The Einstein Factor

The Einstein Factor
The curiosity of the greatest thinker of our time.
By Walter Isaacson

Not Always an EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein arrived in America at age 54, pulling into New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland on October 17, 1933, an official greeting committee was waiting for him. Einstein and his entourage, however, were nowhere to be found.

Abraham Flexner, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was obsessed with shielding his celebrity professor from publicity. So he'd sent a tugboat to spirit the great man away from the Westernland as soon as it cleared quarantine. His hair poking out from a wide-brimmed black hat, Einstein surreptitiously disembarked onto the tug, which ferried him and his party to lower Manhattan, where a car would whisk them to Princeton. "All Dr. Einstein wants is to be left in peace and quiet," Flexner told reporters.

Actually, Einstein also wanted a newspaper and an ice cream cone. As soon as he checked into Princeton's Peacock Inn, he walked over to a newsstand, bought a newspaper and chuckled at the headlines about his mysterious whereabouts. Then he entered a local ice cream parlor and ordered a cone. The waitress making change for him declared, "This one goes in my memory book"

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his contribution to theoretical physics, Einstein was given an office at the institute. He was asked what equipment he needed. "A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils," he replied. "Oh, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes."

He and Elsa, his wife, rented a house and settled into life in Princeton. He liked the fact that America, despite its inequalities of wealth and racial injustices, was more of a meritocracy than Europe. "What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people," he would later marvel. "No one humbles himself before another person."

The lack of stifling traditions, he noted, encouraged more of the sort of creativity he'd relished as a student in Europe, where his constant questioning of established wisdom led to the special theory of relativity, as well as the best-known equation in all of physics: E=mc2. Einstein, however, was no Einstein when he was a child.

Growing up in Munich, Germany, the first of two children of Hermann and Pauline Einstein, he was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he recalled, "that they consulted a doctor."

Even when he began using words after age two, he developed a quirk that prompted his nursemaid to dub him the dopey one. "Every sentence he uttered, no matter how routine," recalled his younger sister, Maja, "he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips." His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one German schoolmaster to send him packing. Another declared that Einstein would never amount to much.

"When I ask myself how it happened that I discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance," Einstein later explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

Encouraged by his genial father, who ran a family business, and his music-loving mother, Einstein spent hours working on puzzles and building towers with toys. "Persistence and tenacity were part of his character," his sister remarked.

Once, when Einstein was sick in bed as a preschooler, his father brought him a compass. Einstein later remembered being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and grew cold. The magnetic needle behaved as if influenced by a hidden force field, rather than through a mechanical method of touch or contact. "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things," he said.

He marveled at magnetic fields, gravity, inertia and light beams. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted and to delight when he saw an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend years later. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

Contrary to widespread belief, Einstein excelled at math. By the age of 13, "he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic," his sister recalled. An uncle, Jakob Einstein, an engineer, introduced him to the joys of algebra, calling it a "merry science," and whenever Einstein triumphed, he "was overcome with happiness."

From his reading of popular science books, which showed him that "much in the Bible could not be true," Einstein developed a resistance to all forms of dogma. As he wrote in 1901, "A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."

At age 15, Einstein left Germany for northern Italy, where his parents relocated their business, and at 16, he wrote his first essay on theoretical physics. By then, he was a head-turning teenager who possessed "masculine good looks of the type that played havoc at the turn of the century," according to a woman who knew him. He was sensuous and sassy, with many romantic relationships over the years.

Einstein's discovery of special relativity, after he graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, involved an intuition based on intellectual as well as personal experience. He developed the theory starting in 1905, after taking a job at the Swiss patent office. But his theory was not fully accepted until 1919, when observations made during a solar eclipse confirmed his prediction of how much the gravity of the sun would bend light beams.

"Lights All Askew in the Heavens," The New York Times headlined. "Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs."

At age 40, in 1919, Einstein was suddenly world famous. He was also married to Elsa, his second wife, and was the father of two sons from his first marriage. By spring 1921, his exploding global fame led to a grand two-month procession through parts of the United States, evoking mass frenzy. The world had never seen such a scientific celebrity superstar.

Dozens of reporters and cameramen rushed aboard his ship. "I can't do that," Einstein protested when told he should lead a press conference. "It's like undressing in public." But he could, and he did. After posing for pictures, he held a press briefing with all the wit and charm of a big-city mayor. When a reporter asked for a one-sentence description of the theory of relativity, Einstein replied, "All my life I have been trying to get it into one book. And he wants me to state it in one sentence!" But he gave a simple overview: "It's a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation."

A reporter asked Elsa if she understood relativity. "Oh, no," she replied. "It is not necessary to my happiness." Later that week, some 10,000 spectators gathered outside city hall to hear speeches. Einstein got a "tumultuous greeting." As he left, "he was lifted to the shoulders of his colleagues in the automobile," the New York Evening Post reported, "which passed through a roar of cheering voices."

On April 25, Einstein paid a visit to the White House to meet with President Warren G. Harding. Afterward he attended a reception at the National Academy of Sciences, where he listened to long, boring speeches. As the evening droned on, he turned to a Dutch diplomat and said, "I've just developed a new theory of eternity."

In Hartford, Connecticut, 15,000 spectators lined his parade route. In Cleveland, several thousand thronged the Union train depot, and a cadre of Jewish war veterans in uniform led a parade of 200 honking horns.

Einstein loved America, appreciating that its bursts of exuberance were the result of freedom and individualism. In March 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany, Einstein realized he could no longer live in Europe. By that fall, he'd settled in Princeton, and by 1940, he was a naturalized citizen, proud to call himself an American.

The Harmony of Nature and Math
His first Halloween living in this country, Einstein disarmed some astonished trick-or-treaters by serenading them at the door with his violin. At Christmas, when members of a local church came by to sing carols, he stepped outside, borrowed a violin and merrily accompanied them.
Einstein soon acquired an image, which grew into a near legend, of being a kindly professor, distracted at times but unfailingly sweet, who rarely combed his hair or wore socks. "I've reached an age when, if somebody tells me to wear socks, I don't have to," he told some local children.

He had also adapted to the role Elsa played, that of a wife who could be both doting and demanding. He gave in to her nagging that he smoked too much, and on Thanksgiving bet her that he would be able to abstain from his pipe until the New Year.

When she boasted of this to friends, Einstein grumbled, "I am no longer a slave to my pipe, but I am a slave to that woman." He kept his word, but "he got up at daylight on New Year's morning, and he hasn't had his pipe out of his mouth except to eat and sleep," Elsa reported.

The greatest source of friction for him came from Flexner's desire to protect him from publicity. Einstein once sent a letter with his return address as "Concentration Camp, Princeton." He proposed ending his relationship with the institute if the meddling continued. Finally Einstein won his battle. Every day he'd shuffle freely from his house on Mercer Street to his office.

He once helped a 15-year-old student, Henry Rosso, with a journalism class. Rosso's teacher had offered a top grade to anyone scoring an interview with the scientist, so Rosso showed up at the Einstein home, only to be rebuffed at the door. The milkman gave him a tip: Einstein walked a certain route each morning at 9:30. Rosso snuck out of school and accosted him.

But the student, flummoxed, didn't know what to ask. So Einstein suggested questions about math. "I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out [its] mathematical structure," Einstein explained about his own education. "It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life."
The interview earned Henry Rosso an A.

Nuclear bomb tests help to identify fake whisky

Radioactive material flung into the atmosphere by nuclear bomb tests is helping scientists to fight the multi-million pound trade in counterfeit antique malt whisky--By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Bottles of vintage whisky can sell for thousands of pounds each, but industry experts claim the market has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit that was made just a few years ago.

Scientists have found, however, that minute levels of radioactive carbon absorbed by the barley as it grew before it was harvested to make the whisky can betray how old it is.

Researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which is funded by the National Environmental Research Council, discovered that they could pinpoint the date a whisky was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.
They can also use natural background levels of radioactivity to identify whiskies that were made in earlier centuries.

Dr Tom Higham, deputy director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said: "It is easy to tell if whisky is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature.

"With whiskies that are older, we can get a range of dates but we can usually tell which century it came from. The earliest whisky we have dated came from the 1700s and most have been from 19th century.

"So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whisky."

The technique the scientists use is known as radiocarbon dating and is more commonly used by archaeologists to date ancient fragments of bone and wood.

It relies upon the fact that all living organisms absorb low levels of a radioactive isotope known as carbon 14, a heavy form of carbon which is present in low levels in the atmosphere.

After death, levels of this isotope in animal and plant remains will slowly decay away, meaning scientists can estimate their age from the amount of carbon 14 that remains in the sample.
Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon 14 in the atmosphere rise around the world and so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated.

Most of the tests on whiskies have been conducted for the Scotch Whisky Research Institute, which is responsible for analysing the authenticity of Scotch malt whisky.

Phials of whisky extracted from the antique bottles are sent to the laboratory in Oxford, where the scientists burn the liquid and bombard the resulting gas with electrically charged particles so they can measure the quantities of carbon 14 in the sample.

In one recent case, a bottle of 1856 Macallan Rare Reserve, which was expected to sell for up to £20,000, was withdrawn from auction at Christies after the scientists found it had actually been produced in 1950.

David Williamson, from the Scotch Whisky Association, said: "The collectors' market has been growing and the SWA would strongly recommend any prospective buyer takes steps to satisfy themselves as to the product's provenance.

"A range of authenticity tests can be carried out on the liquid and packaging and occasionally, radio carbon dating techniques have been used to assist assessments of the liquid's age."

“World’s Fastest Camera” Snaps 6 Million Pictures in a Single Second

Optics researchers have invented a camera that uses infrared lasers to bounce light off an object, and say the result should leave shutterbugs with a serious case of technology envy. Their device can take 6.1 million pictures in a single second, at a shutter speed of 440 trillionths of a second. Light itself moves just a fraction of a centimeter in that time…. “It’s the world’s fastest camera” [Wired], says study coauthor Keisuke Goda.

Conventional digital cameras use charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to take a picture. The devices contain semiconducting chips that … produce electrons in response to light. The electrons are read off the chip and their signals are then electronically amplified and encoded as a digital image [Nature News]. But that process has its limits. Top-notch conventional cameras top out at about 30 frames per second, while the fanciest scientific instruments can take about one million frames per second. For Goda and his colleagues, that just wasn’t fast enough.

To make the serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) camera, described in an article in Nature, researchers fired an infrared laser beam and spread out the light pulse to form a spectral pattern. As demonstrated in a video explaining how STEAM works, the researchers then shine this light onto the object they want to photograph. This means that different parts of the object are illuminated by different wavelengths of light. The reflected light is fed through a special fibre-optic cable that makes different wavelengths travel at different speeds. Longer wavelengths move to the front of the line, while shorter ones fall to the rear. The stream of light is amplified and then read out by a single photodetector [Nature News]. The photodetector records when each wavelength arrives, and that simple data set is used to reconstructs an image of the object.

The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably. “I would imagine that STEAM would be useful for any scientist,” Goda says [Nature News].

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LaserBrain -Hacking the Most Amazing, Sophisticated System Ever to Exist: Us

Scientists are using lasers to directly control parts of primate brains - and not just the crude Ming the Merciless "Point a laser gun and tell them what to do" method, where initial apparent successes are overshadowed by the way your entire base blows up.

Instead, MIT scientists direct a tightly focused laser pulse onto neurons in primate brains, which is a wonderful way of phrasing it without actually saying "Sawed open monkey skulls." You can't just poke any old neuron with coherent light to make it dance, though, unless you're prepared to turn up the power and count "burning to death" as a very specific tango.

Selected cells are pre-infected with a genetically engineered virus which causes them to glow blue, and makes them susceptible to external light switching certain channels on and off. External light isn't normally an issue inside a skull, which is where the laser beam comes in. So we've got genetic engineering, mental lasers, and even brain cells which actually glow blue (which anything with a LED will tell you is the smartest and most modern color) - never mind revolutions in optogenetic neurology, this is what Lex Luthor's origin story would be if we was written today.

The technique's power comes from the highly selective infection and the tight control of laser beams, compared to previous chemical and electrical attempts at brain control - which might have been slightly more advanced than trepanation (aka "knocking a hole in the skull with a chisel"), but suffered similar side-effects of affecting all the cells around the target area.

Expect some spectacularly stupid scaremongering as news of this breakthrough leaks through the internet, with self-appointed "experts" barely reading through the headline before launching into anti-mind-control crusades. This technique could revolutionize fields such as depression and addiction therapy, but it needs injections, optics, and a little thing called direct access to your brain in a specialist facility. At which point they don't need to control you anyway - they're got you. Nobody's beaming control signals through your TV unless it's capable of emitting laser beams and burning right through your eye into the cortex - and let's face it, if a mysterious "they" had weapons like that you'd obey them, hypno-beams or not.

Instead, this incredible breakthrough will lead to great advances in hacking the most amazing, sophisticated system ever to exist: us.

CIA's Kryptos -Does it Hold The Key to the Sequel to "The Da Vinci Code"?

One of the few uncracked codes at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia is found in Kryptos, a wonder of technology, a sculpture sitting in a sunny corner of the headquarters courtyard.

"EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ" is the first line of the Kryptos sculpture, a 10-foot-tall, S-shaped copper scroll perforated with 3-inch-high letters spelling out words in code resembling a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer. Completed 15 years ago, Kryptos, which is Greek for "hidden," at first attracted interest from government code breakers who deciphered the easier parts without announcing their findings publicly.

The main sculpture is made of red granite, red and green slate, white quartz, petrified wood, lodestone and copper, and is located in the northwest corner of the headquarters courtyard.
The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This "inscription" contains four separate enigmatic messages, each apparently encrypted with a different cipher.

Mystery lovers around the world have joined members of the national-security establishment in trying to crack the rest. So far, neither amateurs nor pros have been able to crack the code.
The latest scramble was set off by "The Da Vinci Code," the worldwide bestseller about a modern-day search for the Holy Grail. On the book's dust jacket, author Dan Brown placed clues that hint at Kryptos's significance. The main one is a set of geographic coordinates that roughly locate the sculpture.

A game at www.thedavincicode.com suggested that Kryptos is a clue to the subject of Mr. Brown's as-yet-unpublished next novel, "The Solomon Key."

Kryptos devotees are intrigued by the three passages that have been deciphered so far. They appear to offer clues to solving the sculpture's fourth passage, and possibly to locating something buried.Some devotees believe Kryptos holds profound significance as a portal into the wisdom of the ancients.

Sculptor James Sanborn, Kryptos's creator, says he wrote or adapted all three. In addition to deliberate misspellings, there are letters slightly higher than others on the same line. The first reads, "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion."

The second passage, more provocative and mysterious, reads: "It was totally invisible. How's that possible? They used the Earth's magnetic field. The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location. Does Langley know about this? They should: it's buried out there somewhere." That passage is followed by geographic coordinates that suggest a location elsewhere on the CIA campus.

The third decoded passage is based on a diary entry by archaeologist Howard Carter, on the day in 1922 when he discovered the tomb of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamen.

It reads in part, "With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. Can you see anything?"

Other possible clues are contained in smaller parts of the work scattered around the CIA grounds. Made of red granite and sheets of copper, these are tattooed with Morse code that spells out phrases like "virtually invisible." In addition, a compass needle carved onto one of the rocks is pulled off due north by a lodestone that Mr. Sanborn placed nearby.

Experts say the unsolved fourth passage -- known to insiders as "K4" -- is written in a more complex and difficult code than the first three, one designed to mask patterns of recurring letters that code breakers look for.

