Physics Buzz

How to Sell a Particle Accelerator: Positron-Electron Love Explosions

2013-05-20T13:39:00.002-04:00

While the discoveries and excitement surrounding the LHC have started to cool down, a new contender in particle physics is emerging. Over 2000 scientists are currently working on one of two competing particle accelerator proposals: the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider (CLiC). Both projects would smash electrons and their antimatter counterparts — positrons — at speeds nearing the speed of light. The LHC, on the other hand, primarily smashes heavier particles together including protons and lead nuclei.

Several countries aim to host one of these international physics collaborations, and two regions in Japan have created marketing videos to garner support for a future ILC site. With the same goal in mind, both regions took radically different approaches to their video projects.

Below you can see the more popular video created jointly by the Saga and Fukuoka prefectures. The video combines anime, lab coat raps, and a burgeoning friendship that culminates in a positron-electron collision of love as symbolized by two Japanese girls. At least, I think that's what happened.

Be sure to turn on the English subtitles for the full story.

Another group from the Tohoku Conference for the promotion of the ILC took a more conservative approach in the video below.

ILC Facts

The proposed ILC would run over 30 kilometers long, a bit longer than the LHC's 27 kilometer circumference. This new collider would accelerate particles in a straight line unlike the LHC, which accelerates particles in a circular beam path that sits under the Swiss and French countryside.

Synchotrons like the LHC have several advantages over linear colliders (e.g. the one at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). Most notably, particles in synchotrons speed up during multiple trips around the ring, adding more energy than a single trip down a straight path.

Linear colliders have their own benefits, however. They don't require the complex kinds of magnets that keep particles in a circular path — magnets that presented a few troubles during the development of the LHC. Also, linear colliders lead to far less synchotron radiation — a form of energy loss that happens when particles accelerate in a curved path. This radiation limits the speeds and energies of colliding particles, especially smaller, nimbler particles like electrons.

Despite the design differences, scientists behind the ILC project hope to complement and expand upon the science going on at the LHC. High energy electron-positron collisions could reveal more about conditions during the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy — the pervasive, invisible energy thought to contribute significantly to the expansion of the universe. Detectors at the LHC hope to reveal similar secrets from the early universe.

But the Saga and Fukuoka prefecture team behind the first video understands that there's more to the project than cold, hard physics. There's a human element to such a large collaboration, and they've definitely tapped into that in a wildly entertaining way.

H/T ILC Newsline

A Carbon Signature Revealed

2013-05-18T04:25:00.001-04:00

Imagine diving into the placid surface of a painting by Vermeer, parsing apart Klimt's bejeweled surfaces, or untangling Jackson Pollock's knots of paint. Art historians, collectors, and restoration scholars have long sought to uncover the methods of great painters.

Over the past decade, scientists have peered with light beneath the varnished surface of paintings to discover the chemistry of pigments, to identify the authors of unsigned works, or probe the crack depths from damage or age.

Now, researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain have used light at terahertz frequencies to uncover the hidden carbon signature of a painting previously thought to be unsigned. Though unsigned, the painting has been studied by art historians and confirmed to be painted by the Spanish artist Goya in 1771. Such secondary validation made the piece an apropos choice by the researchers, who published their findings May 14, 2013 on the arXiv.

"Sacrifice to Vesta" at three different levels of imaging at visible and THz frequencies.
Image Credit: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3101

Nested between the infrared and microwave regimes, terahertz radiation can travel through materials like plastic or canvas and bounces back slightly differently depending on the chemical composition of each paint color.

To analyze the Goya piece, the researchers parsed the painting into 1 millimeter squares and recorded the reflected terahertz wave from each square, obtaining images with millimeter resolution. To analyze the structure of the painting -- essentially how the paint was laid on the canvas -- the researchers looked at the shape of the reflected wave. At each layer of paint, the reflected wave registered a unique bump. This kind of so-called structural data enabled the team to reveal features of the painting hidden beneath layers of paint.

Through the structural analysis, the scientists found new textures beneath the painting's veneer. They were able to uncover the thickness of paint strokes, the order of the layers of paint, and even wrinkles in the canvas from pigment deterioration, or mechanical tension on the canvas.

Then, at the very bottom of the painting, the team found a signature. Blind to the visible eye, to X-ray, and to infrared analysis, the researchers identified what they believed to be Goya's signature in the image created by the terahertz reflections. The researchers report that the signature was likely written with a pencil. They suggest that, over the years, the top coat of varnish darkened and obscured the carbon signature. They write that the signature might be missing in 2007 X-ray studies of the painting because carbon has a very similar atomic weight to that of the canvas and paint pigments, leaving the X-ray imaging unable to distinguish between the materials.

Identifying chemical compositions of paint pigments and other paint media remains an area the researchers hope to explore. In their study, the team found that some pigments reflected terahertz waves more than others. They speculated that these have a higher metallic content leading to higher reflectivity. In the future, the researchers imagine that the creation of a pigment spectroscopy database could enable artists, restorationists, and historians to study the detailed chemical compositions of paintings.

Mosh Pit Mechanics, Chattering Gazelles, and Bouncing Baby Shampoo

2013-05-16T15:09:00.000-04:00

Physics Phun in the Phorthcoming Physical Review

What do gabby gazelles, mosh pits and jumping shampoo jets have in common? They're all covered in upcoming Physical Review papers. (This image is a mash up of pictures from Wikimedia Commons. Details and rights info are here, here and here.)

Week after week, the American Physical Society journals are chock full of some of the most important physics papers published anywhere. Importance, of course, doesn't necessarily make something interesting to anyone outside the field. Every once in a while, though, we get a handful of papers that are significant enough to get into the Physical Review journals, including the flagship Physical Review Letters, as well as appealing to people who don't necessarily spend their days hunkered down in a lab or scribbling away on an equation-covered blackboard.

After a quick glance at papers currently accepted for eventual publication in the Physical Review, I've found three that I can't wait to read. Topping my list is a look at the surprisingly simply collective motions that take place in mosh pits. In case you've never been in one, a mosh pit is usually an area near the stage during a concert where the most rabid fans can enjoy the show while being slammed around by dozens of other equally rabid fans. We covered this very research before, when it was being presented at the 2013 APS annual meeting in Baltimore, and it's worth checking out our older piece if you want to see how a crowd of crazy kids is like a flock of birds or a swirling gas. The interesting thing to me is that many people I spoke to back in March thought the research was nothing but a frivolous distraction for a few grad students who really should have been concentrating on their dissertations, not hanging out with hoards of death metal moshers. With the study soon to appear in the world's greatest physics journal, I wonder who's laughing now?

I'm nearly as eager to read about a simulation of Mongolian Gazelles as they wander the steppes of Eastern Mongolia in search of food and, apparently, hollering to each other to "Come and get it!" I had never heard of Mongolian Gazelles before, and hadn't realized that gazelles of any type made noises, much less called other gazelles to dinner. That means that in simply reading one abstract, I've already learned three entirely new things! I can't wait to see the actual paper to find out what other gazelle-related wonders it may contain.

The third forthcoming paper I stumbled across had me worried for a bit. It seems that shampoo can sometimes leap out of your hand as you're pouring it from the bottle in preparation to wash your hair. It's not something I've ever experienced, although it makes my eyes water in anticipation of an unprovoked shampoo attack the next time I take a shower. While it's new to me, I've learned that the phenomenon is well known, and is called the Kaye effect. Check out the video below for some eye-endangering examples.

The new twist, in the paper soon to be published in Physical Review E, is that these jets of soap don't occur for the reason usually given. In the past, most people who studied the effect assumed it had something to do with the fact that shampoo doesn't flow like normal (so-called Newtonian) fluids. Not so, it turns out. As the researchers say in their abstract, " . . . we show unambiguously that the jet slides on a lubricating air layer."

Now that we know the truth, I can only assume that a solution (other than wearing protective goggles to bathe, as I plan to do tomorrow) can't be far behind. One possibility that comes to mind, assuming they're right about the lubricating air, is to shower in an evacuated vacuum chamber. No air, obviously, means no bouncing soap jets. NASA could probably work that out with some sort of pressure suit arrangement. Getting access to your hair through the helmet is going to be tough. But hey, they put a man on the moon, and are currently working on at least one impossible science project and another nearly impossible one - and showering isn't exactly rocket surgery.

PODCAST: Red Rover

2013-05-15T17:12:00.001-04:00

Basic Books

This week on the Physics Central podcast we're talking about an awesome new book called Red Rover: Robotic Space Exploration from Genesis to the Mars Rover. The book's author Roger Wiens talks with us about his career working on robots that are sent to explore space.

Wiens worked on the Genesis space mission, which launched back in 2001, and he is the principle investigator on the ChemCam instrument aboard the Curiosity Rover. In his new book he talks about the ups and downs and successes and failures that come with trying to design and build these instruments, not to mention navigating political hurdles and the curve balls that life throws at all of us. I love that Wiens isn't a dramatic kind of guy—he really loves the science—but a story like this one can't help but be full of drama.

But in case you're more one for the science, let me tell you a little about the projects Wiens has worked on.

Genesis caused a media splash when it crash landed in the Utah desert in 2004. The mission spent 3 years out beyond the orbit of the moon, where it collected samples of the solar wind, and then brought those samples back to earth (it was the first instrument to travel that far from home and then return).

The solar wind is a bit of a living fossil: it's believed to contain the same mixture of elements that existed in the pre-planet days of our solar system. Scientists had previously believed that the sun's elemental mixture would match that of the Earth—since the two came from the same dust cloud.

