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People working in DOE labs, perhaps?

That's the X12B at Brookhaven National Laboratory, not a storage place. Its used for X-ray crystallography. It's apparently scheduled for conditioning until next weekend though.

see here:
http://www.px.nsls.bnl.gov/x12b_info.html

The webcams are to check on it remotely.

a b - a pair of cameras in some storage place, and you can get them to point at eachother :D

a b - a pair of cameras in some storage place, and you can get them to point at eachother :D

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

A chip optimized to do QCD calculations (QCDOC QCD on Chip) has been developed and parallel computers using that chip are being built. More details can be found here. Machines are being built by the U.S., U.K. and Japan. The U.S. and Japaneese machines will be located at Brookhaven National Lab Computing Facilty which is close to Columbia University where the QCDOC was developed.

Class IIIa (>5mW) 532nm green laser pointer (ThinkGeek)

Class IIIb (>15mW) 532nm green laser pointer (MegaLaser)

Class IIIb 200mW handheld green laser (Information Unlimited)

It's even possible to get small, portable Class IV (potential instant severe eye damage, even from diffuse or reflected beams; this is the class of laser which also includes burning and cutting beams) lasers:

Various Class IV portable lasers, including a small battery powered 2W diode laser (Information Unlimited)

The front windows of a commercial aircraft and objects in the cockpit could easily reflect and refract a beam from the ground in ways that would be at a minimum very distracting and unsafe, and potentially damaging to eyesight.

Information about laser classes.

You seem to be assuming that each of these steps are unusual, difficult or impossible.

If you have ever looked at your poop, you've probably seen chunks of undigested material. The phrase corn in your/my/the poop is almost a cliche.

I don't know much about toxicology, but I seem to recall that certain types of food poisoning are caused by ingestion of toxins - proteins - manufactured by bacteria in spoiled food. These proteins are absorbed by the body from ingested material and circulate through the bloodstream. (Hang on while I Google an example... )

Botulinum toxin is a protein which happens also to be a neurotoxin. In children less than a year old the bacteria that produces it can live in the gut and produce the toxin, but in adults it's typically absorbed by eating contaminated food. The toxin itself is absorbed and circulates through the blood, eventually stopping the heart and lungs. (In this type of food poisoning, it's the high level of toxin in the contaminated food that makes one sick, not the ingestion of the bacteria.)

The entire posited improbability chain in your argument is refuted by ample evidence to support the theory that ingesting prion infected material can cause prion disease to manifest in a subject animal or person. The canonical example of Kuru has been mentioned by others here. Kuru affects those who engaged in ritual cannibalism by eating infected brain tissue of deceased relatives, and this pattern of infection contrasts nicely with the statistics on spontaneous prion disease like human CJD which apparently occurs at a rate of about one in a million individuals, randomly distributed throughout the global population regardless of diet or ethnicity. This line of statistical evidence (and much other evidence) supports the potential threat to humans from prion contaminated food regardless of whether one believes there is an as-yet-undiscoverd virus associated with prion disease (which appears less likely now.)

Certainly the entire picture of prion disease hasn't been painted, but we are well past the time when declaring them "bunk" is a rational response to the serious threat of prions in our food chain.

i did some work at Brookhaven National Lab a while back; i hooked up with a cute chick who was into physics and got to slum around the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider quite a bit (mostly the STAR detector, for those who care). i almost choked when i saw a win2k workstation humming away, but that was just the interface computer (there tend to be a lot of interns and such working, so a windows frontend is handy, cuts back the learning curve quite a bit). the rest of the lot was a hodgepodge of unix kit; the really really mission-critical hardware (the stuff that actually ran the collider) was running Solaris, at least as near as i could tell, along with quite a few linux and sgi boxes around for data processing and visualization (if you want pretty posters, get the gold ion collisions from the website).

Wake me up when Seymour Cray buys a site license

Given that he died in 1996, I guess that would indeed be something worth waking up for.

Heh Heh. Cray through SGI has been involved in Windows clustering, but got out of it. Guess they learned better.
Check out this SGI graphics cluster documentation.

