THE LHC RAP: Who knew the Large Hadron Collider, pictured here, would get its own rap tune?
Image: CERN
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Gravity's Engines
We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they...
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LHC gets its own rap song
You know a science experiment has arrived when a rap song extolling its virtues just hit YouTube. After 14 years, CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, is getting ready to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson and the possible source of dark matter as well as study the differences between matter and antimatter. The lab says it plans to send the first particles through the LHC's 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) diameter ring in early September and gradually bring it up to full speed over two months. In honor of the impending start-up, Alpinekat, aka Kate McAlpine, a science writer for CERN, has produced a five-minute rap video starring herself and friends dancing in the bowels of the machine. McAlpine's rap, written during her 40-minute bus commute from Geneva to CERN, gives a rhythmic tour of the mysteries of modern physics and the workings of the LHC, noting that "the things that it discovers will rock you in the head." It even has a good hook.
Peter Piper (actually the FDA) picked a pack of poison peppers
Peppers were apparently the perps in the salmonella outbreak that sickened some 1,300 people in the U.S. and Canada since April. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week that it had traced the responsible bacterial strain, Salmonella Saintpaul, to a serrano pepper grown on a Mexican farm that irrigated its fields with water contaminated by the bug. The farm is located in Nuevo Leon in northeastern Mexico, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of McAllen, Tex., where authorities last week found a salmonella-tainted jalapeño pepper at a packing plant owned by Agricola Zarigoza, Inc. Government officials warned consumers last week not to eat fresh jalapeños and have since added serranos—but the advisory only covers peppers grown in Mexico. FDA officials says tomatoes, once considered prime suspects in the outbreak, are safe to eat but caution that those grown on a second Mexican farm may have played an early role.
New drug shows early promise in Alzheimer's trial
A drug called PBT2, developed by Australian company Prana Biotechnology, appears to improve cognitive abilities in patients with early-stage Alzheimer's disease and reduce protein buildup blamed for the debilitating neurological disorder, researchers report in The Lancet Neurology. After a 12-week course of 250 milligrams of the experimental med daily, patients scored significantly better than untreated study participants on tests analyzing executive functions (organizational skills, planning and reasoning). The drug also appeared to reduce the amount of the protein amyloid beta (which forms toxic plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients) by decreasing the levels of metals such as zinc and copper. These metals help amyloid beta congeal into harmful clumps. Researchers say larger, longer clinical trials are needed to prove the drug's safety and effectiveness before it can be approved for sale.
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5 Comments
Add CommentRE: CERN LHC/ALICE/ATLAS. Well why don't you just 'Rap-Rap-Rap' right down this rabbit-hole, and find out just how far it goes!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://thefifthknight.blogspot.com/
Remember: Follow the 'White Rabbit'!
Let's review the messed-up logic:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCYCLIC ILLOGIC #1
1A) Because the Big Bang is perfectly proven undisputed fact obtained during a direct telephone call to God The Creator himself, the fact that the Big Bang occurred just like we know for certain that it did logically implies that these little black holes dissipate.
VERSUS
1B) We have spent billions of Euros on this thing to prove whether the Big Bang occurred or not, because we are not sure that the facts support a key criterion on which the Big Bang depends.
CYCLIC ILLOGIC #2
2A) Because input stimuli in the LHC happen in nature all of the time, the LHC is perfectly safe.
VERSUS
2B) We have spent billions of Euros on this thing, because we have never observed the outcomes of the LHC in nature.
1A and 1B cannot both be true. 2A and 2B cannot both be true.
To produce different outcomes than seen in nature, evidently the LHC actually does induce different input stimuli than possible outside of the laboratory, or else we would have already been able to observe the LHC's wonderful outputs already in nature. Even people with very high IQs can be very stupidly illogical. Book smarts are not street smarts!
@CMSseeAmess (love the name by the way, are you an old school LEP guy?) Your second point there is actually kind of interesting - to paraphrase, if high energy collisions happen all the time in nature, why don't we just look at them rather than build an expensive machine? The answer is: people do. Check these out: http://www.chicos.caltech.edu/ , http://www.auger.org/ , http://www.cosmic-ray.org/ (and many more). Its good science, and explores energies no conceivable accelerator will ever touch. The thing is, they are looking at events happening miles away in the upper atmosphere. They can see that a collision happened, and measure the energy and direction of the incoming particle, and thats about it. To do the kind of physics they want to do at cern, they need to know exactly what goes in and exactly what comes out, and that means detectors centimeters from where the collisions happen. You could say that its not the energy of the collisions at the LHC thats extraordinary, its the ability to produce them to order where they can be studied.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisshut the damm thing down. You don't know what your doing, so, stop,stop, stop!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe're gonna find ourselves in a collision with our maker, if we go too far with our ignorance.
Shut It down!!!
No more collider !!!
Street smarts is what I am. I only have grade seven under my belt, yet I have solved the Unified Riddle. A formal education is an example of the blind leading the ignorant. If I had followed the path of others, I would be where you're at !! I'm typing this at about ten words a minute...lol.
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