But Genesis told a different story. The oxygen on Earth is over 99% oxygen 16. That's an isotope of oxygen; which you can think of as a different flavor. There are hints of oxygen 17 and 18 as well. And the particles that Genesis collected from the solar wind contained more oxygen 16 than Earth. Which means at some point in our planet's history, it acquired a higher concentration of heavy oxygen elements. Those things don't just pop into existence: a chemical or physical process has to take place to make the change. So what happened to the Earth that made this possible? That's still a largely unanswered question, but thanks to Genesis, scientists are one step closer to finding the answer.

And then there's ChemCam. Science-fiction-come-to-life-ChemCam. This instrument shoots a laser beam at rocks on Mars and can quickly tell scientists what those rocks are made of. The scientists then decide which rocks they want to study more.

The laser beam is cheap to power—it only requires a few watts. It is only the size of a pinhead, and it only lasts for 5 billionths of a second. But, within that small area and short time frame, it packs in the energy of over a million light bulbs. The laser beam hits another material and gives it such an energy punch that it radiate. A telescope on board the rover catches the light, which is like a fingerprint, revealing the make-up of the material that ChemCam just blasted.

At the end of our chat, Wiens read a section of his book that mentions all of the robotic missions that are currently exploring our solar system. I wasn't aware of all of these, and I've had a great time learning about them since. I hope you do as well.

"Mechanical creations from Earth are orbiting Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, the asteroid Vesta, Jupiter, and Saturn; others are on their way to Pluto and to land on a comet; and three others are on their way out of the solar system. Another landed on the tiny asteroid Eros, only about 10 miles across, and a European craft landed on Saturn's larged moon, Titan. Samples have been returned robotically from the Moon, from a comet, from the Sun—in the form of the solar wind—and from the asteroid Itokawa."

Physics of Bubbles: supercomputer needed.

2013-05-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

It took one of the world's most powerful supercomputers five days to model a simple childhood past time: popping bubbles.

Image credit: Andreas Bastian

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at the University of California Berkeley have mathematically described the evolution of a cluster of bubbles. The research was published May 10, 2013 in the journal Science.

Bubbles and foams have been notoriously difficult to model mathematically. Whether a bubble pops and how its neighbors rearrange depend on phyiscal factors that take place at multiple length and time scales. For most materials, the thin fluid membrane between bubbles are thinner than a human hair, contain a proportionally huge amount of gas, and depend on the chemistry of the fluid.

In their paper, the researchers report that they were able to separate out the physical dynamics that take place at different length and time scales in a series of equations.

They had equations to describe how over many seconds, gravity thins out the fluid bubble wall as the bubble approaches popping. A separate set of equations described how, in less than a second, the bubbles rearrange after a neighbor pops. Still more predicted how liquid would flow at the intersection between bubbles.

By writing out a series of equations that describe different aspects of bubble dynamics, the researchers were able to overcome a longstanding challenge of describing a system that covers many time and length scales.

Combining these equations, the researchers used the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to create a computer-generated model of popping bubbles.

In industry, clusters of bubbles belong to a class of materials called foams. From ocean froth, to soapy detergents, fire retardants, and bicycle helmets, foams play an large role in our day to day lives. The researchers hope that their robust model of foam physics will enable accurate modeling and innovation for a variety of industrial foams.

Dancing on the Ceiling

2013-05-13T14:29:00.001-04:00

While choreographed dances are bound by the laws of physics, certain tricks can make the seemingly impossible a reality. In the video below, you can see two dancers walking on walls, dancing on ceilings, and adapting to changes in the direction of gravity. Or so it seems.

Choreographer and dancer Derek Hough performed those feats about a week ago on the popular Dancing with the Stars TV show. Although Derek added modern flair to this trick, the method to his dance has been used in performances for over half a century. Surprisingly, this seemingly physics-denying method has even been used to simulate real physics principles in iconic movies.

So how does he do it? The room in the video actually rotates as a unit, and all of the furniture is nailed to the walls and ceiling. Also, the camera remains attached to the rotating room, making it appear as though the dancers are defying gravity.

Famed Broadway dancer Fred Astaire popularized this method in a dancing routine from the 1951 movie "Royal Wedding." In the video below, you can see how Astaire's performance appeared on screen and how it appeared to the crew filming the rotating room.

Space Odysseys and Artificial Gravity

Since Astaire's performance, several directors have reproduced this method in other films. 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, had a variety of rotating sets that simulated the weightlessness of space on screen.

In the iconic film, astronauts live aboard a giant space station that generates artificial gravity. This idea extends beyond science fiction, however; in fact, NASA scientists have proposed building a spacecraft with a centrifuge to limit the negative effects of microgravity on crew members.

Such a spacecraft would have a large doghnut-shaped, rotating section. With enough rotational speed, astronauts will stay glued to the outer hull of the oval space station.

So why does rotation keep the astronauts stuck to the floor? The reason stems from the same physics behind the outward "force" you feel when riding a merry-go-round or spinning swing ride at an amusement park. Often called centrifugal force, the sensation you feel pulling outward is actually your body resisting the effects of the spinning ride. In short, your body's inertia causes the sensation.

Some rides take full advantage of this effect by spinning riders who are pinned to a wall before removing the floor from underneath the riders. Consequently, the riders seem to "float" above the floor while sticking to the wall.

The riders' bodies are constantly resisting the spinning motion of the ride; if the walls suddenly fell down, the riders would fling out tangentially. Instead, the walls push back on the riders, and the pseudo centrifugal force counteracts the centripetal force that points toward the center of the ride.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a rotating room mimics this effect when a stewardess walks into a centrifuge that seems to flip the direction of gravity. In the two following videos, you can see how the scene appeared on film and how it appeared to the film crew.

Original Scene

Rotating Camera

More Examples

Anyway, let's get back to some more rotating room examples. One of my favorite scenes that used the effect comes from Christopher Nolan's thriller about dream hijacking: Inception.

And no list would be complete without Lionel Richie's Dancing on the Ceiling. Here's a behind-the-scenes look:

Den of Geek has a more complete list of movies and music videos using the rotating room.

Hopefully with these behind-the-scenes explanations, you can keep these rotating scenes in perspective.

Superhydrophobic Cicada Wings Are Self-Cleaning

2013-05-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

Image credit: Pmjacoby via Wikimedia Commons

Rights information: http://bit.ly/11sxp7s

As 17-year cicadas wriggle out of the ground all over the northeastern U.S. this spring, they'll be reemerging into a world that understands them a little better. Researchers now find the design of their wings can cause filth to jump right off of them with the aid of dew, findings that might help lead to better artificial self-cleaning materials.

Scientists had known that cicada wings are super-water-repellent, or super-hydrophobic. This is different from a great many substances that are simply water-repellent, or hydrophobic — for instance, oil and water famously do not mix. But a number of surfaces such as lotus leaves can make themselves even more water-repellent by covering themselves with microscopic bumps, so water drops can float on top much as mystics can lie on beds of nails. For example, cicada wings are covered in rows of waxy cones about 200 nanometers or billionths of a meter high. In comparison, the average human hair is roughly 100 microns or millionths of a meter wide.

When it rains the super-hydrophobic nature of cicada wings can help them get clean — droplets rolling or splashing off them can remove soil, dust, pollen and microbes. But what if there is no rain, especially in the four to six weeks adult cicadas have to live above ground before dying?

Now scientists find rain is not necessary to keep cicada wings clean. Apparently, grime can simply leap right off them, given dew.

Mechanical engineer Chuan-Hua Chen at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and his colleagues were investigating a number of natural and artificial super-hydrophobic surfaces when they noticed drops of water at times rapidly disappeared. They were mystified by this behavior for years until they made observations from a different angle — they used a high-speed video camera to watch the droplets from the side of these materials instead of from above.

"That's when we saw them jumping upward," Chen recalled.

The scientists found that when these surfaces are exposed to water vapor, dew can condense on them. When growing droplets fused together, the merged drop then leapt off the super-water-repellant surfaces. These drops, each up to a few microns to a few hundred microns wide, can jump up to a few millimeters in the air.

"We've since found this happens on almost all normal super-hydrophobic surfaces," Chen said. "If you take a lotus leaf or any of the many other super-water-repellant surfaces out there and you let it cool in your freezer and then take it out, as humidity in the air condenses on it, you can see with your bare eyes that water drops will jump in the air."

When small water droplets combine on super-water-repellent surfaces, a single bigger drop results that has less surface area than its original parts. As such, energy that is no longer needed to flatten that water across the surface the smaller droplets once occupied gets released, popping the drop upward, Chen explained.

"These findings show that super-hydrophobic surfaces don't need water driven by gravity to take contaminants away — jumping droplets can do so," Chen said.

"This is a great piece of work that highlights a mechanism that has not been conventionally considered for self-cleaning," said mechanical engineer Evelyn Wang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did not take part in this research.

Chen and his colleagues found jumping droplets could remove glass, plastic or pollen particles up to 100 microns wide from cicada wings, including contaminants that could not be removed by wing vibration or wind flow.

"Mostly cicadas hang vertically on trees, which means once condensates jump, either gravity or the air will take them away," Chen said. "In the worst case scenario, the wing is held parallel to the ground, but even then, the droplets don't jump straight up, but always have some horizontal momentum. After they fall down, they leap back up again, and after a few jumps they leap away from the edge of the wing."

These findings not only can help explain the mystery of how cicada wings keep clean, but could also lead to improved artificial self-cleaning materials. Jumping droplets could also help remove heat from power plants, Chen said.

"I think this work is very exciting and shows the diverse possibilities and applications with the jumping droplet mechanism," Wang said.

Chen and his colleagues detailed their findings online April 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

-Charles Q. Choi, Inside Science News Service

Charles Q. Choi is a freelance science writer based in New York City who has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, Science, Nature, and many other news outlets.