First of all, I shouldn't have said or agreed with the term, "environmentalist wackos", as if all were. So no, I don't agree with Rush Limbaugh.

Here are some citations about toxic chemicals in solar cell production. Granted, there are toxic chemicals used in almost any manufacturing process.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/man_pro_implicati ons.html?print

http://www.pv.bnl.gov/art_168.pdf


Here are a few articles about the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of ethanol production:

http://www.fcpp.org/publication_detail.php?PubID=1 80

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html

From the sci.skeptic FAQ, here is a definition of "New Age" beliefs (so I am not the only one who associates the two):

http://home.xnet.com/~blatura/skep_7.html


Finally, I have no idea what the remark about chemistry is supposed to mean. Yes, I understand the tremendous amount of knowledge about chemistry that arose from the study of alchemy, but what does that have to do with your argument?

I'm sure that astrologers at one time provided much of the basis of astronomical observation, but I think astrology is ridiculous. Again, so what?

This was on my Physics undergraduate course; a rather nice technique. Releated resources from my lecture notes give:

An abstract, a presentation on applying similar techniques to volcanoes, a citation [L. Alvarez et al, Science 167, 832 (1970)] (accessible only to subscribers of Science, I'm afraid), a Physics Today article, a useful paper.

is the conference where the experiment was originally proposed.

My mistake was in remembering subcritical multiplication being the dominant process when in fact it seems not to be for the RTG's we all know and love (the ones on Cassini).

You can check the cross sections and decay rates at the online chart of the nuclides, hosted in South Korea. (Until recently, that was hosted at BNL; does anyone else find it ironic that the Koreans are now exporting nuclear information to Berkeley?

As we here at Brookhaven celebrate having found the value of the G-factor, we would like to enlist the help of Slashdot readers in a related problem, namely, finding the exact coordinates of the G-Spot.

Oops, wait, this is Slashdot....

The screenshot attached to the email message is available here.

Here's a direct link to the image, if you're feeling lazy.

Next thing we'll all be swallowed up by a black hole.

The standard model is pretty well fucked anyway. It's not a revolution, it's a kick in the ass that's going to force us to re-examine a large amount of our basic assumptions/research done in the Standard Model.

Already outstanding issues include pentaquarks (5-quark exotic baryons), the inability to find the Higgs boson (not so much finding it, but having the found mass be correct), muon g-factor anomalies, and kaon decay, to name but a few.

I guess what I'm saying is: it's going to be a long time. Don't hold your breath.

I have nothing against PV solar cells in space where they face different problems and are more applicable solutions but on earth they are of limited practical use at the moment. Some of the stories about cheap flexible solar arrays being made soon are promising but until there are demonstrateable enviromental and economic advantages over nuclear power I am reluctant to consider them a panacea and more of a hinderance to the energy crisis. Perhaps one day though.

Well, maybe I shouldn't say "prefer."
But I think the Periodic Table and
the Table of Nuclides should be combined.
I found another version here.
I think the shape of the table is very interesting.

Well, some people say this, but they don't really know what they're talking about. (I seem to recall some people saying that RHIC would be the downfall of all human civilization, by the way, yet we're still here.) Black holes decay via Hawking radiation. The smaller they are, the faster they decay, and the ones that might be produced at LHC would be mighty small. (...if they could even be produced at all, which is sort of doubtful in my mind) They would decay long before they even reached the inner wall of the detector.

I think that in general, it's a good idea to be sceptical about end-of-the-world scenarios like this. If it were possible to destroy the world by smashing particles together, it would have happened long before humans ever existed - Earth is continuously bombarded by cosmic rays that have **much** higher energies than anything we could ever hope to create in a lab. Any kind of strangelet, black hole, or whatever that could ever be produced in an accelerator has been produced by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. So don't worry about this sort of thing.

-Bill

More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters. Anybody else observed similar phenomena?"

a link to the paper about the slashdot effect

Your link to the report appears broken (404). I found a link to the pdf version of the report here.

