Liverpool Science & Technology Club - LSTC

This is the highest-resolution photo of the sun ever taken You can see structures on the surface as small as 18.5 miles in size.

First ever black hole image released Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

Earth's Magnetic North Pole Has Officially Moved Earth's magnetic north pole has drifted so fast that authorities have had to officially redefine the location of the magnetic north pole. The extreme wandering of the north pole caused increasing concerns over navigation, especially in high latitudes.

Do you look like your name? People can match names to faces of strangers with surprising accuracy: Computers can also be programed to match names and faces, study says If your name is Fred, do you look like a Fred? You might -- and others might think so, too. New research has found that people appear to be better than chance at correctly matching people's names to their faces, and it may have something to do with cultural stereotypes we attach to names.

Life's Trek Brings Scientist to U.S. from Nepal...

This is a picture of SRF Institute Scientist Pashupati Dhakal stands in front of the induction furnace used for heat treatment of niobium, superconducting radiofrequency cavities.

There were fewer than 1,000 people in the tiny Nepalese village of Tanahun district when Jefferson Lab SRF Scientist Pashupati Dhakal grew up there. He was the son of the village's school principal. And at that time, the local school only went through middle school. Had he stayed there, it would have been a two-hour trek by foot to the nearest high school.

Instead, he moved in with his grandfather in Pokhara, a popular tourist destination in Nepal. "This," he said with a sweep of his hand toward a stunning computer screen shot of the Himalayas, "is the view I woke up to every morning." Impressive, indeed. Almost as impressive as Dhakal's abilities in math, which came to him early and were nurtured throughout his education. His first physics teacher at Tribhuvan University, where he did his undergraduate work, was, in Dhakal's words, "brilliant" and lured him into the field. "Studying with him made up my mind," he recalled. "That's when I said 'I want to be a physicist.'" He stayed on at Tribhuvan University for his master's degree, which he received in 2002, after presenting his dissertation titled, "Thickness Dependence of Chemical Potential in Degenerate Semiconductor."

When he graduated, he had the highest score in the department and received a gold medal from Gyanendra Bir Bikran Shah Dev, the king of Nepal. Dhakal was offered a two-year teaching position for undergraduates and some graduate students while a professor went on sabbatical at the same department where he had completed his master's degree. "I learned even more by actually teaching physics," he noted. As that job was ending, he applied to 10 schools in the United States and had five offers. He chose Boston College, not only for its physics department, but because he wanted a cosmopolitan atmosphere, and he had a friend from Tribhuvan University that had preceded him there. "I'd seen enough mountains," Dhakal said with a laugh. "I was ready for a city." The flight from Nepal to the U.S. took 36 hours and brought him, literally, to the other side of the world. From what he knew about the U.S., he thought he'd be eating sandwiches all the time. Discovering Boston's ethnic groceries and restaurants was a relief. In fact, his friend's wife cooked him a traditional Nepalese meal on his first day.

In graduate school, he was interested in condensed matter physics studying the very exotic properties of materials in ultra-cold temperatures and very high magnetic fields. Working with his Ph.D. supervisor, Michael Naughton, he became skilled in several experimental techniques as well as the theoretical knowledge on condensed matter physics. Dhakal finished his Ph.D. in August 2010 after presenting his dissertation, "Angular Magnetoresistance Oscillations in the Molecular Organic Conductor (DMET)2I3: Experiment and Calculation." In between there had been important business at home to tend to. In 2006, he returned to Nepal to meet, Sangita, the woman who would become his wife. In his culture, he explained, it is not a singular man and woman who are marrying, but the extended families. Sangita's brother-in-law and Dhakal's uncle were friends and thought they would make a perfect couple. In keeping with his home country's tradition, the couple met once and talked about their educations and plans for the future. "In western culture, you think love must come first, but we marry and let the love grow," he said fondly. When Dhakal joined Jefferson Lab's SRF Institute in the fall of 2010, Sangita stayed behind in Boston to finish her own education and received her nursing degree in December, after which she joined him here. Their daughter, Swarupa, is a few months old now. "She's one of the nicest babies," he crooned with a new father's smile, "and she's a good sleeper." Dhakal is teamed with scientists Gianluigi Ciovati and Ganapati Myneni – researching the superconducting properties of niobium, which he described as being "the heart and soul" of SRF, or superconducting radiofrequency technology. He is studying how it changes with heat and surface treatment procedures which are used during the fabrication of SRF cavities.

