created, into other more stable particles that are picked up by the detectors. You then collect these debris particles, measure their masses and energies, and work backwards to see what could have decayed into them. Apologies for rushing this - I'll do a proper explainer some time if there's interest.

10.27am: Proton beams are circulating. Now they have to be ramped up to high energy. You go slow and steady at this stage. If you go too fast and a power unit trips out, you basically slide back down that ladder and have to start all over again.

10.26am: Gregmcdougall asks: "What would the effect on living tissue (other than the assumed cold) of these high-energy beams be?"
A good question.
In the mid-70s, a Russian physicist called Anatoli Bugorski was checking a faulty accelerator when the proton beam came on and hit his head. He says he saw a bright flash "brighter than a thousand suns".
His face swelled up and skin started falling off. He lost some hearing but otherwise his brain remained in quite decent shape. He could still function, but got tired quickly. It was a crazy accident to have happened.

10.21am: ieclark: It's a fair point. I was at Cern for "big bang day" in 2008. It was overdone by the media I think. Especially for poor listeners of the R4 Today programme who were treated to an audio explanation of a dot appearing on a screen. I haven't been asked to live blog this for the Guardian. I just wanted to. It's the biggest experiment in physics in a generation. It might well go badly wrong. I won't live blog every minute, but since I'm going to be watching the coverage anyway, I thought I might write about it while I'm at it. I do take your point about media overkill though. What does everyone else think?

10.17am: New bunch of protons has just been injected. Where do they get all the protons from? Tis easy. Get a big can of hydrogen, put an electrical voltage across it, strip off the electrons and ditch them. Eeach hydrogen atom has one proton for a nucleus, and one electron orbiting it. Once you've got rid of the electrons, you have positively charged protons, which you can steer and accelerate with fields.

10.10am: New analysis shows that the glitch that's holding things up was due to magnetic coupling of the main circuits in super proton synchrotron (the injecting accelerator) and the LHC, not electrical noise. Or is it the Higgs particle wooing its way back in time and jinxing the machine. Again.

10.08am: SirTachyon: I'm not at all sure how you'd go about looking for a tachyon. The buggers move faster than the speed of light, so I for one won't be able to catch one. You might get some joy here.

10.02am: Jacktatum: There's a proper science journalist covering this? Where?!
The machine uses magnetic fields to steer the beams into head-on collisions at four points around the accelerator ring. Well, it's not a ring as such, but it's almost circular. The beams are crossed inside the four detectors: Atlas, CMS, LHCb and Alice.

9.59am: harmonyfuture: It depends if Hawking radiation works as advertised. Bear in mind you need an awful lot of matter to make a dangerous blackhole, and bunches of protons just aren't enough to do that. If you get teensy ones, and it's a huge if, they'll be fabulously hot and are expected to radiate themselves out of existence in the blink of an eye.

9.55am: ieclark: Forgive me, I'm an enthusiast. This thing costs the UK more than a million quid a week, I like to know how it's getting on!

SirTachyon: I do hope so!

9.53am: Wilson is a tad pretentious in that exchange, I'd say. The real question: why do particle physics is a fair one. To learn about the universe and its make-up is enough for me to chip in my tax quids. bear in mind that 25% of the mass of the universe is dark, that we don't know what it is. Plenty more is not understood at all. The history of physics is littered with experts claiming the end of physics is nigh; that we are on the brink of knowing everything. It's no more true today than it was in Lord Kelvin's day.
Beams back in 20 mins.

9.48am: Lemon3: I refer you to the priceless exchange between Robert Wilson, former director of Fermilab, and Senator John Pastore, during a Congressional hearing over the value of building a new particle accelerator. Pastore is sure there must be something about the machine that can be steered towards a defence app:

Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of this country?

Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't belive so.

Pastore: Nothing at all?

Wilson: Nothing at all.

Pastore: It has no value in that respect?

Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with, are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean, all the things we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except perhaps to make it worth defending.

9.41am: So. The machine is still being cooled down so that it can take another filling of protons. These are injected as beams with an energy of 450 billion electron volts. Once those are whizzing around in the machine, the accelerator fields will ramp up, steadily spinning the particles up to 3.5 trillion electron volts per beam.
In case you find this frustrating: In the final year of operation of Cern's last collider, the Large Electron Positron Collider, the machine was being pushed so hard, it tripped out roughly every 15 minutes. That is, it would run for 15 mins, then break down. The beams then had to be filled again, stabilised, and then steered into collisions again. No one said particle physics was easy...

9.33am: I've been trying to think what this all reminds me of and I've got it. Sitting at Kennedy Space Centre waiting for the shuttle to launch. I've been three times and seen zero launches. Each time, the weather closed in or there was a technical glitch of some sort. The whole process is so complex and the price of beign careless and going ahead too early is so high, that everything moves at a (sensibly) cautious pace. Cern can't afford another huge accident like the one that shut this machine down for 18 months in September 2008. These guys have the patience of saints.

9.29am: In case you've ever wondered what the Cern scientists have been up to since the LHC switched on at low energy in November...

9.27am: WendyZu, Apolloman: Not much to add re: the picture except that the yellow curved tracks are charged particles that are kicked out of the collisions and bent by the detector's magnetic field. Some of the other markings are due to the calorimeter in the detector being triggered - they give a measure of the amount of energy carried by the particles produced.
This shot is taken looking down the beampipe or collision axis.

9.23am: Fresh beams expected in just under one hour.

