Welcome to the Saturday Science Edition of Overnight News Digest
Overnight News Digest is a regular daily feature which provides noteworthy news items and commentary from around the world. The editorial staff includes side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, and JML9999.
Neon Vincent is our editor-in-chief.
Special thanks go to Magnifico for starting this venerable series.
Astronomy
Hubble Observations Suggest Underground Ocean On Jupiter’s Largest Moon
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth's surface. [...] "This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish," said John Grunsfeld from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth." Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system and the only moon with its own magnetic field. The magnetic field causes aurorae, which are ribbons of glowing hot electrified gas in regions circling the north and south poles of the moon. Because Ganymede is close to Jupiter, it is also embedded in Jupiter's magnetic field. When Jupiter's magnetic field changes, the aurorae on Ganymede also change, "rocking" back and forth. By watching the rocking motion of the two aurorae, scientists were able to determine that a large amount of saltwater exists beneath Ganymede's crust, affecting its magnetic field. [...] If a saltwater ocean were present, Jupiter's magnetic field would create a secondary magnetic field in the ocean that would counter Jupiter's field. This "magnetic friction" would suppress the rocking of the aurorae. This ocean fights Jupiter's magnetic field so strongly that it reduces the rocking of the aurorae to 2° instead of 6° if the ocean were not present. astronomy
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Magnetosphere Mission Launches
It’s the mission you might never have heard of. Even the name might leave you scratching your head. But with the goal of better understanding Earth’s space weather environment, NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission launched just over an hour before midnight on March 12th from Cape Canaveral on a worthwhile endeavor. The mission aims to provide a high-resolution, 3D view of magnetic reconnection in Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetic windsock that surrounds our planet and where Earth’s magnetic field wins out over the solar magnetic field streaming by. Reconnection is the rapid-fire splicing of magnetic field lines, essentially a magnetic explosion that releases billions of megatons of TNT’s worth of energy. When Earth’s field lines reconnect, they can shoot back toward Earth and hurl charged particles into our atmosphere, spurring auroras. It’s also the process by which the Sun unleashes massive flares. [...] MMS is a quartet of four, 11-foot-wide octagons each decked out with 11 instruments. Once in space they’ll unfurl various booms, including wire booms nearly 200 feet long with sensors on the ends, making them look a bit hairy. In terms of magnetic and electric fields, the spacecraft are some of the cleanest ever launched: they need to prevent as much residual magnetism and electric charge as possible, in order to detect with high precision what’s happening with the charged particles and magnetic fields in Earth’s vicinity. The four spacecraft will fly 10 kilometers apart, and they must maintain their tetrahedron formation to an accuracy of 100 meters, or one-hundredth that distance. The nominal mission is two years, with six months prior to that spent moving them into orbit. They won’t predict space weather directly, but their data will help scientists better understand how that weather works. skyandtelescope
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Let It Go! SMAP Almost Ready To Map Frozen Soil
Those who feel as though they've been living in the never-ending winter of the movie "Frozen" this year may be glad to hear that the spring thaw is now typically arriving up to two weeks earlier in the Northern Hemisphere than it did 20 to 30 years ago. But the changing date of the spring thaw has consequences far beyond reducing the number of mornings when you have to scrape off your windshield. One ecosystem where scientists would most like to understand the effects of changing freeze/thaw cycles is boreal forests, the great ring of green covering the land nearest the North Pole. The forests of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia cover almost 15 percent of Earth's land surface. The Arctic is warming more quickly than lower latitudes, and the way these forests respond to this rapid change could provide valuable clues about our planet's warmer future. But we know very little about how the boreal forests are changing. Millions of square miles have no roads or even villages. "What we have now are very sparse, seasonal measurements from the ground," said John Kimball, a professor of systems ecology at the University of Montana, Missoula, and a member of the science team for NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, launched Jan. 31. "We do have long-term, global satellite data sets that are sensitive to freeze-thaw, but they tend to be very coarse." That means each measurement averages the status of a large area. Like a mosaic made of large tiles, these data cannot show much detail. That's about to change. By the end of April, SMAP will begin monitoring the frozen or thawed state of the landscape north of 45 degrees north latitude (about the latitude of Minneapolis) every two days. The primary mission of SMAP is to measure