Sanborn, who lives and works in Washington, has exhibited around the world, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art. His more recent work has focused on the early development of atomic weapons, employing actual equipment from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons
Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons is a detective story about a secret society that wants to destroy the Vatican using an antimatter bomb. In the book, the antimatter is stolen from CERN.

The Physics of Angels & Demons

Scientists have had to spend a lot of time reassuring to the public that they're not Cobra Commander, out to annihilate the Earth with anti-matter black-hole projectors. Which is totally wasted time, because even if they were that's exactly what they'd tell us anyway. The LHC spent ages assuaging space-time fears (triggered by reporters who have to copy and paste the word "neutrino", and a botanist who's spent more time answering criminal charges than accelerating particles). Now, because of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons, the scientists at CERN have to explain that they're not about to blow anyone up.

The fact that antimatter can create huge explosions is accurate, a rarity in Dan Brown novels. Antimatter meeting matter isn't even called an explosion, it's called "annihilation", and this is in scientific circles who refer to thermonuclear detonations as "events." The energy released is the mass times the speed of light squared, and which means one kilogram gets you ninety quadrillion joules - two thousand times the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The problem is, if your terrorist organisation has a kilogram of antimatter you're invincible anyway - because you can fly past security checkpoints on your quantum unicorns and hypnotize targets using The Force. We can only make a few trillion anti-particles at a time, which does sound like the sort of thing Dr Evil would threaten the UN with until you realise that even half a gram is three hundred sextillion atoms. And that's not even counting how each of those atoms is many, many particles. Oh, by the way, a sextillion is a trillion times bigger than a billion.

See? Even trying to describe how impossible the antimatter bomb is, the comparison numbers start to sound stupid. Short form: if would takes us two billion years to make enough antimatter to blow up the Holy See, and you can safely assume that something else would have happened to him in that time anyway - up to and including the re-evolution of dinosaurs.

If you've got a half gram of antimatter you don't need to blow up the Vatican anyway: it costs sixty two trillion dollars a milligram to make so you're sitting on thirty-one quadrillion dollars. There isn't even three quadrillion on the planet. You can just buy the place and evict them, and by "the place" we mean "Earth."

Oh, and did we mention how you'd have to be driving something the size of a tank to contain the Penning trap, vacuum systems and power supplies involved? You can't fit a fuse on antimatter - if even the air touches it, you and everything else you can see will be kissing gamma rays before you know anything's happened.

So it's a total Cobra Commander plan - sure, it could work, if you had impossible resources that would enable you to enact a million easier options anyway. Why has the story caught public attention? Why, because Scientists Are Bad, of course! Nuclear is boring and hippies destroying food crops doesn't make genetic modification look scary enough, so antimatter is the next big one. It's the biggest and baddest science-boom until someone works out how to garrote people with a superstring, and nobody cares if it's impossible.

Questions about the technologies used in the story. Answers From CERN.

Does CERN exist?
Well, yes, it does. You can see us to the left and slightly up from the centre of the city of Meyrin.

Is it located in Switzerland?
Part is in Switzerland, part in France across the border. CERN is not a Swiss institute, but an international organization. We are very close to Geneva's international airport.

What does the acronym CERN mean?
That is a long story, but the name CERN is derived from the French ‘Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire’.
Does it consist of red brick buildings with white-frocked scientists running around carrying files?
No, that is rather far from reality; we have mostly white buildings made of concrete and the scientists wear everyday clothes and they mostly do not carry files.

Was the Web really invented at CERN as the book states?
Yes, indeed, the Web came from CERN, invented here by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Does antimatter exist?
Yes, it does, and we produce it routinely at CERN. Antimatter was predicted by P.A.M. Dirac in 1928 and the first antiparticles were discovered soon after by Carl Anderson. CERN is not the only research institute to produce and study antimatter.

How is antimatter contained?
It is very difficult to contain antimatter, because any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation.

For electrically charged antimatter particles we know how to contain them by using ‘electromagnetic traps’. These traps make it possible to contain up to about 1012 (anti-) particles of the same charge. However, like charges repel each other. So it is not possible to store a much larger quantity of e.g. antiprotons because the repulsive forces between them would become too strong for the electromagnetic fields to hold them away from the walls.

For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no grip on the particles at all. Scientists work on ideas to use ‘magnetic bottles’ (with inhomogeneous magnetic fields acting on the magnetic moment), or ‘optical traps’ (using lasers) but this is still under development.

What is the future use of antimatter?
Anti-electrons (positrons) are already used in PET scanners in medicine (Positron-Emission Tomography = PET). One day it might be even possible to use antiprotons for tumour irradiation.
But antimatter at CERN is mainly used to study the laws of nature. We focus on the question of the symmetry between matter and antimatter. The LHCb experiment will compare precisely the decay of b-quarks and anti-b-quarks. Eventually we also hope to be able to use anti-hydrogen atoms as high-precision tools.

Do antimatter atoms exist?
The team of the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN made the first anti-hydrogen atoms in 1995. Then, in 2002 two experiments (ATHENA and ATRAP) managed to produce tens of thousands of antihydrogen atoms, later even millions. However, although "tens of thousands" may sound a lot, it's really a very, very small amount. You would need 10,000,000,000,000,000 times that amount to have enough anti-hydrogen gas to fill a toy balloon! If we could somehow store our daily production, it would take us several billion years to fill the balloon. But the universe has been around for only 13.7 billion years...So the Angels and Demons scenario is pure fiction.

Can we hope to use antimatter as a source of energy? Do you feel antimatter could power vehicles in the future, or would it just be used for major power sources?
There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy ‘source’. Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature; we first have to make every single antiparticle, and we have to invest (much) more energy than we get back during annihilation.

You can imagine antimatter as a storage medium for energy, much like you store electricity in rechargeable batteries. The process of charging the battery is reversible with relatively small loss. Still, it takes more energy to charge the battery than you get back.

The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.

I was hoping antimatter would be the future answer to our energy needs. It seems more research is needed for this to happen.

No, even more research will not change this situation fundamentally; antimatter is certainly not able to solve our energy problems. First of all, you need energy to make antimatter (E=mc2) and unfortunately you do not get the same amount of energy back out of it. (See above, the loss factors are enormous.)

Furthermore, the conversion from energy to matter and antimatter particles follows certain laws of nature, which also allow the production of many other, but very short-lived particles and antiparticles (e.g. muons, pions, neutrinos). These particles decay rapidly during the production process, and their energy is lost.

Antimatter could only become a source of energy if you happened to find a large amount of antimatter lying around somewhere (e.g. in a distant galaxy), in the same way we find oil and oxygen lying around on Earth. But as far as we can see (billions of light years), the universe is entirely made of normal matter, and antimatter has to be painstakingly created.

By the way, this shows that the symmetry between matter and antimatter as stated above does not seem to hold at very high energies, such as shortly after the Big Bang, as otherwise there should be as much matter as antimatter in the Universe. Future research might tell us is how this asymmetry came about.

Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.

Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.

Why has antimatter received no media attention?
It has received a lot of media attention, but usually in the scientific press. Also, antimatter is not ‘new’. Antiparticles have been known and studied for 75 years. What is new is the possibility to produce anti-hydrogen atoms, but this is also mainly a matter of scientific interest.

Is antimatter truly 100% efficient?
It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you start from two equal quantities m/2 of matter and m/2 of antimatter, then the energy output is, of course, exactly E=mc2. Mass is converted into energy with 100% efficiency.

But that is not the point: how much effort do you have to put in to get m/2 grams of antimatter? Well, theoretically E=mc2 because half of the energy will become normal matter. So you gain nothing. But the process of creating antimatter is highly inefficient; when you dissipate energy into particles with mass, many different - also short-lived - particles and antiparticles are produced. A major part of the energy gets lost, and a lot of the stable antimatter-particles (e.g. positrons and antiprotons) go astray before you can catch them. Everything happens at nearly the speed of light, and the particles created zoom off in all directions. Somewhat like cooking food over a campfire: most of the heat is lost and does not go into the cooking of the food, it disappears as radiation into the dark night sky. Very inefficient.

