Beautiful World

Looks like the time travelers didn’t get back in time – in time: BBC: CERN LHC sees high energy success

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced record-breaking high-energy particle collisions.

Scientists working on the European machine have smashed beams of protons together at energies that are 3.5 times higher than previously achieved.

Tuesday’s milestone marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics.

There was cheering and applause in the LHC control room as the first collisions were confirmed.

LHC explained

Live Webcast

CERN tweets

Researchers have found the ‘fear gene’ *

With the discovery of a fear factor gene, announced today, scientists have moved a step closer to being able to moderate extreme reactions to fear and also soothe trauma victims.

The researchers identified a gene in mice that controls reactions to impending danger by firing certain neurons in the brain. Mice that don’t have the gene, called stathmin, simply don’t react to situations that should scare the rodent pants off them.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Cor! I really miss that series.

* link thanks to Ace

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals

Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal cortex was scanned – it’s a region of the parietal lobe especially linked with numbers. They next rigorously analyzed brain activity to decipher which patterns might be linked with the numbers the volunteers had observed.
When it came to small numbers of dots, the researchers found that brain activity patterns changed gradually in a way that reflected the ordered nature of the numbers. For example, one might be able to conclude that the pattern for six is between that for five and seven.

In the case of the numerals, the researchers could not detect this same gradual change. This suggests their methods simply might not be sensitive enough to detect this progression yet, or that these symbols are in fact coded as more precise, discrete entities in the brain.

“Activation patterns for numbers of dots seem to be stronger – are more easily discriminated – than those for digits, suggesting that maybe still more neurons encode specifically numbers of objects – the evolutionary older representation – than abstract symbolic numbers,” said researcher Evelyn Eger at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France.

Given that numbers “are in principle infinite, it is very unlikely that the brain can have, or we can detect, a signature for each number,” Eger noted. “There is some hint in our data that smaller numbers have a clearer signature, which may be related to their frequency of occurrence in daily life, but further work would be needed to say something more definite about this and about how the brain deals with larger numbers.”

The methods employed in this research could ultimately help unlock how the brain makes sophisticated calculations and how the brain changes as people learn math, the researchers said.

More…

First Image of a Memory Being Made

For the first time, an image of a memory being made at the cellular level has been captured by scientists.

The image shows that proteins are created at connections between brain cells when a long-term memory is formed. Neuroscientists had suspected as much, but hadn’t been able to see it happening until now.

The experiment also revealed some surprising aspects of memory formation, which remains a somewhat mysterious process.

Kelsey Martin, a biochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues investigated memory formation in neurons from the sea slug Aplysia californica, a good model for brain cells in other organisms, including humans.

The researchers exposed the neurons to the chemical serotonin, which has been shown to stimulate memory formation (this discovery won Eric Kandel and collaborators the Nobel Prize in 2000). But in a new twist, the scientists devised a way to determine whether any new proteins were created when the memory was made.

The researchers used a fluorescent protein that can change from green to red when exposed to ultraviolet light. They flashed the cells with light, so that any proteins that already existed turned red. But when the scientists induced the cells to form memories, they saw new green proteins appear under the microscope.

“One distinction between short-term and long-term memory is this requirement for making new proteins,” said co-investigator Wayne Sossin, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. “To make it last you do need protein synthesis.”

If memories and dreams can be recorded by the physical world, does this give some credence to the idea that thoughts have a physical presence – and that they can be ‘read’?

* The title of the post is explained here, with recipe recommendations:

The small, buttery cakes, which, as Marcel Proust describes in Remembrance of Things Past, “look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell,” will be forever associated with his meditation on time and memory.

One bite into the the madeleine triggers a flood of memories of youth spent in the fictional village of Combray. Eventually, the town of Illiers, Proust’s ancestral home, morphed itself into Illiers-Combray, a “ville touristique,” where some 2,000 madeleines are sold every month to visiting Proustophiles.
The historical origins of the madeleine are disputed, and Larousse Gastronomique relates two conflicting accounts of the cake’s invention. One story lays the origins of the madeleine at the feet of one Jean Avice, the “master of choux pastry,” who worked as a pastry chef for Prince Talleyrand.

Avice is said to have invented the Madeleine in the 19th century by baking little cakes in aspic molds…

..but it still needs some work:

Warp Drive Engine Could Suck Earth Into Black Hole

June 11, 2009 — “Star Trek” makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole.

“Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel,” said Stefano Finazzi of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies. This paper “makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives.”

In normal physics, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Einstein’s theory of relativity forbids it. In normal space any object approaching the speed of light will increase in mass exponentially, and require an exponential increase in the amount of power needed to propel it forward.

There are two exceptions to this rule however. The first is what’s commonly called a worm hole, a bridge connecting two different parts of space. A ship crossing this bridge would move at below light speed, but still arrive before a beam of light that would have had to go the long way around.
space station

Warp drives are the second and more appealing option. A ship can’t move through space faster than the speed of light. But with enough energy, space itself can move faster than the speed of light.

Known for the Mexican physicist Michael Alcubierre who originally developed the idea in the 1990′s, an Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it.

Finazzi and his colleagues propose creating this bubble of space-time by using a massive amount of “exotic matter,” or dark energy. (Exactly how this bubble would be created is still a mystery.) According to their calculations and simplified, it would take a huge amount of energy to create the bubble, and then increasing amounts of energy to contain the highly repulsive dark energy.

Eventually the energy would run out. The bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble.

Anyone watching the ship nearby wouldn’t be much better off.

“We know that the warp drive will be destabilized,” said Finazzi. “But we do not know if it will in the end explode or collapse to a black hole.”

Black Hole Creates Spectacular Light Show

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow.

For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87′s brilliant core.

Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior.

“I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by accretion onto a black hole to increase in brightness in the way that this jet does,” said astronomer Juan Madrid of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who conducted the Hubble study. “It grew 90 times brighter than normal. But the question is, does this happen to every single jet or active nucleus, or are we seeing some odd behavior from M87?”

Many supermassive black holes have jets of material that spray out perpendicularly from the donut-shaped ring of matter falling onto the black hole. These beams of hot gas are thought to result from magnetic field lines that are twisted by the black hole’s mass, and propel charged particles outward.

But most rays do not appear to blaze up with such extreme intensity as HST-1. Scientists aren’t sure if it is an exceptional case, or if it represents a normal event for black hole jets, which are still not very well understood. In this case, the bright knot of HST-1 is about 214 light-years from the M87 galaxy’s core…