Good to see a comment from somebody who's particularly well-informed about this. Unfortunately, it seems that Ninov's work in Germany has been besmirched. GSI people allegedly found fabricated data in their experiments, too. As this article in Nature says:
'The European Physical Journal A article alleges that there were two instances in which raw data from the earlier experiments did not match the published results. Results "were spuriously created", wrote GSI physicist Sigurd Hofmann, lead author in all three articles. But the discovery of elements 111 and 112 still stands, he wrote.'
Um... the kitty litter flushing line was facetious.
The points of the article are: a) otters are dying of a parasitic infection. b) this parasite is found almost exclusively in cat feces. c) otters are more likely to be infected near sources of waste water runoff. The authors then conclude that cat fecal contamination of waste water is a likely culprit of otter deaths. I think that's a story. Why don't you?
Even with 15% efficiency solar cells, you probably wouldn't be able to power a laptop or extend its battery life appreciably. The point I was trying to make was that even if this stuff were cheap, and did last, and were easy to bond with computer cases (none of which is obvious), it would still be useless because of this.
If I recall correctly, commercial solar cells are about 15% efficient -- that is, if you focus 100 Watts of white light on them, you get at most 15 Watts of electrical power out.
It was Big News earlier this year when an organic solar cell broke the 2% efficiency barrier (though it's still below 2% for sunlight.) And that's with a material specifically engineered to be an efficient solar cell.
This stuff, optimized to shine light rather than absorb it, is probably considerably less efficient. Maybe by an order of magnitude even. Combine that with the impracticality of charging your laptop even with commercial solar cells, and you've got a non-starter. Perhaps after several more generations of research this will have some use, but not now.
Though this issue is a bit overhyped, once in a while, the Navy does kill a few whales. For instance, in March, 2000, 17 beaked whales died due to getting battered with sonar. (Link to NOAA press release here.)
There questions whether the race with the Russians (lab in Dubna) caused the error, through carelessness or something else. But now that it looks like one person fabricated the whole thing, that scenario is looking rather unlikely.
If the Russians were close behind and Berkeley simply made up properties for the element, it's highly unlikely they'd get any credit when the Russian scientists *really* found 118 and saw that its properties were quite different than what Berkeley announced.
The $30 billion dollar figure is an Andersen-quality accounting trick. It doesn't include lots of costs that go into building the station, including those of getting the people and equipment into space.
This is a letter that the GAO wrote regarding NASA's accounting practices, and this is GAO's independent estimate of costs: $94 b. (Both.pdf files>
Congress isn't behind the ISS; they almost killed it at one point. It was NASA (read Dan Goldin) and the executive branch (read Bill Clinton) that were to blame.
Shuttle flights were getting old and hard to justify. NASA needed a mission, and they can't go to Mars -- and the ISS was just what the doctor ordered to keep the shuttle fleet alive and give NASA a 20-year manned spaceflight mission.
The executive branch saw an opportunity to funnel money to Russia. Of course, most of the money wound up paying for expensive mansions around Star City, but, hey, you expect a little corruption in a cleptocracy.
NASA hyped the project to the point where congressmen were convinced the ISS would cure prostate cancer (literally -- a statement like this is in the congressional record.) They lied about costs, fiddled with the accounting, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
It's a shame, because NASA does good science (in their umanned program), but Congress is not to blame.
Actually, the absence of gravity isn't really what it's cracked up to be. The vibrations aboard the ISS are much more severe than the specs, messing up the microgravity environment.
Even if you get beyond that problem, it's quite controversial whether the crystal-growth program or biological studies will yield any significant benefits, especially if you look at the cost/benefit ratio.
It *is* useful for learning about the effects of low gravity on the human body, but what can it do that Mir couldn't?
They didn't put it in the article because most science reporters don't understand physics, unfortunately.