Do you make antimatter as described in the book?
No. The production and storage of antimatter at CERN is not at all as described in the book: you cannot stand next to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and see it come out, especially since the LHC accelerator is not yet in operation.

To make antiprotons, we collide protons at nearly the speed of light (to be precise, with a kinetic energy of about 25 GeV) with a block of metal, e.g. copper or tungsten. These collisions produce a large number of particles, some of which are antiprotons. Only the antiprotons are useful, and only those that fly out in the right direction. So that's where your energy loss goes: it is like trying to water a pot of flowers but with a sprinkler that sprays over the whole garden. Of course, we constantly apply new tricks to become more efficient at collecting antiparticles, but at the level of elementary particles this is extremely difficult.

Why then do you build the LHC?
The reason for building the LHC accelerator is not to make antimatter but to produce an energy concentration high enough to study effects that will help us to understand some of the remaining questions in physics. We say concentrations, because we are not talking about huge amounts but an enormous concentration of energy. Each particle accelerated in the LHC carries an amount of energy equivalent to that of a flying mosquito. Not much at all in absolute terms, but it will be concentrated in a very minute volume, and there things will resemble the state of the universe very shortly (about a trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang.

You should compare the concentration effect to what you can learn about the quality of a wooden floor by walking over it. If a large man wearing normal shoes and a petite woman wearing sharp stiletto heels walk over the same floor, the man will not make dents, but the woman, despite her lower weight, may leave marks; the pressure created by the stiletto heels is far higher. So that is like the job of the LHC: concentrate a little energy into a very minute space to produce a huge energy concentration and learn something about the Big Bang.

Does CERN have a particle accelerator 27 kilometres long?
The LHC accelerator is a ring 27 kilometres in circumference. It is installed in a tunnel about 100 m underground. You can see the round outline of it marked on a map of the area.

In fact, why do you make antimatter at CERN?
The principal reason is to study the laws of nature. The current theories of physics predict a number of subtle effects concerning antimatter. If experiments do not observe these predictions, then the theory is not accurate and needs to be amended or reworked. This is how science progresses.

Another reason is to get extremely high energy densities in collisions of matter and antimatter particles, since they annihilate completely when they meet. From this annihilation energy other interesting particles may be created. This was mainly how the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider functioned at CERN until 2000, or the Tevatron currently operates at Fermilab near Chicago.

How is energy extracted from antimatter?
When a normal matter particle hits an antimatter particle, they mutually annihilate into a very concentrated burst of pure energy, from which in turn new particles (and antiparticles) are created. The number and mass of the annihilation products depends on the available energy.
The annihilation of electrons and positrons at low energies produces only two (or three) highly energetic photons. But with annihilation at very high energy, hundreds of new particle-antiparticle pairs can be made. The decay of these particles produces, among others, many neutrinos, which do not interact with the environment at all. This is not very useful for energy extraction.

How safe is antimatter?
Perfectly safe, given the minute quantities we can make. It would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years.

If so, does CERN have protocols to keep the public safe?
There is no danger from antimatter. There are of course other dangers on the CERN site, as in any laboratory: high voltage in certain areas, deep pits to fall in, etc. but for these dangers the usual industrial safety measures are in place. There is no danger of radioactive leaks as you might find near nuclear power stations.

Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?
Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules (1012 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.

You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.

To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):

E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.

This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.

At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need 6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years! It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.

Did CERN scientists actually invent the Internet?
No. The Internet was originally based on work done by Louis Pouzin in France, taken up by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in the US in the 1970s. However, the Web was invented and developed entirely by Tim Berners-Lee and a small team at CERN during 1989-1994. The story of the Internet and the Web can be read in ‘How the Web was born’. Perhaps not as sexy as Angels and Demons, but everything in ‘How the Web was born’ was first-hand testimony and research.

Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?
Unfortunately not.

How thermal-imaging cameras can spot flu fevers

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

NEW YORK (AP) — To screen passengers for swine flu and other contagious diseases, some airports use thermal imaging cameras to see whether travelers have fevers, without having to stick thermometers in their mouths. So how do the cameras work?

The devices are just like regular cameras, except that instead of recording light that objects reflect, these cameras are sensitive to heat. They can even work in the dark.

Recordings from these cameras show up on video screens with hotter objects looking brighter. The systems are very sensitive, measuring temperatures down to a fraction of a degree Fahrenheit, said Andrew Sarangan, an associate professor in the University of Dayton's electro-optics program.

Thermal cameras were rolled out during the SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003, and airports in Singapore and China have been using them continuously since, said Alan Thomson, regional sales director at U.K.-based Irisys, a maker of thermal imaging devices.

Now manufacturers say they've noticed an uptick in orders in recent days. "The phone hasn't stopped ringing," Thomson said.

In Mexico, which already has 10 such cameras, the transportation secretary, Juan Molinar, said Thursday that 40 more were being bought for the country's eight largest airports.

Of course, while the cameras can detect higher temperatures, they can't screen for swine flu itself. Someone running to catch a flight can have a higher body temperature, as can someone who's just had a drink. A fever also does not necessarily mean someone is sick with swine flu, so airports need to do further screening once they spot passengers with high temperatures.

Irisys' cameras, which cost about $3,000, merge visual and thermal images to create a "heat picture" of a person. This image shows up on a screen on the back of the camera, much like the displays on consumer cameras. A pointer automatically shows the hottest area in the picture, which is usually a person's face, mainly because it's not covered in clothes.

Tony Trunzo, senior vice president at Wilsonville, Ore.-based Flir Systems Inc., said his company has seen orders pick up not only from airports, but factory operators as well.

Flir's cameras have improved significantly since the SARS outbreak, Trunzo said. The cameras have a higher resolution, for example. They've gotten cheaper, too, though the company's cameras still range between $10,000 and $15,000.

Flir also has determined that it's best to screen one person at a time, instead of scanning a large crowd.

World first for strange molecule

World first for strange molecule

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News

Electrons can be pictured as orbiting around a central nucleus

The researchers excite an atom to the "Rydberg state" using a laser

A molecule that until now existed only in theory has finally been made.
Known as a Rydberg molecule, it is formed through an elusive and extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms.
The new type of bonding, reported in Nature, occurs because one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or centre.
It reinforces fundamental quantum theories, developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, about how electrons behave and interact.
The Rydberg molecules in question were formed from two atoms of rubidium - one a Rydberg atom, and one a "normal" atom.
The movement and position of electrons within an atom can be described as orbiting around a central nucleus - with each shell of orbiting electrons further from the centre.
A Rydberg atom is special because it has one electron alone in an outermost orbit - very far, in atomic terms, from its nucleus.
Back in 1934 Enrico Fermi predicted that if another atom were to "find" that lone, wandering electron, it might interact with it.
"But Fermi never imagined that molecules could be formed," explained Chris Greene, the theoretical physicist from the University of Colorado who first predicted that Rydberg molecules could exist.
"We recognised, in our work in the 1970s and 80s, the potential for a sort of forcefield between a Rydberg atom and a groundstate [or normal] atom.
"It's only now that you can get systems so cold, that you can actually make them."

Right place, right time
Unimaginably cold temperatures are needed to create the molecules, as Vera Bendkowsky from the University of Stuttgart who led the research explained. "The nuclei of the atoms have to be at the correct distance from each other for the electron fields to find each other and interact," she said. "We use an ultracold cloud of rubidium - as you cool it, the atoms in the gas move closer together."
At temperatures very close to absolute zero - minus 273C - this "critical distance" of about 100nm (nanometres - 1nm = one millionth of a millimetre) between the atoms is reached.
When one is a Rydberg atom, the two atoms form a Rydberg molecule. This 100nm gap is vast compared to ordinary molecules.