The Rocketman Triathlon Video: Racing Through the Kennedy Space Center

2013-05-09T14:24:00.001-04:00

After the finish. Bike, t-shirt, finisher's medal and TARDIS towel

This past Sunday, the day after Star Wars Day, I competed in the world's nerdiest triathlon, The Rocketman. Smooth Running teamed up with NASA to set up a race through the Kennedy Space Center. Of the 30 triathlons I've done this was the coolest. As is probably the case for many children of the '80s, my concept of "science and technology" was defined by the shuttle program. Instead of dreaming of being an astronaut, I was always in awe of the scientists that made it possible to launch the astronauts into space. So, when I heard there was a race that not only would bring me up close and personal with shuttle history, but would let me race in a special "rocket scientist" division, I had to sign up. These seemed like my kind of people. The race didn't disappoint. Thinking ahead, I wore a camera on my helmet during the ride through KSC. What follows is the geekiest race report ever with a biker's-eye video of Launch Complex 39.

Before I get to the bike video, I should say that the whole day was full of nerdy awesomeness. They had a giant inflatable astronaut at packet pick-up and our t-shirts were red, white and blue with their rocket logo. While everyone was setting up and getting ready to get in the water the morning of the race, speakers blaired the Star Wars theme, the Star Trek theme and "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) as opposed to the standard "We Will Rock You."And of course, before the start they played "Rocket Man." I was glad I brought my TARDIS towel to completely geek out my transition area. I giggled when I realized the turn buoys were shaped like rockets and the old Gemini spacecraft. They stuck with the space motif and made this race totally geektastic. For me this race was all about the theme and the packaging, not the actual race.

Race Start:
The bike section is the only reason I did this course. Months ago the PhysicsCentral team decided I should wear a camera on my helmet and document my trip through Launch Complex 39. At first I was nervous I would get in trouble, but heading out from the start no one said anything. I had looked over the course, knew the names of the things I was going to see, but chose not to look at any pictures of the course. I had never been to Kennedy Space Center and I wanted my first tour to be during this race so it could be as shocking as possible.

Mate-Demate Device:
The first part of the bike course was on the road next to the runway the shuttles used to land. I thought this would be cool, but there were trees in the way and I couldn't see the runway itself. I started getting nervous that this would actually suck and I was hurting my neck with the camera for nothing. Then we dipped closer to the runway and I saw a huge scaffolding structure. It didn't know what it was, but I knew it was cool looking. Turns out its what's called the "mate-demate" device (yes, I giggled). If you've ever wondered how they get the shuttles onto the backs of the planes that transport them, this is it. This 100ft structure can lift 120 tons and was mainly used to mate and demate the shuttle as it was carried on the back of a 747 from Edwards Airforce base to KSC. It takes several days to fully couple the shuttle (giggle).

Vehicle Assembly Building:
After a long and windy section through the (mostly uninteresting) Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge we we started back through the actual Space Center. Before the race I had no idea what the "Vehicle Assembly Building" was, I was just hoping I recognized it when I saw it. No problem there, the thing could fit four Empire State Buildings inside and when it was constructed it was the largest building by volume in the whole world. I turned a corner and there it was. The icon of the shuttle program. With the NASA "meatball" on one side and the American Flag on the other. Watching as it grew closer and closer, I remembered why I wanted to do this race. This building was originally constructed to be large enough to assemble a 36-story Saturn V rocket vertically and later used for the final assembly of the shuttles before they were taken to the launch pads. When originally painted, the American Flag on the building was the largest in the world with stripes the size of an average traffic lane. To me, this was what I saw on TV as the home of NASA. This was the building where science happened. And wow, seeing it up close, basically biking through the parking lot, was an incredible experience. I did my best to take good video while not hitting the other people on bikes.

Launch Pad A:
This. Was. Awesome. As I rode down the crawlerway I could see it coming up in the distance still fitted with the rigging needed for the shuttle. It was just as I remembered from watching the shuttle launches on TV. As I was riding closer I was getting worried I wouldn't get close enough, that the course just gave us this distant view. How wrong I was. They planned this section of the course beautifully. As we came up with the pad on our left we were diverted through a parking lot behind a small building. My first thought was "Well, this is new for a course" but it was no random choice. As we turned the corner, there it was. Right there. Right in front of me with a perfect view. If I had kept going straight and strayed off the course I would have gone right up the ramp. My gut reaction was "THIS, THIS RIGHT HERE, IS SCIENCE!" It was the definition of science since my youth. This was where Apollo 11 was launched. That is what I saw as science, as the height of science, as why I should study science, as why the would should study science and as what I wanted to do when I grew up. Build amazing things like that. This was the best part of the course. Regaining that feeling of wonder from my youth, reminding me why I do science and why I want other people to do science. Of all of this course and this race what I value the most is regaining my complete wonder at human ingenuity and imagination. This launch pad allowed us to reach the stars.

Launch Pad B:
I hate to say it, but this didn't do it for me the way Launch Pad A did, but Launch Pad B is the place of the future. The rigging for the shuttle was dismantled to allow for the future of space flight, commercial space trips. If eventually it will be possible to buy tickets to space, you will most likely be blasting off from here. Seeing the three spires and knowing that they were the future was definitely a different feeling from regaining the wonder of my youth. Reading about their future use after I finished really made it worth it though.

Souvenir Snag:
Before I went off to the Space Race my friend told me I should pick up a rock from the crawlerway. The idea of stopping during a race is sacrilege. There was no way I was going to do it. But, well, I couldn't resist. I kept looking at the crawlerway, the path of the shuttle that was made up of special Alabama river rocks that were smooth and would crush just right under the shuttle's weight, and there was no way I was going to pass that up. So I stopped, grabbed some rocks, jammed them in my shorts and went on to the back side of the VAB. As one of my triathlon friends said "Um, STOPPED!!!??? It was RACE, correct!!!???

Launch Control center and Mobil Launcher Platform:
The last amazing thing I saw as I headed out of the complex was the back side of the VAB, home to the Launch Control Center and the Mobil Launcher Platform. The Launch Control Center is exactly what you'd think it is, the place where the Launch Director says "3, 2, 1, Liftoff." All that stuff that makes launches possible, yeah, its here. Four firing rooms, all the tracking equipment and some pretty awesome rocket scientists. The building has been used since Apollo 4 and handled the first U.S. manned space flight, Apollo 8. Quite the history and I was within 100 yards of it on a bike! Right past it was the Mobil Launch Platform in a very different form than the shuttle days. Formerly used to drag the shuttle down the crawlerway, it is now being tricked out to handle commercial space flights.

Rail Road/Train:
By far not the coolest thing I saw while on this ride, but certainly worth a mention was the NASA train. I kept having to cross railroad tracks and was wondering why. They were all over Launch Complex 39. We took a brief detour while passing the VAB and I got a glipmse of the actual NASA train. It was originally used to transport the Solid Rocket Booster and other rocket parts around KSC and to and from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A video of the train in action can be seen here.

Finish
After 49 miles* and one tour bus I headed back home into strong winds. Usually this is the best part of a bike ride, heading back in for one more sport and a good finish, but for the first time I was sad the bike was almost over. The wind wasn't making it better. But, I figured no matter how bad the rest of the race went, [expletive] that was an amazing bike ride.

Finisher's Medal and Bike

*For you tri geeks out there that may want to know about the actual race part of the race, here ya go. It was the "half iron" distance which technically means a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike and a half marathon at the end. The course was mismeasured (leave it to NASA) so I have no idea how far I actually went and my time is immaterial. I got 34th female overall and second in the "rocket scientist" division. The woman who beat me got 3rd overall. The swim was pretty rough water and I swallowed a lot of the river, but felt pretty good, came in 8th woman overall. The bike, well you know how that was, and the run was not so good. But, I survived, got a horrible sunburn and had a great time wearing my finisher's shirt. The race was fairly well organized considering it was the first time it was run and I would definitely do it again.

Thank you to LaserJames for the video edits and Quantum for the great input.

PODCAST: Listening to the Earth

2013-05-08T13:23:00.003-04:00

On this week's podcast I talked to people who listen to the Earth. Scientists monitor seismic waves that bounce through the planet's crust, sound waves too low for the human ear to hear reverberating through the atmosphere and hydroacoustic waves moving through the oceans. These signals carry with them lots of information about the sources of the disturbances, like where they happened and whether they're from an earthquake, a volcano or a large explosion.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization's International Monitoring System listens for these kinds of signals. It's primary job it to detect secret nuclear tests, but it can do so much more. When it's finished it'll have more than 250 monitoring stations that can listen to all kinds of seismic and acoustic waves.

Seismic monitoring stations make up by far the largest proportion of the International Monitoring System. Right now there are 42 primary and 102 secondary seismic stations across the globe.

Seismic stations are buried underground, making them difficult to photograph. There's a primary station under Torodi, Niger ...

... an auxiliary station in Charters Towers, Australia...

... and auxiliary station in Bilibion Russia, one of the most remote parts of the country.

Sixty planned infrasound stations around the world listen for ultra-low frequency sound waves emitted
by giant blasts.

Already 45 have been installed the world over. This one is installed in Qaanaaq, Norway....

...Tristan da Cunha in the United Kingdom...

...and at Windless Bight Antartica (it gets buried by snow a lot).

Underwater microphones listen for hydroacoustic waves moving through the oceans.

Right now there are ten such stations. Sound waves travel far easier under water than in the air, meaning only about a dozen are needed to effectively cover all the world's oceans. Underwater listening devices getting ready for deployment off the coast of the British Indian Ocean Territory...

... a diver inspects the underwater cable that carries signals from the hydrophones to their nearby shore facility...

...the shore facility with its transmission antenna at the British Indian Ocean Territory.