9.20am: Craignewzealand asks about the similarity between LHC collisions and those in the cosmos.

I think it's a fair question to ask, but it's one that gets short shrift from many particle physicists. Very quickly, the argument is that higher energy collisions have been going on for billions of years somewhere in the universe, and there's been no catastrophe yet. That we know of. In space, particles can have head on collisions, though a speeding particle slamming into stationary ion/surface is more likely. John Marburger, President Bush's former science adviser, told me these fears were like going for a swim in Scotland and worrying about being eaten by the Loch Ness monster. Theory doesn't rule out the Loch Ness monster, not absolutely anyway. No one has (really) ever seen it. And if it is there, we don't know if it likes the taste of people. I would go on, but I'm probably boring people!

9.13am: BristolBoy asks: "How long did it take them to discover that noise was coming from passing TGVs"
I'm afraid I can't remember quite how long it took to uncover. I don't think it was too long, because so many Cern staff pass through Geneva train station and they recognised the times when the anomalous signals were appearing. The fact that the signals came and went like clockwork Mon-Fri, and then at different times at the weekend helped. I wonder if anyone would have noticed if the collider was in the UK. Our trains seem to come and go as they please.

9.09am: Friskydiscus says: "When (if) they do manage to collide any particles can you mark it with a big bold Goooooooal!!!!!!!"
But of course. It would be my pleasure.

9.08am: We've just heard from Andrzej Siemko, the man in charge of the quench protection system at Cern's LHC. The system is there to alert operators to problems with the magnets, and to shut the machine down if it looks like a magnet is in danger of being damaged. It's really sensitive. The system picked up an electrical anomaly from two sectors of the machine and flagged a warning to operators. What's interesting - and it's good news I think - is that the problem it identified did not come from one of the LHC's 8,000 superconducting magnets. It picked up a load of electrical noise that was later spotted at other accelerators at Cern (the LHC is just the biggest and shiniest).
Sounds like a glitch with the Cern power supply rather than a problem with the LHC itself. That said, if it's a generator problem, or a substation problem, it could be an annoyance.

8.59am: Some pics from this morning's events so far...

8.54am: The glitch with the cryogenics system seems to have come from electrical noise that hit a few sectors of the LHC and then vanished. Spooky, or not.
Since you ask, Cern's previous machine, the Large Electron Positron collider, had teething troubles too. Weird signals came and went. They realised, eventually, that the machine was reacting to Earth tides: the pull of the moon on the Earth's crust was making the land around the collider heave up and down, causing a 1mm change in the circumference of the 27km collider ring.

And that wasn't the end of it.

More stray signals plagued the machine that seemed to come and go with even more regularity than the moon signals. Turned out that stray currents from the French TGV train at Geneva station were passing through the ground and getting into the collider, causing slight changes in the beam orbit. Once that had been cleared up, they found yet more signals that were traced back to the water level of Lake Geneva.

These are big machines, but they are amazingly sensitive.

8.48am: The protons hurtle around the machine in bunches. When the beams are crossed, some of these bunches smash into oncoming bunches, and some protons will hit others. You can get glancing blows, where protons simply deflect off each other. A direct collision will split the protons into their constituent quarks and gluons. The energy released on impact can condense into entirely new particles, so you see quarks, electrons and their heavier cousins, muons, all flinging out from the collision centre.

8.46am: Right now, Cern staff are cooling part of the machine in preparation of injecting particles again. Once the particles are in, the energy will be ramped up to 3.5TeV. The ramp up usually takes about 45 mins. Then they have to make sure the beams are stable, that is circulating happily without wandering off axis or fading. Only then will they go for collisions.

8.43am: Phillipe Bloch, head of physics at Cern:
"We've worked for almsot 20 years on this project...We have a lot of work in front of us for many years, so we can wait for a few more minutes."

8.39am: The LHC had beams running at 3.5TeV no problem last night. I think the machine's got stage fright this morning.

8.36am: JerryTheDog: a good point re: what will 7TeV collisions mean if they achieve them today. Bear in mind that the American Tevatron collider has been operating at nearly 2TeV for quite a while, though it is colliding protons and antiprotons. For the LHC to see something soon (and I mean within months), there would have to be a particle or an interaction that is sitting just above Tevatron's reach and well within the LHC's reach. What are the chances? Who knows. There are theories that predict a heavy Higgs boson, but the odds seem very slim. Other theories suggest there could be supersyimmetric particles (heavy twins of the particles we know and love) that are within reach of the LHC. More than likely though, it will take many months to find clear evidence of anything. The reason is that new phenomena can easily be obscured by other well-known physics. Slamming protons together is a messy business, because each proton is made of three quarks, which means you can have all kinds of subatomic detritus smothering signs of something knew. My guess is that the Higgs boson won't be seen - by the LHC at least - before it closes down for major work in 2011. Finding supersymmetric particles, or extra dimensions though, would be staggering.

8.27am: What the LHC might find:
The Higgs boson (thought to give mass to fundamental particles)
Supersymmetry (which doubles the number of particle species in the universe)
Extra spatial dimensions (they must be tiny if they're there)
Miniature black holes (and we're talking pin-prick sized)
Dark matter particles

And plenty more. I'll say more about the above in a mo.

8.23am: Britain pays £80m a year in Cern subscriptions, the bulk of which goes on the LHC project.

