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Neutrino event

Issue no. 7, 2010 Published: Feb 26, 2010
World's most sensitive neutrino experiment begins
Losing Google would hit Chinese science hard
UN warns of electronic waste timebomb
Tiny ear listens to hidden worlds
Clean, cheap power from fuel cells in a box?
New material to harvest electricity from body movements
Human behaviour '93% predictable'
Mathematicians offer tip-offs to LAPD

World's most sensitive neutrino experiment begins
An intrepid subatomic particle has travelled through the bedrock of Japan and triggered a detector on the other side of the country, heralding a new attempt to probe the mystery of neutrino oscillations. The result could take us closer to answering one very big question - why is the universe full of matter? In the 'T2K' experiment, an intense beam of neutrinos is being generated in a particle accelerator near Tokai village north of Tokyo, and aimed at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector 300 kilometres away. Neutrinos interact only reluctantly with matter, but from time to time one will be lucky enough to hit an atomic nucleus inside Super-Kamiokande, and so create a distinctive flash of light. The goal is to understand a strange kind of subatomic metamorphosis. These particles come in three types or flavours: electron, muon and tau neutrinos. From earlier experiments, physicists know that neutrinos spontaneously change their flavour, oscillating back and forth from one kind to another. But the details are still hazy. With T2K they are hoping to fill in some of the blanks and possibly shed some light on why we exist.
New Scientist Feb 25, 2010	back to top

Losing Google would hit Chinese science hard
More than three-quarters of scientists in China use the search engine Google as a primary research tool and say their work would be significantly hampered if they were to lose it, according to a survey. Google's future in the country is uncertain following a row with Beijing, but Chinese scientists asked by the Nature journal how much they rely on Google said it was vital for finding academic papers, information about discoveries or other research programs and finding scholarly literature. Google said in January it had uncovered sophisticated China-based attacks on human rights activists using its Gmail service around the world. Google said other firms had also been affected, and after checks into the attacks, the company had decided it was no longer willing to tolerate censorship on its Google.cn search engine. Google also threatened to shut its China offices. In the survey 84% said losing Google would 'somewhat or significantly' hamper their research and 78% said international collaborations would be affected.
Reuters Feb 24, 2010	back to top

UN warns of electronic waste timebomb
The UN has warned of a rise in electronic waste in developing nations that could put ecosystems and human populations at risk. A report from the UN Environmental Programme said that waste from mobile phones, PCs and other electronics could become a serious environmental issue in the coming years for a number of countries. The uptake of electronics in developing countries will increase dramatically over the next 10 years, but many developing regions are ill-prepared to process and recycle the components. The report estimates that levels of electronic waste in India will jump five-fold by 2020, while regions such as South Africa and China could see a four-fold increase. Of particular concern is the prospect of citizens searching through electronic waste for valuable metals. The UN warned that home-made incinerators used to extract valuable metals from circuit boards and electronic components in regions such as China can release hazardous substances into the atmosphere.
VNUnet UK Feb 22, 2010	back to top

Tiny ear listens to hidden worlds
A micro-ear could soon help scientists eavesdrop on tiny events just like microscopes make them visible. Initially, scientists will use the micro-ear to listen to cells as they go about their daily business. Eventually the device could open up novel ways to assess what effect drugs have on some micro-organisms. The scientists are collaborating to create a basic device they hope will become a standard piece of lab equipment like the microscope. Institutions involved include the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford as well as the National Institute of Medical Research at Mill Hill. The micro-ear is based upon modifying an established technology that uses laser light to create optical tweezers. It is already known that by suspending very small glass or plastic beads in a beam of laser light it becomes possible to measure the tiny forces that operate at molecular scales. While many researchers use single beams of laser light to trap single beads, the micro-ear team hopes to use several arranged in a ring that will be able to surround and 'listen to' an object of interest. Already the team has been able to listen to Brownian motion - the restless jostling of the atoms and molecules on a slide. Once the device is completed researchers plan to use it to eavesdrop on flagella - the tiny motors that many bacteria use to move themselves around.
BBC News Feb 26, 2010	back to top

