This last few days I’ve felt one of the major disadvantages of living on the west coast of North America, my timezone. The big CERN announcement about the Higgs boson happened in the wee hours of my day and the live Q&A (questions and answers) about nanotechnology on the Guardian newspaper website was finished before I heard about it. Thankfully, there’s the internet, which gives us all an opportunity to see what happened (if not participate).
Nanotechnology expert Dr Mark Miodownik (King’s College London) answered questions from 1 pm to 2 pm GMT on Thursday Dec. 15, 2011 at the Guardian’s website.. Here are a few excerpts from the Q&A (I have edited out names, moved the answers so they come directly after the questions, and removed consequent redundancies),
14 December 2011 5:06PM
I don’t worry about self replicating nanobots turning us all into Grey Goo.
I do worry about nanofabricated materials entering the body. For example, from things like sunscreen lotion containing nanoscopic particles.
I do worry about nanofabricated materials entering the body. For example, from things like sunscreen lotion containing nanoscopic particles
I agree, I think its important we all worry about this aspect of nanotechnology…but I would argue that we should do so in the same context as worrying about all technologies that enter the public domain. Cars kill a lot of people every year, if they were introduced now as a new technology I wonder whether they would make it through? Mine is not an argument for no regulation though, but for a risk benefit analysis.
Here’s the results of a study of the cancer risk of nanoparticles used in sunscreens:
Hello Dr Mark Miodownik. I am a middle school student and I am having a little trouble coming up with an experiment for my science fair project on nanotechnology. Can you please at least give me one or two ideas on the types of nanotechnology experiments I can conduct? Something on the practical side, such as consumer products or something related to the environment. Thank You.
A great nanotechnology for experimentation at school is ferrofluids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4
The are cheap to buy (just search online), and extremely fun to experiment with. The physics of whats going on to turn a liquid into gel using a magnetic field has great depth in terms of the concepts that need to be understood. Also thinking of new applications for this type of nanotechnology is not a redundant activity, in my opinion we are just scratching the surface of what can be done with magentically tunable liquids.
15 December 2011 10:54AM
Have there any nanotechnology experiments/studies been conducted in the field of Dentistry or Hygiene?
If so, I would be very interested in knowing about any current research.
Many thanks!
Have there any nanotechnology experiments/studies been conducted in the field of Dentistry or Hygiene?
There is a lot of potential in using nanotechnology either to restore teeth or make them stronger.
Hydroxyapatite (HA) nanorods have been found that self-assemble, and have similar structure to the enamel rods in teeth. Lots of people seem to be working on creating replacement teeth that are closer to natural teeth – this is called biomimetics. Building up the structure from the ground up, like biological processes do during teeth formation, allows for a great deal of complexity – and nanotechnology lends itself to mimicking this process – since it is concerned with the building blocks, such as nanorods,
15 December 2011 10:58AM
Couldn’t the Guardian have found a better stock photo to illustrate nanotechnology?
I do think the nanotechnology community take a leaf out of NASA’s book and publish more interesting pics of nanotechnology into the public domain – down there it is as easily as beautiful as pictures of galaxies, which after a while get a bit samey if you ask me.
There are more interesting questions and answers at the Guardian.
Titled “What is the God Particle and Why Should I Care?,” this essay is by Dr. Michael T. Gamble,
So much sound and fury over the Higgs Boson, signifying what? A complete understanding of the fundamental constituents of the world in which we live? Of the universe of which we are an integral part? No … and yes.
High-energy physicists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, announced this week they are closer than ever to detecting the apparently hallowed boson — or possibly it is called God Particle merely for mass consumption. Its quantification would at once provide breathtaking insights into the infinitesimal domain affecting Earthly life and to the composition of the entire universe, a broad range, indeed.