8.21am: Steve Myers, head of accelerators at Cern, has just been speaking. They've had two goes, both of which have failed. The first beams were lost at an energy of 2.2TeV when a power supply tripped. They've reset it and that part seems ok. The second attempt failed due to a problem with the new magnet protection system. This is interesting, because the protection system is very new. It was added during the 18 month shut down to prevent another explosion like the one in September 2008. One of the magnets has quenched, which means it warmed up. That will need to be cooled down again before they can go for collisions. Collisions at 10am earliest.

8.17am: Holger Bech Nielsen must be smiling.

8.14am: Ah judith. I hope you're joking. I've never heard anyone other than a physicist say "I'm concerned about the cryogenics." Sounds like a line from an extra on Star Trek.

8.11am: It could be two hours before they are in a position to collide particles. Good thing they've started early.

8.10am: It's worth bearing in mind that the LHC is the most complex machine that's ever been built. Nothing quite like it has been made before. Last year's explosion - that led to a tonne of helium bursting into the collider tunnel - was the kind of incident that people half expected. An awful lot of things have to go right for it to work at all. Losing the beams today is a minor glitch.

8.06am: Speculative (and often ludicrous) doomsday scenarios have been kicked around since the early days of particle colliders. People have wondered about making greedy black holes; "abnormal matter" that's more stable than regular matter; magnetic monopoles that might cause proton decay and so on. My favourite, or more precisely, the one that intrigues me most, is vacuum decay.

The universe seems to be in a pretty stable state. There's been time for stars and planets to form and for life to arise. But what if the stable state of the universe was an illusion? It could be in a metastable state. And a big kick of energy somewere, anywhere, could knock the universe down into a more stable state. That's vacuum decay. What's staggering about the possibility is that it doesn't just mean curtains for us and all other life on Earth. It means no more life ever, anywhere.

Here's the late, great Sidney Coleman speculating on the prospect in, I think a 1980/81 paper:

"The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated."
Sidney Coleman.

So, we'd best get on and enjoy ourselves, eh?

7.59am: The Cern engineers are trying to fix a glitch in the LHC's cryogenics. You can't accelerate or steer the beams without the cryogenics working, because the superconducting magnets have to be ultra-chilled to work properly.

7.54am: The beam has just been lost. Maybe a power unit tripped. It takes thousands of components to work in unison for this to work. It sounds as though there's a problem with the cryogenics, that is keeping the superconducting magnets cool.

7.49am: The machine was loaded up with particles about 40 minutes ago. The LHC has ramped up energy to 3.5TeV in each beam, but no collisions as yet.

7.45am: We're expecting the first attempt at collisions at 8am BST. Cern has historically shut down its major colliders over Christmas for routine maintenance, but things will be different with the LHC. The machine will run from today all the way through until the end of 2011, or thereabouts.

7.32am: Eighteen months after the Large Hadron Collider suffered an enormous helium leak that shut the machine down, engineers are readying the machine for its first high energy collisions.

The LHC accelerates two counter-rotating beams of protons - the subatomic constituents of atomic nuclei - to within a whisker of the speed of light, before steering them into one another. The head-on collisions release enough energy to mimic in microcosm the conditions that prevailed a fraction of a second after the big bang.

The first collisions are expected as early as 8am this morning, but at Cern things can happen faster or slower than expected. A tentative schedule of the day's events is here.

Alas I am covering the events from London. You can watch Cern's streaming coverage here. If you have work to do and can't sit around watching people chat about particle physics all morning, I'll follow it for you.

The machine has already collided particles at a combined energy (call it centre-of-mass energy) of 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). One electron volt is the amount of energy the particle gains when accelerated across an electric field of 1 volt.

Slamming particles together at 2.36TeV in November showed the machine, and its four huge detectors, work well. It also claimed the crown for the LHC as the most powerful collider in the world, by pipping the US Fermilab's Tevatron collider near Chicago.

Today is bigger news. Today the machine will go to half of its full energy, that is, colliding particles together with a total energy of 7TeV.

In case you are worried, the world will not end.

Good morning and welcome to the Guardian's live coverage of the Large Hadron Collider's second launch

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 30 Mar 2010 | 12:34 am

Koch Industries funds climate change deniers: Greenpeace (AFP)

AFP - Koch Industries, a huge privately-owned US company dominated by oil and chemical interests, is plowing millions of dollars into campaigns to discredit climate science and clean energy policies, a report alleged Tuesday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 30 Mar 2010 | 12:12 am

US and Vietnam sign nuclear energy agreement (AP)

AP - The United States and Vietnam signed an agreement Tuesday that may pave the way for U.S. firms to help build nuclear plants in the Southeast Asian country as it strives to meet booming energy demand.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 11:58 pm

US judge strikes down patent on cancer genes (AP)

AP - In a ruling with potentially far-reaching implications for the patenting of human genes, a judge on Monday struck down a company's patents on two genes linked to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:18 pm

Animal studies paint misleading picture

Unpublished negative results may explain limited translation of promising treatments to the clinic.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/NncIbA8JD_Q" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:01 pm

Wi-Fi by the Hour Now Available for iPad

New hourly Wi-Fi credits for Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch with Boingo app at iTunes.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 9:47 pm

Wi-Fi by the Hour Now Available for iPad (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Good news for people who are springing for the cheaper Wi-Fi edition of the iPad due out this Saturday. Wi-Fi service provider Boingo today announced "Boingo Wi-Fi Credits" available through the iTunes store. iPad users can buy one hour credits for $1.99 in advance or at the time of connection, decreasing the chance of getting caught without a Wi-Fi connection.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 9:40 pm