All images copyright CTBTO Preparatory Commission

Scientists at Play During Wartime

2013-05-07T16:52:00.000-04:00

Ever wondered what life was like for scientists at a lab that didn't officially exist?

Physicist Robert Serber soaks up some rays at Los Alamos. (image: Harold Agnew)

In 1943 the United States Army established a top secret research facility in Los Alamos New Mexico to build the world's first atomic bomb. It was the greatest assembly of the physicists the world had ever seen. Hundreds of the country's top scientists came together to win World War II by splitting the atom. Early morning on July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project detonated Trinity, the world's first atomic bomb.

Nearly everyone's seen the famous film of a bright mushroom cloud rising over the desert in the middle of the night. But not everyone's seen footage of what daily life was like for the scientists there. About a year ago, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab released about ten minutes of home movies from physicist Hugh Bradner taken at the lab. (Bradner is also fameous for inventing the neoprene wetsuit.) Weirdly, sometime in the last year they seem to have taken it down.

In celebration of its 70th anniversary Los Alamos (re)released the footage. It's like watching someone's old home movies punctuated with a top secret physics laboratory.

Highlights:

0:38 Scientists ride around in a small truck with tank treads.

1:12 A look at the temporary buildings around the site. The lab was thrown together very quickly so a lot of the facilities the scientists were working in had to be assembled as quickly and cheaply as possible.

1:24 A look at the high explosive storage area. The high explosives were used to compress the plutonium core of the bomb to touch off a runaway chain reaction.

1:30 "The Concrete Bowl" was built in case the bomb fizzled. They could drop it in and cover it with sand to prevent contamination. At the end of the pan you can see a big round metal object. This looks like a scaled down version of the "Jumbo," a huge metal casing that they decided to contain a possible fizzling bomb instead instead of the bowl.

2:17 The high explosive shed.

2:40 A look at the lab's machine room.

3:16 Unloading of big cylinders of either high explosives or possibly radioactive isotopes.

3:46 "Scientists Leaving for the Trinity Test."

4:06 Home movies of people out exploring New Mexico's hiking trails, meeting locals and swimming in the Rio Grande.

5:35 A shot of British physicist James Tuck, master of high explosives.

6:50 Robert Serber, the physicist who named the bombs, takes a break from horseback riding.

7:02 Robert Wilson secures his horse's saddle. He was one of the leaders on the Manhattan Project, and would later go on to found Fermilab.

7:24 Tennis time!

7:50 Skiing at Sawyer Hill Ski Area.

9:00 The wedding of Hugh and Marge Bradner in Santa Fe.

9:30 Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of Los Alamos, sticks his head into the shot.

And just in case you haven't seen the more famous footage of the Trinity test, you can find it here (the detonation is at 8:16):

Cracked Windshields Reveal Impact Physics

2013-05-06T16:29:00.002-04:00

Many commuters can relate to the common plight of cracked windshields. The ride may be going smoothly until a pop signals a small crack in the corner of the windshield — a small crack that will soon radiate into a spider-like obstruction.

Recently, researchers from Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France published research on this topic, and they revealed a relatively simple relationship between the velocity of an impacting object and the number of radial cracks in the glass. Nicolas Vandenberghe and his colleagues found that the number of cracks is proportional to the square root of the impact speed for small steel projectiles hitting samples of plexiglass.

For example, quadrupling the speed of a small rock would double the number of triangular cracks emanating from the impact site. While this may provide little solace for an angry motorist, the research may prove useful in ballistics testing, forensics, and even protecting spacecraft from the dangers of the cosmos.

Videos of high speed steel projectiles breaking through plexiglass targets.
Top: A projectile traveling at about 50 MPH impacts a 1 mm-thick target.
Bottom: A 126 MPH projectile hits a plexiglass target.
Video Credit: N. Vandenberghe/Aix-Marseille Univ.

The research team used high-speed cameras to record the plexiglass impacts, and you can see two of the impacts above. The researchers shot at sheets of plexiglass with a variety of thickness, and they varied the speed of the projectiles as well. The fastest experimental bullets traveled at over 260 MPH.

When I was an undergraduate doing physics research, we studied similar sorts of impacts on a much smaller scale. My research focused on determining how small space dust particle impacts translated into electrical signals on the Student Dust Counter aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

Although the instrument used a different type of material, the basic impact mechanics were quite similar. When I worked on the project, I was initially surprised by how destructive even microscopic projectiles can be, given a high enough velocity.

A fair amount of this research has been devoted toward finding better ways to protect satellites and spacecraft from extremely fast-moving micrometeoroid. Although they're tiny, some micrometeorites can reach impact speeds of tens of kilometers per second.

Just a few months ago, one such micrometeoroid likely left a "bullet hole" in the International Space Station's solar array. Thankfully, it didn't affect any of the crew.

I imagine this research (or further research in this area) could prove especially useful for forensic scientists looking to trace bullet velocities at crime scenes. To read the full story behind this research, check out this APS Physics summary article or the research paper itself.

Exploring the Secrets Of Hearing Sighs And Whispers

2013-05-03T14:00:00.000-04:00

Bullfrogs' hair cells yield clues on how humans detect faint sounds.

Image credit: Voronin76 | Shutterstock.com

Rights information: http://shutr.bz/17mDNid

Scientists don't fully understand how we detect faint sounds, because they should be drowned out by the background noise that the ear itself produces. Now, however, researchers at UCLA have produced clues to the process that allows us to hear a pin drop, or understand a whispered comment. They did so using hair cells taken from bullfrogs that they studied in laboratory glassware.

The UCLA team used an optical microscope and a high-speed camera to detect how the relationship between signals from faint sounds and bundles of the frogs' ear hairs differs from that between signals from louder sounds and the hair bundles.

Researchers in this field already knew that the hair cells synchronize with strong sound signals. They oscillate in phase with the incoming sounds; the louder the sound, the greater the degree of synchronization.

But in the case of the softest sounds, the UCLA team found, the cells intermittently lose and then regain synchronization in a process called "phase slip."

It is those slips that permit the cells to detect the faint sounds through the ambient noise.

"We show that phase slips occur," said Dolores Bozovic, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA who led the team. "What was surprising was their intermittent occurrence. That’s potentially more powerful than having synchronization all the time."

Why did the team carry out the study on bullfrogs' hair cells rather than those of humans or other mammals?

"We need to open up the organ to access the probes and get precise measurements but not damage the fine machinery of the hair cells itself," Bozovic explained. "Bullfrog cells are very robust organs. Mammalian cells are much more fragile."

In humans and other mammals, the sound-processing system lies in the cochlea, the spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear that contains the hair cells bathed in fluid. Thousands of tiny hair cells in the ear convert the vibrations of incoming sound waves into electrical signals that the brain processes.

The sound vibrations compete with others caused by the temperature in the inner ear. "At room temperature, the 'thermal jitter' means that the hair bundles will show fluctuations in their positions comparable to those caused by incoming signals," Bozovic said.

Bullfrogs do not possess cochleas. Instead, an organ called the sacculus carries out the cochlea's duties, which include hosting the hair cells.

Nevertheless, the frogs' hearing systems are similar to those of mammals and just as sensitive to faint sounds. The sacculus is "one of the common organs used to study the mechanics of hearing," Bozovic said.

Despite their robustness, frogs' hair cells can't be studied inside the ear. Current techniques do not allow scientists to image them there with the necessary precision.

So the Bozovic group, like others, worked with bundles of hair cells in a container that resembles a slightly modified glass microscope slide – a process technically called in vitro.

Because they had removed the hairs from the frogs, the team couldn't use sounds to stimulate them.

"We applied a mechanical stimulus using flexible glass fibers attached to the tips of the hair bundles," Bozovic said. The fibers were attached to a machine that created the necessary vibrations.

"We imaged the hair cells on an optical microscope and recorded their movements with a high-speed camera," she added.

The images showed that the phase slips occurred near an area of dynamic instability, called a bifurcation, Bifurcations are points at which the behavior of the system changes – in this case from the usual synchronization between hair cells and strong sounds.

The team found that the occurrence of phase slips depended on the strength, or amplitude, of the signal. "The rate of phase slips is reduced as the amplitude of the signal increases," Bozovic said.

However, the team found no definitive stimulus level below which full synchronization between the stimulus and vibrations of hair cells gives way to phase slips.

"The rate of phase slips is reduced as the amplitude of the signal increases, but there is no threshold," Bozovic noted.

Bozovic's team includes physics professor Robijn Bruinsma and graduate students Yuttana Roongthumskul and Roie Shlomovitz. Roongthumskul, who carried out much of the detailed study, headed the report on the research in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The paper adds to the substantial literature showing that hair cells, the sensory receptors of the inner ear, operate near one or more dynamical bifurcations that confer specific properties on hearing," said A. James Hudspeth, professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University, in New York. He added, "I would rate the reputation of the UCLA group highly."

The results of the current study present opportunities for further research. "We’re now looking at how multiple cells connected to each other react to the signals," Bozovic said. "We’re asking the question: How does the synchronization between cells work?"

-Peter Gwynne, Inside Science News Service

A former science editor of Newsweek, Peter Gwynne is a freelance science writer based in Sandwich, Massachusetts.

Fun With Science Leads to an Arrest

2013-05-02T21:39:00.001-04:00

xkcd.com store

As soon as I heard about Kiera Wilmot's science experiment gone wrong I thought "wow, that so could have been me when I was her age." For those of you that have not yet read about it, Ms. Wilmot was a curious science student and decided to do an experiment outside of class. She mixed household chemicals in a water bottle and screwed the top back on just to see what would happen, thinking they would produce some smoke. The bottle then exploded, with a "pop", and Wilmot was then expelled from school and arrested for discharging a weapon on school grounds. No one was hurt, no property was even damaged, it affected no one. I'm not saying her choice of venue wasn't monumentally stupid, but I am very upset that doing an unauthorized science experiment on school grounds ended in arrest and expulsion. She can no longer attend her school and her college plans are possibly in jeopardy all because she was curious. As someone who spends their life trying to get people excited and curious it really ticks me off when these traits are rewarded with an arrest warrant.

