Big Results From Small Detector

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“Picture this in the jaws of a magnet,” says Wit Busza, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Look in here. This is where the particles went in.”

He pointed to the inside of a tiny tube covered in a tinier silicon grid, a crucial piece of the Phobos particle detector.

One of four detectors that made up Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Phobos recorded the properties of a special substance known as quark-gluon plasma from 2000 to 2005. Physicists are only now sorting through the last of the small detector’s wealth of data.

Though particle physicists study the universe’s smallest inhabitants, their laboratories are often the realms of big machines, multiple-story detectors in seemingly endless underground tunnels. Phobos’ three main pieces, though, each can fit on a desk. Like model ships in bottles, they now sit in separate glass boxes on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 24.

In 1989, Busza had imagined a much larger experiment. “It was called the Modular Array of RHIC Spectra, or MARS,” he says. “It got rejected. It was too expensive.” Back at the drawing board, he designed a smaller, cheaper detector: “A colleague of mine said that, since MARS was rejected, I should name this one after a moon of Mars.” In 1999, Brookhaven finished construction. Phobos was born.

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Rescuing Moby Dick

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About sixty miles off the coast of southern Georgia, a rescue team of biologists, veterinarians, and conservationists are trying to sneak up on a right whale.

If they can just get close enough to drug the animal, maybe the sedatives will calm it, allowing them to safely approach and cut away the nearly 400 pounds of rope, wrapped around the whale’s head, that’s been slowly killing it for months. Navigating the waves in an inflatable raft, the team is armed with a dose of sedatives so concentrated, it could easily kill them all.

But the whale wants nothing to do with them. It’s been playing cat and mouse, refusing to surface near the boat. And the more they pursue it, the greater risk they run of soliciting a tail strike or worse.

“Sometimes…it’ll turn around and come at us with its head raised fifteen feet out of the water,” says Scott Landry, director of whale rescue at the Center for Coastal Studies. For a sense of scale, that would be like having a garbage truck hovering above your head.

The goal then is simple—to run. “It’s sort of a dance we play. We want to cut the ropes, but not get so close that we’re within striking distance,” says Landry. “These are unlike any other patients you could imagine.”

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Foodie

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Guy Crosby is speaking tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts, and fans form lines in the aisles to meet him.

Some are past students, who he greets warmly. Others are strangers, waiting to tell him how much they enjoyed his last letter to their favorite magazine or his last appearance on the television show America’s Test Kitchen. His warmth never wavers as he thanks them.

Bespectacled, lanky, and enthusiastic, Crosby is a food scientist celebrity. He has appeared on television speaking about steak and upside-down cake. His favorite foods include roast chicken and pasta with clam sauce. If you’re making an omelet, he has said, use frozen butter. It melts just in time to coat the proteins in the eggs that are unraveling with heat, enveloping the individual strands before they tangle and toughen. The butter coating makes the omelet tender.

Soon the theater is dark and Crosby begins his presentation. The film to follow is Babette’s Feast, a story about a meal so delicious it completely converts the bristling hostility of a group of guests to goodwill and cheer. Crosby is here to explain why food has such control over the mind.

Once his talk is finished, he leaves the theater to chat in the lobby. “This is my second career—I never dreamed I would be doing what I am doing now,” he begins.

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Rock Star

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A former student of Professor Tim Grove’s once likened Grove’s life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Bill Murray’s life in Groundhog Day: he comes to campus, experiments on rocks, and teaches. Comes to campus, experiments on rocks, teaches. Campus, experiments, teaching.

And teaching is what he is doing in the single moment I can see him after the hissing begins and before I run out of the room because a stream of pure, poisonous carbon monoxide is blasting his face and billowing around his head.

Professor Grove, as an experimental petrologist, maps rock formations in the Earth’s mantle and crust. Knowing at which pressure and temperature rocks form allows geologists to predict planetary formations, says Grove. In a nutshell, he examines how the Earth’s crust and mantle has formed over the 4.5 billion years the Earth has been around. But he does much more than research.

Grove, who began teaching at MIT in 1979, explained he couldn’t be at the Institute if he weren’t hands-on. “I’m not the ‘sit back and supervise 10 other people to supervise 20 other people to supervise 40 other people to do 80 things’ kind of guy,” he says, cocking his hands. “If you’re going to be a professor you’re supposed to teach people…I think.” Full Article »

The Elusive Wasabi

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There’s an imposter at the sushi bar. I’m not talking about the artificial crab—the artificial crab is genuine artificial crab, a red-painted scrap of pollock. And I don’t mean the Americanized variants of Japanese cuisine either, the California rolls or the sake bombs. They don’t claim to be anything they’re not.

No, the imposter takes the form of a dull green mound that waits alongside your ginger before erupting into your sinuses and sending tears streaming out from behind your eyes. You know him as wasabi. His real name is horseradish.

The majority of sushi bars do not serve real wasabi. This surprised me. Rummaging through my roommate’s arsenal of Japanese culinary supplies, I located a bag of the stuff and read off its ingredients.