Rewards of Basic Science
This is basic science at its best, the unraveling of the underpinnings of the thing, matter, in this case. The payoff is understanding the whys and wherefores of how particles come to be endowed with mass. And when mass teams up with gravity, watch out, literally. An apple falls to Earth because gravity, a force centrally directed toward the Earth’s core, acts on mass, and on mass alone. We all owe a great debt to mass. In hydroelectric power plants, gravity acts on the mass of water spilling over the dam and pulls it downward, turning the turbines.
Humans don’t float away into space, as in Frank in Kubric’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, because the Earth’s gravity acts on our body mass. Yes, mass is directly proportional to weight, the product of mass multiplied times the Earth’s gravitational acceleration. Cheer up, on Mars you would weigh about 60 percent less!
Standard Model Confirmation and Extensions
The best description of the nature of matter and how it interacts with itself that scientists have devised is codified in the so-called standard model (SM) of particle physics. The Higgs Boson is encompassed by the SM and would fit perfectly, once detected, as it is the sole remaining undetected/unquantified particle prophesized by SM devotee.
Of greater import than completing the equivalent of a prestigious stamp collection for high-energy physicists, quantifying the Higgs Field, the modality via which mass is apportioned, would enable more of the principal forces observed in nature to be unified, mutually describable in a set of complete equations.
Electricity and magnetism have long been codified in the Maxwell equations. Quantification of the Higgs Field would enable a separate phenomenon, nuclear beta decay, also called the nuclear weak force, to be unified with the forces of electricity and magnetism and elaborated in electro-weak equations.
While the Higgs Boson remains unquantified, narrowing the range of its mass to between 114.4 GeV and 131 GeV, according to CERN scientists, is meaningful news. Some years ago the Higgs was thought to be as massive as 500+ GeV, an energy regime unreachable by the LHC [Large Hadron Collider], whose peak energy is closer to 450 GeV.
It appears that it is only a matter of time to determining the mass of the God Particle. And although Einstein’s grand unification vision, a single set of equations describing all of the fundamental forces including gravity, will still be unrealized, I, for one, will celebrate by eating ice cream. When talking mass, every kilogram counts.
About Dr. Michael T. Gamble: Dr. Gamble is a former staff member of the physics division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he researched directed-energy devices such as terawatt laser systems. He was also a senior manager within the Gammas, Electrons, and Muons detector collaboration at the Superconducting Super Collider. Gamble is the author of “Zeroscape,” a high-tech thriller. He holds degrees in nuclear and mechanical engineering, and was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Thank you Dr. Gamble for having this essay sent to me today. I very much appreciate the clarity and the way in which you made the Higgs boson relevant to those of us who are not physicists. It makes a good companion piece to the material I was able to include in my Dec. 14, 2011 posting about the CERN announcement.
I stumbled across a Dec. 15, 2011 article in The Telegraph titled “Higgs boson: the particle of faith” by Alister McGrath, which provides a brief history of how the Higgs boson came to be called the ‘god’ particle and some thoughts on science and belief (excerpted from the article),
In 1994, Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman came up with a nickname for the Higgs boson – the mysterious particle proposed by physicist Peter Higgs back in the 1960s to explain the origin of mass. Journalists loved the name – “the God particle” – which probably explains the huge media interest recently in the work of the Large Hadron Collider. Most scientists hated it, considering it misleading and simplistic. Maybe so. But it certainly got people talking about physics.
…
Some tell us that science is about what can be proved. The wise tell us it is really about offering the best explanations of what we see, realising that these explanations often cannot be proved, and may sometimes lie beyond proof. Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) entities – such as dark matter – to explain what can be seen. The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously in science is not because its existence has been proved, but because it makes so much sense of observations that its existence seems assured. In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.
Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology at King’s College London, and President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. He is currently writing a new biography of the Oxford apologist and writer C. S. Lewis, to be published in March 2013.
I think that taken together both of these pieces offer interesting and contrasting perspectives on the Higgs boson, one notable for its clarity and certainty and the other notable for its suggestion that much of what we know about it is based on a type of faith, albeit not a religious faith.