I think there are very few that would argue that this case is ridiculous. Reading the comments on any one of the numerous articles written about he incident makes that clear. But what isn't being said is the toll it may be taking on potential future scientists. When curiosity is publicly rewarded with an arrest, this isn't helping to create budding scientists, its telling people that science is dangerous and scary and should only be done only under a teacher's supervision. Personally, I find the most disturbing part of all the coverage to be the fact that the line: "science teachers at the school said they knew nothing about it" is repeated in every article as if to say "if it was a real science experiment, the teachers would have to be involved." Nothing could be further from the truth. The best science experiments are the ones done in kitchens, in back yards, in garages and in fields.

I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing risky behavior. There are many things that can be dangerous and it is easy for a science experiment to go wrong. Heck, I'm the poster child for that having accidentally electrocuted my boss on her first day (no permanent harm was done). It is important to take safety precautions when doing any science experiment, particularly when there might be big bangs. However, as far as I can tell from the articles, Ms. Wilmot did things pretty safely with the exception of it being on schools grounds. The bottle was in an open field, there was no one around and she expected only smoke. If she had used a soda bottle instead of a water bottle, most likely nothing would have happened. Soda bottles are much stronger than water bottles because soda is pressurized. If she'd done it in her front yard there would have been no issue. But hands on learning and exploring in a school yard, nope, not allowed. Do real science on your own time in your house, not in school.

I was a kid that grew up exploring. I couldn't stop touching or taking things apart or putting things together the wrong way around just to see what happened. I am now a PhD physicist because my parents encouraged my constant need to know. I now try and foster that need in others. I hate to see that spirit of exploration and need to know what's going to be stamped out because it wasn't done under a teacher's supervision in a classroom. If I was in trouble every time I tried to melt my Barbies with a magnifying glass or got arrested for setting off model rockets in the field near my house I would certainly have been an English major.

I hope that Ms. Wilmot continues her science experiments though in her own yard and not on school property and I wish there was something I could do to keep her playing with science. Personally, I'm sending her some comics and posters and a note begging her to stay curious because scientific curiosity could also end in a trip to Sweden and not just a trip to juvie.

PODCAST: Super Sticky Gecko Adhesive

2013-05-01T16:26:00.000-04:00

Photo: Steve Evans

This week on the Physics Central Podcast we're talking about an adhesive material that could soon find its way into your home. The sticky stuff is super strong: a segment as big as your hand can support up to 700 pounds. Of course, most items around the house aren't quite that heavy, so more importantly, the the adhesive peels off easily, is totally reusable, and doesn't leave behind any sticky residue.

For now, this adhesive material only exists in a laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At the APS March Meeting I talk to Michael Bartlett, a graduate student who worked on the new material (and who says it is ready for market). Bartlett explained the physics that went into this sticky stuff, as well as the biology: it was largely inspired by the adhesive toe pads of geckos.

Geckos are the largest animals in nature with an adhesive structure that can support their entire body weight. The gecko's toe pads can stick to most surfaces, but like the new material by the UMass group, they don't leave behind any sticky residue: the adhesive ability of the gecko is entirely mechanical. Scientists have successfully created materials that imitate the gecko toe pads (which contain very tiny, hair-like structures), but they only work for very loads of about 1 pound. The UMass group has created a material based on that same gecko adhesion structure, but which can scale up to larger surface areas and significantly heavier objects.

Tune in to the podcast to learn how the group solved this puzzle and created this awesome new material. You can find us on the Physics Central website and on iTunes.

Roller Coaster G-Forces: We've Got Data

2013-04-30T15:06:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, the Physics Central team met up at the local Six Flags theme park for a sunny day of thrills. We weren't just there for fun, however; a flood of high school students converged there as well for a day of roller coaster physics lessons.

We came armed with accelerometers to measure g-forces on four of the park's rides and coasters. Additionally, we sprinkled physics demos throughout much of the park such as a bucket of oobleck, an egg drop contest, and a bed of nails.

We have photos and acceleration data from our day at Six Flags America. Take a look below for our recap of Six Flags Physics Day 2013!

Superman Coaster

High schoolers ride the Superman roller coaster at Six Flags America on April 26, 2013.
Image Credit: Matt Payne/AAPT

The steel behemoth known as Superman: Ride of Steel launches riders to 75 MPH speeds and heights exceeding 20 stories. I rode it last year, and I can assure you it's definitely a rush.

Below you can see the altitude and resultant g-force data for the Superman ride. The altitude wasn't calibrated, so the exact numbers aren't correct, but you can still see what matters: the relative changes in altitude. One "g" is the approximate acceleration due to gravity at sea level on earth: roughly 9.81 meters per second squared.

While riding the bumps, corkscrews, and loops of roller coasters, students felt accelerations nearly four times as high as the acceleration felt when standing on solid ground. That'll definitely churn a weak stomach (an unfortunate experience I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I'm going to stick to the nice, safe train ride next year).

Top: The total (resultant) g-force for the Superman ride. Bottom: The relative altitude for the ride (ground level is approximately -140 meters on the graph). Click to enlarge.

As the students slowly climb at the beginning of the ride, the total acceleration is about 1 g — the same acceleration felt when standing on the surface of the Earth. While the center of the Earth is constantly pulling us inward, the Earth's surface (or the bottom of a roller coaster cart) pushes back on our feet with the same force, keeping us in place. When there's nothing under our feet, we experience free fall.

That's exactly what happens during the first descent of the ride. As you can see, there's a point after the first altitude drop where the resultant g-force drops to almost zero (right around 83-84 seconds). This is when the riders are in the middle of the first big drop and reach a constant downward velocity.

Although this is an approximate free fall, the only force acting on an object in a true free fall is gravity. This same effect happens on the International Space Station; astronauts are constantly "falling" toward the surface of the Earth. Due to this constant free fall, astronauts experience weightlessness — essentially the same sensation felt during the middle of a big drop on a thrill ride.

Right after that first drop, the ride swoops upward. At the bottom of the drop, the riders experience high g-forces that slow their downward velocity. Some of the other g-forces seen in the graph above are due to the winding nature of the ride in the x- and z-axes. Other rides, however, gave us a more straightforward picture of the physics involved.

Tower of Doom

A drop tower in Australia,
similar to the Tower of
Doom at Six Flags America.
Image Credit: Jak Sie Masz

I was stationed at the Tower of Doom — a ride that slowly lifts you 140 feet up, lets your feet dangle for a frightening second, and drops you rapidly back toward the ground.

Because the ride only moves along one axis, the accelerometer data clearly demonstrate a few physics principles. This ride likely provided one of the best physics lessons for the students.

In the graphs below, you can see how the students inched higher and higher with a constant 1 g-force, just like at the beginning of the Superman ride. Here, we've plotted only the y-acceleration. Because the ride only moves in the y-direction, however, the resultant acceleration is essentially the same as the y-acceleration.

Top: Altitude for the Tower of Doom. Bottom: Y-acceleration for the Tower of Doom. Click to enlarge.

As shown in the data, the students experienced a solid two seconds of free fall during the drop from the top. You can see this around the 59 second mark where the acceleration drops to zero. Brakes on the ride provided a strong upward acceleration, slowing the ride down and spiking the experienced g-force before stopping again at the bottom.

We had a great time spreading some physics knowledge at Six Flags, and we'll be there again next year for more thrills. Six Flags Physics Day is organized by several Physics organizations including the American Physical Society (the publisher of Physics Central), the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Institute of Physics, and the Society of Physics Students.

Of course, Six Flags America provides the rides and assistance to make this day possible. Physics Central would like to thank all of the great volunteers who made it happen this year.

Ants on Surfaces

2013-04-29T16:44:00.001-04:00

For the past week my kitchen has had an ant problem. Any normal person would get some ant traps and be done with the problem. Not being a normal person I've spent the past week learning about ant behavior. I learned that they only focus on one bowl of cat food, even though I have two in my kitchen. They rarely form lines of ants unless there is something really good at the other end like a used lollypop stick. If they can't find the cat food, they love the cat's water dish but I can't figure out why. Leaving a path of ants killed by Windex doesn't stop them, just slows them down for a day. Killing ant "scouts" is of no use. My goal has been to deter the ants from coming in the house and I've had little luck. After much office discussion and memories of my thesis, I've decided that if I can't beat them, I'll use them. I will use them to learn about the topology of various surfaces. When describing curvature of surfaces one often says "if I were an ant on a surface, it would look like this..." Well, I have ants, and I can make surfaces!

In my ant experiments I'm going to look specifically at one type of curvature, geodesic curvature. This type of curvature is extrinsic meaning that to figure it out, you can't be actually on the surface. Only an observer could figure it out, not an intelligent ant with a ruler. To find geodesic curvature, an ant on a surface would walk the shortest distance between two points as an observer watched (you can see where this is going). Then take this path, jam the wonky surface back into flat space and look at how the path is curved. Think of a sphere. If you tired to get from point A to point B on a sphere but had to stay on the sphere, the shortest path isn't a straight line because you aren't allowed to go through the middle of the sphere. Then if the sphere were flattened, the geodesic curvature would be the curvature of the path projected in a flat space.

I plan on finding the geodesic curvature of wonky shapes with my new pet ants. Ants generally get from point A to point B in the shortest possible way. My plan is to make a funky looking shape with paper and let the ants walk over it to a tasty piece of hard candy at the other end. Then, i can trace their path and flatten on the shape. At this point you are probably saying to yourself "why don't you just use math to do this!?!" Yes, I could technically do that, but I would have to know what equations make that surface exist. And those are hard to calculate for random surfaces. Also, this is a heck of a lot more fun.

