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By 'eck! Particle physicist to star in soap opera

By Ken Heartly-Wright

1 April 2010

Brian Cox (courtesy: Gia Milinovich)

Brian Cox, the University of Manchester particle physicist and a researcher at CERN in Geneva, is set to appear in the longest-running British TV soap opera.

The 42 year old has recently presented the BBC series Wonders of the Solar System, in which he travels the globe explaining various phenomena in our solar system.

To promote the series, the former keyboard player in the band D:Ream has also appeared in a string of high-profile television and radio appearances.

Last week the rock-star physicist appeared on the late-night TV programme Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, which is normally reserved for A-list celebrities.

And only last month he was heard on the top-rated Chris Evans Breakfast show on BBC Radio 2. Indeed, most physicists can only d:ream of being on such prime-time shows as these.

Now, however, Cox will star in an upcoming episode of the prime-time soap opera Coronation Street.

The show, known affectionately as Corrie, is set in the fictional town of Weatherfield, a suburb of Manchester, and follows a number of dysfunctional families living on the street with the Rovers Return pub as its main social point.

Cox, who was born in Oldham, Greater Manchester, will be no stranger to the show or indeed the dialect, which can feature terms such as “eh, chuck?”, “nowt” and “by ‘eck!”

The Mancunian physicist is set to play the character Byron Knox, a particle physicist who works at Weatherfield Polytechnic.

Although details about the storyline for Cox’s character are scarce, physicsworld.com has learned that Knox used to work at CERN but returns to Weatherfield after being sacked for accidentally dropping his meat and potato pie onto an electrical connection at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – stopping the experiment from working.

Returning to Weatherfield after his CERN humiliation, Knox discovers that he is the long-lost son of Ken Barlow – famous as being one of the original characters in Corrie and one of the few to have attended university.

Keen to resurrect his career, Knox then begins teaching physics at Weatherfield Polytechnic. Some scenes will involve him lecturing some of the show’s stars on particle physics in the Rovers Return as well as encouraging the street’s rebel teenager, Rosie Webster, to pursue a career in physics.

It is not yet known whether Cox’s appearance will be a one-off or if he will make regular appearances on the show. physicsworld.com understands that this will depend on his research commitments.

UK synchrotron secures £110m upgrade

The Diamond third-generation synchrotron light source in the UK has received £110 m of funding that will allow it to complete 10 more beamlines, bringing the total number of beamlines at the facility to 32. The planned upgrade, to be fully completed by 2017, will allow researchers to study nanometre-scale objects such as quantum dots and to resolve the structure of objects smaller than 1 μm.

The bulk of the money (£97.4 m) comes from the Large Facilities Capital Fund (LFCF), which supports investments made by Research Councils UK – the umbrella organization for the seven UK funding councils – in large research facilities and infrastructure. The remaining £13.8 m comes from the Wellcome Trust – a UK-based independent charity.

Opened in 2007 near Didcot in Oxfordshire, the £260 m Diamond synchrotron is the largest UK-funded scientific facility. It consists of a linear accelerator that accelerates electrons to energies of 100 MeV. After being further accelerated to 3 GeV in a booster ring, the electrons are then sent to a 650 m diameter storage ring, where they produce X-rays as they pass through magnetic devices called “undulators”, which force the electrons along a sinusoidal path.

Ten more beamlines

This radiation is then sent down beamlines and used in a range of experiments from condensed-matter physics to biology. The Diamond synchrotron currently has 17 operational beamlines, which in two years’ time will be extended to 22. The £110 m of funding, dubbed Diamond Phase III, will allow 10 more beamlines, bringing the total number to 32.

“Given the present situation in the economy, we are very grateful of the support of the government and the Wellcome Trust,” Gerard Materlik, chief executive of Diamond, told physicsworld.com. Materlik says that the design phase can now begin for the scientific instruments that could be put on the 10 beamlines.

Announcing the funding yesterday, Peter Mandelson, secretary of state of business, innovation and skills said that the beamlines “could potentially benefit nearly every aspect of our lives and lead to applications such as providing high-resolution 3D images of biological samples, which will further our knowledge of diseases and help to develop new therapies for problems as diverse as Parkinson’s and hip replacements”.

Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive at the Institute of Physics, which publishes physicsworld.com, welcomed the investment. “Our Diamond Light Source is a world-leading facility that uses ‘brilliant beams of light’ to investigate the true nature of materials,” he says. “Diamond will lead to advances in a wide range of fields from new therapies for disease treatment, environmental monitoring to the development of ultra-fast electronic devices.”

More from the hottest party at the March Meeting

And the winner is…David Singh

By Hamish Johnston

My colleague Sharice Collins has just posted a large number of photos from IOP Publishing’s glitzy reception held on 17 March at the APS March Meeting in Portland.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, this year’s party celebrated the twentieth anniversary of our journal Nanotechnology.

The party included a draw for an iPod Nano, which was won by David Singh of ORNL.

Thanks to Sharice for an excellent bash – and you can see in the bottom centre photo that, despite all the hard work, she still enjoyed herself.

Talking about the eerie silence

Is there anyone out there? Paul Davies’s new book

By Matin Durrani

Whether or not we are alone in the universe is one of the great outstanding questions of existence.

But don’t take my word for it – that’s the view of Paul Davies, physicist, popular-science writer and director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in the US and author of a new book The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe.

If you enjoyed Paul’s article about why we should relaunch the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which can be read online here, then why not tune in on 31 March for a free online lecture by Paul himself?

To register for the talk, which takes place at 4.00 p.m. British Summer Time (11.00 a.m. US east coast, 5.00 p.m. Central European Time), simply follow this link.

You can ask Paul questions too – so if you want to know why he thinks magnetic monopoles could be a sign of alien life, you’d better register now.

Oh, and if you miss the talk, or simply want to hear it again, it will be online a few days after the event.

Spin-out puts new spin on wind energy

The future of wind energy could involve huge blades spanning half a kilometre that generate compressed air – which is then piped into giant, underwater balloons. That is the dream of Seamus Garvey, a mechanical engineer at the University of Nottingham in the UK, who envisages using the pressurized air to inflate the underwater balloons, nestling about 500 m below the surface of the sea. Electricity could then be generated by releasing the air to drive a set of turbines.

An important advantage of this arrangement, according to Garvey, is that several days’ worth of energy could be stored in the balloons while the wind is blowing – and then released when there is no wind. Garvey has just formed a university spin-out company called NIMROD Energy to commercialize the technology – dubbed Integrated Compressed Air Renewable Energy Systems (ICARES) – which he was been working on since 2006.

Rotating slowly

Garvey’s generator technology takes advantage of the fact that – for a given wind speed – huge turbines rotate more slowly than their smaller counterparts. While slow rotation makes electrical generation expensive, it is ideal for doing mechanical work. NIMROD’s turbine blades would be hollow and contain an internal piston. When a blade is pointing downwards, the piston is at the tip. But as the blade slowly lifts skywards, the piston falls through the cylinder, compressing air.

According to Garvey, such a scheme can only work if the blade rotates slowly enough that the centripetal force is not too large to pin the pistons to the ends of the blades. As a result, it would only be practical for turbines bigger than about 230 m in diameter. Indeed, he describes the 230 m-diameter turbine as the “baby”, with a giant, 500 m-diameter turbine being the ideal size.

Although building such massive turbines would be expensive, that wind is free still makes them economical in the long term, claims Garvey. He calculates that building a compressed-air system would be less than a third of the price of a conventional offshore wind system with the same generating capacity. Indeed, Garvey says that his system could be as cheap as a gas-turbine generator and have zero fuel costs.

What lies beneath

On the energy storage side of the scheme, Garvey says the ideal storage balloon would be about 20 m in diameter and anchored 500 m below the surface of the sea. He has already begun to test prototype “energy bags” and has received a €310,000 grant from the energy company E.ON to develop the technology further.