This is an exotic possibility of which the report states that "Physicists have grown quite accustomed to the idea that empty space  what we ordinarily call 'vacuum'  is in reality a highly structured medium, that can exist in various states or phases, roughly analogous to the liquid or solid phases of water. . . . Although certainly nothing in our existing knowledge of the laws of Nature demands it, several physicists have speculated on the possibility that our contemporary 'vacuum' is only metastable, and that a sufficiently violent disturbance might trigger its decay into something quite different. A transition of this kind would propagate outward from its source throughout the universe at the speed of light, and would be catastrophic."

I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

On a slightly more serious note...

The article links to a helpful physics primer if you, like me, need a little help understanding subatomic physics. (I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)

A little googling turned up this awesome page on subatomic particles called The Particle Adventure. This is the most accessible physics lesson I've ever received. Awesome.

This is the most fun I've ever had with subatomic physics: Quark Dance!

Pretty cool.

Theres no scientific proof that ADHD even exists. This is all experienced based. People with ADHD reporting to so called experts, experts watching people with ADHD and conducting studies and tests.

Theres no true fact proof that ADHD is a physical disease. Its not even proven to be a disorder even though its treated like one.

Look, Anger could be considred a disorder, a person whos angry could be angry because of physical reasons, social reasons, or the enviornment, but if I were to declare Anger as a learning disability, and say "Well student X is always angry, this student cant learn, this student needs medication, this student needs to be studied"

This does not solve the persons problem. Please tell me why a person with a short temper is considered "normal" however someone with ADHD has something wrong with them.

Also please explain to me why people who have short tempers just need to take anger management classes, while a person with ADHD must go on all these meds?

Its the SAME kinda problem, I consider ADHD a personality trait. Just like short temper is a personality trait, and manic depression is a personality trait.

Pills can only hide a persons natural traits, it cannot change them. Without pills these people wont know what to do with themselves, I'm not saying ADHD doesnt exist, it does, I'm saying its treated like its some kinda disease that MUST be treated with drugs as the first option when most people in my opinion can learn to manage without drugs.

Now I will back up my claims with proof.

Here is how Ritalin works

"Using a technique called positron emission tomography, or PET, researchers at Brookhaven's Center for Imaging and Neurosciences studied dopamine levels in 11 male subjects. In two sessions, the volunteers were each given a dose of Ritalin, calculated using their body weight to correspond to the doses given to children with ADHD, or a placebo. While their brains were scanned to record dopamine levels, the subjects were asked to rate their feeling of restlessness and "high." Meanwhile, physicians monitored each subject's blood pressure and heart rate.

The results showed that brain dopamine levels increased significantly approximately 60 minutes following ingestion of the drug as compared to the placebo.

"We now know that by increasing the levels of extracellular dopamine, you can activate these motivational circuits and make the tasks that children are performing seem much more exciting," said Volkow. "By raising that level of interest, you can significantly increase the ability of the child to focus on the task."

Volkow added that Ritalin also works to suppress "background" firing of neurons not associated with task performance, allowing the brain to transmit a clearer signal. "Random activation of other cells can distract you, and children with ADHD are easily distracted," she said. "Ritalin suppresses that background firing and accentuates the specific activation, basically increasing the signal-to-noise ratio and increasing a child's ability to focus."
Source Source URL

Ritalin works by slowing the brain function down. How do you figure your brain is sharper by doing this? This is equal to taking a 64bit CPU, and running 32bit software in an attempt to filter out "bad" data which you consider "junk" or not u seful to keep the CPU more focused on a single task of say crunching random numbers.

Honestly while this can work, isnt it better to learn to fully use what you have?

Adderall works in the same way, however its a mixture of a few drugs. I am researching it as we speak but so far it seems to be in the same league as Ritalin.

But ok, lets assume you are right, and these drugs are completely safe, harmless with no side effects, lets say these drugs help make the mind sharp and help people concentrate, if this is true shouldnt they be marketed over the counter like anti depression, pain medication, and others?

Think about this.

Here are a couple of interesting articles on the effects aging has on the brain.

You mean, like this?

The difference between CNN linking to a site and /. linking to a site is that there is no such thing as the "CNN Effect" while the "Slashdot Effect" is such a well-known phenomenon it has been written up by a university physicist.

