Large Hardon Collider

[foopy]

http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

Wednesday, Jan. 26, 1 p.m. EST

Media Teleconference on Hubble Discovery

NASA will hold a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST on Wednesday, Jan. 26. Astronomers have pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits and have seen further back in time than ever before. The related discussion will focus on new research findings to be published in the journal Nature.

The teleconference panelists are:

-- Rychard Bouwens, Hubble co-investigator, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University, The Netherlands
-- Garth Illingworth, Hubble principal investigator, University of California, Santa Cruz
-- Eric Smith, Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope Program Scientist, NASA Headquarters, Washington

[Max™]

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-...1012604439.jpg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012604379.html

Writing in the journal Nature, Bouwens and his team say they are 80 percent certain the object is, in fact, an ancient galaxy. They won't know for sure until new telescopes come online over the next few years, particularly the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope, slated to replace Hubble in 2015.
Light from the presumed galaxy lies outside the range of human vision, smeared deep into the infrared by the extreme velocity at which the object is racing away from us - some 98 percent the speed of the light, the universe's ultimate speed limit.
Measuring this redshift tells astronomers the age - and distance - of stars, galaxies, and other heavenly objects.
But because Hubble's new camera lacks the capability to directly measure redshift, Bouwens and his colleagues instead employed a proxy measure made possible by a cloudy quirk of the primordial universe.
As the first stars sparked to life, great clouds of hydrogen and helium filled the universe. This fog absorbed much of the visible light produced by early galaxies, cosmologists say, providing a signature drop-out of light waves at particular frequencies. Bouwens detected such drop-outs for the presumed galaxy.
This technique dates the galaxy to the childhood of the cosmos, just 500 million years after the Big Bang, the cataclysmic explosion that rocketed the universe into existence. No other data exist from this early epoch, leaving cosmologists eager to fill the gaps in their knowledge.
Observations from the new camera, and from another NASA space telescope called Spitzer, tell us that the first galaxies were small-less than one percent the mass of our own Milky Way-and hot, blazing with early stars that hungrily gobbled up the hydrogen fuel around them. "They were forming stars as fast as they could," Bouwens says.
And although the new galaxy might be one of the first, an explosion in galactic growth soon followed. By 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe had grown out of its childhood, and galaxy formation slowed dramatically.
"If you would have asked me five years ago if we could see things this old and study them in any detail, I'd say, 'No, they're too faint,' " says Matt Lehnert, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory who last October spotted a galaxy almost as old as the new candidate.
So the race to peer deeper and deeper into space continues. Lehnert's galaxy - which is a more certain find than the new candidate - hails from about 600 million years after the Big Bang. In April 2009, a group led by Edo Berger of Harvard University reported signals from a massive star that went supernova some 30 million years after that.
"We have a friendly competition with the galaxy people over who has the most distant object," says Berger, who hunts for distant supernovae with NASA's orbiting Swift observatory. "We've been leapfrogging each other recently."

Now Berger is poised to leap ahead again. As soon as next week, he says, he will announce another ancient supernova that could push back the distance record even further, and once again we'll have a newest oldest thing in the universe.

[Woozie]

HUBBLE GOTCHU!

[Max™]

lol

Boosh!

[Mizango]

HUBBLE GOTCHU!

/thread.

looooooooool

[Mizango]

Man, if there was ever a thread winning post, that would definitely be it lol. Bravo Woozie, bravoooooo.

[Hatedregret]

Completely off topic and useless, but I'm very amazed at the amount of South Carolina folks on this board. I personally live in Anderson. I dunno, please excuse randomness.

[Mizango]

I have family in Anderson. 2 of my cousins went to Anderson College a while back. One thing though man, the Carolinas are repped hard here on BG.

[Eliseos]

Yes, USC does. See fellas, this will be a trivia question in the future. Eli and I are both Gamecocks! Team hadron goooo

Yes, there will be a test on this.

Brofist.

[haifa]

Nice update........................

[Acturus]

The Large Hardon Collider is the catch-all ScienceIsAwesome thread, right? I saw this this morning:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70P7AY20110126

Ancient body clock keeps all life on time: studies
Wed, Jan 26 2011
By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified the mechanism that controls the internal 24-hour clock of all forms of life -- a finding they say should shed light on some shift work-related problems like diabetes, depression and cancer.

Researchers from Britain's Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, whose work was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, said their findings provide important insight into health-related problems linked to people such as nurses, pilots and other shift workers, whose body clocks are disrupted.

The studies also suggest that the 24-hour circadian clock found in human cells is the same as that found in algae, and dates back millions of years to early life on earth, they said.