Taller than the Gherkin

Garvey told physicsworld.com that a commercial undersea-storage system will be available by May 2011. However, he believes that it will take about 15 years to get the giant turbines up and running. In the meantime Garvey thinks the undersea bags could offer a convenient way of storing surplus energy from more conventional energy sources such as nuclear reactors, which are often located near the ocean.

Bags of potential

Compressed-air energy storage is not, however, a totally new idea. There are two facilities in the world – one in Germany and the other in the US – where surplus energy is taken off the electrical grid and used to pump air underground into disused salt mines.

According to Garvey, underwater storage has two advantages over such underground facilities. First, underwater storage is not limited to the locations of disused mines. Indeed, many coastlines – including southern Europe and the western US have deep water nearby. Second, the pressure in an undersea bag is constant, which means that turbines can be used to covert the air back into electricity in a relatively efficient way. An underground storage facility, by contrast, has a fixed volume, which means that the air pressure drops as air is released.

Garvey also believes that the bags could be used to store natural gas in maritime nations like the UK, boosting the country’s ability to ride out an interruption in imports of the fuel.

Jakob Mann, a wind-energy expert at Risø National Laboratory in Denmark, says that the storage technique is “worthwhile trying”, adding that cheap ways of storing surplus energy are much needed. However, he added that the undersea nature of scheme could boost the cost. “Offshore is always expensive,” he says.

Although Mann does not think locating the turbines in deep water will be a problem, he believes that building such massive compressing systems will be a challenge. Indeed, he suggests that the concept should first be trialled using electrical turbines that power electrical compressors.

CERN achieves 7 TeV collisions at Large Hadron Collider

Physicists at CERN in Geneva have achieved the first 7 TeV proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The first collisions took place at 1 p.m. local time and are the most energetic ever achieved in a particle accelerator.

More significantly, today marks the beginning of the LHC physics programme, which will test and scrutinize the Standard Model of particle physics.

“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends,” he added.

Heuer’s delight at the LHC finally colliding protons 18 months after the September 2008 accident is shared by Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment. “The prevailing sentiment is emotion,” said Gianotti, speaking shortly after the first collisions were announced. “Behind these instruments are people with their feelings, with their frustrations, with their ambitions – it is the end of 20 years’ hard work within the scientific community.”

All detectors working

The first collisions took place at lunchtime following two earlier attempts that had to be abandoned due to faults in the beamline power supply. The first pair of beams were “dumped” by accelerator scientists after detecting a minor problem with a power supply. The second attempt was aborted by the LHC’s early-warning system, which was installed after the accident in 2008 that punctured the machine’s liquid-helium cooling system

All of CERN’s detectors are now recording collisions and early reactions at CERN suggest that scientists are impressed with what they are seeing. “We are completely ready to start analysing data today because our detector is perfectly aligned and calibrated, and we have already produced meaningful results published in a paper last week,” said Pauline Gagnon of the ATLAS collaboration.

The ATLAS experiment will search for, among other things, the Higgs boson – the missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics that could explain how particles acquire their mass. Precision measurements of known Standard Model particles mean that its mass is unlikely to be more than 186 GeV. Direct searches made at CERN’s Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP) – the forerunner to the LHC – have ruled out a Higgs that is lighter than 114 GeV.

Another experiment at CERN is the LHCb, which will allow researchers to study the difference between matter and antimatter with unprecedented accuracy. Its spokesperson Andrei Golutvin said that he was already intrigued by the detections he is seeing. “Today, we celebrate the start of new life where Monte Carlo simulations are replaced with real data,” he said. “Let us hope that nature is kind to us.”

Going higher

CERN’s plan is to run continuously for a period of 18–24 months, with a short technical stop at the end of 2010. Experiments will run throughout this time, with researchers expecting to accumulate one “inverse femtobarn” of data – roughly 10 trillion proton–proton collisions. The LHC will shut down in 2012 to prepare it to go straight to maximum-energy 14 TeV collisions.

Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, is confident about reaching higher-energy collisions. “We are convinced that, without too much trouble, we can go to 13 TeV, and I am very confident we can go beyond that to 14, some time in 2013,” he said.

