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Home » Page 1656

Baseball and steroids

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How much do drugs affect the performance of athletes and more interestingly how can we quantify such enhanced performance? That was the question that Roger Tobin, a condensed matter physicist from Tufts University, posed in his talk on ‘Sox and Drugs: Baseball, steroids and physics’. Quantifying enhancement is an interesting question, if someone takes drugs and it increases their performance to, say, score one more goal per season or hit a golf ball a few centimetres farther is it really worth it to make a fuss?

The sport in question in Tobin’s talk was of course baseball. In other sports such as weight lifting, taking steroids can have an obvious effect. But what about other sports where strength is an advantage, but cannot easily correlate with results.

He characterized two eras, namely before and after steroid use became well documented (which he put as around 1990s onwards). If one looks at the record home runs in a single season, this explodes in the late 1990s when Sosa hits 66 and Bonds hits 73 home runs in a single season. This increased effect for baseball is around 20% (from the previous efforts of Ruth). Imagine a 20% increase in the 100 m sprint, this would mean a sprinter taking around 8 seconds to run it. If steroid use is the culprit, how can steroid use affect baseball so much but not other sports?

Tobin says that the only advantage of using steroids in baseball comes in the bat speed. It’s pretty straight forward — steroids build muscles, or increase muscle cross section, which allows the player to exert more force on the ball, which then gives the ball more speed. He calculates that steroid use could increase the ball speed by about 3%. Which if one thinks about it is not a lot…

However, here comes the catch. If I took steroids (don’t worry I am not planning to do the experiment) and started playing baseball, it wouldn’t automatically mean that I am going to beat Babe Ruth’s previous home run record, but as Tobin says the player must already “be pretty special.” So what happens? Well, if you look at the hit distribution of a top player, he may hit 10% of all shots as home runs in a season, but he will hit many that are near home runs, in fact the distribution will have a peak at the place which are nearly home runs. What Tobin says is that steroid use shifts this peak so that all those previous near home runs, now become, well, home runs, so this shift alone increases a players 10% home runs to around 15% in a season — all with the help of a few more percent in ball speed…and some steroids.

Seems like condensed matter physicists are spreading their wings, he also plans to extend his work to other sports, so footballer and golfers beware…

Stingy Uncle Sam

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Here I am doing my bit to persuade the US government that it should give a little more money to the nation’s physicists.

The photo was taken by the APS’s Tawanda Johnson, who was trying to get American physicists to write letters to their members of Congress asking them to support the provision of “supplemental appropriations” for 2008. In other words, an extra $510 million in funding that would go to the National Science Foundation, NIST and the Department of Energy — three major sources of money for physics research.

The campaign is in response to the surprise cuts in 2008 research funding that were announced in a recent bill. Hardest hit were fusion and particle physics research, which suffered 10% and 8% reductions respectively.

The letter that the APS would like its members to send describes these and other cuts as “devastating blows [to] science research”…”resulting in significant layoffs of scientists and engineers”. The letter also says that the funding cuts will thwart US efforts to reduce its reliance on foreign oil, mitigate global warming, and put a lid on escalating energy costs. “In short, the enacted bill is bad for our energy and economic future”, the letter says.

At about four in the afternoon, more than 400 letters had been sent and Tawanda expects that a total of about 1200 physicists will put pen to paper at the APS.

Annealing at 1K

My first session was on supersolid He-4, up bright and early for the 8am start. The paper under discussion for the first talk appeared in Nature last year by Xi Lin and colleagues from Penn State University. They looked at the heat capacity of He-4 at low temperature (T < 0.5 K), and reported a peak centered around T = 0.08K.

It also became apparent the difficulties of making accurate measurement at such temperatures, they reported that they constructed 20 low temperature cells for the measurement, and only one of them was heat leak proof.

A large question in the area of supersolid He-4 is what the role of He-3 impurities are, in the final talk of the session given by Philip Anderson this question seems to have even got the better of the Nobel prize winner himself, when he openly admitted to not knowing the answer.