We're not talking an occasional spike in traffic: everytime /. links to an article, that site is hit and hit hard. With the current linking policy (i.e. none), /. inadvertently becomes a DoS portal with us slashdrones the zombified clients.

/. should have taken care of this a long time ago.

Check AWU about the possibilities at these facilities.

Also, check these:

Sandia

Los Alamos

Argonne

Brookhaven

Pacific Northwest

Lawrence Berkeley

Lawrence Livermore

Oak Ridge

And there are other other national labs that I did not mention.

here, here, and here.

Here to save you looking for yourselves. I like the part where the paper about the /. effect gets /.ed it's self.

Nowadays there are protests every time a new accelerator starts up.

My favorite chemical to imagine working with (when I worked at Texas Instruments and wandered around the 3rd floor pipe space looking at labels) was Silane. With a chemical formula just like Methane, with Silicon in the place of the Carbon, you'd imagine it would be explosive but not otherwise interesting. Wrong! Silane can spontaneously explode when exposed to air. It has to be specially ducted and burned off or blown out quickly enough to prevent creation of a flammable concentration. A friend of mine where I work now, though, had more direct experience with Silane while working at another semiconductor manufacturer. He claims that he once liberated a small volume of silane in the air, and found that it formed a bubble... the silane reacted with the air on the edge to form a protective shield around the remaining gas. Of course, when the bubble burst... the explosion was deafening. Strangely enough, I don't think my friend ever found the opportunity to experiment further. But should you care to try it yourself on a smaller scale, go for it!

The stuff you get today will provoke less of a reaction from your geiger counter than the dust bunnies under your bed

If it's not setting off your Geiger counter it's because Geiger counters are poor alpha detectors. Unless the sensor has an extremely thin sleeve, the alphas will never make it to the avalanche plates.

Fiestaware is an extremely popular collectible. The color you want is burnt orange. Happy hunting.

Thin tissue paper stops alpha particles.

The lab I used to work in used Fiestaware (the orange U-238 containing type) to test our detectors. Fiestaware is relatively safe, the only worry being if you scratched the surface with your fork or knife and ingested some of the slivers.

If you just want nuclide information and decay chains, I have to recommend this site.

If you place a link in a comment that you write, please check that the server is alive first, or at least click on the links in the comment preview.

Are you a Top Hacker?

If you place a link in a comment that you write, please check that the server is alive first, or at least click on the links in the comment preview.

Are you a Top Hacker?

If you submit a /. story to a site that you run, please check your bandwidth first to see if it can survive the Slashdot effect, or at least put up a less-graphic version of the page.

I don't know if anyone mentioned ROOT yet, so here goes.

There's a framework from CERN called ROOT, which has a lot of nice features for numerical scientific computing.

The language is C++, but don't let that scare you - in time you will also frown upon procedual languages (they are hard to maintain) and functional languages (they just don't do the job for numerical stuff - to bad - I like the concept).

ROOT provides things like histograms, persistent object storage (and it beats Objectivity by miles!), and ladida. ROOT also has an interactive scripting environment, using C++. This is cool, as it means you can prototype your algorithms as scripts, and when your happy with them, you can simply compile them, and get much higher speeds.

Also note, that Intel's free C++ compiler is reputed to give a 30% increase in speed compared to GCC 3.0.

ROOT is used by some 70+ physics research projects around the world - from the gigantic Alice and STAR to the more modest Athena and BRAHMS.

If I were you, I'd defently consider C++ again. The stuff you've found on netlib is almost all outdated, and there's a good chance that it's been ported to C/C++.

I don't know if anyone mentioned ROOT yet, so here goes.

There's a framework from CERN called ROOT, which has a lot of nice features for numerical scientific computing.

The language is C++, but don't let that scare you - in time you will also frown upon procedual languages (they are hard to maintain) and functional languages (they just don't do the job for numerical stuff - to bad - I like the concept).

ROOT provides things like histograms, persistent object storage (and it beats Objectivity by miles!), and ladida. ROOT also has an interactive scripting environment, using C++. This is cool, as it means you can prototype your algorithms as scripts, and when your happy with them, you can simply compile them, and get much higher speeds.