Canada’s national newspaper (as they like to bill themselves), the Globe and Mail featured Québec researcher’s (Sylvain Martel) work in a Dec. 13, 2011 article by Bertrand Marotte. From the news article,
Professor Sylvain Martel is already a world leader in the field of nano-robotics, but now he’s working to make a medical dream reality: To deliver toxic drug treatments directly to cancerous cells without damaging the body’s healthy tissue.
I have profiled Martel’s work before in an April 6 2010 posting about bacterial nanobots (amongst other subjects) and in a March 16, 2011 posting about his work with remote-controlled microcarriers.
It seems that his next project will combine the work on bacteria and microcarriers (from the Globe and Mail article),
Bolstered by his recent success in guiding micro-carriers loaded with cancer-fighting medications into a rabbit’s liver, he and his team of up to 20 researchers from several disciplines are working to transfer the method to the treatment of colorectal cancer in humans within four years.
This time around he is not using micro-carriers to deliver the drug to the tumour, but rather bacteria.
Here’s a video of the bacteria which illustrates Martel’s earlier success with ‘training’ them to build a pyramid.
The latest breakthrough reported in March 2011 (from my posting) implemented an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine,
Known for being the world’s first researcher to have guided a magnetic sphere through a living artery, Professor Martel is announcing a spectacular new breakthrough in the field of nanomedicine. Using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, his team successfully guided microcarriers loaded with a dose of anti-cancer drug through the bloodstream of a living rabbit, right up to a targeted area in the liver, where the drug was successfully administered. This is a medical first that will help improve chemoembolization, a current treatment for liver cancer.
Here’s what Martel is trying to accomplish now (from the Globe and Mail article),
The MRI machine’s magnetic field is manipulated by [a] sophisticated software program that helps guide the magnetically sensitive bacteria to the tumour mass.
Attached to the bacteria is a capsule containing the cancer-fighting drug. The bacteria are tricked into swimming to an artificially created “magnetic north” at the centre of the tumour, where they will die off after 30 to 40 minutes. The micro-mules, however, have left their precious cargo: the capsule, whose envelope breaks and releases the drug.
I’m not entirely sure why the drug won’t destroy health tissue after it’s finished with the tumour but that detail is not offered in Marotte’s story which, in the last few paragraphs, switches focus from medical breakthroughs to the importance of venture capital funding for Canadian biotech research.
Before launching into the news about its manufacturing plant, here’s a little information about the company itself, CelluForce, a joint venture between FPInnovations and Domtar, from the About CelluForce page,
The company is a joint venture of Domtar Corporation and FPInnovations and was created to manufacture NCC in the world’s first plant of its kind, located in Windsor, Québec.
I wrote about CelluForce in my June 6, 2011 posting around the time it was launched and now its raison d’être, the manufacturing plant, is operational. From the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
Members of the board, management and employees of CelluForce are pleased to announce the end of the construction phase and the start of operations at the first manufacturing plant for NanoCrystalline Cellulose (NCC) in the world.
…
For the last eight weeks, CelluForce has been progressively starting up the equipment for the first ever large-scale production of NCC. The nanomaterial will be produced in state-of-the-art facilities located at Domtar’s pulp and paper plant in Windsor, Quebec. Construction extended over a fourteen-month period. It required a total investment of $36M including the financial participation of both the Federal and Québec governments. The company is particularly pleased to have completed construction phase on time.
CelluForce President and CEO Jean Moreau declared, “Wood pulp is being delivered to the plant to test the new equipment and we are making progress on a daily basis. NCC will start to be produced by the end of the year, with production gradually increasing until it reaches a steady rhythm of 1,000 kg per day in 2012”.
For anyone who’s unfamiliar with NanoCrystalline Cellulose (NCC), I posted an interview with Dr. Richard Berry of FPInnovations who kindly answered some very basic questions on NCC in my Aug. 27, 2010 posting.
The opening of the CelluForce manufacturing plant is very exciting news given that Canadians have a worldwide lead in this research area. Being able to produce NCC in amounts that are meaningful at an industrial scale will make research easier not just in Canada but elsewhere too.