And your confusion about whether MINOS is a repeat of SNO is quite understandable -- and also due to shoddy journalism. In the obsession over neutrino mass, almost nobody got the real news from SNO, which has to do with neutrino "mixing angles." (See
#3848535
which I posted anonymously this morning -- couldn't be arsed to log in.:) )
MINOS, along with a few other experiments, like K2K, are pinning down those mixing angles. (Plus they get an extra-clean signal b/c they control the source of neutrinos as well as the target.)
This is very cool science, but it's way too technical for most journalists to understand. And sadly, even if they *did* understand, they would have a tough time getting the space to explain it to the readers.
You're right that you'd probably learn more about SNs than about neutrinos, but you can learn about neutrinos from a SN. For instance, when you look at the ratios of the different flavors of neutrinos that come out, you can figure out some of their properties, such as their relative masses. (And it's about three local SN per century, rather than one, which means that there's a reasonable chance of seeing one during a research career.)
You're right that even massless things are deflected by curved spacetime, so it's a bad definition of mass.
Neutrino mass is just like the mass of an electron -- or the mass of a brick. You can think of it as the resistance to acceleration by an outside force. The difference is that neutrino masses are inferred without seeing the neutrino accelerate.
The process in question is neutrino oscillation; basically, the neutrino changes flavors from, say, a muon neutrino to a tau neutrino. This oscillation phenomenon comes from a weird mismatch between how the neutrino behaves under different conditions -- and one of those conditions requires mass. So seeing neutrino oscillations implies that neutrinos have mass.
Short answer: neutrinos do contribute to dark matter, but not all that much.
Long answer: There's two types of dark matter. Ordinary, or "baryonic" dark matter, is made of hydrogen, helium, and other types of matter we encounter every day. The second is "exotic" dark matter that is made of everything else: neutrinos and perhaps yet undiscovered neutral particles like axions or neutralinos.
Scientists know how much ordinary matter there is in the universe from various measurements (abundances of elements, features in the cosmic background radiation). About 5% of the "stuff" in the universe is ordinary matter -- and about 90% of that is dark.
However, those observations also show that there's considerably more mass than ordinary matter; an additional 30% of the "stuff" in the universe is "exotic." Neutrinos fall into that category, but unfortunately, they don't account for all that much because too many of them would mess up the formation of stars and galaxies. They're "hot" matter because they move so quickly, while models greatly prefer "cold" dark matter. The best candidate is a light supersymmetric particle that hasn't been discovered yet.
Slashdot Mirror
'The European Physical Journal A article alleges that there were two instances in which raw data from the earlier experiments did not match the published results. Results "were spuriously created", wrote GSI physicist Sigurd Hofmann, lead author in all three articles. But the discovery of elements 111 and 112 still stands, he wrote.'
Intramural penguin football. Dar Gibson was a star punter. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a 65-pound Emperor between the uprights?)
The points of the article are: a) otters are dying of a parasitic infection. b) this parasite is found almost exclusively in cat feces. c) otters are more likely to be infected near sources of waste water runoff. The authors then conclude that cat fecal contamination of waste water is a likely culprit of otter deaths. I think that's a story. Why don't you?
Even with 15% efficiency solar cells, you probably wouldn't be able to power a laptop or extend its battery life appreciably. The point I was trying to make was that even if this stuff were cheap, and did last, and were easy to bond with computer cases (none of which is obvious), it would still be useless because of this.
It was Big News earlier this year when an organic solar cell broke the 2% efficiency barrier (though it's still below 2% for sunlight.) And that's with a material specifically engineered to be an efficient solar cell.
This stuff, optimized to shine light rather than absorb it, is probably considerably less efficient. Maybe by an order of magnitude even. Combine that with the impracticality of charging your laptop even with commercial solar cells, and you've got a non-starter. Perhaps after several more generations of research this will have some use, but not now.
Though this issue is a bit overhyped, once in a while, the Navy does kill a few whales. For instance, in March, 2000, 17 beaked whales died due to getting battered with sonar. (Link to NOAA press release here.)
If the Russians were close behind and Berkeley simply made up properties for the element, it's highly unlikely they'd get any credit when the Russian scientists *really* found 118 and saw that its properties were quite different than what Berkeley announced.
