Crazy (in a good way)

After a month of cramming for finals and living off raw ramen noodles, there's nothing more appealing

to a college student at the end of May than a long summer doing nothing, punctuated, if you're feeling really ambitious, by an occasional camping trip or jaunt to the beach.Unless you're Laurie Stephey or Brad Dinardo. In that case you might feel more up to nine weeks of performing cutting-edge scientific research.

Laurie and Brad are two of this summer's Society of Physics Students interns, a group of motivated, physics-lovin' college students who spend nine weeks every summer working on projects ranging from from locating ice under the Martian soil to developing fun hands-on science curriculum. The interns worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society. Laurie and Brad worked at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland, exploring bendable electronics and spray-on solar cells.

"It's huge," Laurie says of NIST. "It took me six weeks to figure out they had a nuclear reactor and particle accelerator." Laurie gushes that she recently toured the lab's cleanroom—after donning a hairnet, clean suit, and booties, of course. "It was so awesome."

NIST is a smorgasbord of physics, chemistry, materials science, and astronomy research. It also boasts a team of full-time mathematicians (what? mathematicains do things?), a laboratory for analyzing pieces of the fallen World Trade Center, and a building out in a far corner of the campus with a small sign reading, "Special Projects."

"I felt like a little kid at Christmas," Laurie says of her first day. "There is just so much cool stuff."

Brad, a physics and math major, has spent the last 9 weeks exploring how you can make a photovoltaic solar cell by spraying organic molecules onto a surface. He said that that diving right into the world of organic photovoltaics was a baptism by fire...or by organic ink, as it were. "The first two weeks I was swamped and just read and read and read all the time," he says. But soon enough, he was mixing solutions in a glove box, airbrushing with semiconductor ink, and learning the mantra of the physicist: "Uh, it's not working."

"It takes forever to get things to work and when they finally do it's such a relief," says Brad, who presented his results—his spray-on solar cells did work—to a room full of Goddard and NIST researchers today. Results (with the capital R) are usually the product of months or years of research; SPS interns have just nine weeks to make a meaningful contribution to a project.

Laurie, who studied how bendable "memristors" switch states, recently graduated from college and was daunted by the huge commitments scientists make to thei

r research. But her summer at NIST, she said, has her hooked. She wants to study oceanography, and plans to apply to the astronaut program as soon as she get's her master's degree. "When I use the glove box, I pretend I'm in space," she confides.

Working with everyone from graduate students to post-docs to salted veterans, Laurie and Brad saw first hand the dedication it takes to be a scientist, and admit it's not for everyone.

"I think all scientists have a little insanity in them, they all have that drive," said Brad, who wants to teach and do research one day as a professor. "They're all crazy—in a good way."

"The kind of crazy it takes to be in science," Laurie explained.

And the SPS interns, it

seems, already have that spark of "awesome crazy," as Brad puts it. first night out among new acquaintances usually includes a trip to a bar, but rarely does it end in a heated discussion of wave functions.

"From the very first night when we went out to eat, we were talking about quantum and Schrödinger's cat," Brad recalls, laughing. "You won't get that anywhere else."

Read about summer so far and follow the continuing adventures of the intrepid SPS interns. Just three weeks to go!

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'Invisible' Building Design Could Reduce Earthquake Damage

Engineers have been developing earthquake-resistant buildings for years, but a group of physicists now believe it's possible to make an entire building effectively disappear from an earthquake's destructive path, avoiding serious damage. Inspired by the recent development of novel materials that precisely control the flow of light waves around objects, they've shown that the same ideas can work whether the waves make up light, sound or earthquakes.

Earthquakes are some of the most destructive forces in nature. The waves they produce ripple across the earth's surface, much as water waves travel across the ocean. The waves from earthquakes crumple buildings, bridges, and other structures, causing millions of dollars in damage and often death. Despite efforts to understand earthquakes and reinforce buildings against them, damage from the shaking ground is nearly impossible to avoid. But that may not be the case for long, say a team of physicists in France and the United Kingdom.

Recently, physicists have been developing better and better invisibility cloaks, which hide an object from sight by causing incoming light waves to bend around the object, and come together behind the object. Physicists Mohamed Farhat and Stefan Enoch of the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, and Sebastien Guenneau of Liverpool University in England wondered if they could use the same principles to hide an object from the destructive waves produced during an earthquake. In a paper to be published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, the three physicists show that the answer may be "yes."

