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Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?

Eben Harrell
Time
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:51 EST

Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work.

The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment.
Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.

Russia-InfoCentre
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00 EST

The ancient find is a psalium, an element of harness. Experts state that it is just 200 years younger than the first chariot, invented in that very part of the continent, according to research.

The psalium is made of a bull's hipbone. Amazing is the craftsmanship of the master who made this artifact, as well as the ideal state in which it has come down to us.

The swastika was once a symbol of the solar chariot. It is corroborated by archeological finds unearthed not far from the Nizhnyaya Krasavka Settlement of the Saratov Region. The site of the ancient settlement of the Arians has been examined by students and professors for three years already. Within this period the expedition acquired around 20,000 artifacts of various value.

Paola Del Vecchio
ANSAmed
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:17 EST

Madrid - They have renamed it the city recovered from the Euphrates and it is found in the Syrian enclave of Tall Qabr on the banks of the river that, with the Tigris, was the centre of the birth of civilisation in Mesopotamia. It is a circularly planned city, dating back to 2,600 years before Christ.

Galician archaeologists from an expedition from the University of Coruna made the discovery, led by Jean Luis Montero, who identified two layers dating back to from the IV to first millennium before Christ. Since 2008 the multidisciplinary expedition, made up of 20 people, has been working in the area known as the Hill of the Tomb in the Euphrates Valley on an excavation campaign in collaboration with the Syrian government in which various universities are participating with Spain's Superior Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Syrian Ministry of Culture.

Underground lines that bypass monuments

Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:12 EST

A team of mathematicians from the Engineering and Architecture Schools of the University of Seville has created a method to design underground lines whereby a city's historical buildings are unaffected. The results of the study, which has just been published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, offer possible solutions for the future underground line 2 in Seville.

"The methodology applied seeks to minimise the length of underground lines -with the subsequent economic saving- and to maximise their distance from historic buildings to avoid their being damaged", Francisco A. Ortega, co-author of the study and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the University of Seville, explains to SINC.

Marese McDonach
Irish Times
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:58 EST

Brain surgery was being carried out in Ireland more than 1,000 years ago - and patients survived.

People with disabilities were treated with compassion and respect within their communities in medieval Ireland but TB and other diseases, possibly including cancer, claimed many lives while others died by the sword.

A multitude of insights about life and death in Gaelic Ireland were gleaned following the discovery of an unknown medieval church and the graves of about 1,300 men, women and children who lived along the banks of the river Erne at Ballyhanna, Co Donegal, several hundred years ago.

The burial ground, which spanned several centuries, was found during the construction of the Ballyshannon/ Bundoran bypass in 2003.

Scientists Unveil Plant DNA Barcode

Rachel Cooper
The Telegraph
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:33 EST

A new way of classifying DNA looks likely to create shortcuts in many processes that are currently rather tricky.

Scientists meeting at the third International Barcode of Life conference in Mexico City this week have agreed on a region of DNA that will be used to identify plants by genus in a new system of codification.

Although genetic "barcoding" of animals, which allows scientists to identify animals from a small section of their DNA, is already well-established, the system has until now not worked for plant species.

Data about different plant species will then be made available to scientists around the world on a global database and the technology could be used in a number of ways, including tackling the illegal trade in endangered species and identifying new pathways of food webs.

ScienceDaily
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00 EST

Scientists in Washington, DC, are reporting development and successful tests of a new way for exploring the insides of living cells, the microscopic building blocks of all known plants and animals. They explode the cell while it is still living inside a plant or animal, vaporize its contents, and sniff. The study appears in online in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry.

Akos Vertes and Bindesh Shrestha note that knowing the contents of cells is the key to understanding how healthy cells differ from those in disease. Until now, however, the only way to "look" inside an individual cell was to remove it from its natural environment in an animal or plant, or change its environment. But doing so changed the cell. Scientists never knew whether one cell differed from another because of the disease, or because they had removed it to a new environment.

The new report describes development of a new technique that uses laser pulses focused through a tiny glass fiber to explode a cell and turn its contents into vapor. Scientists then use a laboratory instrument to analyze the vapor and get a profile of the chemicals inside. It can reveal differences between diseased and healthy cells, even between adjacent cells in the same tissue. The scientists used this new technique to analyze the contents of living plant and animal cells and show that it quickly and accurately identified important chemical details that would have been overlooked using conventional techniques.

Celean Jacobson
The Associated Press
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:30 EST

© AP Photo/Denis Farrell
Paleontologist Adam Yates , second left, displays fossilized bones of a new dinosaur species, Aardonyx Celestae, from the early Jurassic period (about 200 million years old) during an announcement of the discovery at the University of the Witwatersrand

A newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land, scientists in South Africa said Wednesday.

The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-meter-) long small-headed herbivore with a huge barrel of a chest, and the scientists told reporters it could prove to be a missing evolutionary link.

This is a species "that no one has seen before and one that has a very significant position in the family tree of dinosaurs," said Australian paleontologist Adam Yates.

Yates, who is based at the University of the Witwatersrand's Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research, led the research with a number of other local and international scientists.

Their findings were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B, a London-based peer-reviewed journal.

Human Extinction: How Could It Happen?

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:39 EST

It would take a combination of severe and catastrophic events to drive the hardy human race to extinction, research concludes.

Humans could become extinct, a new study concludes, but no single event, aside from complete destruction of the globe, could do us in, and all extinction scenarios would have to involve some kind of intent, either malicious or not, by people in power.

The determinations suggest that the human race itself will ultimately determine its fate.

"I think the ability to adapt very quickly is singular to humanity," project leader Tobin Lopes told Discovery News. "Species progress and evolve to enhance their chances, but it's done over a very long period of time."

"Instinct guides a lot of what we do early in our lives, but the capacity to learn different behaviors as a result of different environments makes humanity capable of survival," added Lopes, who is associate director of global energy management programs at the University of Colorado Denver.

PhysOrg
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:00 EST

A study of the genetic structure of viruses in an Antarctic lake has revealed an astonishing genetic richness in the large number of viral families discovered.

Aquatic viruses usually infect prokaryotes such as bacteria, but the viruses in the Antarctic had a large proportion of viruses that infect eukaryotes. The findings included small single stranded DNA (ssDNA) viruses and phycodnaviruses that have never previously been seen in aquatic environments.

The researchers, Alberto Lopez-Bueno and colleagues, from Spain and the UK, examined samples taken from Lake Limnopolar on Livingston Island in the Antarctic before and during the summer, and found the aquatic environment to be rich in microorganisms and a diverse collection of viruses that prey on them.

The number of viral genotypes found was unusually high, running into thousands instead of the more usual hundreds, and less than 3 percent of the genome sequences were similar to previously identified viral genomes from aquatic systems. Many of the ssDNA viruses were related to non-aquatic viruses that infect plants, mammals and birds, and some had never been found in aquatic environments before.

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