Looking to the longer term, Heuer today reiterated his desire for the Geneva laboratory to host the next big experiment in particle physics after the LHC. “The energy of this collider will be determined by the results of the LHC,” said the CERN boss. “It would be bad management if we would not put the hat in the ring.”

LHC still poised for collisions at 7 TeV

Crossing the thin black line

By James Dacey at CERN

This chart shows the first of two aborted attempts to collide two 3.5 TeV proton beams here at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Today is supposed to mark the beginning of the LHC physics programme, and the world’s press is gathered here at the particle physics laboratory to experience the events as they unfold.

Look closely at the chart and you will see the thin black line – which represents beam energy – plummet just after 6 this morning. This was done intentionally by beam engineers, who noticed that bunches of protons had become unstable, and it was better to “dump” the beams in a controlled manner rather than allow them to capitulate freely, which could damage equipment.

This process occurred again at around 8.45, following a similar fault.

I have been whizzing around the LHC’s experiments on the media bus to get the reaction of CERN scientists.

“You should not be at all surprised by this – there are many things that can go wrong with the beams, but the fundamentals have been set in place over the past few weeks,” said Crispin Williams, a detector scientist at ALICE.

Another scientist, Hans-Peter Beck, at the ATLAS experiment, explained to me the difficulties of trying to collide the two proton beams.

“It is like a set of marbles slipping down a sheet of ice. We know they will get to the bottom, but it is very difficult to predict or control their trajectories.”

The next attempt is expected to take place in around an hour’s time.

Watch the CERN webcast here.

Next stop, the LHC

An unassuming setting for such an ambitious project

By James Dacey at CERN

Early tomorrow morning, I will be leaving my roadside hotel and taking the second exit on this roundabout towards CERN where the scientists will embark on an infinitely more exciting journey – the start of the physics programme at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

This event is marked by the first particle collisions 7 TeV, which will set yet another impressive benchmark for accelerator physics.

CERN has announced within the last hour that the first attempt at collisions will take place any time from 7 a.m. Central European Summer Time.

I will be reporting from CERN during the day, but if you want to be even closer to the action you can follow events via a live webcast, which will include coverage from the control room as well as step-by-step explanations of the procedures.

Later in the day there will be a number of roundtable discussions as well as broadcasts from the LHC’s four experiments: ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb.

Graphene-oxide framework packs in hydrogen

Stacked layers of oxidized graphene could be used to store hydrogen fuel for cars and other applications. So say researchers in the US who have made graphene-oxide frameworks (GOFs) that can hold roughly 1% of their weight in hydrogen. This value is 100 times better than graphene oxide itself and compares well with MOF-5 (the most studied metal-organic framework to date for hydrogen storage), which absorbs about 1.3 wt%.

Vehicles and other systems powered by hydrogen have the advantage of emitting only water as a waste product. An important challenge, however, is storing enough hydrogen on board a car to give it a range comparable to a vehicle powered by fossil-fuels. If hydrogen is stored as a compressed gas, it takes up far too much space – and liquefying hydrogen is expensive in terms of both cost and energy.

One promising solution to this problem is to exploit the fact that many solid materials will absorb large amounts of hydrogen. Graphene oxide is a sheet of carbon and oxygen just one atom thick, and hydrogen can be stored between the layers in stacks of this lightweight material. The challenge is to get the spacing between layers just right to reach maximum storage capacity.

Connector molecules

Now, Taner Yildirim and colleagues at NIST and the University of Pennsylvania have boosted the storage capacity of graphene oxide by using organic “connector molecules” to separate individual layers by 1.1 nm. This is three times more than the inter-plane distance in bare graphite – which comprises stacked layers of graphene.

“Being able to control this width is important for a number of applications, including hydrogen storage,” explains team member Jacob Burress. He says that the interlayer spacing can be controlled to optimize hydrogen adsorption. The idea is to have pores that are small enough to maximize the interaction between hydrogen and the surface of the frameworks, but at the same time large enough to hold two layers of adsorbed hydrogen.

The team took its inspiration from work already done on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), widely studied materials for hydrogen storage. Here, inorganic nodes are connected by organic struts using well established chemistry techniques. In the new work, the metal oxides are replaced with graphene oxide and the struts with diboronic acid “pillars”.

