John Mayer: Free Fallin' (Live at the Nokia Theatre)

http://youtu.be/20Ov0cDPZy8

Music video by John Mayer performing Free Fallin'. (c) 2008 Sony Music Entertainment

Sarah Parcak: Archeology from space and more

 Sarah Parcak: Archeology from space

 Sarah Parcak is an archaeologist and Egyptologist, and specializes in making the invisible past visible using 21st-century satellite technology. She co-directs the Survey and Excavation Projects in the Fayoum, Sinai, and Egypt's East Delta with her husband, Dr. Greg Mumford. Parcak is the author of Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology, the first methods book on satellite archaeology, and her work has seeded several TV documentaries. She founded and directs the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

While most Google Earth hobbyists are satisfied with a bit of snapping and geotagging, some have far loftier ambitions. Satellite archaeologist Angela Micol thinks she's discovered the locations of some of Egypt's lost pyramids, buried for centuries under the earth, including a three-in-a-line arrangement similar to those on the Giza Plateau. Egyptologists have already confirmed that the secret locations are undiscovered, so now it's down to scientists in the field to determine if it's worth calling the diggers in.

ANN, Firstpost Google Earth Anomalies

Possible Egyptian Pyramids Found Using Google Earth

Worldwide LHC Computing

Grid Cafe

 Individual computers also become more powerful, which means that computer grids are increasingly able to solve increasingly complex problems. All this computing power helps our scientists find solutions to the big questions, like climate change and sustainable power.

The mission of the WLCG project is to provide global computing resources to store, distribute and analyse the ~25 Petabytes (25 million Gigabytes) of data annually generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border.

Current WLCG sites

Architecture of Trigger System

Block diagram of front-end electronics and its interface to Trigger, DAQ and Detector Control System.

Detailed descriptions of the front-end architecture can be found in the following LHCb notes:
EDMS715154, Requirements to the L1 front-end electronics.
LHCb-2001-014, Requirements to the L0 front-end electronics.
EDMS 692583, Test, time alignment, calibration and monitoring in the LHCb front-end electronics.

The HLT (High Level Trigger) have access to all data. At the 1 MHz output rate of Level-0 the remaining analogue data is digitized and all data is stored for the time needed to process the Level algorithm. This algorithm is implemented on a online trigger farm composed of up to 2000 PCs.

The HLT algorithm is divided in two sequential phases called HLT1 and HLT2. HLT1 applies a progressive, partial reconstruction seeded by the L0 candidates. Different reconstruction sequences (called alleys) with different algorithms and selection cuts are applied according to the L0 candidate type. The HLT run very complex physics tests to look for specific signatures, for instance matching tracks to hits in the muon chambers, or spotting photons through their high energy but lack of charge. Overall, from every one hundred thousand events per second they select just dizaines of events and the remaining dizaines of thousands are thrown out. We are left with only the collision events that might teach us something new about physics.

 With this telescope, Jill’s vision, and the power of open-source initiatives, we were able to globalize the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Because we don’t know what a new signal will look like, it’s hard to create an algorithm to find it, and our own eyes actually work better than computers.See:The search for cosmic company goes on

Einstein@Home

LIGO:

See:

• Info From PI-CMS Workshop on LHC and More
• The Trigger and the Parking Lot

Perseid Meteor Shower

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/ for more.

The Perseid meteor shower is underway. There's more to see than meteors, however, when the shower peaks on August 11th through 13th. The brightest planets in the solar system are lining up in the middle of the display.

Mechanical Converted Sounds of Operation

MSL Curiosity's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, with a ruler

• ChemCam: ChemCam is a suite of remote sensing instruments, including the first laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) system to be used for planetary science and a remote micro-imager (RMI).
  See also: Curiosity rover#Chemistry and Camera complex (ChemCam)

• Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS): This device can irradiate samples with alpha particles and map the spectra of X-rays that are re-emitted for determining the elemental composition of samples.
  See also: APXS)

• CheMin: CheMin is the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence instrument.
  See also: CheMin)
  
  

  
  
  See Also:
  
  Spectrometers
  
  

  • Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES)
  • Mössbauer Spectrometer (MB)
  • Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)

Sphere and Sound Waves

Don demonstrates water oscillations on a speaker in microgravity, and ZZ Top rocks the boat 250 miles above Earth.Science off the Sphere: Space Soundwaves

So of course I might wonder about cymatics in space. It 's more the idea that you could further experiment with the environment with which life on the space station may provide in opportunity. That's all.:)

There is a reason why I am presenting this blog entry.

It has to do with a comparison that came to mind about our earth and the relationship we might see to a sphere of water. Most will know from my blog the relevant topic used in terms of Isostatic adjustment in terms of planet design and formation. It is also about gravity and elemental consideration in terms of the shape of the planet.

Now sure we can expect certain things from the space environment in terms of molecular arrangement but of course my views are going much deeper in terms of the makeup of that space given the constituents of early universe formations.  So here given to states for examination I had an insight in terms of how one may arrange modularization in terms of using the space environment to capitalize.

So there is something forming in mind here about the inherent nature of the matter constituents that I may say deeper then the design itself such arrangements are predestined to become perfectly arranged according to the type of element associated with it?

 I want to be in control of that given a cloud of all constituents so that I may choose how to arrange the mattered state of existence. A planet maker perhaps?:) Design the gravity field. There are reasons for this.

Image: NASA/JPL-

Planets are round because their gravitational field acts as though it originates from the center of the body and pulls everything toward it. With its large body and internal heating from radioactive elements, a planet behaves like a fluid, and over long periods of time succumbs to the gravitational pull from its center of gravity. The only way to get all the mass as close to planet's center of gravity as possible is to form a sphere. The technical name for this process is "isostatic adjustment."

