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science
Large Hadron Collider to Shut Down for a Year
Apparently they are working out the bugs in the design… but it’s not a design fault. He said the second problem is not with the most complex technology but involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel. The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one [...]
How the H1N1 Vaccine is Made
Jason Kottke has a great post on how the H1N1 vaccine is made. The most striking feature of the H1N1 flu vaccine manufacturing process is the 1,200,000,000 chicken eggs required to make the 3 billion doses of vaccine that may be required worldwide. There are entire chicken farms in the US and around the world [...]
Centralia
The stupidness of humans never ceases to amaze me. The good people of Centralia, Pennsylvania decided to burn some garbage in May 1962 and hired some volunteer firefighters to do the job and they did in an abandoned coal mine. After burning the trash the firefighters made the bold decision to not actually put the [...]
Time Travel as a Scientific Explanation
Let’s keep in mind that this was printed in the New York Times. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before [...]
Massive blob found off west coast
A huge Arctic goo is moving along the Pacific coast "If it was something we’d seen before, we’d be able to say something about it. But we haven’t …which prompted concerns from the local hunters and whaling captains." The stuff is "gooey" and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, [...]
Staph Infections
There is a good article in Yahoo! Sports by Michael Silver about staph infections. After reading this article last year in L.A. Weekly about staph on Skid Row I have become much more worried about it at work. In 2005, staph infections hit at least 20 Los Angeles city firefighters, many of whom work on [...]
I don’t like these odds
A bizarre story from NASA. A space shuttle on average has a 1-300 chance to experience a “catastrophic” collision with space junk. New number-crunching puts the odds of a catastrophic strike by orbital debris including bits of space junk at about 1-in-185 during Atlantis’ upcoming mission to Hubble. That compares to 1-in-300 odds for a [...]
Just in case you were wondering
Here is a list of problems solved by MacGyver Also, since we are all wondering…. MacGyver’s Swiss Army Knife went through a few changes over the early episodes. His first and most often used knife was a “Spartan” model from Victorinox. In “Thief of Budapest” he gives it away; in the next episode he is [...]