The supersolid peak is independent on the amount of He-3 impurities with Lin presenting samples with 0.3 ppm (parts per million) and 1ppb (parts per billion) of He-3 impurity. But the peak did slightly decrease in temperature when the samples was annealed for longer, so it seemed to depend on how the sample is made. A comment was later made that the supersolid peak could be intimately linked with disorder.

Unfortunately the session did break up a little when the second speaker didn’t show up – which was supposedly a knock on effect from the storm that was over the east coast at the weekend.

New optical clock promises increased accuracy

Researchers from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US have built an optical clock that promises to be the world’s most accurate. The clock is accurate to one part in 10-17, which means it cannot lose or gain a second in more than one billion years.

Optical clocks provide us with the most accurate time keeping known. Unlike conventional atomic clocks, which use microwave radiation, an optical clock uses a beam of visible laser light to fire at an ion. The frequency of the light is tuned so that the ion can absorb a photon and jump from a lower to a higher energy state. When the photon is emitted a moment later the ion returns to lower energy state, much like the ticking of a clock. The jumping is so fast that in one second it can occur over 9 billion times.

Till Rosenband and colleagues selected a single aluminium ion as the basis for their clock because aluminium is less sensitive to temperature and electric fields than mercury, the ion used for the present most accurate clock. But there is a catch: the transition from the ground to excited state in aluminium is hard to probe directly with light. The researchers, therefore, held a beryllium ion next to the aluminium ion in a trap, so that the aluminium ion’s internal state could be transferred to the beryllium ion. This internal state could then be measured — a technique known as quantum logic spectroscopy (Science Express doi: 10.1126/science.1154622).

Apart from the potential of allowing GPS satellites to track position with sub-metre precision, the improved accuracy of the optical clock has led the researchers at NIST to look at whether the fine-structure constant, which governs how light and electrons interact, has actually been changing over time. By measuring the ratio of clock frequencies for aluminium and mercury the researchers at NIST have concluded that the fine structure constant is not changing to within 1.6 x 10-17 per year. Indeed, they believe they have met the required precision to say that it is not changing at all. “This measurement of the ratio of aluminium and mercury clock frequencies is the most accurate known physical constant,” says Rosenband.

The NIST researchers believe that aluminium could be a potential candidate for a clock that is accurate to 1 part in a billionth of a billionth (1 x 1018) of a second, even more accurate than mercury. This would allow researchers to further tighten the constraints on whether the fine structure constant is changing.

Cold Fusion as Policy Posterboy

The March Meeting has everything, including a session on cold fusion.

It is almost 20 years since Pons and Fleischmann told the world that they had seen nuclear fusion in what is essentially an electro-chemistry experiment. The idea is that if you packed enough deuterium into a piece of palladium metal, the deuterium nuclei would somehow overcome considerable electrical repulsion (perhaps being screened by palladium electrons) and fuse together, releasing lots of energy.

The announcement set off a furore that pitted chemists against physicists and led to allegations that big-energy interests and the physics “establishment” were trying to cover up a genuine breakthrough. And sadly, as nuclear physicists scrambled to do experiments involving hydrogen and electricity, there was at least one deadly explosion.

However, other researchers were unable to confim cold fusion and today most of the physics community has forgotten it. Except for a small band of researchers who have somehow convinced the APS to give them a session at the March Meeting.

This year’s session included a talk from a non-physicist, Thomas Grimshaw, who teaches public policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Grimshaw has adopted cold fusion as “a posterboy for rational policy making”. He looked at cold fusion research results using “evidence-based policy making” analysis techniques — the sort of thing a government would use to decide if lower speed limits save lives on the roads.

His conclusion is that there is a “preponderance of evidence” that funding cold fusion research is in the public interest. The minimum response, he believes, is that the US government should reinstate its cold fusion programme — and it would be a reasonable response to give cold fusion the same funding status as conventional approaches to fusion such as magnetic and interial confinement.

While I doubt that this public-policy approach will raise the profile of cold-fusion research, there is something admirable in the fact that the people in session A14 have battled against conventional wisdom for nearly two decades. But writing as someone who did a cold fusion experiment in 1990, my personal opinion is that whatever they are seeing — it’s not fusion.