Laughs decoded: Hyena giggles reveal their social status

A hyena's "laugh" contains important information about the animal's social status, a new study reveals.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Mar 2010 | 7:55 pm

'Nyet' to $1 million? Math genius may reject award (AP)

AP - Who doesn't want to be a millionaire? Maybe a 43-year-old unemployed bachelor who lives with his elderly mother in Russia — and who won $1 million for solving a problem that has stumped mathematicians for a century.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 7:27 pm

Urine Signals Sex, Violence to Crayfish

Female crayfish release urine to attract mates. But the aphrodisiac confuses males, that use it as a sign of violence.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 6:29 pm

Probe sees 'Pac-man in the moon'

The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn catches an interesting new view of the tiny moon Mimas.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 29 Mar 2010 | 6:02 pm

What Does Islamic Faith Promise Martyrs?

Islamic extremists who believe in suicide bombing as martyrdom expect rewards in the afterlife.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 4:50 pm

Truffle's savoury secret revealed

The Périgord black truffle's flavour depends on its own enzymes rather than on where it grows.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 29 Mar 2010 | 3:24 pm

Video: Elephants Run Like No Other

A biomechanical analysis of running elephants has revealed that Earth’s largest land animals do some strange things at high speed.

Unlike every other quadruped, they use all four legs for braking and propulsion, rather than rather dividing those tasks between hind and front legs.

Elephants also prove to be extremely inefficient while running. Compared to animals like horses, they perform quite poorly. Then again, given their size, running itself is quite an achievement.

“It’s pretty cool that they can run at all. And they do it in such a weird way,” said John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of London.

In a study published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hutchinson’s team videotaped six Asian elephants as they ran across mechanical plates that measured the force of each stride. By combining gait models distilled from the video with force measurements, they could quantify the elephants’ biomechanics.

Surprisingly, they learned that braking and propulsion is performed equally by each leg. In other quadrupeds, rear legs are mostly used to push off, and front legs to slow down. The elephants’ arrangement likely makes them more stable and reduces physical stress placed on each leg, said Huchinson.

Stress reduction could also explain the pronounced knee bend of running elephants. A relatively straight-legged gait, which elephants possess while walking, is better at converting muscular effort into physical force. However, it does little to absorb stresses generated when an elephant’s leg hits the ground. Bent knees are a natural shock absorber.

To compensate for the loss of leverage, running elephants must work extra hard. The scientific term for limb leverage is “effective mechanical advantage,” or EMA. While walking, elephants have an EMA of one, but it drops to 0.5 in running elephants, calculated Hutchinson.

Even as EMA declines, the force of an elephant’s mass striking the ground rises with speed. “If EMA goes down by a factor of two, and the forces that EMA resists go up by a factor of three, muscles have to work six times as hard,” said Hutchinson.

That inefficiency could explain why elephants are not known as long-distance runners, and have speeds of just 15 miles per hour. Then again, when you’re as big as a small house, there’s not much you need to run from.

Video and image: An Asian elephant and trainer in the study; the white patches are infrared reflectors used as reference points in motion models/John Hutchinson.

See Also:

• Counting Elephants by Voice
• African Footprint Fossils Are Oldest Evidence of Upright Walk …
• The Potential for a 40-MPH Man
• Short Heels and Long Toes: A Surprising Recipe for Speed
• Secret Law of Flying Could Inspire Better Robots

Citation: “The extraordinary integration of biomechanical compliance, leverage, and power in elephant limbs.” By Lei Ren, Charlotte Miller, Richard Lair, and John Hutchinson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 13, March 30, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Mar 2010 | 3:17 pm

What Were the Worst Product Recalls in History?

Product recalls can severely affect consumer confidence in certain products and the companies who manufacture them.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 3:04 pm

The Sun Points Radio-Active Sunspot at Earth

As the sun becomes more active, radio astronomers listen into an intense battle between magnetism and plasma deep inside a particularly noisy sunspot.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 2:46 pm

Does Eating Oatmeal Lower Cholesterol?

Oatmeal contains soluble fiber that reduces the "bad" cholesterol that can increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 2:40 pm

Single gene powers hybrid tomato plants

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A mutation in a single gene can turn hybrid tomato plants into super producers capable of generating more and much sweeter fruit without genetic engineering, scientists said in a study released on Sunday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 2:33 pm

Morality Altered by Brain Stimulation

Scientists can influence people's moral judgments by stimulating a specific region of their brain
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 2:03 pm

Magnets Can Manipulate Morality

Magnetic fields targeting the moral center of the brain could scramble our sense of right and wrong.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 1:01 pm

Bats Get Pitchy to Make 3-D Echolocation Map

Bats can subtly adjust the frequency of the sounds they use to do echolocation to adjust to particularly cluttered terrain.

In a laboratory testing room filled with dangling plastic chains, bats wearing tiny, half-gram microphones were recorded flying through the obstacle course. When confronted with the forest of chains, the bats tended to reduce or increase the sounds they emitted by a few kilohertz. On their return flights, the path is clear and they stop tweaking their frequencies.

The researchers hypothesize that using multiple frequencies helps the bats resolve their environments faster than using single sound could allow.