"The Rydberg electron resembles a sheepdog that keeps its flock together by roaming speedily to the outermost periphery of the flock, and nudging back towards the centre any member that might begin to drift away," said Professor Greene.

Pushing this electron out to its lonely periphery - and make a Rydberg atom - requires energy.
"We excite the atoms to the Rydberg stage with a laser," explained Dr Bendkowsky.
"If we have a gas at the critical density, with two atoms at the correct distance that are able to form the molecule, and we excite one to the Rydberg state, then we can form a molecule."
This ultracold experiment is also ultra-fast - the longest lived Rydberg molecule survives for just 18 microseconds. But the fact that the molecules can be made and seen confirms long-held fundamental atomic theories.

"This is a very exciting set of experiments," added Helen Fielding, a physical chemist from University College London.

"It shows that this approach is feasible, and it will be interesting to see what other fundamental physics we'll be able to test with it."

Prize-winning ideas

Professor Greene's prediction that Rydberg molecules could exist was inspired by another Nobel prize-winning piece of physics research.

When, in 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent some theoretical calculations about particles to Albert Einstein, Einstein made a prediction.

He said that if a gas was cooled to a very low temperature, the atoms would all suddenly collapse into their "lowest possible energy state", so they would be almost frozen and behave in an identical and predictable way.

In a sense this is analagous to when a gas suddenly condenses into drops of liquid.

When scientists reached the goal of Bose-Einstein condensation, by cooling and trapping alkali atoms, Professor Greene realised that ultracold physics could be used to form molecules that simply would not exist in any other conditions.

Nano - The Next Big Thing

Scientists predict it could have as much of an impact as the industrial revolution did.
Michael Franco

First there was plain old small. The Japanese perfected that with the transistor radio, then the Walkman. Then we had mini - Alex Issigonis shrunk the car down to city-friendly proportions. Next came micro, as Gordon Moore introduced the microprocessor and founded Intel on the strength of it. Now we have gone even smaller: nano.

Derived from the Greek word for "dwarf," nano refers to all things that take place at the sub-microscopic level. The usual measure of length at this level is the nanometre, which equals one one-millionth of a millimetre. That's small - very small

If you shrunk human beings down to this size, you could easily line up every single person on the planet from one side of an average bedroom to the other - with plenty of space left over.So while things at the nanoscale are tiny indeed, many expect the work being done in this field will have a gargantuan an impact on society. Scientists predict it could have as much of an impact as the industrial revolution did. You could almost say small size matters big.

Nanoparticles

Because they can enter and be absorbed by the body more effectively, nanoparticles - which have at least one dimension of less than 10 namometre - are now appearing in a whole host of consumer goods. This includes hairsprays, bug repellents, moisturisers, sunscreens and deodorants. And thanks to a company in China, you can even drink nanoparticles of pulverised leaves in a bottle of nano-tea.

Ironically, the super-absorbability of nanoparticles has consumer watch groups uneasy, and several have called for studies to track the effects of such tiny particles inside the human body.

Sometimes though, the theoretical risks of nanoparticles are outweighed by the tangible benefits. That's certainly the case at the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center where scientists have linked gold nanoparticles to antibodies which are drawn to cancer cells. Once inside the rogue cells, the golden hitchhikers can be beamed with a laser to determine tumour size and location, acting as an early detection system

Other researchers find silver more attractive than gold because of its natural ability to resist and fight bacteria. They're embedding silver nanoparticles into everything from soaps to mobile phones. Pooghe Laundry in the United States has even created germ-resistant nanotech underwear.

And soon, movie-goers might be able to enjoy a ring-free entertainment experience - once the theatre walls are coated in a new nanoparticle paint that blocks mobile phone signals.

Nanofibres

Nanofibres are defined as fibres with diameters less than 100 nanometres, roughly one-thousand times thinner than a human hair.

These liliputian filaments have already woven themselves into our lives in the form of substances like Nano Tex, used by clothing manufacturer Eddie Bauer to keep shirts and pants stain resistant. Researchers at Ohio State University, by treating nanofibres with certain chemicals, can alter their properties to attract or repel various substances like oil. Coating a sheet of glass with such dirt-repelling fibres, which are invisible to the human eye, could mean never having to wash windows again

Nanofibre bandages that would heal wounds faster and fight infection harder than traditional wraps have already been through clinical trials and may be on the market later this year.

And, most significantly, Northwestern University science professor Samuel Stump has just developed a method of restoring the mobility of paralyzed mice. He injects them with a liquid that assembles itself into a nanofibre scaffold along which nerves can grow to repair damaged spinal cords. Which proves once and for all that sometimes, the biggest things really can come in the smallest of packages.

And, most significantly, Northwestern University science professor Samuel Stump has just developed a method of restoring the mobility of paralyzed mice. He injects them with a liquid that assembles itself into a nanofibre scaffold along which nerves can grow to repair damaged spinal cords. Which proves once and for all that sometimes, the biggest things really can come in the smallest of packages.

Buckyballs

If you've ever seen a dome-shaped house, then you have some idea of what a buckyball looks like. These tiny particles are named after the inventor of the geodesic dome home - architect and engineer R. Buckminster Fuller - and are also remarkably similar to traditionally-stitched footballs. Just like their inflated cousins, buckyballs can bounce and spin. But crush one under extreme pressure, and it snaps back into shape when the pressure abates.

What makes buckyballs so tough? The lines that make up their cage-like structures consist of carbon bonds - the strongest molecular bonds found in nature.

Because of their incredible might, researchers at Rice University have figured out a way to use them as mini-crates to store compressed hydrogen. Before this discovery, there was simply no way to compact this potential fuel-of-the-future for efficient storage in a car's gas tank.

Medically, buckyballs are being studied for their sneeze-stifling abilities because they can prevent certain cells from releasing histamine into the body. They're also great free radical sponges and may someday work to soak up these cancer-causing substances in our blood streams.

In a truly futuristic development, buckyballs have been used as the wheels of the world's smallest car which measures just 3x4 nanometres. The hope is that one day small vehicles like this could work as pick-up trucks delivering atoms around molecular-sized nanofactories.

Carbon Nanotubes

If you held a piece of paper on its edge and tried to balance a teacup on it, the results would be obvious, and messy. Roll that paper into a tube however and then put the teacup on it. Voila, you have something very light supporting something relatively heavy.

This is the idea behind carbon nanotubes which are formed by rolling up a sheet of honeycomb-like carbon molecules. The process creates the strongest substance on earth - tiny tubes that are 100 times stronger than steel, yet six times lighter.

Researchers at the University of California have exploited the electricity-producing ability of carbon nanotubes by using them in artificial muscles that can not only repair themselves but can generate enough power through their expansion and contraction to actually charge your iPod.

Nanotubes can also channel sound frequencies and, in fact, one has been used as the world's smallest radio, appropriately broadcasting "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.

Scientists at Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in America have even produced a darker colour black by stacking carbon nanotubes on end like bristles on a brush. Because light slips between the tubes and gets swallowed instead of reflected, the colour appears much darker than any black to date. This new material can store energy from light sources, including the sun, and militaries worldwide are interested in its ability to make the "cloak" part of "cloak-and-dagger" even more clandestine.

Discover More:

http://www.nanotechia.co.uk/content/aboutus/

http://www.crnano.org/

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/04/SpinalCordInjury.html

Unfair Advantage

Today’s stealth technology is close to making every warrior’s ultimate goal of being invisible to the enemy a reality. Using plasma clouds, radioactive paints, light-bending cloth and deadly-silent power plants, the prospect of war could turn into a decidedly one-sided proposition.
By Mark Davis

(Stealth technology also known as LO technology (low observable technology) is a sub-discipline of military electronic countermeasures which covers a range of techniques used with aircraft, ships, submarines, and missiles, in order to make them less visible (ideally invisible) to radar, infrared, sonar and other detection methods.)

