May 20, 1998: When you have eliminated all other possibilities, Sherlock Holmes instructed, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer.

In the mysterious case of the Soft Gamma Repeaters, or SGRs, the answer appears to be a magnetar, a neutron star with a super-strong magnetic field a thousand trillion times stronger than Earth's................READ MORE

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June 12, 2008

R3M technology can help remotely detect oil and gas — and reduce drilling.

How can you “hear” oil and gas hidden miles beneath the ocean floor?  Len Srnka, chief research geoscientist at ExxonMobil, is part of a team that is perfecting a new technology called R3M that does just that.

R3M stands for Remote Reservoir Resistivity Mapping.  It is a sophisticated technology based on a simple fact: that oil and gas are ..................READ MORE

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We are dealing with magnets so we have to know this stuff - RIGHT??? Physics? No Problem!

 (Reuters) - The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. Its scientists are preparing to start a small-scale re-enactment of the "Big Bang" that created the universe.

Following is a brief history of CERN and its advances in particle physics:

1954 - CERN was founded as one of Europe's first joint ventures, partly as a way to share the rising costs of running nuclear physics facilities. Its 12 founding members were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia..........Click Here to read timeline

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(Reuters) - Following are five facts about the 10 billion Swiss franc (5 billion pounds) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will smash together particles at close to the speed of light after its start-up on Wednesday at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN):

* Though built to study the smallest known building blocks of all things -- known as particles -- the LHC is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground, straddling French and Swiss territory.

* At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 percent the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600 million collisions every second.

* When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space. Meanwhile, the cooling system that circulates superfluid helium around the LHC's accelerator ring keeps the machine at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.34 degrees Fahrenheit).

* To collect data of up to 600 million proton collisions per second, physicists and scientists have built devices to measure the passage time of a particle to a few billionths of a second. The trigger system also registers the location of particles to millionths of a metre.

* The data recorded by the LHC's big experiments will fill around 100,000 dual-layer DVDs each year. Tens of thousands of computers around the world have been harnessed in a computing network called "The Grid" that will hold the information.

 © Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

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Without magnets what would we do? Yet another example of the importance of magnets in daily life and here with such lofty goals of exploring the origins of the universe - pretty interesting!

 By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at a vast underground Swiss laboratory will launch an experiment on Wednesday to re-enact the "Big Bang" on a small scale to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbor life.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets......Click Here to Read More

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WASHINGTON (Sept. 3) - Nearly half of U.S. adults will develop painful arthritis of the knee, a leading cause of disability, and hospitalizations for the condition are soaring, researchers reported on Wednesday.

 

During their lifetimes, an estimated 45 percent of Americans will develop knee osteoarthritis, a common kind of arthritis that wears away cartilage cushioning the knee joint, according to a study in the journal Arthritis Care & Research

 

 

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and University of North Carolina researchers based the findings on data from 3,068 people age 45 and older in North Carolina.

 

Obese people had a higher risk, with the extra weight putting additional stress on the knee joint. While 35 percent of normal-weight people got osteoarthritis of the knee, 65 percent of obese people developed it, along with 44 percent of overweight people, the researchers said.

 

"Simply put, people who keep their weight within the normal range are much less likely to develop symptomatic knee osteoarthritis as they get older, and thus much less likely to face the need for major surgical procedures such as knee replacement surgery," Dr. Joanne Jordan of the University of North Carolina, one of the researchers, said in a statement.

 

 

There were no significant differences in risk associated with sex, race or education level, the researchers said.

 

The people in the study were interviewed and were given an exam that included X-ray images of their knees.

 

In addition, a report by an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed that hospitalizations due to osteoarthritis rose to 735,000 in 2006 from 322,000 in 1993, mostly due to an increase in knee replacement operations.

 

From 2000 to 2006, knee replacement surgery rates rose 65 percent, while hip replacement surgery rates rose 21 percent, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

 

Osteoarthritis, also called degenerative joint disease, is the most common type of arthritis. It can affect any joint but most often affects the hands, hips, knees and spine.

 

It worsens over time and there is no cure. The pain can be disabling and doctors may recommend joint replacement surgery.

 

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Maggie Fox and John O'Callaghan

 

Copyright 2008, Reuters

 

2008-09-03 21:09:08

 

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