Breaking Open the Unknown Universe

Hello there it’s me again. Just thought I’d let u know in case u forgot who I am Adam. Anyways I bet you can’t guess where I got this article. Okay fine maybe you can it’s from Popular Science…again (Don’t worry as soon as I get signed copy of Brinsinger from my cousins I’ll read that (unless my brother steals it)). Back on topic now, this article was all about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After 14 years it’s finally complete and they’ve started smashing protons together. The LHC is located under a small town called Meyrin in Switzerland. The LHC is the largest, most complex, and powerful (it can crush a bus) science experiment ever. Its only goal is to smash particles together and try and create the unknown. Above is a picture of the magnets that can crush buses. The LHC smashes protons together with such force and creates so much energy people are worried it will destroy us all. However the LHC will not doomed us to nonexistence. It just proves how far humans are willing to go to fulfill our endless curiosity. Some things the LHC is looking for are the Higgs particle, dark matter, and anything else that just happens to appear. The amount of data the LHC generates each day is about as much data on the World Wide Web. Since over 99% of the data it generates will be useless the scientists can just dump it, however some data will be sent to hundreds of computers worldwide. Well that’s all I got for now come back next week for most likely another Popular Science article.

Burning the Tide

Woot. Second post. All five or so of you must be super excited or somethin. Well anyways the article I read this week is also from Popular Science (what can you say its science and its popular). Anyway the article was about Alan Burns the old and his quest to harness the power of the waves (just finished invocation trying to return to normal language). However Burns isn’t doing it the ways most do. Most people float a high-tech buoy or something similar to that on the ocean’s surface. Burns is putting his devices called CETO (named after a Greek sea goddess (cool huh?)) under water where they will be more resistant to storms. Since waves are much more consistent than the sun and wind it seems to be a very logical source of energy other than oil. Burns believes that soon there will be huge demand for renewable energy sources (btw before this Burns was an oil man). He hopes his CETOs will bring in big profits as a cheap renewable way to get energy. The only possible problem the CETO has is that it’s at the bottom of the ocean were waves are weakest. However Burns hopes to make up for this by making CETOs cheap and keeping them underwater where they will be safe from storms. That’s all I got for this week…so…bye.

The Driving Airplane Gets Real

Hello everyone, I’m sure you are all excited for my first L.A. related post. This past week I read an article in the magazine Popular Science about a flying car or driving airplane as the Terrafugia Company prefers to call it. The article goes from page 42-48 and it’s all about The Transition. The Transition is set to go on sale next year and is scheduled to start flying in November. In the upper right of this write up I have put in a few pictures of The Transition. Anyone can buy it but only pilots can fly it. It was very difficult for Terrafugia to make The Transition meet all Federal Aviation Administration and all National Highway Transportation Safety Administration standards. However they did it and made an airplane that you can take on the roads, fit in your garage, and keep you safe. On the road The Transition’s top speed is 80 mph while in the air it has a cruising speed of 115 mph. The Transition will cost about $194,000 each and will be able to carry two people. However the biggest problem for Terrafugia is getting money. The company started with $30,000 which was awarded to their CEO Carl Dietrich for being the most inventive young engineer at MIT College. Now they have to get investors and customers who will buy The Transition. To help with this they’re taking The Transition to Oshkosh, Wisconsin to unveil it at the Experimental Aircraft Association show. Well that’s it for this post. Come back next week after I’ve read something else.

First Post

Yay! first post. I'm just testing...