You can read more about Grimshaw’s work here.

Physicist wins by-election for US Congress

The number of physicists in the US Congress has risen to three after G. William “Bill” Foster, a veteran of the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, won a by-election in Illinois on Saturday. Foster, a Democrat who has never previously stood for political office, secures a seat in the House of Representatives previously occupied by Republican and former House speaker Dennis Hastert, who resigned after 20 years service. “Back in the laboratory, this is what we’d say was a pretty successful experiment,” Foster said.

The two existing physicists in Congress are Republican Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, a nuclear physicist and one-time chair of Calvin College’s physics department, and Democrat Rush Holt of New Jersey, formerly assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Scientific training teaches you always to look at the facts first Bill Foster

Foster, 52, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1975. Four years later, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, he joined the Irvine–Michigan–Brookhaven (IMB) collaboration where he helped to design, build, and conduct research the IMB detector. Designed to spot proton decay, this instrument gained fame when it detected a burst of neutrinos emitted by the SN 1987A supernova.

On earning his Ph.D. in 1984, Foster began what was to become a 22-year stint at Fermilab. As his first task, he designed and built components of the Tevatron’s CDF detector, which discovered the top quark in 1994. In the early 1990s, he led a team responsible for designing an integrated circuit that ratcheted up the speed and accuracy of measuring particle collisions. Later in that decade he co-invented Fermilab’s “recycler ring”. Foster left Fermilab two years ago to devote himself to political activism. However, because it lies within his constituency, he retains links to the lab.

Before he became a physicist, Foster had launched a successful business career. When he was 19, he and his younger brother Fred used $500 of their parents’ money to found a lighting company, Electronic Theatre Controls Incorporated, which now manufactures more than half the theatre lighting equipment used in the United States. The equipment has featured in Broadway, in Rolling Stones tours, and in half-time entertainment at the Superbowl. Foster used some of the fortune generated by the company to finance his election campaign.

His background in physics played its own critical role in his political success. “The scientific training teaches you always to look at the facts first,” he said in reference to the Iraq war. “If you look at the places this country’s gotten itself in trouble, it’s very often where we ignore facts for political reasons.”

Streetcar to the Garden District

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It’s a lovely day in New Orleans and I managed to get a sunburn walking around the French Quarter this morning….I suppose I’m a real redneck now!

Our hotel is right across the road from the convention centre and there are now lots of physicists milling about — the excitement is building. Like myself, many of them look like they haven’t seen the sun for quite some time, so local pharmacies better stock up on sunburn cream!

After lunch I took an ancient streetcar (tram to our European readers) out to the Garden District — a leafy area of huge moss-covered oak trees, ornate Victorian houses and of course, fragrant gardens.

As I was coming back on the St Charles streetcar, I noticed that the branches of the trees at the side of the road were festooned with hundreds of garish necklaces of every possible colour. I’m guessing that these were thrown from floats during a Mardi Gras parade.

I might go back to the Garden District and try to find the City of the Dead — a cemetery where all the tombs are above ground. Maybe I can persuade the IOP crew to make the journey tonight after dark!

Arrived and ready

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The 21 hour door-to-door trip is past us now as we focus on the start of the conference tomorrow. We arrived at the hotel early on Sunday morning after a quick connection in Chicago. The whole trip from Heathrow to New Orleans went quite smoothly, except for the need to change planes in Chicago after we were all seated and ready to go – apparently there was a problem with the braking system, so I wasn’t complaining to change planes. It was also on the flight from Chicago that it became apparent that there were possibly many physicists on-board, most of them armed and ready with poster tubes.

Today, we had our first chance to see some of New Orleans. We had a brief walk around the French Quarter and along the Mississippi river where most of the hotels are situated near to the convention center. Though it was not immediately clear from these areas the devastation that was inflicted by hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I popped into the convention center itself, and already saw a mass of physicists queuing up to register. Coming to the center is the first time the scale of the APS March meeting hits you – containing massive halls where the exhibitions are held. Some people already have their hands on the thick conference book, meticulously studying it, though no doubt looking for the location of colleague’s talks.