Barricaded behind the rubble of a shattered village, heavily armed fighters watch as enemy troops pick their way down a distant hillside. It is daytime and the glaring sun can easily play tricks on even the most experienced eyes, but the defenders watch in bewilderment as one by one, the approaching soldiers reach up to their helmets, flip a switch and seem to vanish from sight. Without the slightest warning of any sound, there are suddenly a half dozen helicopters, bristling with weapons, hovering above the encampment like a swarm of deadly insects, soundless and fading in and out of sight behind shimmering waves of heat.

Off balance, unsure where to shoot first, one of the better-hidden fighters takes aim at a still-visible foot soldier. The instant his bullet leaves its barrel, a cluster of geo- metrically arrayed microphones on an approaching vehicle triangulates the shock wave and delivers 3D co- ordinates to a soldier's aiming aid. One shot, threat eliminated.

Sounds far-fetched, but the world's major military powers aren't just dreaming about such systems.

"Take Michael Callahan of the Pen- tagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He is tasked with making the futuristic scenario hap- pen today for the US military. "It is my goal to provide our men and women with an unfair advantage over the enemy," he says.

Up in the Air

While military technology co-opted the term "stealth" 40 years ago, the first large-scale attempt to hide armies and weapons goes back to World War II, with the introduction of patterned camouflage uniforms.

"Stealth," as weapons expert Da- vid Hambling puts it, "comes down to not being spotted by whatever is most dangerous to you.

"This is as easy as sticking grass in your helmet for infantry soldiers, but WWII aircraft engineers grap- pled with ways to minimise airframe silhouettes against the daytime sky.

At first they tried painting the underbelly of the airplanes white, or pale blue, to match the sky. They soon realised, however, it was the shadow - not the colour - that made the dark dot in the sky. To get rid of the incriminating shadow, engineers attached fluorescent lights under the fuselage and wings that pilots could dim or brighten to match the time of day. It wasn't perfect, but gave pilots some virtual invisibility.

The quest to make planes invis- ible received an unexpected boost when US space programme scien- tists from NASA noticed that early spacecraft went dead to radar and radio waves upon re-entering the atmosphere. This occurs because the friction heating on re-entry creates a plasma "bubble" around the craft, making it vanish from radar screens. Called plasma aerodynamics, the concept seems right out of an episode of "Star Trek," but several inventors say they have a way to cre- ate "cloaking devices" for real.

One suggestion involves an on- board particle accelerator that zaps the atmosphere immediately in front of the aircraft, laying down "a carpet of invisibility" to fly into.

Another method advocates us- ing an on-board super-conductor magnetic coil to engulf the craft in a radar-absorbing plasma cloud. A third suggestion involves painting warplanes with radioisotopes that would ionise the surrounding atmo- sphere, creating a plasma sheath.

The beauty of flying your airplane in a plasma sheath is that it also sig- nificantly reduces drag, by as much as 3 percent. The one drawback of painting a fighter, bomber or recon- naissance plane with radioactive isotopes is that they will glow in the dark. There is speculation that some of the glowing in the night skies over the notorious "area 51" in the US state of Nevada, widely speculated as being caused by UFOs, might instead have been the result of the US Air Force's top-secret experi- ments using radioactive paint on U-2 spy planes.

Other stealth approaches involve using high-tech materials that could either scatter incoming radar waves, or even switch their wavelengths, thus confusing the trackers by turn- ing the aircraft's radar signature into random noise.

Lost at Sea

The Swedish Navy leads the way to invisibility on the high seas with its corvette-class Visby warship. Made from the same ultra-hard, carbon- fibre material used in Formula One racing cars, the Visby is light and quick and uses less fuel than more conventional ships in its class.

Love Hormone Boosts Strangers' Sex Appeal

Love Hormone Boosts Strangers' Sex Appeal
Oxytocin Could Play a Key Role in Choosing Mates
By EWEN CALLAWAY

A chemical best known for cementing the bond between a mother and her newborn child could also play a part in picking mister (or miss) right.

A new study shows that men and women who inhale a whiff of the hormone oxytocin rate strangers as more attractive.

When oxytocin courses through our blood, "we are more likely to see people we don't know in a more positive light," says Angeliki Theodoridou, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who led the new study.

This effect adds to the hormone's known role in human relationships. One study found that oxytocin levels spike after new mothers look at or touch their newborns and may help bonding.

Other work has hinted at the importance of oxytocin in social situations between adults too.
People administered the hormone make overly generous offers in an economic game that measures trust, while men who got a dose of oxytocin proved better at remembering the faces of strangers a day later, compared to subjects who got a placebo.

Dampened Fear?

In the latest trial, Theodoridou's team tested 96 men and women in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. After participants got either a spritz of oxytocin or a placebo, they rated pictures of 48 men and women for attractiveness and 30 for trustworthiness. Her team also tested for mood.

No matter their sex or mood, volunteers who received oxytocin rated male and female strangers as both more attractive and trusting.
Theodoridou's study did not examine how oxytocin could affect social judgements, but she speculates that the hormone dampens brain activity in a region involved in processing fearful emotions, called the amygdala.

A previous study found that oxytocin tempered amygdala activation in volunteers who saw a face that had previously been paired with a slight shock.

Love Spray

Although Theodoridou's study shows that oxytocin acts similarly on men and women when rating strangers, sex differences could emerge in real-world situations, says Jennifer Bartz, a psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York.

More research is needed to see if this is the case, she says.Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurs are already trying to make a buck off of oxytocin's social effects. One company offers a spray that claims to engender trust in others, though it offers little more than testimonials as evidence that it works. Could a similar spray spark romances between total strangers? Theodoridou doesn't think so. "I would not endorse any of these products," she says.

Prevent a cyber 26/11

Pic:Ankit Fadia, 23, is a cyber security expert. He helped police trace the email sent by terrorists soon after the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai.

Prevent a cyber 26/11
-by Ankit Fadia
The rising threat of terrorism has led to unprecedented levels of security at Indian airports, railway stations, hotels, ports etc. But the government does not seem to see the bigger threat, which will not come from AK-47s, bombs and rifles. The next big attack will be come from terrorists in the cyber world.

We live in a technologically interconnected world. Most of us cannot imagine even a single day without our cell phones, internet and ATMs. There is hardly any distinction between where our bodies end and technology begins. Would it be surprising then, if terrorists choose to attack India via the internet?

Let me share some facts about how real and damaging that threat can be If a terrorist group were to attack our stock market and financial infrastructure, it would cause widespread panic and losses to millions of people and organizations. Imagine yourself running helplessly from one ATM to another, trying to withdraw money from your account, only to find that the attack has forced banks to suspend online transactions.

Likewise, our telecom infrastructure. If it were flooded with malicious data, business and personal life would grind to a standstill. Terrorists could also target India's top businesses, hacking into their systems, stealing valuable intellectual property, sensitive information and company secrets. Even military networks can be targeted.

These scenarios are not from a Bollywood flick, but tangible threats that loom large. In May 2007, Estonia — a small but technologically sophisticated Baltic country — fell victim to a cyber attack. The unidentified terrorists bombarded the country's network with data traffic, clogging it and rendering major services unusable. People were not able to access financial utilities, communications and data services for several hours and some, for days together. What stops cyber terrorists from launching similar attacks in India?

Very little because, despite being an infotech power, India lags on cyber security. Neither the government, nor the private sector is adequately prepared to face a cyber attack. We have the necessary laws in place, but they are futile in the absence of trained security experts and police officials to enforce them. Recently, I was at a conference in the Capital, attended by numerous Delhi Police officials. During the question-answer session, one police official asked me: "All this is fine Mr Ankit, but yeh internet ki building kidhar hai?" According to him, the internet was a huge building and, in order to protect it from cyber terrorists, the police had simply to stand all around it, holding rifles and lathis to fight off viruses, worms and criminals! If this is the state of affairs in the police department of the national capital, one can't even begin to imagine the way it is in other cities.