Also note, that Intel's free C++ compiler is reputed to give a 30% increase in speed compared to GCC 3.0.

ROOT is used by some 70+ physics research projects around the world - from the gigantic Alice and STAR to the more modest Athena and BRAHMS.

If I were you, I'd defently consider C++ again. The stuff you've found on netlib is almost all outdated, and there's a good chance that it's been ported to C/C++.

kay, i /really/ dig the clear HD tops, but there's no way in hell i'm gonna open up my drive in the Great Outdoors. i have access to all ranges of cleanrooms at the lab, from (ISO) Class 8 down to better-than-Class 1 (i don't have personal access, but i know people with access to the rooms who'd be happy to slap a plexiglas cover on my drive). so my question is this: what class cleanroom would be the best for cracking a drive? i could just send it in to the cleanest one onsite, but i'd like to keep the hassle for everybody involved to a minimum, and that means using the minimum cleanroom neccessary.

This is simply a fantastic experiment. The level of precision they have acheived is phenomenal, and they should all be commended for their efforts. The fact that the experiment was cancelled is a great tragedy. These kinds of experiments are a cheap way to look for new forms of matter. They won't tell you what the new matter is, but they will tell you it's there. They do this by very accurately measuring things that are easy to measure (like the muon's magnetic moment, or "g-2"), which are changed very slightly by the presence of new matter. The complimentary experiments are The Tevatron and The Large Hadron Collider which may be able to directly produce the new kinds of matter (if the new matter isn't too heavy) and thus identify it and study its properties.

From a theoretical point of view, it is very easy to "screw up" this measurement. That is to say, if you write down a new theory that has almost any kind of new matter, it gives a contribution to the muon's g-2. This is why there was so much excitement last year when they announced a deviation from the Standard Model. One must remember however that the community's accepted standard for a "discovery" is 5 standard deviations between the measurement and the prediction. The top quark discovery had more than 5 standard deviations signal over background. I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.

Practically speaking, 2-standard deviation measurements pop up and then disappear all the time in physics. This is why we require the stringent "5-sigma" rule.

-- Bob

This is simply a fantastic experiment. The level of precision they have acheived is phenomenal, and they should all be commended for their efforts. The fact that the experiment was cancelled is a great tragedy. These kinds of experiments are a cheap way to look for new forms of matter. They won't tell you what the new matter is, but they will tell you it's there. They do this by very accurately measuring things that are easy to measure (like the muon's magnetic moment, or "g-2"), which are changed very slightly by the presence of new matter. The complimentary experiments are The Tevatron and The Large Hadron Collider which may be able to directly produce the new kinds of matter (if the new matter isn't too heavy) and thus identify it and study its properties.

From a theoretical point of view, it is very easy to "screw up" this measurement. That is to say, if you write down a new theory that has almost any kind of new matter, it gives a contribution to the muon's g-2. This is why there was so much excitement last year when they announced a deviation from the Standard Model. One must remember however that the community's accepted standard for a "discovery" is 5 standard deviations between the measurement and the prediction. The top quark discovery had more than 5 standard deviations signal over background. I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.

Practically speaking, 2-standard deviation measurements pop up and then disappear all the time in physics. This is why we require the stringent "5-sigma" rule.

-- Bob

Also, I look forward to working in Europe at some point in the next few years. If we make it difficult for their nationals to work here, then it will become more difficult for Americans to work abroad.

They're not the rent-a-cops at the mall.

damn straight - at my old college, the "guards" carry pepper spray and sticks...at the lab, the police all carry .38s loaded with wadcutters, about half the guys carry MP5s (the guys at the gate have them set to 3round, apparently Real Men don't use safties), and they have four M16s in the gate booth. and that's just what they let you see - and we aren't even a weapons lab, there's zip that terrorists would be interesting in stealing from here. if you've seen this month's national geographic, you've probably seen the DOE guard with the plutionium locker at rocky flats - i expect nothing less (M16, body armor, cold steely glare) from the gurads at Yucca .