The explosive green paste making inroads on the North American palette is little more than a combination of dried horseradish, mustard, and blue and yellow coloring. Occasionally, a brand will throw in some concentration of dried wasabi power, but even then it’s the horseradish that does the talking.

So why aren’t we eating the real thing?

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High-tech Rain Dance

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Call it a high-tech rain dance.

Farmers, worried that drought or hail will put their crops at risk, have a number of options, some stranger than others. They can improve their irrigation system. They can buy hail insurance.

Or, they can contact Weather Modification Incorporated in Fargo, North Dakota, and order some “enhanced precipitation” or “hail damage mitigation.” It sounds like science fiction, but in many places around the world, scientists are actively attempting to manipulate the weather.

Weather Modification, Inc. has been conducting such projects since 1961. The practice itself dates back to World War II, when scientists at General Electric started researching ways to prevent aircraft icing. Today, weather modification is used in twenty-four countries around the world, including the United States, Russia, and China. Full Article »

Where’s Waldo, DARPA-Style

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Ten red weather balloons, one day, 48 continental states, $40,000 to you if you can track them all down. And . . . GO.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will tether ten 8-foot balloons across the country during the daylight hours of December 5 and award the prize money to the person who submits correct GPS locations for all of them. The challenge commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Internet, which DARPA created in 1969.

The 8-foot balloons will be raised at 10 a.m. EST and lowered at roughly 4 p.m. local time. This setup favors western time zones, some seekers point out, who also complain that the money can only be awarded to an individual, although the individual can represent a team or organization. The Saturday date is meant to encourage participation, especially by students, says deputy director Norm Whitaker. Participants can submit locations until December 14. As of November 29, more than 100 people had registered on the DARPA Web site.

Some teams are considering coordinated drives, but others say the total gasoline costs could exceed the prize pot by several hundred thousand dollars. Flying or satellite imagery—if you can find a rapidly-updated image database—would also work. Google maps won’t work: their data can be up to three years old. Full Article »

In Pursuit of a Dialogue

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Michael Demkowicz is a tranquil, clear-spoken man. A materials scientist who studies the atomic-scale structure of metals, he has an airy office overlooking a tree-lined court at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When asked if his Catholic faith informs his life and work, he replies, “Of course.”

“The perception is that faith should be kind of like a garnish to your life,” he says. That perception is wrong, he explains: faith is the foundation, not the frosting.

While a sizable minority agrees with Demkowicz—48 percent of university scientists identified with a faith tradition, and 68 percent affirmed interest in spirituality in one 2007 study—others do not. In an editorial on the religiosity of the director of the National Institutes of Health, Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, claimed, “It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.”

Molecular biologist Angela DiBenedetto says this “conflict” arises from ignorance. “[S]cientific atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and others, ridicule simplistic images of God as the magician who pulls created things whole hog out of a hat,” she explains. “[They] completely ignore the centuries of deep, sophisticated theological thought about the nature of God such as one finds in Augustine, Aquinas, and other great thinkers.” Full Article »

Hospital Computerization Not a Budget Saver, Concludes Study

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Hospital computerization neither saves money nor improves healthcare, say Harvard researchers in a controversial new study.

The recent survey of over four thousand hospitals found no connection between computerization and reduced costs. In addition, increased computerization led to only small improvements in the quality of care.

Researchers found that more “wired” hospitals had higher total costs and more rapid cost increases. They also examined a list of the “100 Most Wired” hospitals and determined that these institutions had performed no better in terms of administrative expenses or quality of care.

These findings contradict previous anecdotal evidence indicating the benefits of healthcare information technology (IT), a category that includes systems such as electronic medical records and computerized order entry. The study has sparked significant controversy, in part because President Obama and others have widely promoted healthcare IT as a tool for saving money and improving healthcare. The 2009 stimulus bill included over $19 billion to encourage the adoption of healthcare technologies.

Using twenty-four different measures of hospital technology, researchers created a composite “computerization score” and compared this with changes in administrative costs and quality of care during the years 2003 to 2007. The only area in which they found significant improvement was in the quality of care for heart attacks.

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Arecibo

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Aimed at asteroids that could threaten Earth, a venerable telescope fears only retirement.

A September interim report from the National Academy of Sciences praises Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, built in 1963, for its “unique role” and “unmatched precision and accuracy” in determining the make-up and path of objects that might hit the planet—members of a larger group of space rocks known to astronomers as NEOs or near-Earth objects.

Despite the Academy’s report, the National Science Foundation, which funds Arecibo almost entirely, has no room in its 230 million dollar budget to continue complete funding of the unique tool. Over three years, the Foundation has reduced funding for the telescope, from over 10 million dollars, before a 2006 Senior Review report, to currently 8 million dollars. Recommendations from the 2006 report suggest further funding cuts and, without outside funding, closure of the telescope in 2011.

“We looked at all of our existing facilities,” says Dana Lehr, Program Director for the Foundation’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, regarding the 2006 Senior Review, “in the hopes of carving out some free space, meaning money, for new facilities.”

Lehr stresses that cutting funds for current facilities was unavoidable as the Foundation attempts to support five established national observatories while answering the astronomical community’s call for new telescopes, such as those that will appear in the National Research Council’s 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey.

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