Guenneau said that it's possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren't there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

"It's the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it's bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock." The object, or building, is "invisible" to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. "Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object)," Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each "tuned" to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

Guenneau warned that there are some limits to what the cloak can accomplish. He and his colleagues could not find a way to shield a structure from the types of earthquake waves that travel below the earth’s surface. He noted that surface waves are typically the most destructive in an earthquake.

Jim Beck, an earthquake engineering expert at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, wondered if the ring would be worth building if it couldn't protect a structure from different types of shaking, not just different wavelengths. The cloak might only work perfectly in special circumstances, he said.

"It sounds like an interesting idea, but I think there's a long way to go before they get to what they would like to see done," he said.

Guenneau said he hopes that others will take the idea and explore its promising applications. Last year, Guenneau and his colleagues made headlines by building a prototype tsunami invisibility cloak that uses ring-shaped channels to redirect water waves around an object. Now they're probing that idea further in a large-scale experiment.

The reality of making buildings seem invisible to the destructive forces of nature, be they the waves from earthquakes or tsunamis, "seems a bit crazy, but it's not science fiction," Guenneau said. "We gave the people the concept, now people can try to improve it to make it more tractable."

By Lauren Schenkman
for Inside Science News Service


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"Sixty Symbols"

Whether µ, h, and l make perfect sense or are (literally) Greek to you, don't miss "Sixty Symbols", the latest in science video yumminess from the hilarious, kooky, and frequently brilliant media team at the University of Nottingham. Now that they've completed their quest to capture the essence of every element in the periodic table in a five minute video, they've decided to take on the mysterious and meaningful language of scientific symbols.

Each video is an intimate desk-side chat with a scientist, taking on concepts ranging from the fundamental, such as vectors, to the erudite, such as chaos theory's Feigenbaum constant. The style is a cocktail of home video and scientific portrait. I love that director Brady Haran keeps them short and sweet and gets interesting angles on even drier-sounding symbols like "magnetic susceptibility" (the above video features levitating beer!) Think of the series as a meandering, nonlinear journey through the world of physics. Each arcane-looking symbol is like a different door, so choose your adventure and enter!

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USA! USA! USA!

Hey there sports fans there's an international showdown going on that you might not even know about! Right now some of the brightest high school physics minds in the United States are down in Mexico matching wits against some of the brightest high school physics minds of the rest of the world. It’s the annual International Physics Olympiad! Go team go!

Ok, I got that out of my system, but the IPHO, being held this year in Merida Mexico, really is an incredible event. Each year over 65 teams representing countries from around the world vie for the gold. Instead of incredible feats of strength the participants must perform incredible feats of intellect. Through three physics problems and a lab held over the course of eight days from July 12th to the 19th, the teams will duke it out to see who goes home with the gold!

I had the privilege of meeting some of the team members and coaches in May when they were training at the University of Maryland. I was really blown away when I met them; I have never seen a big group of kids who got such a big kick out of science and discovery.

"It's really fun. It's really exciting. You're challenged a lot more than you would be in high school," said Anand Natarajan, who was selected to travel to Mexico.

Getting to the finals was no easy task for the team members. About four thousand students took the first round "F=MA" exam. From there two more tests followed, each getting tougher as they go. I've looked through some of old exams and the actual IPHO questions and they are not simple matters by any stretch.

What struck me most about the team when I visited was even though many of them had only met each other a few days earlier, how close a bond they all seemed to have. Not only were they a team, but they all really seemed like a big group of friends. When everyone ate lunch together they were relaxed and joked around like they had known each other for years and did this every day.

"They can be who they are without being self conscious about being the only kid in the room who likes physics," said Paul Stanley, their head coach.

Even though there were only five who would travel to Mexico and nineteen kids hoping to go, there was no rivalry between them for the coveted slots. Everyone was there doing what they loved to do, physics.

“I never felt that the camp was about fostering competition over the five traveling team spots,” said Marianna Mao who is currently down in Mexico, “Physics is our idea of a good time.”