After a few too many shrimps this afternoon, we are ready for the conference tomorrow and look forward to keeping you updated on all the in’s and out’s of the 2008 APS March meeting.

Off to New Orleans

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Michael and I are leaving for New Orleans bright and early tomorrow morning — along with five other colleagues from IOP Publishing. Our journey begins in Bristol at about 9.30 in the morning and if all goes well, we will arrive in New Orleans just before midnight (local time). I reckon that’s about 21 hours door-to-door. Unless, we get snowed-in in Chicago!

We have just put the finishing touches on our battle plan for what promises to be a intensive week of condensed matter physics. Actually, more than just condensed matter is on the agenda. Michael will be looking into “econophysics” and physics of the stock market, while I’m looking forward to learn about the physics of hurricane formation and climate change.

See you in the Big Easy!

Nanotubes measure DNA conductivity

Ever since the famous double-helix structure of DNA was discovered more than 50 years ago, researchers have struggled to understand the complex relationships between its structural, chemical and electrical properties. One mystery has been why attempts to measure the electrical conductivity of DNA have yielded conflicting results suggesting that the molecule is an insulator, semiconductor, metal—and even a superconductor at very low temperatures

DNA’s apparent metallic and semiconductor properties along with its ability to self-replicate has led some researchers to suggest that it could be used to create electronic circuits that assemble themselves. Now, however a team of researchers in the US has shown that DNA’s electrical conductivity is extremely sensitive to tiny structural changes in the molecule — which means that it could be very difficult to make reliable DNA circuits.

Reliable connection

Colin Nuckolls of Columbia University, Jacqueline Barton of Caltech and colleagues were able to make reliable conductivity measurements by inventing a new and consistent way of connecting a single DNA molecule to two carbon nanotubes (Nature Nanotechnology 3 163). Past methods had struggled to make a reliable connection between a DNA molecule — which is only about 2  nm wide— and two electrodes. Poor connectivity is thought to be behind many of the inconsistencies in previous measurements.

The team began with a nanotube — a tiny tube of carbon about as thick as DNA itself – that was integrated within a simple electrical circuit. A 6-nm section of the nanotube was removed using plasma ion etching. This procedure not only cuts the tube, but also oxidizes the remaining tips. This makes it possible to bridge the gap with a DNA molecule with ends that have been designed to form strong chemical bonds with the oxidized tips.

Similar to graphite

The conductivity was determined by simply applying 50  mV across the DNA and measuring the current that flowed through it. In a standard piece of DNA, the conductivity was similar to that seen in graphite. This is consistent with the fact that the core of the double helix of DNA consists of stacked molecular rings that have a similar structure to graphite.

A benefit of having the DNA attached securely to the electrodes is that the conductivity can be studied under ambient conditions — in a liquid at room temperature. This allowed the team to confirm that they were actually measuring the conductivity of DNA and not something else in the experiment. This was done by adding an enzyme to the surrounding liquid that cuts DNA – and as expected the electrical circuit was broken.

Mismatched bases

The team were also able to investigate the effect of base mismatches on conductivity. DNA double strands are normally connected through interactions between particular bases—adenine to thymine and cytosine to guanine. If one of the bases in a pair is changed, the two strands will still stick together, but with an altered structure around the mismatched bases.

The team first measured the conductivity of a well matched strand and then exchanged it for a strand with a single mismatch. This single mismatch boosted the resistance of the DNA by a factor of 300. According to Jacqueline Barton “this highlights the need to make measurements on duplex DNA that is well-matched, undamaged, and in its native conformation.”

An important implication of this sensitivity to small changes in structure is that DNA by itself might not be an ideal component for future electronic devices.

Indeed, this inherent sensitivity to structural change could allow living cells to detect DNA damage, which can accumulate in cells and lead to problems including cancer. Cells have ways of repairing this damage, but the mechanism they use to detect damage is still not completely understood. Barton says that this “whole body of experiments now begs the question of whether the cell utilizes this chemistry to detect DNA damage.” This is a question her group is now trying to answer.

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