From the news item on Nanowerk,
CelluForce will, on a worldwide basis, market NanoCrystalline Cellulose for strength applications under the CelluForce Impact™ brand, and for optical applications of NCC under the CelluForce Allure™ brand.
I don’t think this video adds much information but it is very slick and entertaining,
NCC’s properties and many potential forms enable many uses, including:
Biocomposites for bone replacement and tooth repair
Pharmaceuticals and drug delivery
Additives for foods and cosmetics
Improved paper and building products
Advanced or “intelligent” packaging
High-strength spun fibres and textiles
Additives for coatings, paints, lacquers and adhesives
Reinforced polymers and innovative bioplastics
Advanced reinforced composite materials
Recyclable interior and structural components for the transportation industry
Aerospace and transportation structures
Iridescent and protective films
Films for optical switching
Pigments and inks
Electronic paper printers
Innovative coatings and new fillers for papermaking
One of the most notable attributes of this material is that it can be used to form iridescent coloured films that can be adjusted precisely, making it possible to revolutionize many applications, including, among others;
Security papers
Iridescent pigments
Switchable optical filters and barriers
Sunscreens
Cosmetics
Packaging
Coatings
I hope to hear more about CelluForce and its efforts with NCC.
On a somewhat related note, I wonder what’s happening with the NCC efforts in Alberta? I noted in my July 5, 2011 posting that an NCC pilot plant was being opened in that Canadian province but I haven’t heard anything since.
I also noted that there is going to be a session titled NanoCellulose: An Abundant, Sustainable, Versatile Biopolymer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Vancouver this February 2012 featuring a researcher from Alberta.
Nanocellulose is a generic name for a new family of novel fibrils derived from plant cell walls or bacteria. Just as cellulose has been an abundant natural resource for millennia with substantial contributions to the development of civilizations, the unique nanocelluloses are sustainable biopolymers poised to have a major role in improving the quality of human life in this century. A rapidly expanding field of nanocellulose science has emerged with pioneering results, leading some to predict that the field could parallel history, where the 1920s studies on cellulose contributed to the discovery of polymers and led to the origin of polymer science. Fibrillated, crystalline, and bacterial nanocelluloses have unsurpassed versatility and strength for composite materials, films, medical implants, drug delivery systems, and a biomaterial rivaling Kevlar, which is made from fossil fuels. With cellulosic biofuels becoming a competitive alternative to fossil fuels, research in enzymology is targeting high-value nanofibrillated cellulose as a biofuel co-product. This symposium will present current findings that bridge multidisciplines, from genomics of tree and plant breeding, plant cell wall structure and function, advanced techniques for characterizing cell walls and nanocellulose, and specialized methods for isolating nanofibrils, to novel biomaterials. The speakers represent three international science and technology centers at the forefront of this new wave of cellulose research.
Organizer:
Barbara Illman, U.S. Forest Service
Moderator:
Barbara Illman, U.S. Forest Service
Speakers:
Theodore Wegner, U.S. Forest Service
A World View of Nanocellulose
Nils Petersen, National Research Council Canada
Nano-Scale Devices for Nanocellulose
Ali Harlin, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland
Nanocellulosic Technologies: A Success Story
It looks interesting but I would have liked to have heard from an FPInnovations researcher and the Brazilian researchers who are working on nanocellulose fibres from pineapples and bananas (my Mar. 28, 2011 and June 16, 2011 postings) and Israeli researchers who are working on NCC foams (my Aug. 2, 2011 posting). These panels are always difficult to organize as you try to get everyone in the same room at the same time although the panel does seem to be focused on wood products as a source for NCC. (If you search Ali Harlin on LinkedIn, you’ll find paper and wood products are Harlin’s area of expertise.)
I notice Nils Petersen, one of the speakers, who in addition to being a National Research Council (NRC) scientist is also the Director General for Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology located in Alberta.