I also plan on trying to make an ant trap by smearing ant scent on a Mobius strip and seeing if they will follow it and get stuck. How many times have you said "if an ant were walking on a Mobius strip it would only be walking on one side and never escape." We shall see...

Physicist Proposes New Way To Think About Intelligence

2013-04-26T14:00:00.000-04:00

A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research.

These diagrams show how software that harnesses "causal entropic forces" emulates the intelligent behavior required to walk upright or use tools. Courtesy of Alexander Wissner-Gross

Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developed an equation that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use.

The researchers suggest that intelligent behavior stems from the impulse to seize control of future events in the environment. This is the exact opposite of the classic science-fiction scenario in which computers or robots become intelligent, then set their sights on taking over the world.

The findings describe a mathematical relationship that can "spontaneously induce remarkably sophisticated behaviors associated with the human 'cognitive niche,' including tool use and social cooperation, in simple physical systems," the researchers wrote in a paper published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"It's a provocative paper," said Simon DeDeo, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, who studies biological and social systems. "It's not science as usual."

Wissner-Gross, a physicist, said the research was "very ambitious" and cited developments in multiple fields as the major inspirations.

The mathematics behind the research comes from the theory of how heat energy can do work and diffuse over time, called thermodynamics. One of the core concepts in physics is called entropy, which refers to the tendency of systems to evolve toward larger amounts of disorder. The second law of thermodynamics explains how in any isolated system, the amount of entropy tends to increase. A mirror can shatter into many pieces, but a collection of broken pieces will not reassemble into a mirror.

The new research proposes that entropy is directly connected to intelligent behavior.

"[The paper] is basically an attempt to describe intelligence as a fundamentally thermodynamic process," said Wissner-Gross.

The researchers developed a software engine, called Entropica, and gave it models of a number of situations in which it could demonstrate behaviors that greatly resemble intelligence. They patterned many of these exercises after classic animal intelligence tests.

In one test, the researchers presented Entropica with a situation where it could use one item as a tool to remove another item from a bin, and in another, it could move a cart to balance a rod standing straight up in the air. Governed by simple principles of thermodynamics, the software responded by displaying behavior similar to what people or animals might do, all without being given a specific goal for any scenario.

"It actually self-determines what its own objective is," said Wissner-Gross. "This [artificial intelligence] does not require the explicit specification of a goal, unlike essentially any other [artificial intelligence]."

Entropica's intelligent behavior emerges from the "physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible," said Wissner-Gross. Future histories represent the complete set of possible future outcomes available to a system at any given moment.

Wissner-Gross calls the concept at the center of the research "causal entropic forces." These forces are the motivation for intelligent behavior. They encourage a system to preserve as many future histories as possible. For example, in the cart-and-rod exercise, Entropica controls the cart to keep the rod upright. Allowing the rod to fall would drastically reduce the number of remaining future histories, or, in other words, lower the entropy of the cart-and-rod system. Keeping the rod upright maximizes the entropy. It maintains all future histories that can begin from that state, including those that require the cart to let the rod fall.

"The universe exists in the present state that it has right now. It can go off in lots of different directions. My proposal is that intelligence is a process that attempts to capture future histories," said Wissner-Gross.

The research may have applications beyond what is typically considered artificial intelligence, including language structure and social cooperation.

DeDeo said it would be interesting to use this new framework to examine Wikipedia, and research whether it, as a system, exhibited the same behaviors described in the paper.

"To me [the research] seems like a really authentic and honest attempt to wrestle with really big questions," said DeDeo.

One potential application of the research is in developing autonomous robots, which can react to changing environments and choose their own objectives.

"I would be very interested to learn more and better understand the mechanism by which they're achieving some impressive results, because it could potentially help our quest for artificial intelligence," said Jeff Clune, a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming.

Clune, who creates simulations of evolution and uses natural selection to evolve artificial intelligence and robots, expressed some reservations about the new research, which he suggested could be due to a difference in jargon used in different fields.

Wissner-Gross indicated that he expected to work closely with people in many fields in the future in order to help them understand how their fields informed the new research, and how the insights might be useful in those fields.

The new research was inspired by cutting-edge developments in many other disciplines. Some cosmologists have suggested that certain fundamental constants in nature have the values they do because otherwise humans would not be able to observe the universe. Advanced computer software can now compete with the best human players in chess and the strategy-based game called Go. The researchers even drew from what is known as the cognitive niche theory, which explains how intelligence can become an ecological niche and thereby influence natural selection.

The proposal requires that a system be able to process information and predict future histories very quickly in order for it to exhibit intelligent behavior. Wissner-Gross suggested that the new findings fit well within an argument linking the origin of intelligence to natural selection and Darwinian evolution -- that nothing besides the laws of nature are needed to explain intelligence.

Although Wissner-Gross suggested that he is confident in the results, he allowed that there is room for improvement, such as incorporating principles of quantum physics into the framework. Additionally, a company he founded is exploring commercial applications of the research in areas such as robotics, economics and defense.

"We basically view this as a grand unified theory of intelligence," said Wissner-Gross. "And I know that sounds perhaps impossibly ambitious, but it really does unify so many threads across a variety of fields, ranging from cosmology to computer science, animal behavior, and ties them all together in a beautiful thermodynamic picture."

-Chris Gorski, Inside Science News Service

Chris Gorski is an editor for Inside Science News Service.

PODCAST: Dating Ancient Water

2013-04-24T16:00:00.000-04:00

Image: Böhringer Friedrich

Hey Folks! I'm back from the APS April Meeting that took place in Denver, Colorado this year. While I was there I heard a talk by Zheng-Tian Lu, who is a physicist at Argonne National Lab and a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Lu is the kind of physicist who spends most of his time inside. In fact, because he often works with lasers, many of the windows in his laboratory are sealed off (for safety—can't have stray laser beams bouncing around). But in the past year Lu has been out in the field visiting with geologists; and those geologists are sending water and ice samples to Lu and his colleagues at Argonne. Why?

Lu and his group have developed a method for dating water samples. It's called the Atom Trap Trace Analysis, or ATTA. These samples come from underground wells, pockets of isolated ocean water, and glaciers, and the ATTA method can determine how long they have been sealed off from the atmosphere. Dating these samples could reveal when glaciers formed, show the path of ocean currents, and help hydrologists figure out which underground water sources will be the best suppliers for humans.

The ATTA method determines the age of water samples using something called radiometric dating. Radiometric dating (which includes radiocarbon dating) takes advantage of a cool physics concept: certain atoms break down over time, and effectively disappear (of course nothing just vanishes; they do leave behind traces of their presence). This is called radioactive decay, and the atoms that do this are called radioactive isotopes. What's great for scientists is that the isotopes do this on a very regular schedule. So if you have a sample and you know how much of a particular radioactive isotope was in the sample when it went into the ground, and you can measure how much is in it today, then you can figure out how old the sample is. Radiometric dating is what tells scientists the age of rocks and fossils and dead bodies and even the Earth itself.

There are a number of radio active isotopes in our atmosphere, and these get into both organic and inorganic material; when those materials become isolated from the atmosphere, they stop absorbing those isotopes, so they contain a (mostly) fixed amount. Carbon is the most commonly used radioactive isotope for radiometric dating, but it isn't the only radioactive isotope in our atmosphere. The ATTA method tests for Argone 39, Krypton 81 and Krypton 85.

You'll have to listen to the podcast to hear more. Find it here or subscribe via iTunes!

Rename the Higgs Boson?

2013-04-23T15:21:00.000-04:00

One of the six scientists who helped divine the existence of the Higgs boson, Carl Hagen, is lobbying to rename the now world-famous subatomic particle. It's not just a case of sour grapes either, he has a pretty good point. All together six physicsts working together made roughly equal contributions to developing the theory in the 1960s.

Image: CERN

The "Higgs" boson was a group effort on the part of Robert Brout, Francois Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, Peter Higgs and Tom Kibble. The particle that gives all matter its mass got labeled the Higgs boson, because Peter Higgs was the first to present at a conference about it, and the name's stuck for nearly 50 years.

It's unofficial nickname, "The God Particle," may be the least popular nickname in science right now. It appearantly was bestowed upon kind of by accident by Leon Lederman, the nobel laureate at Fermilab. He was writing a book about it, and wanted to call it "The Goddamn Particle," but the publisher balked at the name and shortened it to "The God Particle."

But what to rename it?

The new suggestions so far are... lackluster. One idea is to use an acronym of all of the contributors last names, but there aren't really enough vowels in the bunch to make that pronounceable. Hagen suggested calling it the "Standard Model Scalar Meson" or "SM Squared" for short. Still not very catchy.

We here at PhysicsCentral have come up with our own lineup of suggestions.

1) Change it to an unpronounceable symbol (scientists love symbols) and refer to it as "The Particle Formerly Known as Higgs."

2) Shorten its name simply to "Boson" but only write it in Comic Sans. The people at CERN know why...

3) Name it Todd... Todd is a nice name. Also we can call it the Todd Particle.

4) The Lardon. The Higgs boson gives matter its mass. That's kind of like what too much lard does to my waistline.

5) Put the naming rights up for corporate sponsorship and sell it to the highest bidder. We could have the Pepsi Particle, or the H&R Block Boson. Though if Nabisco bought it, they would probably keep the name the same and release a line of "Higgs Newtons."