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Manhattan's grid is a modern-day Stonehenge

Yesterday evening, the citizens of New York City enjoyed an awesome spectacle of the sun setting exactly in line with the east-west streets of the Manhattan grid. Known as Manhattanhenge, a term coined by Hayden Planetarium's director, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the phenomenon is just like what you see at Stonehenge at the summer and winter solstices. But in New York City, the special days are May 30 and July 12. This is due to the fact that the grid, made up of streets running east to west and avenues running north-south, isn't exactly in line with the compass. It's offset 28.9 degrees east from geographic north.

As Tyson suggests, I can just imagine the archaeologists of the future trying to piece together why Manhattan's streets are aligned just the way they are. What's so important about 28.9 degrees? Were May 30 and July 12 the holy days of this lost civilization?

To save archaeologists the trouble, I decided to do my own digging, and called Joyce Gold, Manhattan history maven and NYC tour guide. Gold told me there's a really simple reason for why Manhattan's grid was drawn the way it was in the 1811 plan. The 28.9-degree tilt means the east-west streets run the shortest route across town from the Hudson River to the East River. However, Gold said, "There is at least one street laid out by a compass." That's Stuyvesant Street, which runs due east from 9th St. and 3rd Ave. to 10th St. and 2nd ave.

"A lot of people think of that as the crooked street in the East Village, but in fact it's the only straight one," Gold said.

Manhattanhenge is one of the phenomena that reminds you just how dramatically the sun's apparent journey through the sky changes over the course of the year, thanks to the 23-degree tilt to the earth's axis. But there's another way, if you're patient, to see this in action.

Photographer Justin Quinnell made this solargraph using a pinhole camera strapped to a telephone mast. The film inside the camera was exposed for six months, creating this ghostly record of half a year. With little more than a soda can, some photographic paper, and a decent helping of patience,you can create your own solargraph. (The developing process even uses a scanner and Photoshop instead of dark room chemicals, so really, no fancy photo knowledge or tools required.)

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The numbers are in: people like science

Yesterday the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released an extensive study exploring how the public feels about scientists and how scientists feels about the public. (It occurs to me that the way I phrased that makes it sound like they recently went through a bad breakup.) Here are the results, in a nutshell:

Public: "Oh look, scientists! Hey, I'm a big fan. I mean, thanks for the internet and medication and stuff."

Scientists: "Um, you're welcome?"

Public: "But you know what, to be honest, I don't really understand you very well."

Scientists: "Maybe you're short-selling yourself."

Public: "No, seriously. Ask me a question."

Scientists: "Okay. Let's see...hey, here's an easy one. Which are smaller, atoms or electrons?"

Public: "Um..."

Scientists: "Sigh...Well, I suppose it's not your fault, considering the abysmal state of science education and science media in this country."

The report covers a broad range of topics, including how the public rates science's usefulness and importance, the opinions of scientists versus the general public on important science-related issues like global warming and animal testing, and how informed the public is about science. You can participate in the last bit by taking Pew's Science Knowledge Quiz. The report itself is extremely interesting and multifaceted, and definitely worth reading. On the whole, things look good for scientists; most people admire scientists, think that science benefits society, and value research as a worthy item on which to spend their taxes. Scientists, on the other hand, have a pretty low opinion of the media's science coverage—63% rate newspaper coverage of science as only fair or poor--and think the public's lack of scientific knowledge is a major problem for science. Which makes a bit of sense if you look at the results from Pew's science quiz. More than half of people answered the aforementioned atoms versus electrons question incorrectly.

Personally, I was really excited to see that the public had such a high opinion of science. I might have guessed as much from my experience working at a Department of Energy physics lab; when the lab opened its doors for a public lecture, hundreds of people turned up, oftentimes standing for an hour just to hear about black holes. Pew reports that even the majority of people who see the Bible as their textbook on evolutionary biology think science is good for humanity. But depending on what news source you read, you'll see a different slant on the results.

The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and the New York Times claim a "widening gap" between the opinions of scientists and the public on science:

...while almost all of the scientists surveyed accept that human beings evolved by natural processes and that human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming, general public is far less sure.

Almost a third of ordinary Americans say human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time, a view held by only 2 percent of the scientists. Only about half of the public agrees that people are behind climate change, and 11 percent does not believe there is any warming at all.

MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle handles the report deftly, moving on from the numbers to ask what can be done to get Scientists and the Public talking again, given that the Public really does actually like Science after all.

Rather than merely complaining about the sorry state of scientific literacy, scientists should value the communicators in their ranks - such as the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who was as comfortable in front of a camera as he was in a lab.