“It’s all a matter of matching the broadcast to the echo,” said Mary Bates, a biology graduate student at Brown University and a co-author of the new study March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s a matter of ignoring or not processing the things that are going to interfere and doing this careful matching of sound to echo.”

The bats need data about the placement of the chains faster than the first round of echoes can provide, so they send out a second and third and a fourth batch. By changing the pitch of the noises slightly, the bats can differentiate between their different noises. Their brains then integrate those streams of sounds into a high-resolution 3-D map of the terrain.

Researchers have often marveled at bats ability to use echolocation even in very crowded environments or among many similar bats using their own sounds to resolve their environments.

“The navy is really interested in what we do because manmade sonar has come nowhere close to what bats and dolphins can do,” Bates said.

The frequency-shifting trick is one way that bats are able to echolocate while moving quickly, Bates and her lab leader, Jerry Simmons hypothesize. They also use the trick when dealing with interference from other members of their species, they’ve discovered.

Images: J. Simmons, J. Barchi, J. Gaudette and J. Knowles.

Citation: “Echolocating bats shift frequencies to avoid broadcast-echo ambiguity in clutter” by ShizukoHiryua, Mary E. Bates, James A. Simmons, and Hiroshi Riquimarouxa. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1000429107

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 29 Mar 2010 | 1:00 pm

Live from Iceland: Streaming Video of a Volcanic Eruption!

As if last week's show-stopping images of the Eyjafjajokull volcano erupting in Iceland weren't enough, some kind soul has set up a camera a few clicks out from the volcano and is streaming video for all to see! This is ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 1:00 pm

'Supertaskers' That Can Drive and Talk on Phone Rare

A very small percentage of the population can safely drive while talking on their cell phones, but chances are high that you're not one of these "supertaskers."
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 12:41 pm

Pope’s Saint-Making Miracle Questioned

These are tough times for the Vatican. Not only is the current pope under fire for allegedly helping cover up child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but questions have recently been raised about a miracle attributed to the previous ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 12:23 pm

Erupting Iceland Volcano Seen From Space

New satellite image reveals lava fountains and steam plumes from erupting Iceland volcano.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 12:19 pm

What Were the Worst Subway Attacks in History?

Monday's twin suicide bombing attacks in two of Moscow's busy subway stations mark the latest in a history of deadly subway attacks around the world.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 12:18 pm

Friday News Feedbag for March 26, 2010!

If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag...we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and chat ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 12:06 pm

Egypt finds Pharaonic false door to the afterlife

CAIRO (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Luxor have uncovered a 3,500-year-old false door belonging to the tomb of a Pharaonic official, the Ministry of Culture said on Monday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 29 Mar 2010 | 11:52 am

Tiny Mercury Easier To Spot

Mercury and Venus will appear unusually close together from now until April 10.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 11:09 am

Is Green Energy Really Green?

General Electric confirmed a few days ago that, yes, it is going to start producing thin-film solar cells--a move that is expected to drive costs down and give industry leader First Solar a run for it. Renewable energy developments like ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:40 am

Emergency legislation to ban mephedrone

Home secretary Alan Johnson to rush ban on legal high 'meow meow' through parliament despite resignation of drugs adviser

The legal high drug mephedrone will be banned within weeks, Alan Johnson, the home secretary, announced today.

Emergency legislation classifying mephedrone as a class B drug comes after Johnson's expert drug advisers disclosed that the drug has been implicated in 25 deaths in England and Scotland.

The ban is expected to gain cross-party support to be rushed through both houses of parliament in the four remaining sitting days before the general election.

The decision to push ahead with legislation comes despite the resignation of a further member of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which left a legal question mark.

Johnson has brushed aside the effects of the latest resignation, that of Dr Polly Taylor, a consultant veterinary surgeon, whose decision to quit leaves the ACMD inquorate and technically unable to make a recommendation to the home secretary. Home Office lawyers are confident that the ban can go ahead. Taylor's term on the council was due to end shortly and candidates have already been interviewed for her place.

The decision to classify mephedrone as a class B drug alongside the amphetamines it imitates will also extend to other cathinones which have been synthesised by south-east Asian chemists from the active ingredient in the plant qat.

Professor Les Iversen, who chairs the ACMD, said that the rise in popularity of mephedrone – also known as meow meow or drone – was unprecedented: "I have never experienced such a widespread use in such a short space of time. There is no question this is the drug of the moment," he told the ACMD meeting today in London.

"It is being taken by young people who have never taken drugs before in their lives because they think it is legal and it is safe. It is neither legal nor safe."

He said the figure of 18 possible mephedrone-related deaths in England was based on data from the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, which collates information from police forces and forensic labs. Iversen said they were regarded as the most reliable source but cautioned he was only saying the drug was possibly implicated in those deaths. Full postmortems have yet to be carried out. A further seven cases have been reported in Scotland, although only one so far has been confirmed as a mephedrone-related death and the heroin substitute methadone was also reported to be a factor in the case.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:17 am

Avatars May Inspire Us to Exercise

Could watching a digital version of yourself on a treadmill encourage you to change your behavior?
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:05 am

James Lovelock: 'Fudging data is a sin against science'

In his first major interview since the climate-change emails scandal, James Lovelock says he is disgusted by the actions of some scientists, applauds 'good' climate sceptics, and warns that global warming could even lead to war

As you travel along the drive to James Lovelock's house, located in a remote, wooded valley on the Cornwall-Devon border, you pass a sign by a gated cattle grid. "Experimental station," it reads. "Site of a new natural habitat. Please do not trespass or disturb."

