Mishap At The Reno Discovery Museum?

Even though we have achieved so much advancement in the field of science and technology, can a routine science experiment still go awry in this day and age? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Back in Thursday, September 4, 2014, a supposedly “routine” tornado simulation demonstration in the Tommy Lee Wells Discovery Museum in Reno, Nevada unexpectedly turned into a flash fire that resulted in the injury of kids on a field trip. Even though the flash fire looked quite dramatic on the mobile phone video camera that captured it and resulted in the injury of some kids watching close to the science experiment, the quick response of the Reno Fire Department averted a major disaster that would have gutted the entire museum. Given how far we have advanced in the field of science and technology, does mishaps like these still a possibility in supposedly routine science experiments this day and age? 

Employee error was blamed for the incident and the museum attendant who initiated the experiment is now on administrative leave after initial investigation revealed that the attendant skipped a step and an ingredient that resulted in a dramatic flash fire on a supposedly routine tornado simulation experiment. The tornado experiment at the Discovery Museum in Reno had been a routine attraction to elementary school kids on their field trip since the museum set up shop. It might have been a rare mishap given that the years since the museum opened, such accidents had never ever happened. 

13 people were injured in a flash fire, including 8 children. Bill Nye the Science Guy recently demonstrated the tornado experiment on his show and points out the danger of the ethyl alcohol and cotton used at the experiment as the step with the most potential to initiate in a dramatic flash fire with a high potential for injury to the experimenter and the spectators. 

Jamie Edwards: Youngest Fusioneer Ever?

While competing with an American who created a proof of concept fusion power plant, is the 13 year old British student Jamie Edwards now the world’s youngest fusion energy pioneer?

By: Ringo Bones 

A month ago, a 13 year old student from Preston, England using the money he saved from his own allowance managed to build a proof of concept fusion power plant as his own school science project. Jamie Edwards fast tracked his fusion power plant project back in December 2012 after hearing that a 14 year old American student is planning to do the same - thus becoming the youngest person ever to perform an actual  proof of concept fusion power generation experiment.

When he turned on his fusion power plant in the classroom of his school, Sue Edwards – Jamie’s Mother – and other students sensibly fled the room for safety reasons. Even though experts had been foreseeing gene manipulation projects will be commonplace as middle-school and high-school science projects by the 21^st Century, Jamie Edwards fusion power plant seems to have been bucking the trend given that nuclear science projects has always been hard to do when done on a “shoestring” budget. And for his next school science project, Jamie Edwards plans a scaled down version of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. With his achievement, Jamie Edwards has recently become a guest on The Late Show With David Letterman. 

Transistor Radio Turns 60 in 2014

The lowly battery-operated transistor radio may only be useful today when a calamity suddenly interrupts our mains AC, but is the transistor radio the intrepid witness of history in the post World War II half of the 20^th Century?

By: Ringo Bones 

This 2014, the “lowly” battery operated tabletop transistor radio will be celebrating its 60^th Anniversary. Often seen as the intrepid witness of the mid 20^th Century portion of the Cold War and onwards, the transistor radio set’s contribution to the latter half of the 20^th Century seems to be – more often than not – somewhat overlooked. As the Cold War starts to heat up a little back in 1954, America’s consumer electronic manufacturers managed to use the solid state semiconductor transistor device that was developed by Bell Labs back in 1947 into an “affordable” battery operated transistor radio set. Even though the first sets were priced between 50 to 90 US dollars back then (close to 1,000 US dollars in today’s money) it helped made post World War II popular music - as in Rock N’ Roll music – “go viral” like the Sputnik scare with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens and other pioneering Rock N’ Roll musicians. 

As the Cold War further heated up, transistor radios started sporting two tiny triangles on their radio dials at the 640-kHz and 1240-kHz points based on the American Civil Defense logo and marked the two as the CONELRAD stations – that then awkward acronym that stood for Control of Electromagnetic Radiation. As part of the scenario scheduled to unfold in the event of a thermonuclear attack by the then Soviet Union, television station transmitters would go dark and non-essential radio stations virtually silent. Only the CONELRAD stations would operate and they would transmit emergency instructions at low transmitter power – a tactic meant to keep enemy aircraft crews, mainly Soviet era strategic bombers, from homing in on signals of known higher-powered stations and using them to navigate to their strategic bombing targets. CONELRAD lasted from 1951 to 1963, when the Emergency Broadcast System replaced it. 