the amount of moisture in the top few inches of soil globally, but it also detects whether that moisture is frozen or in liquid form. SMAP's radar measurements, with "tiles" only half a mile to a mile and a half (1 to 3 kilometers) across, will reveal far more detail than scientists now have about the freeze/thaw status of the land surface. Why is greater detail needed? In the Arctic, the timing of the spring thaw can vary considerably within a small area. Because the returning sun is low on the horizon, the shadowed north side of a hill may remain icy many days after plants have started growing again on the sunlit south side. Those early spring weeks are critical in the short Arctic growing season. "Once the vegetation thaws, boom! Photosynthesis takes off," Kimball explained. "You can get your highest rates of photosynthesis within a few weeks after the thaw, and a later thaw can mean much lower vegetation growth for the season. We need observations at what I call the landscape level to more precisely monitor those patterns and changes." nasa
Biology
Taste Quality Decoding Parallels Taste Sensations
Summary: In most species, the sense of taste is key in the distinction of potentially nutritious and harmful food constituents and thereby in the acceptance (or rejection) of food. Taste quality is encoded by specialized receptors on the tongue, which detect chemicals corresponding to each of the basic tastes (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory), before taste quality information is transmitted via segregated neuronal fibers, distributed coding across neuronal fibers, or dynamic firing patterns to the gustatory cortex in the insula. In rodents, both hardwired coding by labeled lines and flexible, learning-dependent representations and broadly tuned neurons seem to coexist. It is currently unknown how, when, and where taste quality representations are established in the cortex and whether these representations are used for perceptual decisions. Here, we show that neuronal response patterns allow to decode which of four tastants (salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) participants tasted in a given trial by using time-resolved multivariate pattern analyses of large-scale electrophysiological brain responses. The onset of this prediction coincided with the earliest taste-evoked responses originating from the insula and opercular cortices, indicating that quality is among the first attributes of a taste represented in the central gustatory system. These response patterns correlated with perceptual decisions of taste quality: tastes that participants discriminated less accurately also evoked less discriminated brain response patterns. The results therefore provide the first evidence for a link between taste-related decision-making and the predictive value of these brain response patterns. cell
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Analysis Of Worm Neurons Suggests How A Single Stimulus Can Trigger Different Response
Even worms have free will. If offered a delicious smell, for example, a roundworm will usually stop its wandering to investigate the source, but sometimes it won't. Just as with humans, the same stimulus does not always provoke the same response, even from the same individual. New research at Rockefeller University, published online today (March 12) in Cell, offers a new neurological explanation for this variability, derived by studying a simple three-cell network within the roundworm brain. "We found that the collective state of the three neurons at the exact moment an odor arrives determines the likelihood that the worm will move toward the smell. So, in essence, what the worm is thinking about at the time determines how it responds," says study author Cori Bargmann, Torsten N. Wiesel Professor, head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior. "It goes to show that nervous systems aren't passively waiting for signals from outside, they have their own internal patterns of activity that are as important as any external signal when it comes to generating a behavior." The researchers went a step deeper to tease out the dynamics within the network. By changing the activity of the neurons individually and in combination, first author Andrew Gordus, a research associate in the lab, and his colleagues could pinpoint each neuron's role in generating variability in both brain activity and the behavior associated with it. The human brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, or connections, among them. The brain of the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, by comparison, has 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses. So while the worm's brain cannot replicate the complexity of the human brain, scientists can use it to address tricky neurological questions that would be nearly impossible to broach in our own brains. Worms spend their time wandering, looking for decomposing matter to eat. And when they smell it, they usually stop making random turns and travel straight toward the source. This change in behavior is initially triggered by a sensory neuron that perceives the smell and feeds that information to the network the researchers studied. As the worms pick up the alluring fruity smell of isoamyl alcohol, the neurons in the network transition into a low activity state that allows them to approach the odor. But sometimes the neurons remain highly active, and the worm continues to wander around - even though its sensory neuron has detected the odor. biologynews