There’s a new cotton fabric that will self-clean when exposed to sunlight. From the Dec. 14, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
Mingce Long and Deyong Wu say their fabric uses a coating made from a compound of titanium dioxide, the white material used in everything from white paint to foods to sunscreen lotions. Titanium dioxide breaks down dirt and kills microbes when exposed to some types of light. It already has found uses in self-cleaning windows, kitchen and bathroom tiles, odor-free socks and other products. Self-cleaning cotton fabrics have been made in the past, the authors note, but they self-clean thoroughly only when exposed to ultraviolet rays. So they set out to develop a new cotton fabric that cleans itself when exposed to ordinary sunlight.
Their report describes cotton fabric coated with nanoparticles made from a compound of titanium dioxide and nitrogen. They show that fabric coated with the material removes an orange dye stain when exposed to sunlight. Further dispersing nanoparticles composed of silver and iodine accelerates the discoloration process. The coating remains intact after washing and drying.
It’s nice to see that the coating doesn’t wash or dry off easily. Long’s and Wu’s report appears in the ACS [American Chemical Society] Applied Materials & Interfaces (“Realizing Visible-Light-Induced Self-Cleaning Property of Cotton through Coating N-TiO2 Film and Loading AgI Particles”). Mingce Long is from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and Deyong Wu is from the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Hubei University for Nationalities, China.
Dexter Johnson of the Nanoclast blog on the IEEE website (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) notes this in his Dec. 22, 2011 posting,
… This is not just cotton treated with TiO2 but cotton treated with a mix of silver iodide (Agl) along with Nitrogen (N)-TiO2. This combination increased the photocatalytic activities of the material.
So, this is what I find so infuriating about coverage of nanotechnology. Couldn’t someone (besides me) have said that researchers had found a way of improving the photocatalytic performance of TiO2 in textiles so as to make their self-cleaning properties X times better than previous methods?
There you have it from an engineer who’s been the nanotech scene for quite some time. The concept of coating a textile with nanoscale titanium dioxide so it self-cleans is not new; the discovery in this case is a refinement which increased the photocatalytic properties of the textile in question.
If you should happen to find a dead beetle or other insect with a hard exoskeleton, take a good look and marvel at strength that doesn’t require bulk or weight. Scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have been inspired by those exoskeletons, made of something called insect cuticle, to create a new material, shrilk. From the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on phosorg.com,
Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a new material that replicates the exceptional strength, toughness, and versatility of one of nature’s more extraordinary substances—insect cuticle. Also low-cost, biodegradable, and biocompatible, the new material, called “Shrilk,” could one day replace plastics in consumer products and be used safely in a variety of medical applications.
…
Natural insect cuticle, such as that found in the rigid exoskeleton of a housefly or grasshopper, is uniquely suited to the challenge of providing protection without adding weight or bulk. As such, it can deflect external chemical and physical strains without damaging the insect’s internal components, while providing structure for the insect’s muscles and wings. It is so light that it doesn’t inhibit flight and so thin that it allows flexibility. Also remarkable is its ability to vary its properties, from rigid along the insect’s body segments and wings to elastic along its limb joints.
Insect cuticle is a composite material consisting of layers of chitin, a polysaccharide polymer, and protein organized in a laminar, plywood-like structure. Mechanical and chemical interactions between these materials provide the cuticle with its unique mechanical and chemical properties. By studying these complex interactions and recreating this unique chemistry and laminar design in the lab, Fernandez [Javier G. Fernandez] and Ingber [Donald Ingber] were able to engineer a thin, clear film that has the same composition and structure as insect cuticle. The material is called Shrilk because it is composed of fibroin protein from silk and from chitin, which is commonly extracted from discarded shrimp shells. [emphasis mine]
The researchers say that shrilk could be used as an environmentally-safe and biodegradable alternative to plastic, e.g. trash bags, diapers, and packaging. It could also be used to suture wounds.
As I noted last week (in my Dec. 6, 2011 posting), there was a big Dec. 13, 2011 announcement from CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) about the Higgs boson. No, they haven’t found it but researchers believe they’ve discovered a hint of where it might be—this ‘hint’ has made international news.