With much smaller bodies, such as the 20-kilometer asteroids we have seen in recent spacecraft images, the gravitational pull is too weak to overcome the asteroid's mechanical strength. As a result, these bodies do not form spheres. Rather they maintain irregular, fragmentary shapes.

See Also:

• Water in Zero Gravity
• Grail: Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory
• Isostatic Adjustment is Why Planets are Round?
• Universality Can Lead too, Isostatic Adjustment

Antennae Starwave Formation

Supernova explosions are enriching the intergalactic gas with elements like oxygen, iron, and silicon that will be incorporated into new generations of stars and planets X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. See: Antennae: A Galactic Spectacle

Info From PI-CMS Workshop on LHC and More

A slice of the CMS detector.

Broadly speaking, the aim of the talk is to give the theorists in the audience an
introduction to state-of-the-art reconstruction (e.g. particle flow, techniques for dealing with high pile-up, the status of tau reconstruction) and their implications for searches. A discussion of triggering (whether focused on hadronic or more general) would also be very useful. Beyond these vague suggestions, you can define the scope of the talk however you think will do best to motivate, focus, and inform discussions about possible future analyses. The theorists in the audience will have a mix of BSM and SM expertise, and a somewhat more appetite than average for experimental details. See: Jet Reconstruction and Triggering

A block diagram of the CMS L1 trigger

 In particle physics, a trigger is a system that uses simple criteria to rapidly decide which events in a particle detector to keep when only a small fraction of the total can be recorded. Trigger systems are necessary due to real-world limitations in data storage capacity and rates. Since experiments are typically searching for "interesting" events (such as decays of rare particles) that occur at a relatively low rate, trigger systems are used to identify the events that should be recorded for later analysis. Current accelerators have event rates greater than 1 MHz and trigger rates that can be below 10 Hz. The ratio of the trigger rate to the event rate is referred to as the selectivity of the trigger. For example, the Large Hadron Collider has an event rate of 1 GHz (10⁹ Hz), and the Higgs boson is expected to be produced there at a rate of at least 0.01 Hz. Therefore the minimum selectivity required is 10⁻¹¹.Taking A Closer Look

Trigger system

To have a good chance of producing a rare particle, such as a Higgs boson, a very large number of collisions are required. Most collision events in the detector are "soft" and do not produce interesting effects. The amount of raw data from each crossing is approximately 1 MB, which at the 40 MHz crossing rate would result in 40 TB of data a second, an amount that the experiment cannot hope to store or even process properly. The trigger system reduces the rate of interesting events down to a manageable 100 per second.

To accomplish this, a series of "trigger" stages are employed. All the data from each crossing is held in buffers within the detector while a small amount of key information is used to perform a fast, approximate calculation to identify features of interest such as high energy jets, muons or missing energy. This "Level 1" calculation is completed in around 1 µs, and event rate is reduced by a factor of about thousand down to 50 kHz. All these calculations are done on fast, custom hardware using reprogrammable FPGAs.

If an event is passed by the Level 1 trigger all the data still buffered in the detector is sent over fibre-optic links to the "High Level" trigger, which is software (mainly written in C++) running on ordinary computer servers. The lower event rate in the High Level trigger allows time for much more detailed analysis of the event to be done than in the Level 1 trigger. The High Level trigger reduces the event rate by a further factor of about a thousand down to around 100 events per second. These are then stored on tape for future analysis.

See Also: 

• PI-CMS Workshop on LHC Search Strategies
• A Real Workshop
• The Trigger: Discarding All But the Gold

Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity

 Sabine Hossenfelder "ESQG Summary and Outlook"

Talk on 16 July 2010 at the workshop "Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity", 12-16 July, 2010, at Nordita in Stockholm, Sweden.

http://www.nordita.org/esqg2010

See Also:

Bee Writes:I like this example of neutral Kaon oscillations because it demonstrates so clearly that quantum gravitational effects are not necessarily too small to be detected in experiments, and it is likely we'll hear more about this in the soon future.Neutral Kaons and Quantum Gravity Phenomenology

The KLOE detector on the DAFNE interaction region (INFN - Frascati National Laboratories)

DAFNE or DAΦNE, the Double Annular Φ Factory for Nice Experiments, is an electron-positron collider at the INFN Frascati National Laboratory in Frascati, Italy. Since 1999 it has been colliding electrons and positrons at a center of mass energy of 1.02 GeV to create phi (φ) mesons. 85% of these decay into kaons (K), whose physics is the subject of most of the experiments at DAFNE.
There are five experiments at DAFNE:

• KLOE, or K LOng Experiment, which has been studying CP violation in kaon decays and rare kaon decays since 2000. This is the largest of DAFNE experiments.
• FINUDA, or FIsica NUcleare a DAFNE, studies the spectra and nonmesonic decays of Lambda (Λ)-hypernuclei produced by negatively charged kaons (K−) striking a thin target.
• DEAR, or DAFNE Exotic Atoms Research experiment, determines scattering lengths in atoms made from a kaon and a proton or deuteron.
• DAFNE Light Laboratory consists of 3 lines of synchrotron radiation emitted by DAFNE, a fourth is under construction.
• SIDDHARTA, or SIlicon Drift Detectors for Hadronic Atom Research by Timing Application, aims to improve the precision measurements of X-ray transitions in kaon atoms studied at DEAR.

 See: Neutral kaon interferometry at KLOE and KLOE-2