Study: 4 Percent of Power Disruptions Associated with Solar Flares

2013-04-22T15:57:00.003-04:00

Although the sun provides the necessary energy for life on earth, its surface hosts one of the most hostile and violent environments in the galaxy. During the peak of the solar cycle, spots on the sun explode multiple times per day, burping out a plasma soup of electrons, protons, and light ions.

Usually, these coronal mass ejections (CMEs) cause little harm to the Earth and even cause the beautiful auroras seen near the Earth's poles. Some CMEs, however, have caused extensive damage in the past. In 1989, for instance, a huge CME damaged satellites, shutdown a Quebec, Canada power grid, and showered Texas with an extremely rare aurora.

A new study by researchers at Lockheed Martin has revealed that about 4 percent of power disruptions in the U.S. from 1992 to 2010 were associated with elevated solar activity — the kind of activity that releases CMEs. This finding clashes with government reports that blamed zero disruptions on solar activity during that same time period.

A long filament erupted from the sun on August 31, 2012, emitting a coronal mass ejection.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

Ignition and Induction

When solar flares release the charged particles found in CMEs, it takes several days before they reach Earth. Upon arrival, the fast-moving charged particles create currents in the Earth's atmosphere, similar to the currents that flow through wires for electrical devices.

But these currents are huge. A flow of charged particles such as those in CMEs have accompanying magnetic fields that increase with the size of the current. In turn, these changing magnetic fields induce currents in nearby conductors such as power lines. If the induced current reaches a high enough point, the power grid can become overloaded, leading to blackouts such as the one that happened in Quebec in 1989.

Lockheed Martin scientists Carolus J. Schrijver and Sarah D. Mitchell suspected that these CMEs may have been behind other power disruptions in the past, prompting them to dig into the data. For their research, Schrijver and Mitchell used grid disruption data collected by the federal government and an organization of utility operators across North America. In total, the data covers over 300 million customers in the U.S. and Canada.

Comparing this data with instances of elevated solar activity, the researchers found that 4 percent of the reported power distributions from 1992-2010 were strongly correlated with heightened solar flare activity.

Conflicting Data

The two scientists compared power disruptions that occurred near heightened solar activity with power disruptions that happened during periods of low solar activity. Most disruptions stem from other causes (e.g. vandalism, local weather events, or fuel price changes), so the researchers controlled for these other factors when comparing solar activity levels.

In the words of Schrijver and Mitchell, "the null hypothesis that the US power grid is insensitive to space weather is rejected with more than 0.975 (or 32 in 33) probability" (3-sigma confidence).

The official government reports, however, tell another story. Solar activity was never cited as a primary cause or contributing factor to a power disruption over the 19-year time period, according to Schrijver and Mitchell. While the authors caution that their research doesn't necessarily suggest that geomagnetic storms are the primary cause of the 4 percent of outages.

Nonetheless, they believe that geomagnetic storms were likely a contributing factor.

For instance, Schrijver and Mitchell suggest parallels between geomagnetic storms and skier-caused avalanches. When snow and weather conditions are just right, sometimes all it takes is the small disruption from a skier to trigger massive avalanches. Similarly, geomagnetic storms have the potential to cause widespread outages when other conditions render the power grid susceptible.

Schrijver and Mitchell's paper was recently published in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, according to their arXiv submission.

NASA's Cold Fusion Folly

2013-04-19T14:00:00.000-04:00

I am sad - horrified really - to learn that some NASA scientists have caught cold fusion madness. As is so often the case with companies and research groups that get involved in this fruitless enterprise, they tend to make their case by first pointing out how nice it would be to have a clean, cheap, safe, effectively limitless source of power. Who could say no to that?


NASA Langley scientists are hoping to build spacecraft powered with cold fusion. Image courtesy of NASA.

Here's a word of caution: anytime anyone, especially a scientist, starts by telling you about glorious, nigh-unbelievable futuristic applications of their idea, be very, very skeptical.

NASA, for example, is promoting a cold fusion scheme that they say will power your house and car, and even a space plane that is apparently under development, despite the fact that cold fusion power supplies don't exist yet and almost certainly never will. And if that's not enough, NASA's brand of cold fusion can solve our climate change problems by converting carbon directly into nitrogen.

The one hitch in the plan, unfortunately, is that they're going to have to violate some very well established physics to make it happen. To say the least, I wouldn't count on it.

To be clear, cold fusion does indeed work - provided you use a heavier cousin of the electron, known as a muon, to make it happen. There is no question that muon-catalyzed fusion is a perfectly sound, well-understood process that would be an abundant source of energy, if only we could find or create a cheap source of muons. Unfortunately, it takes way more energy to create the muons that go into muon-catalyzed fusion than comes out of the reaction.

Cold fusion that doesn't involve muons, on the other hand, doesn't work. In fact, the very same physics principles that make muon-catalyzed fusion possible are the ones that guarantee that the muon-less version isn't possible.

To get around the problem presented by nature and her physical laws, NASA's scientists have joined other cold fusion advocates in rebranding their work under the deceptively scientific moniker LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), and backing it up with various sketchy theories.

The main theory currently in fashion among cold fusion people is the Widom-Larsen LENR theory, which claims that neutrons can result from interactions with "heavy electrons" and protons in a lump of material in a cold fusion experiment. These neutrons, so the argument goes, can then be absorbed in a material (copper is a popular choice) which becomes unstable and decays to form a lighter material (nickel, assuming you start with copper), giving off energy in the process.

At least one paper argues that Widom and Larsen made some serious errors in their calculations that thoroughly undermine their theory. But even if you assume the Widom-Larsen paper is correct, then there should be detectable neutrons produced in cold fusion experiments. (Coincidentally, it's primarily because no neutrons were detected in the original cold fusion experiments of Pons and Fleischmann that physicists were first clued into the fact no fusion was happening at all.)

Some proponents claim that the neutrons produced in the Widom-Larsen theory are trapped in the sample material and rapidly absorbed by atoms. But because the neutrons are formed at room temperature, they should have energies typical of thermal neutrons, which move on average at about 2000 meters a second. That means that a large fraction of them should escape the sample, and be easily detectable. Those that don't escape, but instead are absorbed by atoms would also lead to detectable radiation as the neutron-activated portions of the material decays. Either way, it would be pretty dangerous to be near an experiment like that, if it worked. The fact that cold fusion researchers are alive is fairly good evidence that their experiments aren't doing what they think they're doing.

But if you're willing to believe Widom-Larsen, and you suspend your disbelief long enough to accept that the neutrons exclusively stay in the sample for some reason, and that the energy released as a result dosn't include any radiation, it should still be pretty easy to determine if the experiments work. All you'd have to do is look for nickel in a sample that initially consisted of pure copper. If published proof exists, I haven't found it yet (please send links to peer-reviewed publications, if you've seen something).

Instead, people like NASA's Dennis Bushnell are happy with decidedly unscientific evidence for cold fusion. Among other things, Bushnell notes that " . . . several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted, indicating when the conditions are "right" prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released."

Of course, chemical reactions can blow things up and melt glass too. There's no reason to conclude nuclear reactions were responsible. And it certainly isn't publishable proof of cold fusion. Considering that most of these experiments involve hydrogen gas and electricity, it's not at all surprising that labs go up in flames on occasion.

On a related note, a recent article in Forbes magazine reported that Lewis Larsen, of the above-mentioned Widom-Larsen theory, claims that measurements of the isotopes of mercury in compact fluorescent bulbs indicate that LENR reactions are taking place in light fixtures everywhere. If only it were true, it would offer serious support for the Widom-Larsen theory.

It's too bad the paper Larsen cites says nothing of the sort. According to an article in Chemical and Engineering News, the scientists who performed the study of gas in fluorescent bulbs were motivated by the knowledge that some mercury isotopes are absorbed in the glass of the bulbs more readily than others. The isotope ratio inside isn't changing because of nuclear reactions, but instead by soaking into the glass at different rates. Sorry Lewis Larsen, nice try.

Added note: I want to thank Steven Corneliussen of Physics Today for his timely summary of the recent cold fusion coverage in Forbes. I am even more grateful to Jeff McMahon of Forbes for his shockingly credulous reporting of the NASA Langley cold fusion program - it would have been nice if he'd interviewed someone with conventional views of physics, but at least he got the word out.

Life Elsewhere: NASA's Kepler Reveals Earth-Like Planets

2013-04-19T03:48:00.002-04:00

Relative sizes of the known habitable zone planets identified to-date.
Image Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech

Today, we met the neighbors.

NASA astronomers announced that the Kepler mission has discovered three earth-like planets orbiting distant stars and which are within the 'habitable zone' -- where distances from the sun-like star maintain temperate surface temperatures that maintain liquid water.

Key to the planet-hunters' spotting is the Kepler spacecraft. NASA's Kepler space telescope has one primary sensor that detects the light of hundreds of thousands of stars all at once.

If a planet passes between our Solar System and a distant star, the sensor registers a tiny dip in the star's brightness. By studying the pattern of dips, researchers can determine how long it takes for the planet to orbit its sun.

Two of the newly uncovered planets orbit around a star called Kepler-62, about 2,700 light-years away. As far as suns go, Kepler-62 is a smaller, dimmer star than our own. One of the planets, charmingly named Kepler-62f, is a mere 40 percent larger than Earth, closer in size than any other planet known to orbit within the habitable zone of a star. It's neighbor, Kepler-62e, lies on the hot inside edge of the habitable zone and is about 60 percent larger than Earth.

The second planetary system, Kepler-69, is similar in size and brightness to our sun and much closer at only 1,200 light-years. That's why astronomers believe that the third exoplanet, Kepler-69c, with a orbit of 242 days similar to Venus, might have a similar surface composition.

In their report published in the journal Science on April 18, 2013, the researchers say that while the Kepler telescope enables unprecedented access to search for the earths of the universe, the data from Kepler isn't sufficient to determine the surface composition of the planets. Instead, the researchers compare factors like orbit time, size, and brightness of the planet's sun to planets closer to home to imagine the planets' land.