For anyone who may have some questions about what exactly a Higgs boson is, here’s a video of “Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln [describing] the nature of the Higgs boson. Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass” (from the YouTube description),
Here’s a little more about why there’s so much excitement, from the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on Science Daily,
The Standard Model is the theory that physicists use to describe the behaviour of fundamental particles [the smallest discrete entities that make up matter and are not made up of smaller constituent bits of matter themselves] and the forces that act between them. It describes the ordinary matter from which we, and everything visible in the Universe, are made extremely well. Nevertheless, the Standard Model does not describe the 96% of the Universe that is invisible. One of the main goals of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] research programme is to go beyond the Standard Model, and the Higgs boson could be the key.
A Standard Model Higgs boson would confirm a theory first put forward in the 1960s, but there are other possible forms the Higgs boson could take, linked to theories that go beyond the Standard Model. A Standard Model Higgs could still point the way to new physics, through subtleties in its behaviour that would only emerge after studying a large number of Higgs particle decays. A non-Standard Model Higgs, currently beyond the reach of the LHC experiments with data so far recorded, would immediately open the door to new physics, whereas the absence of a Standard Model Higgs would point strongly to new physics at the LHC’s full design energy, set to be achieved after 2014. Whether ATLAS [research group at CERN] and CMS [research group at CERN] show over the coming months that the Standard Model Higgs boson exists or not, the LHC programme is opening the way to new physics.
The search for the Higgs boson has been ongoing for some 40 or 50 years and this announcement points to a definitive answer as to its existence by late 2012.
Two groups at CERN have reported on the results of their search for the Higgs boson. From the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on physorg.com,
Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have nearly eliminated the space in which the Higgs boson could dwell, scientists announced in a seminar held at CERN today. However, the ATLAS and CMS experiments see modest excesses in their data that could soon uncover the famous missing piece of the physics puzzle.
The experiments revealed the latest results as part of their regular report to the CERN Council, which provides oversight for the laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
Theorists have predicted that some subatomic particles gain mass by interacting with other particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson is the only undiscovered part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions.
The experiments’ main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.
Scientists (Philip Schuster, Natalia Toro, and Andy Haas) at the Dec. 13, 2011 (9:30 am PST) Perimeter Institute webcast (What the Higgs is going on?), which took place a few hours after the CERN announcement, exhibited a lot of excitement liberally spiced with caution in regard to the announcement. The webcast is available for viewing and if you’re wondering whether it’s suitable for you, here’s a description from the event webpage,
What is everything in the universe made of?What was the universe like billions of years ago?
These are eternal questions that humans have pondered throughout the ages. Today, we are on the verge of potentially making revolutionary breakthroughs in answering them.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a 27-kilometre long underground experiment located on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It smashes subatomic particles together at vast speeds in an effort to learn more about the fundamental building blocks that make up everything around you. It is the biggest, most ambitious scientific experiment in human history.
On December 13, the LHC will announce its latest findings in its search for the last undiscovered particle in our current model of subatomic particles. This particle is the near-mythical ‘Higgs Boson’ — the particle thought to be involved in giving other particles their mass.
This educational event, geared towards high school students, teachers and the general public, will follow CERN’s announcement and discuss its findings and their background and implications in clear, accessible language.
You can view the webcast from here. The description of how scientists choose which events to measure and the process they use to define whether or not an event is significant adds to one’s appreciation of the work being done in these projects.
Jon Butterworth, a physicist who works at CERN and whose blog is one of the Guardian science blogs, wrote a limerick about it all in his Dec. 13, 2011 posting,
A physicist saw an enigma
And called to his mum “Flying pig, ma!”
She said “Flying pigs?
Next thing you’ll see the Higgs!”
He said “Nah, not until it’s five sigma!”
Five sigma is a measure of certainty. The current results have a 2.3 sigma, which is promising but the gold standard is five.