Clean, cheap power from fuel cells in a box?
Silicon Valley start-up Bloom Energy has unveiled a fuel-cell product this week that can power a small office building. The company expects to have home systems within a decade that are about the size of a loaf of bread. The technology gives users the ability to produce electricity - as opposed to buying it from utilities - and has the potential to extend electricity to parts of the world lacking traditional power systems and lines, Bloom says. With Bloom's fuel cell, air and fuel - such as natural gas, ethanol or biogas - are fed into the cell. The oxygen ions react with the fuel to produce electricity. There's no burning, so the fuel cell is two-thirds cleaner than coal-fired plants, Bloom says. Its technology is cheaper and more efficient than others because it uses low-cost materials - sand and ink - in 10cm-by-10cm fuel cells as thick as business cards, which are stacked together to produce more power. Bloom's big breakthrough was reducing breakage by figuring out how to get the cells and the metal plates that go between them in the stacks to expand and shrink at the same rate at temperatures up to 800 degrees Celsius. The high heat makes the fuel more reactive and the cell more efficient. The heat also enables use of different fuels, making the tech easier and cheaper to deploy, according to Bloom.
USA Today Feb 24, 2010	back to top

New material to harvest electricity from body movements
US Scientists are reporting an advance toward scavenging energy from walking, breathing, and other natural body movements to power electronic devices such as cell phones and heart pacemakers. They describe development of flexible, biocompatible rubber films for use in implantable or wearable energy harvesting systems. The material could be used, for instance, to harvest energy from the motion of the lungs during breathing and use it to run pacemakers without the need for batteries that must be surgically replaced every few years. Popular hand-held consumer electronic devices are using smaller and smaller amounts of electricity. That opens the possibility of supplementing battery power with electricity harvested from body movements. So-called piezoelectric materials are the obvious candidates, since they generate electricity when flexed or subjected to pressure. However, manufacturing such materials requires high temperatures, making it difficult to combine them with rubber. The scientists describe a new manufacturing method that solves this problem. It enabled them to apply nano-sized ribbons of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) - each strand about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair - to ribbons of flexible silicone rubber. PZT is one of the most efficient piezoelectric materials developed to date and can convert 80 percent of mechanical energy into electricity. The combination resulted in a super-thin film they call 'piezo-rubber' that seems to be an excellent candidate for scavenging energy from body movements.
PhysOrg / American Chemical Society - Nano Letters Feb 24, 2010	back to top

Human behaviour '93% predictable'
Location data from mobile phones has indicated that 93% of human movement is predictable. The study examined anonymised data culled from mobile phone service providers and found that it was possible to accurately predict movement and location up to 9% of the time for the majority of people, and 93% of the time for the entire set of data. The study also found that the majority of people did not stray outside a 6 mile radius for the bulk of the period investigated, and that at any one time people were 70% likely to be at their most-visited location. The study used date from mobile phones which were logged by networks at least once every two hours, and gave location information an accuracy of two square miles. Even for callers who travelled regularly over areas of hundreds of miles, data showed that their movements were predictable, indicating the travel patterns tend to be quite formulaic. Each user was found to visit an average of 63 places regularly. Although the data might appear to confirm what people intuitively believe - that most days, most people go to work, go out and come home again, for instance - the researchers, from Boston, USA and China, believe that it could be useful for mobile networks' data load management, city planning and anticipating the spread of viruses.
Daily Telegraph / Science Feb 24, 2010	back to top

Mathematicians offer tip-offs to LAPD
Los Angeles police are getting tip-offs from unlikely informants: mathematicians. Using crime data from southern California, researchers from the University of California set out to calculate how the movements of criminals and victims create opportunities for crime, and how police can reduce it. They came up with a pair of equations that could explain how local crime hotspots form - which turned out to be similar to those that describe molecular reactions and diffusion. The equations suggested that there are two kinds of hotspot. The first, called 'supercritical', arises when small spikes in crime pass a certain threshold and create a local crime wave. The second, 'subcritical', happens when a particular factor - the presence of a drug den, for instance - causes a large spike in crime. The equations also indicated that rigorous policing could completely eliminate the subcritical hotspots, but would simply displace the supercritical variety. The researchers hope eventually to be able to predict where subcritical hotspots are forming, so police can step in to nip problems in the bud. The team is already collaborating with Los Angeles police.
New Scientist / PNAS Feb 23, 2010	back to top