The LHC should invest in better quality…

Click image for high-resolution!

Image (C) by userfriendly.org. Stolen without permission. :)

I bet the Tevatron is a partner of Denon… ;-)

X-Ray Galore – with sticky tape!

Since Tomaso likes to play around with his personal dosimeter on airplanes, I’d like to propose him a new 50 keV X-Ray experiment for his toy.

Everyone knows that peeling of scotch tape under her or his blanket emits some light. But did you also know that you can’t only use it as holographic memory but also let it send off X-Rays in vacuum? I found this article on Hack A Day today and also this really cool video up on Nature’s website.

So, vacuum-chamber anyone? Thinking of Ponder Stibbons‘[1] proposal to create a lot of electricity by mounting a lot of cats to wheel and let an amber-rod stroke their fur, I could think of an easier way to produce lots of X-Rays than the method DESY is using ;-)

[1] Obviously a Discworld reference.

Bronze Buddha by rconstruct

Now for something completely different: A friend of mine, head-artist of our really great WW2-submarine simulation “Danger from the Deep“, rendered this classic standard Stanford-Buddha with his own procedural shaders powered by Shrimp (which means: No textures!). It’s just so gorgeous, I had to share it with his kind permission.

Fig 1: Stanford standard Buddha, original mesh by Stanford University, cleaned, decimated, converted to RiSubd with K-3D by rconstruct (click for 1024×1024 PNG)

Ain’t that nice?

Check out Shrimp, an interactive Renderman shader creator.

P.S.: Whoring++ – all those creationists are tagging their postings with “science” – so I’m going to tag that posting with “science” (it’s CS) and “religion” (it’s a Buddha!) as well.

Gedankenexperiment: Why travelling near light-speed is a bad idea

A couple of friends and me were quite in a jolly mood so we came up with this idea:

Travelling near light speed is bad for humans. The electrons of the atoms which make up the human body gain a lot of energy – but eventually, when you reach your destination, you need to pull the brake. Where should all the excess energy go which the electrons piled up? Bloody Bremsstrahlung which’ll harm the body :)

Next time I need to do some calculations how much radition you’d pile up at certain speeds relative to.

Stay tuned for more drunken theories.

Tell me about your concerns!

Updates:

1) Tonnie pointed out that he’d be more concerned about debris in space on your path. I agree with him, although that’s a lame excuse not going to space :)

Spin, pulsar, spin!

Via Scientific Computing:

The January issue of Nature has an article (subscribers only) about a solution to the problem how pulsars get their spin. This was quite a mystery, for a pulsar should have the same spin as the star it used to be, but faster because it’s contracting during the collapse. However, it somehow didn’t sum up – this theory would only be true for very fast spinning pulsars – those with a rotation-time less than a second or so.

Now some fellow from the Department of Energy and the North Carolina State University used Oak Ridge’s Phoenix (rated 32 in the TOP500), a Cray X1E supercomputer, to perform detailed simulations about what happens during the collapse.

The results were interesting; apparently the spin of the neutron star is not determined by the spin of the star, but from the shock waves which occur when the solid iron-core of the star collapses:

“That shock wave is inherently unstable, a discovery the team made in 2002, and eventually becomes cigar-shaped instead of spherical. The instability creates two rotating flows — one in one direction directly below the shock wave and another, inner flow, that travels in the opposite direction and spins up the core.

“The stuff that’s falling in toward the center, if it hits this shock wave that is not a sphere any more but a cigar-shaped surface, will be deflected,” Mezzacappa said. “When you do this in 3-D, you find that you wind up with not only one flow, but two counter-rotating flows.”

Interesting stuff, although I must admit that I didn’t really understand everything. A pity that no animations or better pictures than the one published at Scientific Computing are available, it could enlight the uninitiated. Kudos to Dorigo, for he presents his results in a way that even the dumbest high-school-grade physics-adept understands it :) (if brain is enabled)

Spin, spin, spin! I get all dizzy.

P.S.: The ORNL website seems to be down at the moment. Wasn’t me!

Tech Tags: space science

Rosetta: Article “Deciphering Protein Structures”

Via the NCSA:

The NCSA wrote a very easy to understand, yet quite complete article with explanations about David Baker’s Rosetta project, an theoretical approach to deduct a protein’s structure using computer-simulations.

Things I learned from this article:

1. The code does not start with a “flat” protein-molecule, starting to wiggle it around, but with a “homologous known protein structure” as a starting point. I don’t understand if that’s good or bad, but it limits the permutations to be checked.
2. David created a portal known as Robetta, where other biologists can submit their models to be crunched.
3. The Rosetta-project (not to be confused with Rosetta@home) uses a lot of CPU-hours on NCSA’s clusters and supercomputers (Tungsten Linux Cluster, NCSA Condor Flock, and now possibly TeraGrid resources)

However, quite a nice read, go and grab it while it’s hot!