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Tulane Pathogen Release Blamed On Sloppy Safety Practices
A federal investigation into the release of a dangerous bacterium from the Tulane National Primate Research Center in Louisiana has found serious problems with biosafety procedures, including workers who improperly used or even eschewed protective clothing. Concerns arose at the center in Covington, Louisiana, after two rhesus macaques became ill in late November with melioidosis, a disease caused by the tropical bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. In January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Agriculture investigators traced the strain infecting the primates to a vaccine research lab working with mice. Last month, as the investigation continued, CDC suspended the primate center’s 10 or so research projects involving B. pseudomallei and other select agents (a list of dangerous bacteria, viruses, and toxins that are tightly regulated). Meanwhile, a report in USA Today suggested the bacterium might have contaminated the center’s soil or water. In a press release today [Mar, 13], CDC concludes that investigators could not pin down “the specific transmission event” that led to the monkeys’ infections but that “plausible mechanisms were uncovered.” Inspectors found “lapses” in the use of outerwear, “which could have led to the bacteria clinging to inner garments and getting carried out of the select agent lab where research was being conducted with the bacteria on mice.” Those workers might have transferred B. pseudomallei to the center’s primate breeding colony or to a clinic where the monkeys are given medical care, the release says. In addition, workers “frequently entered the select agent lab without appropriate protective clothing,” the release says. No center staff has shown signs of illness, even those with weak levels of antibodies to the bacterium. And CDC “has found no evidence to date to suggest the organism was released into the surrounding environment.” Still, select agent research will remain on hold until Tulane demonstrates it is following proper biosafety procedures. In a statement, a Tulane University representative said the center is working to implement “the recommended corrective actions” and has called in an expert in select agent research for advice. “We apologize for any anxiety, discomfort or inconvenience this incident has caused,” the statement says. sciencemag
Chemistry
Chemical Building Blocks Produce A Wellspring Of Organic Molecules
Scientists in the US have developed an automated platform to create small organic molecules from a set of simple of chemical building blocks, raising the potential to produce a range of compounds from fatty acids to DNA cleaving agents. Small organic molecules act to regulate processes in nature and biology, serving different purposes in a wide array of fields. Found in pesticides and drugs, the large scale synthesis of these molecules has proven troublesome in recent years, however. Researchers often have to tailor their synthetic approach to the specific molecule they want to manufacture. A team led by Martin Burke from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have dodged this problem by identifying bifunctional N-methyliminodiacetic acid (MIDA) boronates as a common intermediate building block. MIDA boronates can be used as part of an automated coupling and purification process to produce a diverse range of organic molecules. The researchers were able to produce oligophenylene, a conducting polymer used in semiconductors, and the DNA cleaving agent citreofuran. They say their system has the potential to speed up areas such as drug development rsc
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This New Device Recycles Plastic Bottles Into 3D-Printing Material
Watching how relatively quickly 3D printing has hit the mainstream over the past few years has been fascinating. They're turning up in university labs and school rooms, you can buy one to stick in your living room for $100. It's become so easy for people to 3D-print guns in the privacy of their homes that the US state of Massachusetts has recently banned their manufacture, saying that as an American, you have a right to bear arms, but you do not have a right to bear "electrical arms", which is anything that comes out of a 3D-printer. Whether a fad or an integral part of our future, 3D printers are sure making an impact, but not always in the way we want. When you print something, you're going to end up with little plastic corners and ends that are trimmed off and discarded because they're too small to reuse. Think about how many 3D printers there are in the world and how many things they're printing every day, and that's a whole lot of waste that can only really end up in landfill. So three engineering physics students at the University of British Columbia in Canada have invented the ProtoCycler, a device that can grind up all kinds of waste plastic into a beautiful clean spool of plastic filament that can be used in a 3D printer. We're talking anything - plastic bottles, 3D-printing cut-offs, takeaway food containers. If your kids leave their LEGOs out one too many times for you to tread on with your bare feet... throw them in too. It works just like a juicer, which you can see in [this video]. "We were concerned about the amount of plastic waste generated in our engineering projects, so we looked for a way to recycle that plastic back into usable filament," one of the team, Dennon Oosterman, said in a press release. [...] The team hopes that the ProtoCycler will be something schools invest in so their students can go absolutely nuts on their 3D printers without the environment or their school's budget having a total heart attack. "Schools are including 3D printing as part of their science and technology curriculum, but the cost of having each student try a project can quickly become unaffordable," Oosterman says. "With ProtoCycler, the students can try over and over until it's perfect, nearly for free, without harming the environment." sciencealert