The second part of his work involves researching ways to improve the quality factor of SRF cavities (Q0), which is limited by the so called residual loss. This means finding ways to reduce, eliminate or manage impurities and contaminates while fabricating and processing SRF cavities. "A new kind of clean, ultra-high vacuum induction furnace has been recently acquired to avoid contamination on niobium cavities during the heating process," he explained of a portion of the process necessary to prepare the cavities. "We have preliminary results, which look very good. They are showing signs of improvement." When evenings and weekends roll around, Dhakal enjoys following sports on TV. "I watch anything," he said with a laugh. Learning the American games was tricky; it took him a while to figure out that U.S. football players touch the ball with their hands instead of just their feet. His parents have been visiting, to help out with the new baby and Dhakal had the opportunity to take them to New York City. "I took them to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building and said to them, 'This is the real America.'"
SOURCE: jlab.org and Judi Tull

~Herr von Bradford

Arsenal owner Alisher Usmanov hands Nobel Prize back to disgraced DNA scientist James Watson... Alisher Usmanov, the Arsenal owner and the richest man in Russia, has bought the Nobel prize that was sold by James Watson, one of three people who won the prize for discovering the DNA double helix. Usmanov will now give it straight back to him — leaving Watson with the medal as well as the record-…

Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang machine!

Known as a quark-gluon plasma, the primordial state of matter may be what the entire universe was like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang. The exotic material is more than a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star, one of the densest known objects in the universe. "Besides black holes, there's nothing denser than what we're creating," said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC's ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma. "If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons."

Densest Matter Acts Like Perfect Liquid

By triggering hundreds of thousands of high-speed collisions each second, physicists using the LHC hope to break subatomic particles into even more basic forms of matter, which can be used to study what the universe was like a trillionth of a second after the big bang. LHC scientists made the quark-gluon plasma last year by smashing together lead ions—lead atoms that have been stripped of their electrons—at nearly the speed of light. As the name suggests, quark-gluon plasma is made up of quarks and gluons. Quarks are the elementary building blocks of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, which make up atomic cores. Gluons are particles that "glue" quarks together using the so-called strong force.

It's thought that, as the universe cooled, the quark-gluon plasma that existed after the big bang coalesced to form matter as we know it today. (Related: "Strange Particle Created; May Rewrite How Matter's Made.") The quark-gluon plasma created at the LHC is about twice the amount and about twice as hot as quark-gluon plasma previously made using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Still, the plasmas created by the two machines are very similar, scientists said this week during the Quark Matter 2011 Conference in Annecy, France. For example, scientists have now confirmed that both versions behaved like so-called perfect liquids, with nearly zero friction.

"If you stir a cup of tea with a spoon and then take the spoon out, the tea stirs for a while and then it stops. If you had a perfect liquid and you stirred it, it would carry on going around forever," Evans explained. Some theories predict that, in the extreme heat of the very early universe, quarks and gluons would have been even more widely spaced, creating a quark-gluon plasma that behaved like a gas. The ALICE team is therefore looking for evidence of gas-like behavior in the early stages of their quark-gluon plasma formation. "There are slight differences between our measurement and RHIC's," Evans said. "It could well be that in the very early stages [of our quark-gluon plasma], it's behaving more like a gas, and then as it cools it turns into a liquid, but we will need to investigate this further."

Highs and Lows of Making Matter

If this gas-to-liquid transition has indeed been observed, it would be surprising, since theory predicts that it should occur at much higher temperatures than those currently being produced at the LHC, said Thomas Ludlam, chair of the physics department at Brookhaven. "I would regard the ALICE claim that they may be seeing hints of this as very interesting, but rather speculative at this stage," said Ludlam, who was not involved in the project. The results are nevertheless very exciting, he added. "They show that the LHC"—which went online in 2009 after more than a year's delay due to mechanical problems—"is squarely in the game now." Also, by comparing the lower energy quark-gluon plasma created at the RHIC with the higher energy version from the LHC, scientists could gain a better understanding of how and when the substance changed as the universe cooled, Ludlam said.

"I think we're now at a point where, with these two machines, we can look over a very wide energy range at the properties of the quark-gluon plasma as it evolves with temperature and density," Ludlam said. With this goal in mind, he added, RHIC scientists have been trying for the past year to create a quark-gluon plasma at even lower energies, to find the temperature at which quarks and gluons come together to form protons and neutrons. Meanwhile, the LHC is still operating at only half of its maximum energy, and the ALICE team expects to create even denser forms of quark-gluon plasma as the machine ramps up in the future.

SOURCE: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110524-densest-matter-created-lhc-alice-big-bang-space-science/

~Herr von Bradford

Two new particles found at Large Hadron Collider | Science News Physicists with the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment have identified two new particles called Xi_b'- and Xi_b*-.

European Space Agency’s Spacecraft Lands on Comet’s Surface A signal from the lander arrived at the mission control center at Darmstadt, Germany, just past 11 a.m. Eastern time.

we are so happy to have a ROOM for LSTC.
YES , FINALLY ............................................

happy tihar liverpoolians ...........

Check it out !
Ran (robotics association of nepal) official notice on notice board today !