Gizmorama
March 16, 2011
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Good Morning,
Now I wouldn't get too excited, but I have a compelling
article today that looks into the possibility (claims of two
physicists in Nashville) of the Large Hadron Collider, which
we addressed a couple weeks ago, possessing the ability to
transfer particles backwards in time. The claims are sound,
however far-fetched. The connection is made--in the article--
that this could mean that the collider could act as the first
ever time machine for particle-based messages; that?s a lot
of ?could?s for my taste. Take a look at the last article
for more details.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Effect of heat on world corn crop studied
PALO ALTO, Calif. - U.S. researchers say historical crop
records show corn -- long believed to tolerate hot tempera-
tures -- will, in fact, be seriously affected by global
warming. Stanford University agricultural scientist David
Lobell and researchers at the International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center say a clear negative effect of warming on
maize -- or corn -- production was confirmed in records of
experimental crop trial conducted in Africa from 1999 to
2007. Analyzing data from 20,000 trials in sub-Saharan
Africa with weather data recorded in the region, they found
a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius (1.8 degrees-
F.) would cause yield losses for 65 percent of the present
maize-growing region in Africa, a Stanford release reported
Monday. "The pronounced effect of heat on maize was sur-
prising because we assumed maize to be among the more heat-
tolerant crops," Marianne Banziger of the maize and wheat
center said. "Essentially, the longer a maize crop is ex-
posed to temperatures above 30 C, or 86 F, the more the yield
declines," she said. "The effect is even larger if drought
and heat come together, which is expected to happen more
frequently with climate change in Africa, Asia or Central
America, and will pose an added challenge to meeting the
increasing demand for staple crops on our planet." The study
is among the first to track the effect of heat on crops,
Lobell said. "Projections of climate change impacts on food
production have been hampered by not knowing exactly how
crops fair when it gets hot," he said. "This study helps to
clear that issue up, at least for one important crop."
Scientists describe 'fossil seismograph'
TEL AVIV, Israel - Scientists at Tel Aviv University in
Israel say they've developed a "fossil seismograph" that
can uncover signs of ancient seismic activity. Professor
Shmuel Marco of the Department of Geophysics says he was
inspired by a strange "wave" phenomenon he found in distur-
bed sediment in the Dead Sea region, a TAU release reported
Monday. The new research method, developed with input from
geologists and physicists, is relevant to areas where earth-
quakes affect bodies of water, such as the West Coast of the
United States or the current situation in Japan, Marco said.
"Current seismographical data on earthquakes only reaches
back a century or so," Marco said. "Our new approach investi-
gates wave patterns of heavy sediment that penetrates into
the light sediments that lie directly on top of them. "This
helps us to understand the intensity of earthquakes in bygone
eras -- it's a yardstick for measuring the impact factor of
earthquakes from the past." The researchers considered the
geometry of the deformation they found in the Dead Sea sedi-
ment and combined it with a number of other parameters found
in physical science to calculate how earthquakes from the
past were distributed in scale, time and place. "We've expan-
ded the window of observation beyond 100 years, to create,
if you will, a 'fossil seismograph,'" Marco said. The
researchers say the ability to learn from earthquakes of the
ancient past could help better predict earthquakes of the
future.
Effects of sonar on whales studied
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland - A study by Scottish researchers says
whales can be disturbed by naval sonar and are particularly
sensitive to the man-made sounds. Scientists studying beaked
whale populations in the Bahamas say sonar for naval commun-
ication has been a suspect in beaked whale stranding in the
past, the BBC reported Tuesday. Beaked whales are an elusive
group of small whales named for their elongated snouts, long
studied for their connection to the possible risks naval
sonar poses to marine mammals. In 2000 and 2002, large groups
of beaked whales stranded and died, and in both cases naval
exercises involving sonar were taking place in the vicinity,
the BBC said. Scientists from the University of St. Andrews
used underwater microphones to study whales in waters around
the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center
on Andros Island in the Bahamas. During live sonar exercises
by the Navy, the whales stopped making their clicking and
buzzing calls that are thought to be used to navigate and
communicate. Tagging of the whales allowed the researchers to
track their movements by satellite, and they found the whales
moved as far as 10 miles away from the area during sonar
tests and did not return for three days. "It was clear that
these whales moved quickly out of the way of the [navy]
sonars," Ian Boyd, chief scientist on the research project,
said. "We now think that, in some unusual circumstances, they
are just unable to get out of the way and this ends up with
the animals stranding and dying."
Physicists propose collider 'time travel'
NASHVILLE - Two U.S. physicists say if their theory is right,
the Large Hadron Collider, the world largest atom smasher,
could be the world's first time machine. Vanderbilt Univer-
sity researchers Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho say the machine
could be capable of causing matter to travel backward in
time, a university release said Tuesday. "Our theory is a
long shot," Weiler said, "but it doesn't violate any laws of
physics or experimental constraints." One of the major goals
of the collider is to discover the elusive Higgs boson, the
particle that physics theories invoke to explain why parti-
cles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the
collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scien-
tists predict it will create a second particle, called the
Higgs singlet, at the same time. Weiler and Ho's theory says
these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra,
fifth dimension where they can move either forward or back-
ward in time and reappear in the future or past. "One of the
attractive things about this approach to time travel is that
it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time
travel is limited to these special particles, it is not pos-
sible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his
parents before he himself is born, for example. "However, if
scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets,
they might be able to send messages to the past or future,"
he said. The test of the researchers' theory will be whether
the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs
singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously ap-
pearing in the collider. If they do, Weiler and Ho say they
believe it will mean they have been produced by particles
that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that
produced them.
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