Thirty years ago, Lovelock planted 20,000 trees to create the much more biodiverse habitat around his home. But you suspect that, had this fiercely independent scientist and globally respected environmental thinker been around 3.8 billion years ago when life first erupted on this planet, he would have organised a similar notice to be placed somewhere prominent.

After all, Lovelock – now into his 90s but still fit enough to be invited aboard Richard Branson's soon-to-launch commercial spacecraft – is the man who first developed the "Gaia theory" in the late 1960s: the still-challenging idea that Earth is one giant, self-regulating organism whose equilibrium is being very much disturbed by the actions of one species. Lovelock has been warning with increasing urgency that the survival of that species – Homo sapiens – is now gravely threatened by the "Revenge of Gaia", the title of one of his more recent bestselling books.

He is billed as an Old Testament-style prophet for our times, predicting fire and brimstone for a damned generation if it does not urgently and radically change its polluting ways. But in person Lovelock has a becalming presence, even when firing off verbal thunderbolts at the various "dumbos" with whom we have bestowed our collective fate: namely, "the politicians, scientists and lobbyists".

The past four months, he says, have only hardened his disdain for this grouping; a turbulent period that has seen efforts to tackle climate change undermined by the online release of the hacked University of East Anglia emails, the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, the (forced) admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that its latest report contained some minor mistakes, and the onset of an exceptionally cold winter across some parts of the northern hemisphere.

Leaning back into his swivel chair in his modest office-cum-laboratory, from where he writes and conducts the odd commissioned experiment for the Ministry of Defence and MI5 ("it's nothing that interesting; just health-and-safety work", he says when probed for more detail), Lovelock directs his first wave of ire at the reports that climate scientists had been caught up in the email scandal. He was, he says, "utterly disgusted" when he first heard about the allegations. (He didn't read the actual emails when they were posted online, adding that: "Oddly, I felt reluctant to pry.")

During this discussion, Lovelock recalls the "corruption of science" that occurred during the attempts to link chlorofluorocarbons with the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. "Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do."

Lovelock says the events of the past few months have seen him warm to the efforts of some climate sceptics: "What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the creek.

"The good sceptics have done a good service – but some of the mad ones, I think, have not done anyone any favours. Some, of course, are corrupted and employed by oil companies and things like that. Some even work for governments. For example, I wouldn't put it past the Russians to be behind some of the disinformation to help further their energy interests. But you need sceptics, especially when the science gets very big and monolithic."

And the sceptics are right, he says, to be deeply distrustful of scientists who are overly reliant on computer models, particularly when it comes to predicting future climate scenarios: "We're not that bright an animal. We stumble along very nicely and it's amazing what we do do sometimes, but we tend to be too hubristic to notice the limitations. If you make a model, after a while you get suckered into it. You begin to forget that it's a model and think of it as the real world."

It is obvious, both from talking to Lovelock and reading his work, particularly his most recent books, that he doesn't have the highest opinion of mankind's capabilities to see the long game and act accordingly.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle as complex a situation as climate change," he responds, when asked whether we are up to the task as a species of tackling climate change. "We're very active animals. We like to think, 'Ah yes, this will be a good policy,' but it's almost never that simple. Wars show this to be true. People are very certain they are fighting a just cause, but it doesn't always work out like that. Climate change is kind of a repetition of a wartime situation. It could quite easily lead to a physical war."

Hopelessness is a response, one senses, never far from a Lovelock audience. He is not one to toss around crumbs of comfort when he believes they're not justified, and displays a great deal of contempt for what he believes to be the naive idealism and ideologies of much of the current environmental movement – a significant proportion of which still looks up to him with a certain reverence. For example, it was his high-profile switch a few years ago to promoting nuclear energy as the best hope for saving ourselves that helped convince many environmentalists to rethink their instinctive opposition to this technology. Now, he says, he is not convinced that any meaningful response to "global heating", as he likes to call it, can be achieved from within the modern democracies of the western world.

"We need a more authoritative world," he says resolutely. "We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. They should be very accountable too, of course – but it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems.

"What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

But with public confidence in climate science taking such a knock in recent months, what will it take to convince the public that urgent action really is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – or, as is Lovelock's preference, to adapt and prepare the lifeboat for a changing climate?

"There has been a lot of speculation that a very large glacier in Antarctica is unstable," he says, referring to Pine Island glacier or "the Pig", as the scientists now monitoring it like to call it. "If there's much more melting, it may break off and slip into the ocean. I'd say the scientists are not worried about it, but they are keeping a close watch on it. It would be enough to produce an immediate sea level rise of two metres – something huge. And tsunamis. That would be the sort of event that would change public opinion – or a return of the dustbowl in the American midwest. Another IPCC report won't be enough; we'll just argue over it like now."

(I later contact Dr Robert Bindschadler, the Nasa scientist who leads the team monitoring the Pig. "No one expects full collapse of the system as quickly as [in the next] 100 years," Bindschadler responds, "'but even if it did, the mean rate of sea level rise would 'only' triple the current rate of rise. No one would get their feet wet overnight.")

On a noticeboard behind Lovelock hangs a photograph of a huge wind turbine. As an active anti-wind farm campaigner, does it infuriate him that so much investment is now being poured into renewable energy infrastructure? "I've always said that adaptation is the most serious thing we can do," he says. "Are our sea defences adequate? Can we prevent London from flooding? This is where we should be spending our billions. If wind turbines really worked, I wouldn't object to them. To hell with the aesthetics, we might need them to save ourselves. But they don't work – the Germans have admitted it.

