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New Neutrino Detector Being Built In Minnesota
lithis writes "NOvA, a new neutrino detector, is being built in northern Minnesota. MPR has information on the project's funding and the International Falls Daily Journal talks about the environmental issues. This detector will complement the MINOS neutrino detector in the Soudan Underground Laboratory."
Where in the hell is "Minneosta"?
raivo pommer-www.google.ee
raimo1@hot.ee
THE Australian dollar
At the local close, it was trading at US72.45c, up from Thursday's close of US72.36c.
During the session, the unit traded between US73.24c and US72.24c.
It began the local session at a six-month high of US73.18-22c.
ICAP economist Adam Carr said risk appetite was boosted by the declining US dollar.
The safe-haven currency declined during the four-day Easter break after news that US bank Wells Fargo had posted a better-than-forecast guidance for its first-quarter earnings.
"The Aussie's tracked higher," Mr Carr said. "We've had a couple of bounces up a couple of hundred points.
"US dollar weakness has been the key thing over the Easter period. Today, we've given some of those gains back, but not a lot. Significantly, we've held over US72c."
According to Wells Fargo, it expects "record" net income, about $US3 billion ($4.1 billion) for the first three months of 2009.
Markets considered it another sign of improvement in credit and lending markets. But Mr Carr said the overnight offshore session could prove volatile for the Australian dollar.
Does it run Linux?
Is that a rhetorical question ?
It's about time someone found a use for northern Minnesota. :)
(Shout-outs to my friends at the call-center in Chisholm)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Turn your freezer on to max, and mail all the ice cubes you can manage.
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
...detecting neutrinos.
Nothing else ever happens around here.
I've been to the Soudan mine and the underground lab. Heck, I helped get them wired up. The network at the site is all fibre-optic and, except for the VAXen they still had running a few of years back, it is (or was) all very state-of-the art. The uplink, however, is a different story.
Perhaps this new project, which they've actually been working on for years, will give them the boost they need to get a fiber run from Ely. Maybe they've gotten it already. When I was working with the project, we had to run fiber to a hut on a hill, run coax to the other company's hut, microwave the signal to Tower, MN, and then run it over 11 pair of copper to Soudan.
It worked.
If you like the outdoors and like to travel, it's beautiful country up there. If you don't mind the skeeters and the black flies. The Soudan Mine is actually a state park, and during the summer months you can visit. They run tours down the mine on a regular basis. You ride a car down an incline into the mine, about a half mile down and they walk you around and show you how the mining was done. Greenstone and iron... the iron so pure you can weld to it.
If you catch the 10 am tour (double check me on that before you go) you also get a tour of the Physics lab. It puts the BatCave to shame--and yes, there are plenty of bats down there. The lab is carved out of the rock and iron of the mine and it looks like a set from a War Games or Dr. Strangelove type movie. Huge (very) steel plates hang from railings overhead, with fine fiber optic cable running through them, trying to catch a glimpse of a neutrino or two as they fly through. The neutrinos, of course, are being fired at Soudan from Fermilab in Illinois.
Worth the trip, just to see the mine, but the Physics lab is icing on the underground cake.
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/soudan_underground_mine/index.html
Professor: "I'll be teaching a class on "Quantum Neutrino Fields.'"
Fry: "Good, cuz I'm taking it, "Wanton Burrito Meals.'"
As a resident of MN, I have never seen such an apt description of my state before.
No Nova! No disassemble!
I worked on NOvA R&D years ago as an undergrad research project. It's been under construction already for several years now...
I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.
Many fewer than a few per billion. The mean free path of a neutrino is light years - in lead: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html
Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg
Control the protons - control the neutrinos.
Really. How dense can you be?