Category: Hellraisin’
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Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid
It just gets worse for CERN and its attempts to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won’t make mincemeat of the planet. It’s beginning to look as if a massive miscalculation in the safety reckonings means that CERN scientists cannot offer any assurances about the work they’re doing. In a truly frightening study, Toby…
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Rule breakers make traffic jams less likely
Rules are a good thing when it comes to road traffic: drive on the wrong side of the highway and you’ll cause chaos, if you live. If that seems forehead-smackingly obvious, then an analysis by Seung Ki Baek at Umea University in Sweden and pals my come as a surprise. They say that a small…
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Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes
There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right? Err, yep. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. And the new calculations are throwing up some surprises. One potential method of…
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How Google’s PageRank predicts Nobel Prize winners
Ranking scientists by their citations–the number of times they are mentioned in other scientists’ papers– is a miserable business. Everybody can point to ways in which this system is flawed: not all citations are equal. The importance of the citing paper is a significant factor scientists in different fields of study use citations in different…
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How the credit crisis spread
Where did the credit crunch start? According to Reginald Smith at the Bouchet-Franklin Research Institute in Rochester, it began in the property markets of California and Florida in early 2007 and is still going strong. To help understand how the crisis has evolved, Smith has mapped the way it has spread as reflected in the…
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Calculating the probability of immortality
How likely is it that a given object will survive forever? With many groups predicting that human immortality is just around the corner, you could say we all have a vested interest in the answer. A t first glance, the odds are not good. As David Eubanks of Coker College in South Carolina puts it:…
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How much force does it take to stab somebody to death?
How much force does it take to stab somebody to death? Strangely enough, forensic scientists do not know. A number of groups have attempted to measure the forces necessary to penetrate skin but the results are difficult to apply to murder cases because of the sheer range of factors at work. The type and sharpness…
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Why PAMELA may not have found dark matter
This is the one we’ve been waiting for. For months, the astrophysical world has been abuzz with rumors that the orbiting observatory PAMELA has found evidence of dark matter. Various people have speculated on the nature of this dark matter but the PAMELA team has been cautious, refusing to release the data until they are…
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And the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy is…
31573.52 No really. At least according to Duncan Forgan at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. The Drake equation famously calculates the number of advanced civilisations that should populate our galaxy right now. The result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of planets that…
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How chemotherapy can make tumors bigger
While our understanding and treatment of cancer has advanced significantly in recent years, most specialists would readily admit that the dynamics of tumor growth are poorly understood. It’s easy to see why. Tumor growth is a multifaceted process that involves complex interactions between many types of cells and their surrounding tissue. So it’s interesting to…