You remember the doomsday device giant laser machine we posted about last month. Well, after a series of unfortunate events the guys at CERN have decided that it would be best to run it at half power–only 3.5 trillion electron volts–per beam when they start it up again late this fall. If things go well and we are all still here then they are going to step it up to 5 TeV per beam and then by the end of 2010 hope to be back at full power–7 TeV per beam. So, keep an eye on the news… while you still can.
Life being on Mars now or at some time in the future has become a definite possibility with he discovery of water–and evidence of water–as well as methane on Mars. Now biologists have discovered microbes that can withstand extreme heat, cold and other harsh environments with little to no moisture–conditions much like Mars.
Methanosarcina barkeri is the most versatile survivor. It isn’t picky about where it lives and can even create its own organic molecules from scratch using phosphate, sulfur and some other minerals found in soil and nitrogen from the atmosphere. M. barkeri can even create its own energy solely from hydrogen and carbon dioxide–both of which are believed to be on Mars.
Biologists are to begin rigorous testing on the microbe to see just how much it could handle and see if it could truly survive on the red planent. I for one can see this going horribly wrong if the microbe is modified by a shaky hand or too close to a giant laser.
One day biologist hope to do a real world test with the microbe on Mars.
In May of this year the National Ignition Facility officially dedicated the world’s largest and highest-energy laser facility. This monster, housed in a 10 story 3 football field sized building, contains a cluster of 192 laser beams that, NIF hopes, when all focused on one BB sized ball of frozen hydrogen gas will achieve nuclear fusion, in essence creating a star on Earth.
The good? If–being the key word–they are successfully able to achieve this it will be one of the biggest discoveries of our life times. This would be one of the first effective ways to create more energy than what was used to create it and could possibly solve global power issues in the future.
The bad? Maybe they haven’t seen Spider Man 2. The ‘star’ would have the same mass, gravitational pull and temperature-over 100 million Kelvin- as a star its same size. As you can see from the pictures below they have a special chamber to perform their experiments in which is an improvement to a bionic man with octopus arms and definitely a step in the right direction.
They will begin testing next year with an estimated live date of 2040 unless things go well from the start.
Worst case scenario we find out how black holes are made–just a little too late.