Transistor radio sets offered increased portability over their vacuum tube counterparts due to more efficient operation and lower voltage requirements – though the transistor radio’s sound quality improvements will come a little later. Despite what the Madison Avenue admen might want you to believe back then, transistors radios weren’t quite as small as their manufacturers might want you to believe. When the Japanese made Sony TR-63 pocket transistor radio arrived in the United States back in 1957, it was billed as a “shirt-pocket” transistor radio, but because it was actually a tad bigger than that, Sony’s American affiliates had shirts with oversized pockets tailored for their own salesmen. 

Strangelets: Doomsday Matter?

Predicted by physicists as a “strange” form of matter that might be created in high energy particle experiments and freak cosmic events, could strangelet particles be the death knell of the entire known Universe?  

By: Ringo Bones 

Forget the super powerful mini black holes that could have been created on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that would have supposedly migrated into the core of planet Earth causing it to implode in a matter of minutes. As far back as 1999, doomsday prophets have been warning us that strangelet particles would be the death knell of the entire known Universe. But what are strangelet particles anyway? 

Stangelet particles / strangelets or strange matter had been theorized by high energy physicists since the dramatic advances of particle accelerator technology – i.e. very high energy yields – since the start of the 1970s. Some researchers believe that ion smashups in a powerful enough particle accelerator could create a new form of matter called strangelets. These subatomic bundles could theoretically created when three species of quarks combine: the common “up” and “down” quarks that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons and the rarer “strange” quarks that are found in short-lived particles such as Kaons. 

So far at the time of writing this blog, scientists have yet to observe an actual strangelet in nature, so they can only guess at its properties. The most dangerous possibility would be the creation of a stable or long-lived strangelet with a negative charge. This type of strangelet would not act like ordinary negatively charged particle; it would grow rapidly by gobbling up all positively charged atomic nuclei that it encountered. Such a voracious beast known as “strange matter” could consume our planet as effectively as a black hole could. But should we be worried about “strange matter” rampaging across our Universe?

According to Robert L. Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that strangelets can only be produced under conditions of extremely high pressure and extremely low temperature. Jaffe says: “It is effectively impossible to make them in the ion collider we currently have.” And he also said that “The only place where it could happen is in a core of a neutron star.”Fortunately, cores of typical neutron stars are never just a few thousandths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero. 

Todd Akin’s Junk Science Destroying America?

Given the Missouri Republican congressman’s recent televised “junk science” explanation of “legitimate rape”, is Todd Akin’s junk science now poised to destroy America? 

By: Ringo Bones    

             

A number of US Republican Party insiders even started confessed that the current GOP is a wholly different beast from what it is during the days of Ronald Reagan. With party regulars resorting to demagoguery and organized Christian dogma rather than reasoned argument and science to justify their being beholden to dirty coal and unethical crude oil corporate Capitol Hill lobbyists, many now wonder if junk GOP science – especially Missouri Republican congressman and US senate hopeful Todd Akin’s misguided junk science is now poised to destroy not just America’s education system, but also its industry and commerce – and even the environment – as well? Looks like I’ll be waiting in vain for a truly American innovation in stem-cell based therapy. 

If you are old enough to remember the mid-1990s, you’ll be old enough to remember the most influential members of the US Republican Party resorting to organized Christian scripture and dogma to deny that global warming and climate change is mainly caused by dirty coal and crude oil burning. Not to mention resorting to demagoguery and political influence – instead of science and reasoned argument – to stifle American women’s reproductive rights. And the latest of this line of GOP junk science is brought to us televised via Missouri Republican congressman and US senate hopeful Todd Akin over his “arcane” explanation of the junk science of his legitimate rape theory where women’s bodies have a biologically innate or natural tendency not to get pregnant when they are “legitimately raped”. Doesn’t this remind you of that Nazi era Ice Universe Theory that even Adolf Hitler found too fantastic to be believed?