"It's like the Common Agricultural Policy, which led to corruption and inefficiencies. A common energy policy across Europe is not a good idea. I'm in favour of nuclear for crowded places like Britain for the simple reason that it's cheap, effective and exceedingly safe when you look at the record."

His views on carbon emissions trading, as is being touted by the EU and others, are equally dismissive: "I don't know enough about carbon trading, but I suspect that it is basically a scam. The whole thing is not very sensible. We have this crazy idea that we are setting an example to the world. What we're doing is trying to make money out of the world by selling them renewable gadgetry and green ideas. It might be worthy from the national interest, but it is moonshine if you think what the Chinese and Indians are doing [in terms of emissions]. The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

Lovelock freely admits that, at 90, he won't be around to see the results of the "experiment" humans are currently conducting with the atmosphere. It's what, in part, gives him the licence to speak with such frankness. But for anyone younger, Lovelock's prognosis for our species is hard to hear, let alone accept. That a black, rain-laden cloud is welling up over the nearby moorland as I set off to leave only acts to darken the mood.

James Lovelock will be speaking at the Southbank Centre in London tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 7.30pm (southbankcentre.co.uk)

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Mar 2010 | 10:00 am

'Door To Afterlife' Unearthed At Karnak

An Egyptian excavation team has unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 9:53 am

Scientists to Levitate Drops of Liquid to Study Glass

Scientists are building a levitation chamber to suspend a drop of liquid in mid-air and watch its atoms as it cools into glass.
Source: Livescience.com | 29 Mar 2010 | 9:22 am

When Doha Became No-ha

At the global conservation summit that ended last week, marine species were spurned, and this turned out to be the year that conservation lost out heavily to continued consumption and profit-making.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 29 Mar 2010 | 9:20 am

What is a collision?

Jon Butterworth, a physicist at the Cern coal face, gives an in-depth view of what has already been achieved at the Large Hadron Collider and where we go from here

Some time tomorrow, the Large Hadron Collider will attempt to crash protons together at an energy three and a half times higher than the previous record. The moment will mark the beginning of a long search for new particles, forces and dimensions at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation, near Geneva.

The LHC really became a collider just before Christmas. The collisions recorded back then were not at particularly high energy, but three experiments have now published results; my experiment, Atlas, being the latest, with the paper being accepted for publication only last week. Before storming onward, it is a good moment to see what these results actually tell us.

The detectors (Alice, CMS and Atlas) are really just huge digital cameras designed to record what happens when protons smash together. The first thing you do with a new collider and detector is measure the particles produced in an "average" collision.

Measuring average, typical events tells us various things. We know the proton is full of quarks, stuck together by the strong nuclear force. How it behaves at high energies is not very well known, and these measurements will help. They also help us understand backgrounds to rarer events, for example, those where a Higgs particle (which is thought to bestow mass on elementary particles) might be produced, and inform models of massive air-showers, which happen when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere. You can see in the Atlas paper that the models don't fit the data quite right. The model builders are already tuning up to improve this.

The papers from the three detector teams all have their strengths. The Alice paper was first, although they did not wait for all the data so it's less precise than the others. The CMS paper was next, and is the only one to include the highest energy collisions so far, at 2.36 TeV (trillion electron volts).

The Atlas paper was significantly slower to appear, and I really hope CMS don't beat us to the Higgs that way! The main strength of the Atlas paper is subtle but important. To understand it you have to go back and ask what is a collision?

So far as the LHC is concerned, a collision is when two protons interact. But most of the interactions are glancing blows. In most of these collisions the protons remain intact, or are broken into very few particles. We call these "diffractive" collisions.

How common diffractive collisions are matters if we want to be clear what an average event looks like. To find out, we measure a series of collisions, which are selected using what is called a "minimum bias". This is simply a way of ensuring we are not giving undue weight to a certain kind of event. It means our average collision really is typical of what goes on in the machine.

An equivalent would be working out the average height of a person in the UK by selecting a sample of people and measuring them. You wouldn't do it in a pub, because that would bias your sample: there would be too few children. (Plus you might get funny looks.)

The problem with collisions at the LHC is you can't be truly unbiased: the vast majority of glancing collisions don't leave a trace in the detector. Instead, the protons carry on down the LHC beam pipe. In practice you will see most of the "non-diffractive" collisions, where the protons are smashed up and the particle debris hits the detector, but only a handful of the diffractive ones.

In the past, experiments have used theoretical models to solve this problem. They either remove the small number of diffractive collisions that are recorded and produce measurements of what they call non-diffractive events. Or they estimate the missing diffractive events and add them in. This means that what you are measuring is only defined within a theory, where "diffractive" and "non-diffractive" are really just words. If you use a model to correct for them, you buy into a particular definition of them, and hence a particular view of nature.

The bottom line is that if you take this approach, you are no longer just reporting what happens. In my view, it's important that, having gone to the enormous trouble of building the LHC and the detectors, we should first just say what happens when particles collide inside them. Only then should we confront that data with theory, as part of the process of exploration and understanding. The first bare reporting step is essential.

This is what we did on Atlas. We measured the particles produced from all of the collisions we recorded that left at least one track in the detector, regardless of whether theoretical models would label them as glancing collisions or non-diffractive events. This isn't perfect, but it is the most objective way we have of measuring an average collision: there is a bias, but it does not depend on the theory.