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Addressing Long-Standing Mysteries Behind Anti-Wear Motor Oil Additive
The pistons in your car engine rub up against their cylinder walls thousands of times a minute; without lubrication in the form of motor oil, they and other parts of the engine would quickly wear away, causing engine failure. Motor oil contains chemical additives that extend how long engines can run without failure, but, despite decades of ubiquity, how such additives actually work to prevent this damage have remained a mystery. [...] The anti-wear additive zinc dialkyldithiophosphate, or ZDDP, was essentially discovered by accident in the 1940s. Originally added to prevent rusting, engineers found it increased the anti-wear properties of motor oil by some then-unknown mechanism. As analysis techniques improved, researchers discovered that ZDDP breaks down and turns into a "tribofilm," a thin, solid layer that adheres to the surfaces in contact and further protects them from wear. The exact process by which ZDDP makes this transformation, however, remained unclear. "ZDDP has been used for more than 70 years," Gosvami said. "It's one of the most successful antiwear additives we have, but we still don't understand how it works. We do know that everything that happens during sliding is occurring on the first few atomic layers of the surfaces, so we have to use the knowledge we have from nanotechnology and apply it to understand what's going on there." Researchers would like to find molecules to reduce or replace ZDDP altogether, because, although it reduces wear, it slightly increases friction in the engine. It can also generate byproducts in the exhaust that reduce the lifespan and efficiency of a car's pollutant-reducing catalytic converter. Additionally, ZDDP does not work as well on the lightweight engine materials eyed as potential replacements for steels. sciencedaily
Earth Science
What Lake Tahoe Tells Us About A Changing Climate
A recently published study on how natural and man-made sources of nitrogen are recycled through the Lake Tahoe ecosystem provides new information on how global change may affect the iconic blue lake. “High-elevation lakes, such as Lake Tahoe, are sentinels of climate change,” said Lihini Aluwihare, associate professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego and co-author of the study. “Small changes in the lake's chemistry can have big impacts on the entire ecosystem.” Lake Tahoe's nitrogen concentration is one of several factors that helps maintain its crystal clear waters. To keep Tahoe blue in the future, the researchers say it's important to keep a close eye on the nitrogen balance in the ecosystem over time. “The things we do, as humans, affect change in nature. We know the Lake's foodweb is changing due to warming and nitrogen inputs. Our marine and aquatic ecosystems across the globe face many of the same environmental stressors. What we've learned about how aquatic foodwebs recycle nitrogen in Lake Tahoe may be applicable to the clear waters near Hawai‘i,” said Stuart Goldberg, lead author of the study and post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (Goldberg was a post-doctoral researcher at Scripps Oceanography during this research). [...] A main goal of the study was to understand how the nutrient is being cycled through the microbial food web. Goldberg compares the foodweb to a cafeteria that sends out a variety of different dining options that support the community as a whole. Nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon come in, and the foodweb changes them into different types of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon – proteins, sugars, and fats, for example. Some types are easier to eat than others, and are reused or eaten almost instantly. Other types, like the proteins isolated for this study, aren't easily consumed and accumulate in the Lake. enn
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New Explanation For Siberia’s Mystery Craters
In mid-July 2014, a mysterious hole in permafrost, spotted by helicopter pilots in the Yamal region of northern Russia, captured the world’s attention. Reindeer herders reported a second hole some days later, and still later a third Siberian crater was found. Weird explanations ranged from meteorites to stray missiles to aliens, but by late July a team of scientists reported that they had measured unusually high concentrations of methane inside the first crater, which is now known as B1. The journal Nature published a story on its website on July 31, 2014 featuring those findings, and many accepted the unsettling idea that an explosive release of methane, related to global warming, caused the craters … until February 2015 when the Siberian Times reported more craters in Siberia. A Russian scientist speculated that there may be “20 to 30 craters more.” The report of more craters has led scientists to offer a different, simpler explanation for them, one that is still related to global warming, but does not involve a powerful and explosive methane release. [...] Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gas Hydrates Project, told EarthSky this week (March 9, 2015) that an explosive release of methane is not a likely explanation for the craters. It’s true that, in Siberian permafrost, large deposits of methane gas are trapped in ice, forming what is called a gas hydrate. Methane remains stable and frozen at certain temperatures, but as the permafrost warms, and its internal strength decreases, it may be less able to withhold the build-up of sub-surface gases, and thus a release of methane is possible. But, Ruppel told us: Generic methane hydrates in permafrost settings are normally not stable above about 200 meters depth. The craters are far shallower than that, so tapping into dissociating methane hydrate is probably unlikely. She and other scientists are calling on a simpler explanation, related to mounds of earth-covered ice in the Arctic and subarctic known as pingos. [...] She said rocks may have been ejected upward when methane-containing natural gas – stored in the permafrost but kept under pressure by the weight of the pingos – suddenly released in the warmer temperatures as the pingos collapsed and made the craters. That’s a less dramatic scenario than the original idea, which was that methane in and of itself exploded upward forcefully enough to create the giant holes. earthsky
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Wet Wipes Box Says Flush. New York’s Sewer System Says Don’t.
With its sewer system under siege, tallying millions of dollars in equipment damage across its underground maze, New York City is confronting a menace that has gummed the gears of plumbing networks around the world: the common wet wipe. In recent years, the intersection of evolving hygienic sensibilities and aggressive industry marketing has fueled the product’s rise. Wet wipes, long used for baby care, have grown popular with adults. Some of the products are branded as “flushable” — a characterization contested by wastewater officials and plaintiffs bringing class-action lawsuits against wipes manufacturers for upending their plumbing. Often, the wipes combine with other materials, like congealed grease, to create a sort of superknot. “They’re really indestructible,” said Vincent Sapienza, a deputy commissioner for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. “I guess that’s the purpose.” The city has spent more than $18 million in the past five years on wipe-related equipment problems, officials said. The volume of materials extracted from screening machines at the city’s wastewater treatment plants has more than doubled since 2008, an increase attributed largely to the wipes. nyt
Physics
Solving The Riddle Of Neutron Stars
It has not yet been possible to measure the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. They are so weak that they get lost in the noise of the measurements. But thanks to the latest simulations of the merging of binary neutron star systems, the structure of the sought-after signals is now known. As a team of German and Japanese theoretical astrophysicists reports in the Editor's choice of the current edition of the scientific journal Physical Review D, gravitational waves have a characteristic spectrum that is similar to the spectral lines of atoms. Gravitational waves are generated when masses accelerate. The first indirect evidence for their existence was detected in 1974 when the binary pulsar PSR B1913+16 was discovered in the constellation Aquila. The two rapidly rotating neutron stars are drifting towards each other in a spiral shape, which is why, the astrophysicists explain, they are losing energy and emitting gravitational waves. Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. In the meantime, there are now several large-scale experiments for detecting gravitational waves: the American LIGO experiment, the European Virgo experiment, and the Japanese KAGRA detector. Experts estimate that signals of gravitational waves from merging binary neutron star systems will be detected within the next five years. "These signals are not easy to detect, because they have an extremely small amplitude." But despite these difficult conditions, it is possible to find them, if you know what to look for in advance," explained Professor Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University. Together with a Japanese colleague from Osaka University, he has studied a number of binary neutron star systems with the help of the latest simulation techniques and has discovered that the merging of the stars generates characteristic gravitational wave spectra. "These spectra correspond, at least logically, to the electromagnetic spectral lines emitted by atoms or molecules. From these we can derive information on the characteristics of the stars," explains Rezzolla. As the astrophysicists show in two publications with related content in Physical Review Letters (published in November 2014) and in the current edition of Physical Review D, the gravitational waves spectrum is like a fingerprint for the two stars. If scientists learn how to interpret these spectra, they will know what the neutron stars are made of and will be able to determine what is their equation of state, which is so far unknown. Equations of state describe the thermodynamic properties of systems as a function of variables, such as pressure, temperature, volume, or particle number. To this Rezzolla adds: "This is a very exciting possibility, because then we would be able to solve a riddle that has remained unsolved for 40 years: What are neutron stars made of and what is their stellar structure?" "If the signal is strong and thus the fingerprint is very clear, even a single measurement would be sufficient," Rezzolla predicts. "The prospects of solving the riddle of neutron stars have never been this good. The gravitational waves that we hope to detect in a few years are already on their way from the farthest reaches of the universe." phys.org