The fact that few engineering colleges in India offer courses on cyber security is a major reason for the lack of cyber experts. The result is that when a private company website gets hacked, the incident is brushed under the carpet lest its brand image is tarnished. Worse, it's considered normal for most Indian government websites to get hacked regularly.

But the lack of trained professionals and a lax attitude are the least of India's concerns. The internet has no boundaries and allows cyber terrorists to hide behind geographic, political and diplomatic clouds. It is easy for a criminal to hide behind proxy servers and bounce off systems in unfriendly countries to stop security agencies from tracing the culprits. The dynamic nature of cyber security, coupled with the obsolete techniques used by the Indian forces, means it is a losing battle for India.

Let's not wait for a cyber 26/11 to happen. A willingness to make changes, a proactive approach with some nimble execution can fix the chinks in India's cyber security and drastically improve our preparedness to fight a cyber war.

Real-life spy thriller in cyberspace

Real-life spy thriller in cyberspace

By: Eric Auchard, a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Once in a while a good computer security scare comes along that has all the makings of a taut Cold War spy thriller and the latest news of a global computer espionage ring is one such story.

A new report entitled “Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network,” argues that poorly defended computers used by government and private organizations in 103 nations may have been violated. The study has attracted widespread media attention after a New York Times story about it at the weekend.

The study by a group of activist researchers based in Toronto called “Information Warfare Monitor” says computers in various foreign ministries, embassies and Taiwanese trade groups have been pilfered by computers located at a Chinese government intelligence center on the island of Hainan. A computer in the private offices of the Dalai Lama was infected and e-mail lists and negotiating documents were stolen using a virus that “phoned home” to its controller, it alleges.

Data retrieved in the attacks appears to have been used to rein in Tibetan critics of China. But the report has trouble pinning the theft of computer secrets back to the Chinese government. It is also unclear how much information of value was gathered, outside a handful of instances. It conflates evidence of sniffing with acts of actual snooping.

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed the report’s claims as rumor and said his government was committed to protecting Internet security. “There’s a ghost abroad called the Cold War and a virus called the China threat,” ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference.

In fairness, the researchers acknowledge up front that its findings raise more questions than answers and that it is “not clear whether the attacker(s) really knew what they had penetrated, or if the information was ever exploited for commercial or intelligence value.” It says that proving who is responsible for cyber attacks remains a major challenge — what experts refer to as the “attribution problem.”

The report was conducted at the request of the office of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exile organizations, who have long accused the Chinese government of using cyber war to disrupt their activities. It describes the sophisticated techniques used to infiltrate the computers of the offices of the Tibetan government-in-exile. But the connections it draws to a wider global spy ring are sketchy. Some of the break-ins may be explained by shoddy computer maintenance.

In cyberliterature, the bad guys, typically unknown, break into vital government, military, banking or political organizations and cause immeasurable damage or steal uncounted billions of dollars. Throw in contemporary geopolitical rivalries and references to the latest techno-jargon and the formula is more or less complete.

To be sure, international computer security experts have seen the hand of Chinese hackers in growing number of computer intrusions around the world in recent years. The global scale combined with the sophisticated targeting of specific computers by GhostNet make most efforts at wiretapping government opponents scrawny by comparison.

But China is not alone among major world governments in viewing cyber warfare as a tenet of national security. To an unknown degree, for example, the United States, Israel and Britain snoop not just on their enemies but also their critics.

The problem with much of the writing about computer security is that it conflates basic issues of computer hygiene with diabolical threats to society or the economy. In the virtual world, teenage vandalism of web sites blurs into acts of terror. Police and government officials don’t help by painting the Internet’s inherent tension between openness and security as a danger to public safety.

Kwangmyongsong(Bright Star)

Kwangmyŏngsŏng (meaning "Bright Star" in Korean) is a class of experimental satellite developed by North Korea and named after a Chinese-language poemby Kim Il-sung. It is the first class of satellite built by this country and the program started in the 1980s.


PIC:Kim Il-sung

According to North Korea Academy of Science's Academician Kwon Tong-hwa,the SLV was developed in the 1980s when the late leader Kim Il-sung decided to launch a Korean satellite. At the beginning of the 1990s, the capacity to achieve this goal was already reached.

On occasion of Kim Jong-il's 50th birthday, on February 16, 1992, his father Kim Il-sung presented him with a Chinese calligraphed poem he had written.Referring to his son's birth, an event that was reportedly marked by a doublerainbow and a bright star in the sky, the future Korean SLV and satellite wouldbe named after it:

From the eternal snowy summit of our sacred Paektusan Mountain,A Bright Star shall rise.—DPRK President Kim Il-sung

PIC:Kim Jong-il

The decision to send a North Korean satellite was precipitated by the successfullaunch of South Korea's first satellite, Uribyol 1 aka Kitsat 1 aka Oscar 23 aka KO 23, on August 10, 1992[3] and its second satellite, Uribyol 2 aka Kitsat 2 akaOscar 25 aka KO 25, on September 26, 1993[4], both by an European Ariane 4 SLV.In a late-1993 meeting of the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee, Kim Il-sung expressed his desire to quickly place a satellite into orbit, leading to the expansionof North Korea's nascent space program and the requirement for a space launch vehicle

In designing the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-1, North Korea received considerable assistance from the China's Academy of Launch Technology. This assistance has continued with the developmentof the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 satellite project. It may also extend to additional satellites,including a crude reconnaissance satellite.

Only five years later, preparations for the first satellite launch began at the Musudan-ri Launch Facility on August 7, 1998. Two weeks later, Korean People's Navy vessels proceeded to their mission area into the Sea of Japan (East Sea of Korea). By that time, South Korea had already placed two other satellites into space with Delta-7925 SLVs, Koreasat 1 aka Mugunghwa 1 aka Europe Star B, on August 5, 1995, and Koreasat 2 aka Mugunghwa 2 on January 14, 1996.

The mission was planned with an initial evening launch window that was favorable for observation. After a weather forecast predicted heavy winds and rain on the evening of the first launch window in question, the decision was then taken to delay the launch until 12:07 when the weather had cleared.

Liftoff occurred at 12:07 hours local time on August 31. The first stage was separated from the rocket 95 seconds after the launch. The fairing shroud separated at the 144th second, then the second stage separated itself from the rocket at the 266th second. North Korea claimed that the third stage put the satellite into orbit 27 seconds after the separation of the second stage.

Kwangmyŏngsŏng-2 is a planned North Korean satellite. According to the North Korean government,it is scheduled for launch between 4 and 8 April 2009, on an Unha-2 carrier rocket. If it reaches orbit, North Korea will become the tenth country to successfully launch a satellite. South Korea,Japan and the U.S. suspect the launch will be used for tests of the delivery technology for a long-range missile Taepodong-2

The launch was first publicly announced on 24 February 2009, when the Korean Central News Agency reported that they had been informed by the Korean Committee of Space Technology that preparations for a satellite launch were underway, and that the satellite would be launched from the Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground in Hwadae. At about the same time, Kim Jong-il visited the province where the launch site is located, as he had immediately prior to the previous launch on 4 July 2006.

North Korea designated the waters off Japan's Akita and Iwate prefectures as a risk zone for falling debris. Most of a designated zone in the Sea of Japan lies within Japan's exclusive economic zone and outside its territorial waters.

April 4. 2009 Juche 98--KOREAN NEWS

DPRK(Democratic People's Republic of Korea) to launch Its Satellite Soon
Pyongyang, April 4 (KCNA) -- Preparations for launching "Kwangmyongsong-2," an experimental communications satellite, by carrier rocket "Unha-2" have been completed at the satellite launching ground in the east coastal area of the DPRK, according to the information available from the Korean Committee of Space Technology.

The satellite will be launched soon.There is no change in the technological indexes necessary for the safe navigation of airliners and ships provided to the international organizations and the countries concerned in advance.