In the first study, Cambridge scientists found for the first time that red blood cells have a 24-hour rhythm.

This is significant, they explained, because circadian rhythms have always been assumed to be linked to DNA and gene activity -- but, unlike most other cells in the body, red blood cells do not have DNA.

"The implications of this for health are manifold. We already know that disrupted clocks...are associated with metabolic disorders such as diabetes, mental health problems and even cancer," said Akhilesh Reddy, who led the study. "By furthering our knowledge of how the 24-hour clock in cells works, we hope that the links...will be made clearer."

Many scientific studies have found links between working irregular hours and a greater likelihood of developing diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Sleep disruption is also associated with mental illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorder.

A team of scientists said last year they had used experimental drugs being developed by Pfizer to reset body clocks of mice in a lab -- opening up the possibility that drugs might in future be developed to restore rhythms to people whose body clocks have been messed up.

In these new studies, Reddy's team incubated purified red blood cells from healthy volunteers in the dark and at body temperature and sampled them regularly over several days.

They then examined the levels of certain biochemical markers -- proteins called peroxiredoxins that are found in virtually all known organisms and are produced in high levels in blood. The results showed that there was a modification in these proteins in a pattern that went back and forth over 24 hours.

A further study found a similar 24-hour cycle in marine algae -- suggesting that internal body clocks have always been important, even for ancient forms of life.

The researchers found those rhythms by sampling the peroxiredoxins in algae at regular intervals over several days. When the algae were kept in darkness, their DNA was no longer active, but the algae kept their circadian clocks ticking even without active genes.

Scientists had previously thought the circadian clock was driven by gene activity, but both the algae and the red blood cells kept time without it.

Andrew Millar of Edinburgh University, who led the second study, said it showed that body clocks are ancient mechanisms that have been around through a billion years of evolution.

"They must be far more important and sophisticated than we previously realized," he said. He added that more research was now needed to determine how and why these clocks developed in people, and what role they play in controlling our bodies.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

[Woozie]

Hmm, so how exactly *does* a RBC have an internal clock?

Actually, I didn't even know individual cells had internal clocks. I thought our only clock in our body was whatever gland it is that secrets hormones on regular intervals and based on sunlight, etc (hypothalamus?).

[Kaylia]

The Large Hardon Collider is the catch-all ScienceIsAwesome thread, right? I saw this this morning:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70P7AY20110126

Ancient body clock keeps all life on time: studies
Wed, Jan 26 2011
By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified the mechanism that controls the internal 24-hour clock of all forms of life -- a finding they say should shed light on some shift work-related problems like diabetes, depression and cancer.

24h is definitively not enough to work, have fun, and sleep. Nature need to evolve faster to let us live on a 36h schedule.



Also, fuck yeah, I aced my advanced statistical physics class. It feel good considering how much I struggled the whole time

[Woozie]

Nature needs to evolve us a way to not need sleep at all. Maybe we could be like dolphins and sleep only certain parts at a time, while the other part stays up and does our homework/wash our dishes, etc.

[Kaylia]

I like sleeping a lot in the morning, I don't want to get ride of that! Going to bed fucking suck though...

[foopy]

sorry if repost:

was it miz or wooz that exchanges emails with NTD?

anyways, saw this clip and thought of you:

[Woozie]

I'm starting to wonder if I could ever become a professor. I love teaching but I really hate grading papers. But then again, half the professors I know don't grade anyways. Either grad students grade or they just draw a big check mark on every paper.

One thing I don't understand is the huge difference between senior undergrads and first year grad students. There's a very noticeable difference in well they know the material and how well they write proofs. This is odd considering (1) there's only a year separating these students and (2) you can become a grad student during your senior year if you're a math major here and you want a Masters instead of a bachelors (for one extra year of study), meaning in some cases there are no years separating the two groups. Yet, when I'm grading papers, there's a very big difference in how they do proofs. This doesn't make any sense to me. There's one student who was an undergrad last semester and is a grad this semester and her proof writing just magically improved over winter break somehow.

Edit: I think part of the reason could be that a lot of the undergrads in advanced calc/intro analysis are engineers and education majors and hence don't care about proof writing or just haven't practiced it as much. But that doesn't completely explain the weird discrepancy.

[Woozie]

It's Miz. He wont even accept my facebook friends request presumably because I still call Pluto a planet.

Edit: NDT is lying. There's no way NDT and Caral Sagan were in the same place at the same time without the entire universe collapsing under the combined weight of their awesomeness.

[Pirian]

That's Miz, and that's really an amazing story (albeit, short)

[Max™]

It's Miz. He wont even accept my facebook friends request presumably because I still call Pluto a planet.