Science tidbits
It's been a long, long time since I wrote anything here: I've just finished teaching an intensive one month "Spring Term" class on Medical Physics that met two to three hours a day, five days a week. This might have been less stressful if I'd ever taught (or taken) a class on the subject before (or if I hadn't spent the whole week between my previous final exams and the class starting writing and giving a conference talk in Chicago). But it seems to have gone well, and I've now officially hit summer vacation! That means that I get to procrastinate on baby preparation and paper writing by sharing cool recent science tidbits.
The first is serious physics, and has the potential to be tremendously exciting if it pans out: the CDF experiment at Fermilab may have found the first direct evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics! For a nice layman's summary, my friend Sean Carroll has a good writeup at Cosmic Variance; for some more detail, follow the links to posts at Résonaances. I won't try to repeat them here; I'll just show the exciting data:
and comment that the red line is the expected Standard Model result and the blue bump above would presumably correspond to an entirely new neutral particle about 150 times heavier than a proton. This result still isn't 100% solid: it's a "4.8 sigma" result, which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen by chance, but until it's reproduced by Fermilab's D0 experiment or by the LHC there's always the chance that someone forgot to carry a two during the data analysis.
The second thing to share is a beautiful time-lapse video of the Earth rotating under the stars that was recently adapted from an earlier video of stars rotating in the sky. It's a vivid demonstration of the Earth's motion through the heavens that makes you rethink your assumptions about what's really moving when you watch the sky. Here's the video; seriously consider watching it full-screen in HD!
The first is serious physics, and has the potential to be tremendously exciting if it pans out: the CDF experiment at Fermilab may have found the first direct evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics! For a nice layman's summary, my friend Sean Carroll has a good writeup at Cosmic Variance; for some more detail, follow the links to posts at Résonaances. I won't try to repeat them here; I'll just show the exciting data:
and comment that the red line is the expected Standard Model result and the blue bump above would presumably correspond to an entirely new neutral particle about 150 times heavier than a proton. This result still isn't 100% solid: it's a "4.8 sigma" result, which is extraordinarily unlikely to happen by chance, but until it's reproduced by Fermilab's D0 experiment or by the LHC there's always the chance that someone forgot to carry a two during the data analysis.
The second thing to share is a beautiful time-lapse video of the Earth rotating under the stars that was recently adapted from an earlier video of stars rotating in the sky. It's a vivid demonstration of the Earth's motion through the heavens that makes you rethink your assumptions about what's really moving when you watch the sky. Here's the video; seriously consider watching it full-screen in HD!
Click to view