Here’s the live blog that Alok Jha, science correspondent for the Guardain, kept during the Dec. 13, 2011 announcement (excerpted from the live blog),
1.01pm: Cern’s live webcast has begun, but the seminar has yet to start. The expressions on some of the faces in the audience suggests Christmas is about to come early for the physics community.
1.02pm: Ok the seminar has started, but traffic to the webcast is obviously heavy, breaking up the transmission.
TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, held a public seminar at 2:30 pm PST (Dec. 13, 2011) on their site at the University of British Columbia. They also have some information on their website about Canadian scientists who are involved in the CERN experiments ( from the Research Highlights page, Physicists Smell but Don’t Yet Taste Higgs),
In a seminar held at CERN this morning and then repeated across Canada at multiple partnering institutions, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Finding this particle would snap in the last missing puzzle piece of the Standard Model that describes the universe at its most basic level. Tantalizing hints have been seen by both experiments in the same mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass in the range 115-130 GeV, excluding essentially all other hiding places.
“We are at a crossroads in our understanding of how energy gained mass and became matter in the early universe,” said Rob McPherson, spokesperson of the Canadian team working on the ATLAS project and a professor at the University of Victoria and a research scientist with the Institute of Particle Physics. “If these hints lead to a firm discovery over the coming year, we will be at the start of our investigation of the interactions that lie behind our current theories. If they are not confirmed, we will have to reject our present understanding, throw out our current theories, and start over. It is an extremely interesting time in particle physics.”
So there you have it. They think they observed something but they’re not sure, which makes for a very exciting time (they hope). While I’m not a scientist and cannot fully appreciate this moment, I can remember similar moments in my own work when something seems to be coming into focus. It isn’t my final result but it does hint at what is to come and gives me the resolve (giddy excitement for a few hours or days) I need to continue because a lot of what I do is slogging (I recognize the word play).
On a final note, it seems there was a minor crisis during the presentations in CERN. Lily Asquith, at the Argonne National Laboratory [Chicago, US] writes about it on Jon Butterworth’s blog (Guardian science blogs) in her Dec. 14, 2011 posting,
We have a large windowless meeting room at Argonne with an old-fashioned pull-down projector screen. When I walked in there yesterday morning for the CERN videolink I was greeted by 30-odd ashen-faced physicists. Oh lord, I thought, there has been a terrible accident. …
There stands Fabiola Gianotti [particle physicist in charge of the ATLAS experiment in CERN], our queen, looking fabulous and doing a typically faultless job of presenting a complicated and not-yet-conclusive measurement; taking the work of hundreds of nutty, stressed-out physicists and breathing sense into it.
But I hear only one thing as I walk the corridors of my lab and of the internet:
comic sans [the font Gianotti used for the text in her presentation]
– why‽
…
Do we need to add an additional systematic uncertainty to all our measurements based on this unwise choice of font? Are any of our results still valid? What does this mean for the speed of light?
Please do read the rest of Asquith’s very amusing piece. Who knew physicists are so concerned with fonts?
For the curious, here’s a sample of Comic Sans along with a history excerpt from its Wikipedia essay,
Microsoft designer Vincent Connare says that he began work on Comic Sans in October of 1994. Connare had already created a number of child-oriented fonts for various applications, so when he saw a beta version of Microsoft Bob that used Times New Roman in the word balloons of cartoon characters, he decided to create a new face based on the lettering style of comic books he had in his office, specifically The Dark Knight Returns (lettered by John Costanza) and Watchmen (lettered by Dave Gibbons).
So the font was originally designed for children and comic books, eh?
Hands were featured in Waldo (a 1943 short story by Robert Heinlein) and in Richard Feynman’s “Plenty of room at the bottom” 1959 lecture both of which were concerned with describing a field we now call nanotechnology. As I put it in my Aug. 17, 2009 posting,
Both of these texts feature the development of ‘smaller and smaller robotic hands to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular levels’ and both of these have been cited as the birth of nanotechnology.