Future optimization

The GOFs can store roughly 1 wt% of hydrogen at 77 K and 1 bar. “This is less than one fifth that the ‘ideal’ GOF structure can hold, according to state-of-the-art computer simulations,” says team member Wei Zhou. “Based on our adsorption simulations, the ideal GOF structure can adsorb hydrogen up to 6 wt% at 77 K and atmospheric pressure, suggesting that our GOF materials could be significantly optimized in the future.”

As important as its hydrogen-storage properties are, the fact that graphene-oxide production can easily be scaled-up to industrial quantities is a big advantage too. What’s more, it is inexpensive and thought to be safe for people and the environment.

The team also discovered that the hydrogen-adsorption kinetics of GOFs are different compared with other materials. At lower temperatures, there is little adsorption and hardly any hydrogen gas is released either. This means that the material can be loaded with gas at higher temperatures and then cooled below this blocking temperature to hold the hydrogen in place. Gas will not be released until the sample is allowed to warm up. Ideally, this blocking temperature needs to be as close to room temperature as possible for practical applications.

Drug delievery

“We expect to see more work on graphene oxide where it is linked by many different connectors for a variety of chemistry and physics applications,” Burress tells physicsworld.com. “We anticipate these materials to be very useful not only for hydrogen storage but for other gases such as ammonia and carbon dioxide as well.” He also hinted at medical applications: “Once the graphene-oxide layers are separated by sufficiently large distances, one could also imagine adding some biomolecules for drug delivery”.

The researchers now hope to look into possible electronic applications for the GOFs because they may be useful as conducting materials for fuel cells or batteries. Another possibility is to use the GOFs as sensors, where gas adsorption leads to a measurable change in the material’s electronic properties.

The next immediate step is to optimize hydrogen-storage capacity, says the team. This could be achieved in a number of ways: including removing unreacted hydroxyl groups to increase the useable surface area; and optimizing the linkers in terms of concentrations and chemistry.

“We also want to understand the nature of hydrogen-adsorption kinetics and how we can use it to our advantage!” says Burress. “This is just the beginning of new research and there are many new experimental avenues to follow.”

The research was presented last week at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society.

Leading British scientist to scrutinize BBC's science coverage

Steve Jones to head BBC Trust review

By James Dacey

British biologist Steve Jones is to head a review of impartiality and accuracy in the BBC’s coverage of science, called for by the BBC Trust – the BBC’s governing body. The Trust has also published guidelines for this review, which give the scope and the timetable of activities.

The review comes as pressure has mounted on the BBC in recent years due to issues such as climate change, GM crops and stem cell research becoming increasingly politicized.

For example, in 2007 the corporation cancelled a special day of programmes that was to be devoted to climate change when senior news executives questioned the impartiality of this broadcast.

The BBC Trust will assess BBC content across all of its media outlets including the BBC World Service, over the coming months. They say that this will involve a number of public engagement activities.

“It will ask whether the BBC’s coverage of science taken as a whole, presents a partial view of the nature of science and the role science plays within society,” say the review guidelines.

Jones will scrutinize the results of these exercises before writing a final report, which is expected to be published in the first half of 2011.

“I look forward to sampling some of [the BBC’s] huge coverage of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, geology and more to see how well it is doing its job,” says Jones, who is head of the genetics, environment and evolution department at University College London.

“Science is by nature a field full of dispute; this is how it advances. Dispute is not the same as bias, though: and a bias towards optimism or pessimism is a real danger, both in the public presentation of science, and in the beliefs of scientists themselves.”

In addition to his academic research, which focuses on the evolutionary and genetic aspects of biology, Jones is also a familiar guest in BBC programming. He has made more than 200 appearances on BBC radio and has also been a guest on a number of BBC current affairs programmes including Question Time and Newsnight.

“He was selected on the basis of his academic credentials, of his knowledge of the media and his reputation amongst the scientific community,” says the BBC Trust in a statement.

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By 'eck! Particle physicist to star in soap opera