Nanowire ‘pine trees’ on physicsworld.com

This morning I picked up a recent copy of national geographic and read through an article about environmentalism in Iceland. It was talking about the dilemma Iceland are facing surrounding renewable energy. Iceland has thermal and hydroelecticity in abundance, but also has an incredibly beautiful landscape, which the exploitation of such power sources, would, and is in the process of, destroying. ‘Green Energy’ and environmentalism have therefore in this case become enemies. You can see pictures on the National Geographic Website.

The reason I say all this is that it reminded me that for some time I’ve been wanting to find a good Physics magazine. It turns out physicsworld.com is a good one, and it’s online, so I don’t have to pay anything, which is of course a bonus. It’s the level of physics which is actually interesting, unlike ‘New Scientist’, which is just annoying… And produces articles which provide ‘proof’ for pantheism.

I watched a video today about the ATLAS particle detector. It showed how it was constructed and so on, step by step. As an aspiring engineer, the sheer complexity of this project and the multidisciplinary nature of it is incredible. Thinking about it, the design team would have to contain world-class physicists, mechanical and civil engineers. As far as the sheer complexity of this project, my impression is that it quite easily rivals the space program (although it is an awful lot cheaper). Man went to the moon with less computing power than you have in your mechanical wristwatch, but to give an idea of how much computing power CERN requires, have a look below, I’ll give one small statistic.

If all the data CERN will produce this year were put on CD, the pile would be 20km high. (~15,000,000 gigabites per year)

I think CERN press statements may be the summer release we should most look forward to.

ATLAS Videos:

• Episode 1: A New Hope
• Episode 2: The Particles Strike Back (Part 1)
• Episode 2: The Particles Strike Back (Part 2)

On thing that must be said is that the titles of these videos do not help to remove the impression that these scientists sitting in a cave for years of their lives to study physics are just a little white and nerdy.

Scientists have dug up a fossilised hadrosaur which includes fossilised skin and soft tissue as well as bones.

The odds of such an intact dinosaur being found are extremely slim, Manning said. The dinosaur body must have somehow escaped predators, scavengers, and degradation by weather and rivers, he said.

Earlier this week, I also read an article about the work of Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist who discovered the presence of haemoglobin and red blood cells in dinosaur bones. A more complete record of this discovery and subsequent research is available here, and the article I read in discover magazine is available here.