The details are a bit sketchy but it seems that scientists at the University of Bath (UK) have created a tiny (nanoscale) tool that looks like a hand. From the University of Bath’s Dec. 12, 2011 news release,
The lower picture shows the AFM probe with the nano-hand circled. The upper image is a vastly enlarged image of the nano-hand, showing the beckoning motion spotted by Dr Gordeev.
Here’s a little more about Dr. Gordeev’s observation from the Dec. 12, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,
Dr Sergey Gordeev, from the Department of Physics, was trying to create a nano-scalpel, a tool which can be used by biologists to look inside cells, when the process went wrong.
Dr Gordeev said: “I was amazed when I looked at the nano-scalpel and saw what appeared to be a beckoning hand.
“Nanoscience research is moving very fast at the moment, so maybe the nano-hand is trying to attract people and funders into this area.
…
The research group is using funding from Bath Ventures, an organisation which commercialises the results of the University’s research, and private company Diamond Hard Surfaces Ltd, to explore the use of hard coatings for nano-tools, making them more durable and suitable for delicate biological procedures.
I appreciate Dr. Gordeev’s whimsical notion that the hand might be trying to attract funding for this research group.
The research focus for Indonesia’s newly launched nanotechnology center will be single-electron devices. From the Dec. 11, 2011 article by Bayu Marhaenjati for the Jakarta Globe,
By April 2012, a high-tech research center is expected to open at the country’s premier educational institution to independently develop nanotechnology.
The Rp 10 billion ($1.1 million) Mochtar Riady Quantum Plaza nanotechnology research center (MRPQ UI) at the University of Indonesia’s school of engineering in Depok will conduct research focused initially on single-electron devices.
At the groundbreaking ceremony on Monday, Mochtar, the Lippo Group founder and chairman, said global developments meant all countries needed to be competitive, especially in technology. He said a number of nations had already established nanotechnology research centers to fuel their growing industrial bases.
“The current hotbeds of technological development are the US, China and Japan. I strongly feel that Indonesia is not far behind,” he said. “Indonesians need to play a role in this new world. Without human resources, Indonesia cannot be competitive on the global stage. That is why education is important.”
At the bottom of Marhaenjati’s article, there’s a note to the effect that the Jakarta Globe is affiliated with the Lippo Group chaired by Mochtar Riady who shares his name with the new research center.
Richard M. Jones at the American Institute of Physics (AIP) reports in a Dec. 9, 2011 article in the AIP Bulletin no. 145,
Members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology [PCAST] were briefed last month on the implementation of the council’s recommendations regarding the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). Now in its tenth year, federal agencies participating in the NNI expend about $2 billion per year, having spent a cumulative $14 billion on nanotechnology R&D since its inception.
Jones summarized the presentations (here’s a sampling),
Sally Tinkle, Deputy Director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office was the first of four speakers in this sixty-minute briefing. … As examples, she described an increase in the number of public-private partnerships (citing examples from the NIH and NIST), outreach to states (including a full-time employee dedicated to this effort), interactions with officials from the European Union, better information dissemination programs, and research on health, environmental, safety, ethical, and legal matters. …
Carlos Pena, Director of Emerging Technology at the Office of Science and Health Coordination of the Food and Drug Administration was the second speaker. He described FDA’s efforts to carefully protect human health while fostering the development of nanotechnology, using science-based decision making. Among those steps it has taken is increasing training of its staff and improved coordination and cooperation with other agencies. …
Other topics covered in a concluding question-and-answer period included monthly inter-agency briefings, meetings with the European Union, products awaiting FDA approval, federal agency funding collaborations, the desirability of a multi-agency roadmap to support further development of nanotechnology, the engagement of nongovernmental stakeholders, and computational support.
You can access the webcast, briefing materials, minutes, etc. from the Nov. 2, 2011 meeting here.
What I find most interesting is that this particular US government administration is making a big effort at offering access and information about science matters. It seems strange to me that I rarely come across similar information from the Canadian government, which makes no great effort to let us know about their (it is most definitely theirs and not ours) science.
