NEQNET: Non-equilibrium Phenomena

Cosmology, turbulence, markets, non-equilibrium QFT and much more. No nonsense, just science

Saturday’s photoguess: what does this monkey symbolize?

There are two questions for this week’s photoguess:
1) What exactly does poor monkey symbolize?
2) Where is this strange artefact located? (Answering this question will also help you to find answer for the question 1).

Hint: the topic of this photoguess is directly related to the subject of one of this week’s posts on NEQNET

Dynamics of space storm

A team from the U. of Alberta was able to observe a space storm in its full dynamics – at least during first minutes from its birth. For that, they used a network of cameras located in multiple places within Canada – you can see exact location of vertices of the grid on the video below. Phase front propagation velocity of the storm in the atmosphere was about 100000 km/h, so it took a couple of minutes for the storm to cover the whole Earth (well, half of it) from the moment first electrons hit the atmosphere.

Typically, we know that a storm hit Earth if we see auroras, and it is easier to catch them on the north, closer to magnetic poles of the Earth, where the characteristic width of the Earth’s magnetic field “layer” is much smaller than near equator. Although I spent 3 years in Helsinki, I was not lucky enough to catch an aurora

One step for a Man

Nature News has decided to start running a Twitter microblog devoted to the history of Apollo 11 mission – the first manned mission to the Moon. They will basically twit all the steps of the mission, to the Moon and back, day after day, event after event as if it was happening today, in 2009. They also promise that the feed will include various contextual information – politics, related events, etc. Following this Twitter feed you will open yourself to a quite unique experience: learn exactly what your father felt back in 1969. Thanks so much for this precious gift, Nature. Such feeds as yours make Twitter a really great service, worth to have a Twitter account.

If I may to suggest one thing… Many of your readers are young, restless and eager to learn. Although it is priceless to remember the history, to know what our fathers and mothers were able to accomplish, your younger readers look into the Future. Start another feed – about the future mission, the next “step for a Man”. I believe such a feed will find its readers.

Thank you, Nature.

P.S. Let me also list some other news on the subject (space research) I found interesting…

a) due to the lack of funding ESA is going to somewhat cut the forthcoming (scheduled for 2016 at this moment) mission ExoMars. In particular, they decided to drop “Humbolt” from the project – “Humbolt” is a static science payload for studying Mars climate. There are also difficulties with ESA Bepi-Colombo mission to Mercury. It is not like EU was more seriously affected by crisis than USA, and ESA funding is uncomparable to the one of NASA anyway. I really hope that this is not the reflection of seemingly stable recent trend of funding cuts for space research.

b) China Daily and a couple of other portals including the authorized government portal site to China, www.china.org.cn, have published recently a rather interesting note. In this note an opinion by a seniour strategist is presented that “hi-tech military corps, including space forces, need to be considered in the future development plan of the Chinese Army”. I guess, the very fact that China develops military satellites (as well as military space station) is le secret de notre polichenel. What is interesting is that the opinion was published on the State Council Information Office portal. From my point of view, it means that the development of the program is really close to the end. Whether you want it or not, Middle Kingdom is going to be a Player in space.

LISA technology and instrumentation

Oliver Jennrich (European Space Agency) has prepared a large review on technical aspects of LISA (space laser interferometer) mission – the project is extremely complicated for realization, many technologies are not even yet fully developed, and various prototypes will have to be launched. Yet, possible payout is so huge – even including possible detection of gravitational waves from the very early Universe – from inflationary and reheating stages (just think about it – detecting EM radiation did not really allow us to go beyond redshift so far, not including here CMB of course). Who is a sucker for space research as I am – please check out the paper. It does not discuss science related to the mission but contains tons of technical information about LISA you won’t find anywhere else.

Test beam for LHCb

Video about LHCb experiment and the recent test of their detector using Super Proton Synchrotron. LHCb experiment is one of six particle detector experiments aimed to measure CP violation in the interaction of b-hadrons (hadron containing b quarks).

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