The number of particles in an average collision can vary by up to 20% depending on how you define the average. That may seem a small difference, but the difference in the principle of how the measurement is made is huge. In my view, this approach should be carried forward into all future measurements at the LHC.

So, the first results are in. The detectors work well. The theoretical models are reasonable, but can be improved. We're not at the stage of reporting really exciting new physics yet, but it is interesting and important for firming up our knowledge as we step into the unknown. As we go there, we should all be sure to first report what we see, and only then have a go at interpreting it.

Jon Butterworth is a member of the High Energy Physics Group at University College London

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Mar 2010 | 6:48 am

I'm converting sceptics on YouTube

Scientific candour, not polar bears and submerged cities, has helped my channel, Potholer54, to 27,000 subscribers

So you have this friend who just doesn't seem to get global warming. Showing him pictures of polar bears stranded on icebergs generates no sympathy. He is unmoved by computer images of New York under water. Could he really be a right-wing crackpot, unwilling to face the fact that the Earth is doomed?

Well maybe not. After questioning and listening to hundreds of climate change "sceptics," I have found that not all are conspiracy theorists or religious fundamentalists. Many are keen to learn about the science of climate change, but they have been learning about it from rather dubious sources.

So two years ago I began a series of videos on YouTube to explain the science, and rebut urban myths that spin round the internet and end up on the opinion pages of the Daily Express and the Wall Street Journal. The result has been astonishing. My channel, Potholer54, now has over 27,000 subscribers. The videos have been mirrored by others all over the internet, and several university lecturers have asked if they can use it in their environmental science classes. Most importantly, former sceptics tell me the videos have changed their minds about the reality of climate change.

That success, however, comes at a price. It means looking at the science – not scary and unrealistic images of submerged cities. It means accepting the fact that Al Gore is not always right, and he should not be defended when he's wrong. It means acknowledging that while sceptics like Christopher Monckton and Martin Durkin fabricate a lot of their facts, many environmental activists tend to exaggerate theirs.

Of course, the evidence clearly shows that the climate is changing, largely because of man-made gases. And the consequences are likely to be dire. But exaggerating them – and being caught out – is not the way to gain public understanding or trust. As a science journalist I could not, with a clear conscience, report that the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps will drown most of Florida (as Al Gore does in An Inconvenient Truth) without pointing out that this is not likely to happen for thousands of years.

The result of this candour is that a lot of sceptics trust the Potholer54 channel, and appreciate that they are not being talked down to, or badgered or lectured. I do not call them climate "deniers", which presupposes there is some irrefutable truth they are denying. But neither are they truly sceptics. They learn climate science the same way many schoolchildren learn about sex – from other kids. The only difference in the internet age is that the playground got bigger.

Without question they unsceptically believe dubious sources like Fox News, the Daily Express and amateur blogs. A parade of scientists (never mind if they have degrees in microbiology or metallurgy) tell them that ocean cycles are reponsible for global warming, or that there is no warming at all, or that even if there is there is nothing to worry about.

Spend just a few days in this bizarre world of disinformation and it is hard to understand how the audience could not come to the conclusion that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. And if it is a hoax, the next obvious conclusion is that climate scientists must be either stupid or in it for the money. Deconstructing all this spurious guff, one myth at a time, means checking it back to its source, finding the errors, and then pitting it against proper research studies. No need for condescention, insult, or appeals to emotion.

Environmental activists who have subscribed to the channel also began to change their minds about climate change, but for a different reason. They learned that some tenets of the environmental movement are not founded on solid science. And they told me the series had armed them with the information they needed to rebut arguments from sceptic friends and relatives.

Science is science because the knowledge we aquire comes from experimentation and observation, not guesswork, belief and hearsay. Sadly, most newspapers dispensed with a dedicated science correspondent years ago. Editors at the Mail may be a whizz at dissecting the problems of the National Health Service, but the morsel of science they understand can be drowned in their lunchtime gin-and-tonics. Once people understand this, the job of explaining real science is easy.

• Peter Hadfield was a correspondent for New Scientist for 14 years, and contributed regularly to the BBC's Science in Action and ABC's (Australia) The Science Show

Climate voices - messages sent to Peter Hadley via his YouTube channel

• "Your series on climate change is by far the best scientific, non-sensational piece I've ever seen on the subject. It clears up a lot of things that I'd been hearing about that I now realise were purposefully leaving things out. I can only hope more people adopt your non-partisan style of reporting facts in the future."

• "Really well done. I have learned a great deal from this series. I am sceptical by nature but fed into the 'denier's' claims without doing the proper investigation ( it can be quite time consuming)."

• "I decided a year ago that I would face my beliefs and distroy them. Belief used to be defined as ... the acceptance of something as true no matter the evidence to the contrary. It has since been watered down.

I believed that global warming caused by mans activities was bullshit. I just finished viewing your series on this issue and ... I must distroy my belief and accept the science on the topic. You have presented compelling evidence to support global warming due to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere ... I cannot express how painful that is to type ... POTHOLER54"

• "EXCELLENT WORK ... as one of those "environmental activists" who admittedly doesn't know all the science ... (hey I'm a Social Studies major) I am looking forward to your next video. I'm glad someone finally explained the 800-year discrepancy thing."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 29 Mar 2010 | 4:03 am

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