... this means they might lose Lance Bass too.
The $30 billion dollar figure is an Andersen-quality accounting trick. It doesn't include lots of costs that go into building the station, including those of getting the people and equipment into space. This is a letter that the GAO wrote regarding NASA's accounting practices, and this is GAO's independent estimate of costs: $94 b. (Both .pdf files>
Sorry about the bold tag; meant to hit [p] instead. I'll preview next time.
Congress isn't behind the ISS; they almost killed it at one point. It was NASA (read Dan Goldin) and the executive branch (read Bill Clinton) that were to blame. Shuttle flights were getting old and hard to justify. NASA needed a mission, and they can't go to Mars -- and the ISS was just what the doctor ordered to keep the shuttle fleet alive and give NASA a 20-year manned spaceflight mission. The executive branch saw an opportunity to funnel money to Russia. Of course, most of the money wound up paying for expensive mansions around Star City, but, hey, you expect a little corruption in a cleptocracy. NASA hyped the project to the point where congressmen were convinced the ISS would cure prostate cancer (literally -- a statement like this is in the congressional record.) They lied about costs, fiddled with the accounting, and now the chickens have come home to roost. It's a shame, because NASA does good science (in their umanned program), but Congress is not to blame.
Even if you get beyond that problem, it's quite controversial whether the crystal-growth program or biological studies will yield any significant benefits, especially if you look at the cost/benefit ratio.
It *is* useful for learning about the effects of low gravity on the human body, but what can it do that Mir couldn't?
And your confusion about whether MINOS is a repeat of SNO is quite understandable -- and also due to shoddy journalism. In the obsession over neutrino mass, almost nobody got the real news from SNO, which has to do with neutrino "mixing angles." (See #3848535 which I posted anonymously this morning -- couldn't be arsed to log in. :) )
MINOS, along with a few other experiments, like K2K, are pinning down those mixing angles. (Plus they get an extra-clean signal b/c they control the source of neutrinos as well as the target.)
This is very cool science, but it's way too technical for most journalists to understand. And sadly, even if they *did* understand, they would have a tough time getting the space to explain it to the readers.
You're right that you'd probably learn more about SNs than about neutrinos, but you can learn about neutrinos from a SN. For instance, when you look at the ratios of the different flavors of neutrinos that come out, you can figure out some of their properties, such as their relative masses. (And it's about three local SN per century, rather than one, which means that there's a reasonable chance of seeing one during a research career.)
You're right that even massless things are deflected by curved spacetime, so it's a bad definition of mass. Neutrino mass is just like the mass of an electron -- or the mass of a brick. You can think of it as the resistance to acceleration by an outside force. The difference is that neutrino masses are inferred without seeing the neutrino accelerate. The process in question is neutrino oscillation; basically, the neutrino changes flavors from, say, a muon neutrino to a tau neutrino. This oscillation phenomenon comes from a weird mismatch between how the neutrino behaves under different conditions -- and one of those conditions requires mass. So seeing neutrino oscillations implies that neutrinos have mass.
Short answer: neutrinos do contribute to dark matter, but not all that much. Long answer: There's two types of dark matter. Ordinary, or "baryonic" dark matter, is made of hydrogen, helium, and other types of matter we encounter every day. The second is "exotic" dark matter that is made of everything else: neutrinos and perhaps yet undiscovered neutral particles like axions or neutralinos. Scientists know how much ordinary matter there is in the universe from various measurements (abundances of elements, features in the cosmic background radiation). About 5% of the "stuff" in the universe is ordinary matter -- and about 90% of that is dark. However, those observations also show that there's considerably more mass than ordinary matter; an additional 30% of the "stuff" in the universe is "exotic." Neutrinos fall into that category, but unfortunately, they don't account for all that much because too many of them would mess up the formation of stars and galaxies. They're "hot" matter because they move so quickly, while models greatly prefer "cold" dark matter. The best candidate is a light supersymmetric particle that hasn't been discovered yet.