Tech Tags: BOINC distributed computing Rosetta@home Science

Big-scale quantum-computing

Creating quantum-computers is hard. You’re working with nano-sized devices, which are hard to manipulate, hard to connect to the outside world, extremly fragile, basically a bitch to work with.

Geordie from D-Wave, a quantum-company in Canada, bloged about how they build big-scale quantum-devices through exploting superconduction. They cool down niobium, a transition metal, until it becomes a superconductor (that would be 9.2 Kelvin) – a bunch of superconducting niobium-atoms behave like they would be only one atom instead of many. Speaking of quantum-mechanics they really behave like one single big atom – therefore you can use it for quantum-experiments.

So instead of using very few individual atoms for building up a quantum-chip, they use many atoms, cool them down until they become a superconductor (and possibly an Einstein-Bose condensate, see below) – voila!

Unfortunately my knowledge about that topic ain’t not enough to completly understand the implications, but as i understand it – and i invite you to correct me – is that the niobium-devices they build get cooled down until they become an Einstein-Bose condensate, start behaving like one atom on a macroscopic scale, therefore behave like a blown-up version of single-atom quantum-devices.

Now how cool is that? Pretty cool.

Picture courtesy of Florian Marquardt, released under the GNU FDL.

Tech Tags: Science quantum computing

Gamma-Ray-Burst came before a supernova

Via the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:

NASA’s satellite SWIFT, built for detecting and analyzing Gamma-Ray-Bursts (GRB), recently detected a GRB and alerted scientists all over the world who pointed their whole weaponry to the spotted location and yes! There was a supernova. They were able to observe the 40-minute event, which occurred some 440-million years ago, in it’s full length and beauty.

GRBs were linked to supernovae for quite some time, now the gathered data seems to support the theory even more.

Tech Tags: Science Space

Busy writing handbooks & link roundup

Not much time for anything at the moment. I’m currently writing documentation for new products my company is selling, but which lack proper engineering-documents. So poor /me has to extract useful information from marketing-documents (Ha! I can’t say it without grimacing) and write some proper planning-manuals for our engineers. Life’s hard.

Nevertheless, here some unsorted links to news worth reading:

Astronomers Use Supercomputers To Study Atoms Linked To Black Holes
UA Physicists Invent ‘QuIET’- Single Molecule Transistors
ClearSpeed Breaks GigaFLOP per Watt Performance Barrier for Supercomputing
Cray Wins $52 Million Supercomputer Contract With National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
The Future of User-Directed SMP Parallel Programming : OpenMP 3.0
UA Physicists Invent Single Molecule Transistors
27th Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released: DOE/LLNL BlueGene/L and IBM gain Top Positions
Astronomers Crunch Numbers, Universe Gets Bigger
NSF Funds LSU $1 Million for PetaShare Development

Some interesting blog-postings:

What is software pipelining?
A Discussion On Parallel Languages

I’ll write more when I’m out of the deep shit.

Tech Tags: hardware HPC science supercomputing

“Billiard-transistor” bounces electrons around

Scientists at the University of Rochester are developing a completely new type of transistor, named “Ballistic Deflection Transistor”. Instead of improving existing technology like FET- or bipolar-transistors they fire electrons through an electric field on to a wedge-shaped target. This target acts like the “cushion” of a pool-table, reflecting the electron either in one or the other direction.

This technology has the advantage that switching is lightning-fast – setting up a small electric field is faster than saturating a region of a classical transistor. The heat-dissipation is also much lower: with traditional designs you got to get rid of those electrons which you used to saturate a region.

Graduate student Quentin Diduck made up the design; he compares the transition to this new technology to earlier transitions in semiconductor-technology:

“Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm, We’ve gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we’re taking the next step on the evolutionary track.”

Marc Feldman, professor of computer engineering at the University, points out that the team is made up of scientists who usually work in different disciplines:

“We’ve assembled a unique team to take on this chip. In addition to myself and Quentin, we have a theoretical physicist, a circuit designer, and an expert in computer architecture. We’re not just designing a new transistor, but a new archetype as well, and as far as I know, this is the first time an architect has been involved in the actual design of the transistor on which the entire architecture is built.”

Nice quote from the original article which really shows that it’s something entirely new:

There’s one hurdle the team isn’t quite as confident about: “We’re talking about a chip speed measured in terahertz, a thousand times faster than today’s desktop transistors” Diduck says. “We have to figure out how to test it because there’s no such thing as a terahertz oscilloscope!“

Cornell Nanofabrication Facility created a proof-of-concept prototype with the help of the Office of Naval Research.

Tech Tags: hardware science Ballistic Deflection Transistor