ANTIMATTER...THE MOST VOLATILE SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO MAN

ANTIMATTER...THE MOST VOLATILE SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO MAN

A single droplet of antimatter contains the explosive power of a ten kiloton bomb (Hiroshima.)Antimatter is extremely unstable and explodes when it comes in contact with absolutely anything (even air.)

Nonetheless, antimatter is now being produced at CERN in Switzerland, where anti-particles are accelerated around a 27-mile-long circular tunnel... traveling so fast that they complete the enormouscircle over 11,000 times per second.

Antimatter is routinely produced at CERN (more than 10 million particles per second.) The World-wide Web was invented at CERN. The world's largest magnet, weighing more thanthe Eiffel tower, is at CERN. CERN's biggest accelerator is 27 kilometers around, andparticles travelling near the speed of light lap it over 11,000 times each second.

In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter,where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed ofparticles. For example, an antielectron (a positron, an electron with a positive charge) and an antiproton (a proton with a negative charge) could form an antihydrogen atom in the same way thatan electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing matter and antimatter would lead to the annihilation of both in the same way that mixing antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs.

There is considerable speculation as to why the observable universe is apparently almost entirelymatter, whether there exist other places that are almost entirely antimatter instead, and what mightbe possible if antimatter could be harnessed, but at this time the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. The process by which this asymmetry between particles and antiparticles developed is called baryogenesis

An antimatter weapon is a hypothetical device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or anexplosive for a weapon. Antimatter weapons do not currently exist as far as we know outside fiction (such as Star Trek's photon torpedo). The United States Air Force, however, has been interested in militaryuses—including destructive applications—of antimatter since the Cold War, when it began funding antimatter-relatedphysics research. The primary theoretical advantage of such a weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions convert 100% of mass into energy while comparatively a fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb is on the order of 0.7%.

The History of Antimatter
The history of antimatter begins in 1928 with a young physicist named Paul Dirac and a strange mathematical equation...

The equation, in some way, predicted the existence of an antiworld identical to ours but made out of antimatter. Was this possible? if so, where and how could we search for antimatter?
From 1930, the search for the possible constituents of antimatter, antiparticles, began, and it has been the main influence behind a major scientific and technical evolution over the last 70 years.

CERN physicists Alvaro de Rújula and Rolf Landua answer your most frequently asked questions.
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• What can antimatter be used for?

There are several different uses for antimatter, the main one being for medical diagnostics where positrons are used to help identify different diseases with the Positron Emission Tomography (or PET scan). For other uses, we are still in the first phases of development and it's difficult to foresee what will happen in the next ten years!

• Can we use antimatter to propel a car or a spaceship?

In principle, yes, but in practice it is very difficult. You all know that the Star Trek Spaceship Enterprise flies around powered by antimatter. But in reality, making antimatter is so difficult that it is hard to foresee it ever being used as a propellant fuel. In order to propel a matter spacecraft weighing several tons up to the speed of light, you would need an equal amount of antimatter and, using the present technology, it would take millions and millions of years to produce a sufficient amount.
However, if you had a gram of antimatter, you could drive your car for about 100.000 years!

• Is it possible to build an antimatter weapon?

The military use of antimatter has the same limitations as spaceship propulsion: both would require a huge amount of antimatter, taking million of years to produce.
But if you define a weapon as something which shoots bullets, an accelerator could be considered an antiparticle gun! But we are talking about single particles, so the amount of energy you release when you shoot one of these "bullets" is so small you wouldn't even tickle your enemy.

• How do you store antimatter?

Antiparticles have either a positive or a negative electrical charge, so they can be stored in what we call a trap which has the appropriate configuration of electrical and magnetic fields to keep them confined in a small place. Of course, this has to be done in good vacuum to avoid collisions with matter particles.
Antiatoms are electrically neutral, but they have magnetic proprieties that can be used to keep them in "magnetic bottles".

• What does antimatter look like?

Matter and antimatter are identical. Looking at an object means seeing the photons coming from that object; however, photons come from both matter and antimatter. If there were a distant galaxy made out of antimatter, you couldn't distinguish it from a matter galaxy just by seeing the light from it.

How can you be so sure there is not antimatter around?

If there was antimatter here, around us, it would annihilate with matter and we would see light coming out. But we don't...
About the possibility of antimatter in space (antistars or antigalaxies), theorist have reasons to believe that the Universe is all made of matter. But we are not 100% sure, and that's way there are experiments, like AMS*, which are going to look for it.

• If the only difference between a particle and its antiparticle is the charge, how do you distinguish a neutron from an antineutron ?Neutrons are made of quarks, and antineutrons are made of antiquarks. Quarks and antiquarks have opposite charges, even though they sum up to zero in both cases.
And a very good way to recognize them is to put a neutron close to an antineutron and see how they immediately annihilate.

• What about antiphotons?

Photons have zero charge and do not contain inside objects that are charged, so a photon can not be distinguished from an antiphoton. Photon and antiphotons are the same thing, i.e. the photon is its own antiparticle.

• How do sound waves propagate in antimatter?

If there is a difference between matter and antimatter, it is very very tiny, that's why we are doing experiments here at CERN to investigate it. They are so similar that sound waves, that are vibrations of matter or antimatter, would be identical. An antimatter piano would sound exactly as a matter one.

• How does the gravitational field act on antimatter?

The gravitational force depends from the energy of an object, and since matter and antimatter have both positive energy, gravitation acts on them in the same way.
This means that an object made of matter and one made of antimatter would both stand on the floor, the latter one not flying off the sky...

• How mach antimatter can you make in one accelerator cycle?

Here at CERN we can produce 50 millions antiprotons in each cycle (about once a minute), that allows us to make a few hundred antihydrogen atoms.
The number could be 10 times higher in particular configurations of the accelerator. This sounds a lot, but expressed in grams it is a billionth of a gram in a year.

• How much does it cost to produce antimatter?

If we count on the production CERN has done over the last 10 years (about 1 billionth of a gram), it has cost a few hundred millions Swiss francs.

• How long will it take to have "new results" out of the AD?

The experiments took about three years to set up, and now that they are ready, it will take a year or two to understand the production of antihydrogen and how to contain it. Then the first studies can be done, where we compare atoms and antiatoms, and this will be two or three years from now.

AMS:'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'
About 15 billion years ago, matter and antimatter were created in a gigantic Big Bang in equal amounts, at least according to today's best theory. It is therefore surprising that our Earth, the solar system, and our galaxy (the Milky Way) do not contain any antimatter.

To explain this absence, scientists have come out with two possibilities: either antimatter completely disappeared during the history of universe, or matter and antimatter have been separated from each other to form different regions of the universe.

In the second case, we would be located in a region where only matter exists (or rather what we call 'matter'), but some antimatter coming from an 'anti' region outside our galaxy could still have a chance to reach us. This antimatter would be in the form of anti-nuclei (like anti-Helium, anti-Carbon, etc..) as opposed to lighter antiparticles (such as antiprotons) which are also created in high energy collisions between ordinary matter. To search for this extragalactic antimatter, the best way is to place a particle detector in space.

A world-wide collaboration of physicists, lead by Nobel prize laureate Prof. Samuel Ting of MIT, decided to build the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer', or AMS. AMS is a high energy particle detector which will try to detect the passage of such very small amounts of antimatter, while orbiting at an altitude of a few hundred kilometers above the atmosphere.

Some of the main challenges of the project are very technical: having to be carried on the Space Shuttle, each component of the apparatus has to be miniaturized as much as possible to keep the total volume to a maximum of 10 cubic meters and the weight to a maximum of 3 tons (a typical high energy apparatus at LEP with the similar detecting principles is about 1000 cubic meters in volume and 100 tons in weight).

Even more important is the power consumption: AMS should not need more than 2 kW (kilowatts) of electricity, provided by the solar panels of the Space Station. And 2kW is less than what a kitchen oven needs!