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Scientists Make Breakthrough In Understanding How To Control Intense Heat Bursts In Fusion Experiments
Researchers from General Atomics and the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have made a major breakthrough in understanding how potentially damaging heat bursts inside a fusion reactor can be controlled. Scientists performed the experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego. The findings represent a key step in predicting how to control heat bursts in future fusion facilities including ITER, an international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy. The studies build upon previous work pioneered on DIII-D showing that these intense heat bursts - called "ELMs" for short - could be suppressed with tiny magnetic fields. These tiny fields cause the edge of the plasma to smoothly release heat, thereby avoiding the damaging heat bursts. But until now, scientists did not understand how these fields worked. "Many mysteries surrounded how the plasma distorts to suppress these heat bursts," said Carlos Paz-Soldan, a General Atomics scientist and lead author of the first of the two papers that report the seminal findings back-to-back in the same issue of Physical Review Letters this week. Paz-Soldan and a multi-institutional team of researchers found that tiny magnetic fields applied to the device can create two distinct kinds of response, rather than just one response as previously thought. The new response produces a ripple in the magnetic field near the plasma edge, allowing more heat to leak out at just the right rate to avert the intense heat bursts. Researchers applied the magnetic fields by running electrical current through coils around the plasma. Pickup coils then detected the plasma response, much as the microphone on a guitar picks up string vibrations. The second result, led by PPPL scientist Raffi Nazikian, who heads the PPPL research team at DIII-D, identified the changes in the plasma that lead to the suppression of the large edge heat bursts or ELMs. The team found clear evidence that the plasma was deforming in just the way needed to allow the heat to slowly leak out. The measured magnetic distortions of the plasma edge indicated that the magnetic field was gently tearing in a narrow layer, a key prediction for how heat bursts can be prevented. "The configuration changes suddenly when the plasma is tapped in a certain way," Nazikian said, "and it is this response that suppresses the ELMs." phys.org
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Large Hadron Collider Fires Up In A Bid To Shake Up The Standard Model
After a two-year hiatus, CERN is set to restart the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its main experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb over the next few weeks. After discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, the LHC was shut down in February 2013 for a major upgrade of the accelerator and its experiments. If all goes well, the LHC and its experiments will be fully operational and collecting data in late May or early June 2015. Upgrade work – including a complete overhaul of the superconducting connections between magnets – was completed last June, and much of the LHC has now been cooled to its operating temperature of 1.9 K. On 7 March, the first proton beams were transported through some sectors of the 27 km-long collider. By May of this year, the revamped LHC is expected to be colliding protons at a collision energy of 13 TeV, heralding the beginning of what CERN has dubbed "Run 2". While this energy is nearly double that of the previous 8 TeV run, it is below the LHC's design energy of 14 TeV. The decision to run at 13 TeV was made because of the extra time that is required to "train" the LHC's superconducting magnets for 14 TeV collisions. The higher energy should allow CERN physicists to improve their understanding of the newly found Higgs boson, because the number of particles produced in collisions is expected to increase by a factor of 10. Overall, physicists will have to sift through nearly five times more data in Run 2 than were produced in the LHC's first run. CMS spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi, says that they will not be using "brute force methods" to cope with this deluge of data, but have instead developed more efficient ways of processing it. Another important goal of Run 2 is the search for evidence of physics beyond that described by the Standard Model of particle physics. In particular, physicists will be looking for evidence of supersymmetry (SUSY) – a theory that predicts that every fundamental particle has a so-far-undiscovered "superpartner" particle whose properties are imperceptibly different. Other signs of new physics that could be detected include evidence for extra dimensions, exotic particles and dark matter. physicsworld