Meanwhile, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker (which keeps up with the biggest stories of the day, and media coverage of them. A really great resource if you see a lot of conflicting reports of the same thing) rounds up the articles and blogs, adding:

One notes that bylines tend to belong to science writers. Science writers can hope to cover science itself with a semblance of objective dispassion. But they have an inbuilt conflict of interest when the topic is the standing and penetration of science as a way to reach conclusions.

As for me, I was interested by the complaint among scientist that a lack of scientific education was really hurting society. It is a shame when a lack of resources in schools mean kids miss out on getting excited about science and acquiring at least some sense for what science does. But does having a lot of formal science education really help you understand the latest scientific research? Even people with a bachelor's degree in a subject like physics, biology, or chemistry lack the background knowledge to really understand what's being published in peer-review journals in those subjects, not to mention if you go across subjects. Scientists famously complain about coverage of their own fields, but I bet Ph.D.s in physics are glad that the latest medical news isn't written only for doctors. And in science journalism, you can only be so precise before you begin to lose your reader. It's easy to tear apart most lay versions of science research as "not quite right," but every science article can't be a crash course in physics.

So what do you think? Are you a scientist? A high school student? How much formal science education do you have? Take Pew's quiz and tell us how you did (anonymous posting is fine). Why do you think you got some questions wrong? How do you feel about science coverage in the media?

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Putting old particle physics experiments out to pasture

Somewhere in the quintessentially Californian golden hills above Stanford University, a giant physics experiment is quietly rotting. "In" is the operative word here; the behemoth sits in a three-story-deep, concrete-lined hole in the ground, sheltered in a warehouse-sized structure in one of the more deserted reaches of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's sprawling campus. Cars and trucks still park in the lot outside, bearing scientists, construction workers, and engineers to the lab's current big project, accessible via two entrances nearby. But this particular piece of physics junk is closed for business.

A hulking steel beast seemingly overgrown with wires, this detector, known as Mark II, was once a microscope that could peer into the most fundamental building blocks of our universe. And it's only a small piece of the much larger experiment that made it happen. Although you can't see them, the two halves of a 2.2-km circular tunnel come together here. If you could turn the clock back about twenty-five years, electrons and positrons would be flying toward the Mark II from either side of the dank tunnel, coming together in a shower of exotic particles and radiation. The intricate family of detectors within Mark II watched and listened, sending data via its millions of wires to physicists who would then meticulously comb through the piles of numbers for some new clue to the universe's puzzle—the lifetime of the tau lepton? The whisper of "I'm here" from a passing selectron?

I was reminded of the Mark II moldering spectacularly in its grave when I saw today's Wired Science photo essay about the death of another old and much-beloved big physics experiment in the Bay Area, Berkeley Lab's once-futuristic Bevatron. It reminded me of how much SLAC, Berkeley, CERN and other labs are massive, physical palimpsests, continuously reinventing themselves. Although perhaps most famous as the proving ground of an incredibly audacious plan to build a two-mile-long accelerator in the early sixties, SLAC's been home to a venerable family tree of acronymic experiments, each building on the infrastructure (tunnels, buildings, technology) and innovations of the previous generation.

Mark-II enjoyed 13 years of use, though it wasn't always here in this underground lair. It started life in the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, or SPEAR, in the heart of SLAC's campus, before it was moved* out to the suburbs. SPEAR hasn't just sat there either. It's now a synchrotron, a factory for high-intensity X-rays. It's a hive of activity where a constantly changing cast of biologists, chemists, earth scientists, physicists, and even archaeologists probe the unseen in their fields. And while SLAC's linear accelerator is no longer a powerhouse of particle physics, its new incarnation as an X-ray free-electron laser (or "Giant Laser," as I like to call it, though it's official moniker is the Linac Coherent Light Source), soon to be capable of molecular movies, shows SLAC scientists are still as daring and ambitious as they were in '61.

*"I mean MOVED, seriously," says Brad Plummer, who for the last three years has written about, snapped photos of, and filmed just about every corner of SLAC. "That's a big, delicate piece of hardware to be moving around. The trailer they put it on had 180 wheels." Thanks, Brad for these gorgeous photos of the Mark II and the hilariously retro control room for the SLAC Large Detector. For more of Brad's stuff, including technolust-inspiring snaps of the Giant Laser, er, LCLS, check out his website.

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