In the meantime, the Kepler telescope has kept scientists busy. Since its launch in 2009, the telescope has detected over two thousand candidate exoplanets, 122 of which have been confirmed. To keep track of the hunt for distant earths, check out the exoplanet database.

PODCAST: Fusion Energy

2013-04-17T16:30:00.000-04:00

On this week's podcast, we talked about two of the leading fusion energy experiments, the National Ignition Facility and ITER. It's hard to get a real idea of these facilities without seeing them.

Located at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, the National Ignition Facility shoots powerful lasers at a tiny pellet of hydrogen in hopes of getting it to "ignite." This technique is called the Inertial Confinement, because the intense heat and pressure of the lasers to crush the hydrogen together from all angles. In a building the size of three football fields, workers prepare the 192 lasers aimed at the their targets. Each laser has to fire with better than millisecond precision so that each beam hits the fuel pellet at exactly the same time. (Image: DoE)

The target chamber is round because all the laser beams have to hit the target evenly from every direction. The shots have to be even or else one side will be squeezed either too much or not enough and the target hydrogen nuclei won't fuse together. (Image: DoE)

All that for a the tiny little target at the end of the cone. Inside the silver spool-shaped holder is a plastic pellet that holds the hydrogen about the size of a ball bearing. So far, the lasers at the NIF have been able to annihilate the pellet just fine, but they haven't been able to get more energy out of the explosion than they put in, the holy grail of fusion research. (Image: DoE)

The NIF improved on the older NOVA laser, also at Lawrence Livermore. The NOVA experiment ran from 1984 through 1999 and used ten lasers. It laid the groundwork for almost all the research being done today at the NIF. (Image: DoE)

ITER is a totally different method, one that uses magnetic fields to get the high temperatures and pressures needed for fusion. It's still being constructed so all that really exists right now are some empty buildings in the south of France, parts being built all around the world and some impressive looking designs. (Image: ITER)

ITER is a tokamak and while it has yet to be fully assembled, there have been dozens of others built around the world to test the design. None have gotten close to producing more energy than they take in, but they've been crucial to learning how to build ones that might. This is the Alcator C-Mod at MIT's Plasma Physics laboratory. It looks a little familiar...

Inside the C-Mod. The donut-shaped chamber is about 1.5 meters across. When its running powerful magnetic fields would pinch the burning plasma into a thin purplish ring. The plasma gets astoundingly hot, tens of millions of degrees, which is why this photo was taken when the machine was off. (Image: Mike Garrett)

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NTX for short) at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab is taking a slightly different approach. Instead of the donut shaped plasmas you see in most tokamaks, the NTX shapes it into almost a perfect sphere, with a much smaller hole going down through the middle. (Image: DoE)

Fusion research has been around in some capacity since the end of World War II, and lots of other designs have come and gone. This is a schematic for the Mirror Fusion Test Facility, a "Magnetic Mirror" system. It works just like a tokamak, just stretched out into a straight line. The Department of Energy actually built this machine, but the day it was completed in 1986, the project was canceled by Congress and the experiment never ran. (Image: DoE)

A Sign of Population Collapse

2013-04-16T18:37:00.002-04:00

In January, researchers announced that decades of fishing has decimated the bluefin tuna population by over 90 percent. Just days earlier, one such Pacific bluefin tuna sold for $1.76 million at an auction in Tokyo.

The bluefin tuna can weigh over 1,000 lbs and swims at speeds over 50 mph. While most remain in the eastern Pacific waters off the coast of Japan, some bluefin species migrate across the Pacific to the coast of California. More than 90 percent of bluefin tuna are caught before they have reproduced, severely damaging the population.
Image Credit: Aziz Saltik

Climate change, overfishing, and other ecological changes can push wild animal populations towards extinction. For years, scientists have observed changing wildlife populations and seek to measure the risk of population collapse in order to preemptively protect endangered species.

Now, a team of physicists at MIT have demonstrated that variations in population density may accurately reflect the population's risk of collapse. By studying spatial relationships of neighboring populations, the researchers hoped to catch early signs of population collapse. The research led by Jeff Gore, Lei Dai, and Kirill Korolev at MIT was published online in the journal Nature on April 10, 2013.
The researchers used yeast cells as a model population. Unlike larger organisms, a single day can bear witness to 10 generations of yeast. Yeast populations are also cooperative. Each cell produces enzymes that help break down sucrose in the environment into simpler sugar food that benefits rest of the population. As a result, there is an equilibrium density at which a population is strongest.

Scientists have observed that wild populations closer to inhospitable environments are more likely to be affected by the bad neighbor than populations further away from the affected region. Based on this, the team at MIT proposed that a population's susceptibility to collapse could be described by the spatial scale of recovery from a bad neighborhood to one at equilibrium.

To put the theory to the test, the researchers first grew multiple yeast populations into an equilibrium "happy" state. By moving a certain percentage of each population into adjacent regions, the team mimicked populations migrating to new neighborhoods. To test effects of bad habitats like overfishing, environmental changes or invasive species, the researchers then introduced a bad neighborhood by developing a nearby region where only one in 2,500 yeast survived each day.

The researchers found that populations closest to the bad neighborhood had difficulty maintaining the optimal, equilibrium, state. Neighborhoods farther away from the bad habitat maintained their optimal state more easily.

The researchers defined the recovery length as the distance between the bad neighborhood and the equilibrium neighborhoods. Like a ripple on a pond, the recovery length describes the geographical distance necessary for connected populations to recover from negative effects in a localized region.

The team found that the recovery length increased dramatically before a population collapsed.

Unlike many methods of studying population dynamics, which require many generations to uncover patterns, the spatial recovery length described by Gore and his colleagues may enable scientists to study population dynamics with survey and satellite data more readily and speedily available. In the future, the team hopes to expand their research from yeast cells to systems with several microbial populations or other animals like bees and fish.

Game Theory Tackles Rising Health Care Costs

2013-04-15T15:46:00.004-04:00

Operations research finds an increasingly important application in health care.

Image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Savannah District via flickr | http://bit.ly/Zm0xcG

Rights information: http://bit.ly/9h3qT6

By Joel Shurkin, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS) -- A new army is marching into the war against rising health care costs: engineer-mathematicians.

These individuals occupy a field called operations research, also known as advanced analytics. A subset is game theory, a way of modeling complex human behaviors and decision-making to produce the best outcomes. Applied to health care, the work includes scheduling operating rooms, setting fees, training technicians and deciding where to build hospitals.

The field has grown enormously in the last 20 years, according to Michael Carter, a professor of industrial and mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, and one of the leading theorists. (University engineering schools are one of the likeliest places to find operations research programs.)

"It's being used in so many areas and so many applications," said Carter.

Much of the work is simulation and some of it looks like complex computer games.

Operations research goes back to the eccentric 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage who besides building the first mechanical programmable computer (the "Difference Engine"), also worked out the mathematics that essentially created the modern version of Britain's postal service and the first accurate actuary tables.

In World War II, the Allies used operations research as a weapon of war.

American physicist William Shockley, who would later co-invent the transistor, may have saved thousands of lives by advising Allied Atlantic convoys to seek cloud cover. By analyzing data from all German bomber attacks on convoys he was able to prove that the bombers did not use radar and were therefore less effective in cloudy weather.

General Electric Co. now is using a similar technique in India in efforts to help solve that country's massive health problems.

Called Corvix, after one of the moons in Star Trek's Klingon Empire, GE took publicly available health and population data from the Public Health Foundation of India for the state of Andrha Pradesh in southern India, and then installed powerful analytical techniques in the back end with a game-like operating system. Think of Sim City on steroids.

"You are actually feeding off real-life data, and you are making projections in the future," said Mitch Higashi, chief economist for GE Healthcare. "Changing any one factor alters the simulation. If you put a hospital in a certain place and configure it in a certain way with a certain number of beds, how much imaging equipment would you need?"

GE is not getting into the hospital-siting business just yet. Higashi said the aim of the current pilot program is to determine how many health professionals the government has to train to provide new hospitals with the imaging technologists, pharmacists, and laboratory technicians.

So far, Corvix predicted they would need ten times as many imaging technicians to staff the equipment the government is planning to buy, he said. GE, of course, sells the equipment.

In other situations, game theory provides a tool.

Game theory is probably best known from the work of John Forbes Nash Jr., depicted in the film "A Beautiful Mind." It tries to predict the best way for people to act when faced with complex decisions and how to reach a result the philosopher Jeremy Bentham described as "the greatest good for the greatest number," and researchers call the Nash Equilibrium.

Game theory can help a group find the best strategy for itself, in both competitive and collaborative settings.

This would apply in health care, Higashi said. Take three organizations, each wanting to build a hospital, but each having a different a different site they think will maximize profits. Unless they work together, they are likely to get into an expensive turf war.

"You can drag and drop a virtual hospital right on top of a map and then activate the big data in the cloud to start running a forecast," Higashi said.

All this can apply to the mundane as well. Carter is working on operating room schedules.

"The docs are paid fees for services so they want to operate as much as possible," he said. "The hospital is operating on a tight budget, and they want as little as possible. And the nurses all want to go home at 5 o'clock." The trick is balancing all those into an equilibrium.

Researchers at Penn State, in University Park, are working on applying game theory to pricing, trying to get the hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies to cooperate to keep prices from rising. If they all cooperate they can come to the greater good; if they don't prices will rise.

Carter said that 20 years ago no one is paying attention to these tools.

With health care now absorbing 14.6 percent of the U.S. gross national product, Carter and others think serious math may provide an answer.

Article via Inside Science News Service

Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks