The Peak Oil Crisis: The Quantum Fusion Hypothesis

From Falls Church News Press: The Peak Oil Crisis: The Quantum Fusion Hypothesis
For nearly 25 years now, the idea that it might be possible to extract unlimited amounts of energy from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom at low temperatures has been pretty much in disrepute. When major laboratories were unable to detect nuclear reactions on their work benches back in 1989, the whole notion of what was then called "cold fusion" was debunked as junk science and for most remains so to this day. Fortunately however, a few scientists kept plugging away on just how one could get heat from the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. Now their efforts seem to be paying off. In recent months numerous respected scientists have been reporting at scientific gatherings that they are seeing increasing amounts of heat, which can only be coming from nuclear reactions, during experiments with hydrogen loaded into nickel and palladium under the proper conditions.

There have been so many of these reports by reliable and respected scientists that it has become absurd to claim that the phenomenon is fraudulent or that all these scientists are mistaken in their observations. Currently there are at least six different organizations around the world saying they have a commercially useful heat-producing device under development which they will be demonstrating soon.

To the comfort of skeptics, most of these organizations have been very circumspect in releasing details of their devices and the physics behind them. There are, of course several reasons for this reticence. Some may hope to keep their heat-producing secret as long as possible in hopes of making money from their discovery. More likely, however, is that while they have developed a way to produce heat, they really don't understand the physics underlying their device.

This situation however seems to be changing following a lengthy interview with a fellow out in Berkeley, California by the name of Robert Godes of Brillouin Energy. He has been working in this field for the last ten years and says that he not only has a reliable heat-producing device, but also understands the physics behind it – which he calls the Quantum Fusion Hypothesis. He says that this theory of just how low-energy nuclear reactions work has allowed the development of a device which produces heat immediately and reliably. Most interestingly, Godes says he has shared his insights with scientists at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories and SRI International, one of the leading US laboratories investigating the phenomenon. He says that both have verified that his theory does indeed work and that they can now produce heat from hydrogen every time they try.

Godes' hypothesis is interesting for those with even a smattering of physics in their background. First of all, he holds that the heat which is coming from infusing hydrogen into nickel or palladium is not coming from "cold fusion" in the classic sense of the term. It is not a deuterium fusing with deuterium reaction as takes place in the sun or H-bombs and which requires extremely high energies.

What seems to be happening in this new kind of fusion is that when hydrogen is "loaded" into nickel or palladium and subjected to the proper kind of an electromagnetic pulse, the hydrogen nucleus which is a positively charged proton acquires and electron which turns it into a low energy free neutron. Now a low energy free neutron is something very nice to have for it quickly combines with other protons to form deuterium, tritium and finally quadrium. The quadrium only lasts for an instant before undergoing a process called beta decay turning it into helium. This is where Einstein and E = MC2 comes in. The beta decay of quadrium results in a loss of mass which is turned into heat. If all this pans out as claimed, it could be one of the most important secrets of nature that has ever been discovered, for our energy problems are over.

This new hypothesis, it is not yet a theory, says that It would be possible to use water as the source of all energy that mankind could ever want with no bad or radioactive leftovers -- only helium and heat. Note that Godes says that if the reaction is done properly, the nickel or palladium which are only used as a matrix to hold the hydrogen in one place, are not consumed in the reaction. For those who are skeptical, and I don't blame you for this a lot to comprehend, I recommend Brillouin's web site (www.brillouinenergy.com) where you will find some reasonably comprehensible explanations and videos as to just how all this supposedly works. For those conversant with Bose-Einstein condensates, the Molecular Hamiltonian, Heisenberg confinement energy, and the dense mathematics of nuclear physics there are papers there for you too.

So what happens now? There is so much misunderstanding and skepticism about this phenomenon during the last 20 years, it is likely that the mainstream media will not touch the story until some highly respected institution rolls out a machine that is too hot to touch, will run for months without any visible source of power, and will belch fire and brimstone on command.

Much to its credit, the first thing that Brillouin Energy says it is going to do with its new technology is to build a prototype boiler using its new heat source that would eventually replace the ones currently burning coal in our power stations. This is clearly a brilliant idea for swapping out old coal fired boilers for ones that run on a few cups of water would be a no-brainer for the world's electricity industry – provided of course they can be made to work reliably.

Brillouin Energy says they have a contract with SRI International to design and build a prototype of what they call a "Hot Tube" boiler. If the concept works well Brillouin would license the technology to the world's boiler makers who presumably would work overtime replacing every fossil fuel fired boiler on the face of the earth. And that is just the start.

Why is safety a divisive issue for Nuclear Regulatory Commission?

From the Los Angeles Times: Why is safety a divisive issue for Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
Reading between the lines, it's probably fair to say that Greg Jaczko may not be someone you'd want to work for.

As chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he's been accused of yelling at people, browbeating subordinates and picking fights with his fellow NRC commissioners when he doesn't get his way. That's pretty much the totality of the bill of particulars Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) put out in December in support of a concerted, albeit unsuccessful, campaign to drive Jaczko from his job.

(Jaczko has acknowledged that there are strong disagreements within the agency, but vehemently denies being especially tough on women, another charge made by Issa.)

What the report on Jaczko issued by Issa's committee on oversight and government reform didn't delve into too deeply, however, were the policy issues underlying the personal friction. That's too bad, because the disagreements concerned Jaczko's efforts to tighten safety and security regulations for the nation's 104 nuclear power reactors, in the face of the other commissioners' efforts to slow him down.

Given what the agency's critics say is its customary laxness in matters of safety and security, you'd think that would be the central concern of a committee devoted to government oversight. Not in this case.

Issa's relentless focus on trivialities now threatens to bite him where it hurts. Safety issues are at the heart of the unfolding fiasco at Southern California Edison's San Onofre nuclear plant, which is in Issa's district. San Onofre was completely shut down starting in February, after engineers discovered unexpectedly extensive wear in brand new generators installed at a cost of nearly $700 million.

By then, at least one leak had released a small amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere. It's a good bet that the plant will stay offline through the peak electrical demand months of summer, posing the prospect of blackouts and higher costs for customers across Southern California.

The entire affair points to the possibility that the NRC allowed Edison to make design changes in the equipment without adequate regulatory input, which is the level of performance NRC critics have warned about for years, and which got short shrift from Issa.

The congressman wisely has taken a hands-off stance on the NRC's current investigation of San Onofre. "The dysfunction at the NRC that the committee has looked at is very much a separate question from what's going on with the situation at San Onofre," Issa's spokesman, Frederick Hill, told me. Perhaps, but many independent NRC watchdogs think San Onofre raises more important questions about the NRC than those on which Issa did sound off.

"There are a lot of other things at the NRC worth examining by Congress," says Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Other longtime critics of the agency suggest that Issa's focus on personal spats was misplaced in Washington, where sharp elbows are part of the standard armory for turf battles. It's bizarre to see Issa trying to pillory Jaczko for being highhanded — he's not above being highhanded himself when it serves his purpose. (Ask the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the target of an earlier Issa campaign.)

It's important to be mindful that all five NRC members are pro-nuclear to varying degrees. All are scientists or engineers.

Three are Democrats. Jaczko, who has served on the commission since 2005 and was appointed chairman in 2009, holds a physics doctorate from the University of Wisconsin and served as an aide to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) before joining the agency. George E. Apostolakis is a former MIT professor and William D. Magwood a physicist and former manager at the utility industry's Edison Electric Institute.

Two are Republicans: Kristine L. Svinicki was a nuclear engineer at the Department of Energy, and William C. Ostendorff is an engineer and former submarine commander.

One might expect, at worst, that the commission would split along partisan lines. But NRC watchers say their votes more typically reflect their attitudes toward regulating the nuclear power industry. Jaczko often finds himself on the losing side in 4-1 votes, with the majority favoring less stringent safety and security initiatives.

"Greg's not anti-nuclear," says Christopher Paine, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "but he's pro-nuclear in a smart and considered way. He's the first NRC chairman who's been serious about nuclear safety in quite some time."

The most important issue driving a wedge between Jaczko and the four other commissioners has been how to shore up nuclear safety in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Japan's coastal Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Extensive radioactive contamination was released into the environment while crews struggled in vain to contain the disaster. Jaczko convened a high-level task force to propose safety upgrades at U.S. plants in light of Fukushima — not least at California's San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, which similarly are situated in coastal earthquake zones with limited options for large-scale emergency evacuations.

After the task force issued its report in July, Jaczko moved to make its 12 recommendations public and implement them promptly.

These included strengthening containment buildings and spent fuel storage, which proved to be weak spots at Fukushima, and safeguarding against total plant blackouts, which led to much of the damage at the Japanese plant. But the other commissioners thwarted this effort, moving instead to tie up the report and its recommendations in bureaucratic procedure — a "regulatory meltdown," as Rep. Markey described it in a report in December.

"Jaczko wanted to use Fukushima as a galvanizing event to reform the NRC," says the NRDC's Paine. He's been unsuccessful. As recently as Feb. 9, Jaczko's attempt to write mandates for post-Fukushima safety upgrades into a new license for a nuclear plant in Georgia was voted down, 4 to 1, provoking him to complain that the commission was acting "as if Fukushima had never happened."

Agency critics say its coziness with the utility industry may also be implicated at San Onofre, that full-featured facility on Interstate 5 a few miles south of San Clemente.

When Edison decided several years ago to replace the plant's aging steam generators, it described the new equipment as essentially identical to the old and said the work would involve only "minimal … modifications" to the plant. That's according to a technical paper issued under the imprimatur of Edison and the generator manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Edison maintained, therefore, that the work would not require extensive and costly prior approval, even a re-licensing, by the NRC. The agency agreed.

But the changes may have been not so minor. The technical paper acknowledges that the four modernized generators, which each comprised more than 9,700 alloy metal tubes with walls the thickness of a dime, presented "unique design and fabrication challenges."

Among other points, the new generators encompassed 4% more tubes than the old, which may have produced novel stresses on the components. These challenges were supposedly addressed at the manufacturing stage. But although the critical goal was to minimize the potential for tube wear because of vibration, the technical paper says, it was not known whether the product "would eventually perform as specified."

It hasn't: Engineers are focusing on vibration as the cause of premature wear in hundreds of tubes, increasing the potential for ruptures that could release radioactivity into the environment.

The larger question is whether NRC staff waved through a design change they should have scrutinized attentively. The agency says it's examining whether Edison told it all it needed to know about the redesign, and whether its own staff should have pushed back against the utility's contention that the changes were no big deal.

On the surface the agency seems to have dropped the ball. "A major regulatory function was unacceptably cast aside," says Damon Moglen, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth, which has produced useful analyses of the redesign.

That happened under the supposedly more collegial pre-Jaczko regime. "The most Greg is guilty of is raising his voice and getting passionate," says NRDC's Paine. "Apparently you can't get passionate about issues on the NRC, you have to be 'reasoned.' Everybody's been reasoned and calm over there, but they've basically been doing industry's bidding. So they tried to get rid of Jaczko."

U of Mn (Minnesota): Nuclear Physics Seminar in 435 Physics

From University of Minnesota Wedbsite: Nuclear Physics Seminar in 435 Physics Wednesday, April 25, 2012:
1:30 pm:
Nuclear Physics Seminar in 435 Physics
Speaker: Charles McEachern, University of Minnesota
Subject: Using CASTRO to Model Hydrogen Ingestion in X-Ray Bursters

In a 2004 paper Woosley et al. brie y explored, using a low-resolu tion 1D KEPLER routine, an X-ray burst model in which violent convection causes hydrogen ingestion; that is, a rapid mixture of hot carbon and cool hydrogen. The mixture burns explosively, ballooning out the neutron star photosphere in a photospheric radius expansion (PRE) burst. We implement a streamlined nuclear reaction network in CASTRO in order to follow up on this work at high resolution and in multiple dimensions. Perhaps the most valuable application of PRE burst study is to develop constraints on the stable masses and radii that can be exhibited by neutron stars. However this work is also relevant to the study of neutron star interiors as well as the hydrogen ingestion mechanism which occurs during helium shell ashes in AGB stars.

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Rice Farmers Seek to Save Their Crops From Salt

The New York times: Rice Farmers Seek to Save Their Crops From Salt
TOKYO — Toshiharu Ota, a rice farmer in Miyagi Prefecture, in northeastern Japan, survived the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster last year. But his fields were devastated by the salt deposits left behind when the tsunami’s floodwaters receded. Now, to help farmers like Mr. Ota, a research team is working to develop a new salt-tolerant variety of rice.

The tsunami’s waves, up to 40 meters, or 130 feet, high engulfed the coastline around Ishinomaki City, where Mr. Ota lives, devastating hundreds of thousands of lives and washing away whole sections of towns, neighborhoods and farmland.

Miyagi Prefecture has estimated the cost of damage to agricultural land and facilities at ¥381 billion, or $4.6 billion, making it one of the prefectures hardest hit in economic terms by the disaster.

Rice has traditionally been a leading crop in northeastern Japan. Miyagi Prefecture’s 2010 harvest fetched $818 million. But last year the harvested rice acreage fell short of target by 4,600 hectares, or 11,400 acres, according to the agriculture ministry. In total, 11 percent of the prefecture’s farmland was damaged.

More than a year after the disaster, many farmers like Mr. Ota are still struggling to cope with the economic consequences. Even leaving aside the widespread fallout of radioactive elements released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the tsunami left the soil of coastal farmlands damaged by sodium chloride from the sea water.

Mr. Ota, who farmed 11 hectares of rice paddies, said nearly half were flooded. Local workers have labored hard to remove salt from the soil in the past year. Still, nothing has been the same since.

“Even with desalination, the yield has dropped,” Mr. Ota, 56, a sun-tanned, fifth generation farmer with graying hair, said during a recent interview.

Once dissolved into the soil, salt is hard to remove. It tends to stick to other elements and comes out only when plant roots emit an acid that breaks away minerals, including sodium chloride, to be absorbed by the plant, he said.

“When I test the soil for sodium, the reading comes out clean, but when I actually grew rice, the crop did not do well,” Mr. Ota said.

To help farmers like him, a team of scientists has been working to speed up development of a new salt-tolerant rice variety, with the aim of making it commercially available in a few years. The project involves heavy ion beam technology developed by the prestigious independent research organization Riken.

Working on the project with Riken are researchers at Miyagi Prefecture’s Furukawa Agricultural Experiment Station in Osaki City and Tohoku University in Sendai, the chief city in the prefecture.

“We’ve had success in developing one variety of salt-resistant rice, although this variety doesn’t taste that great,” said Tomoko Abe, research group director of accelerator applications at Riken’s Nishina Center in Wako city, north of Tokyo, last month.

Salt damage can cut the yield of a rice crop in half. “With the rice variety we’re developing we should see the yield only drop by 20 percent,” Ms. Abe said. “We should also see less fragmented rice.”

Mainly used in nuclear physics and also in medical applications like cancer treatment, heavy ion beam technology was first applied by Riken to speed up mutations in plants in 1989. Ms. Abe helped to develop the world’s first salt-tolerant rice variety, based on the Nipponbare rice strain, in 2006.

Compared to more traditional types of plant mutation techniques, using x-rays or gamma rays, plants need to be exposed to only a low dosage of powerful heavy ion beams for a short time — seconds and minutes instead of hours, days or weeks — for a high likelihood of mutation to occur. The survival rate of the exposed plants is high, moreover, because the highly focused beam does less damage to their overall DNA.

“It takes 10 years to develop a new breed using traditional methods, but Riken’s method shortens the cycle considerably,” said Takashi Endo, a researcher at Miyagi Prefecture.

In the year since the tsunami about 5,250 hectares of farmland in the prefecture have been desalinated, including rice paddies. The prefecture aims to clean up an additional 4,100 hectares this year and a final 3,650 hectares in 2013.

“We’ll be seeing more regions restarting farming this year, but some areas will still be unable to farm,” Mr. Endo said.

The introduction of salt-tolerant rice varieties could also help the region cope with another problem — land subsidence. Miyagi and surrounding coastal farmlands now face a higher risk of saltwater damage, experts say, because the earthquake’s seismic shift caused large parts of northeastern Japan to sink.

In Mr. Ota’s case, his farmland has sunk by about 80 centimeters, or 2.6 feet. Closer to the epicenter, the subsidence is greater. Oshika Peninsula, just a short drive away, was the closest place to the epicenter of the offshore quake. Land there sunk by 1.2 meters and slid horizontally eastward by 5.3 meters, according to the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan.

“We’ve been in a terrible situation,” Mr. Ota said. “We’re not dealing with just seawater but also flooding from storms. We have a sharp increase in drainage water that lingers on our farmland.”

Discharged storm water used to recede in a day: Now it takes up to a week to drain away. “It’s been overwhelming,” he said.

Having the option to grow a sodium-tolerant variety of rice may determine whether some farmers can continue to stay in agriculture, said Kazuhisa Matsunaga, who works for Zen-noh Miyagi, an agricultural cooperative.

Some coastal farmlands have dropped almost to sea level. “Those areas would need to raise their land considerably to continue to use the existing variety of rice,” Mr. Matsunaga said. “It would make a difference for them to be able to continue farming using a variety that would be forgiving to soil that has some sodium left.”

Mr. Endo said it could take two years to develop a salt-resistant variety and another two years to grow enough of the seeds to bring it to commercial scale.

Faced with the long-term worry that cesium will be detected in their crops and consumer anxiety over radioactivity in anything grown, raised or caught near Fukushima, Miyagi Prefecture’s farmers will have to overcome daunting challenges if they are to stay in business.

“We hope that our research results will be a bright spot for farmers affected by the disaster,” Mr. Endo said.

2008 Nobel Prize winner talks neutrons, protons and the future of nuclear power in Mongolia

From UBPost: 2008 Nobel Prize winner talks neutrons, protons and the future of nuclear power in Mongolia
By B.KHASH-ERDENE: 2008 Nobel Prize recipient in the field of physics Toshihide Maskawa is spending a week lecturing in Mongolia. The following is an interview with him about his time in the country:

-Do you have any other reason for visiting our country besides giving lectures?

-I have come at the request of the Japanese Ambassador to Mongolia, for 40 years there have been diplomatic relations between our nations. I think I have Mongolian heritage, because when I was born I had the blue mark. The Japanese nation is made up of diverse people. People from Mainland China, Siberia, Korea, and Mongolia have migrated to Japan. I heard it’s very cold in Mongolia, and when I came here the taxi driver told me that the traffic was very bad, and I had the chance to see the city. The temperature reaches -40 C at night and 0 C during the day. The atmosphere is directly influenced by the rapid fluctuation of the temperature. I would like to see the countryside and natural wonders of Mongolia before I leave.

-What contributions did your 2008 Nobel Prize discovery make to science and physics? Can you expand on your discovery?

-People have always wanted to find out what the universe is made up of. We know that the atom is made up of neutrons, protons, and electrons. The particle accelerator has been developed recently and we needed a general theory to explain the particles that were formed by smashing atoms against each other. It was hard to explain the formation of the universe with the three quarks categorization. In 1972, the theory that there must be three more quarks had been introduced. Theorists accepted this in 1978, but the means to confirm this theory was not available at the time. In 2002 we used a particle accelerator to prove this and in 2008 we received a Nobel Prize. The theory wasn’t proved for 30 years. The reason for this was that the nucleus inside the quark was much denser than anticipated. The capability of the particle accelerator was not enough to it, which prolonged the research.

-At what age did you receive the Nobel Prize? How many Nobel Prize winners are from Japan?

-Although I started my work when I was 32, I received the prize at 68. There are 15 people in Japan who have received the Nobel Prize.

-Science and technology is developing rapidly, some even say there is little left to discover. What are your thoughts?

-Every new discovery leads to another question. Thus, I think there will always be questions to seek answers to. When a new discovery is made, it takes about a hundred years for it to be implemented. For example Maxwell’s Theory of Electromagnetic Field was introduced in 1864 but it was implemented in 1940, which was 80 years later. So we can deduce from this that it requires about 100 years for scientific theories to become a part of everyday life.

-You will be giving a lecture on Saturday, what do you hope to tell the public?

-On Friday at 11am I will give a physics lecture at the National University of Mongolia titled, “The Chaotic Theory of the Nucleus to the Organized Structure.” This lecture will then be given again at the Culture Center on Saturday at 3pm.

As science becomes ever more sophisticated, particle accelerators will be in higher demand. We need the support of the public. In recent years, people have demanded immediate results after they invest money, but science requires time. The general public needs to know that modern science requires their support.

Also scientists need to know that they can only do their work with the help of the public, so they need to understand that their duty is to inform the public about their discoveries and findings. Giving lectures is also my responsibility and duty.

-Since you are a theoretical physicist, I have to ask you something. Mongolia is planning to build a nuclear power plant. Do you think a nuclear power plant is a good idea, do you think it is compatible with the Mongolian climate?

-The Japanese people are generally against nuclear power plants, but there is a small group who support the idea and I am one of them. I think it is right to talk about nuclear power plants in general. The natural resources for power is believed to end in about 300-500 years time. To remedy this, we have to consider how we would produce power in a condition where no wind or sunlight is available. I’m not saying that the Government shouldn’t regard public opinion but I think it is right to use and develop nuclear energy sources. If we stop producing power or using cars this issue will not arise. I believe there is a lot of potential in nuclear energy.

With Yandex at CERN, Search and Science Collide

From BloombergBusinessweek: With Yandex at CERN, Search and Science Collide
As a physicist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, Andrei Golutvin spends his days smashing subatomic particles into one another at the Large Hadron Collider, a ­16.8-mile ring of superconducting magnets buried 328 feet under Switzerland and France. The high-energy collisions of his experiment, one of four currently under way at the LHC, hint at the answers to some of nature’s greatest mysteries—and generate about 20 billion data points each year. Searching the enormous archive for collisions that match specific criteria can take hours.

Golutvin got weary of waiting. A few months ago he asked for help from Yandex (YNDX), the dominant Web search company in his native Russia, and on April  10 the two organizations unveiled the result of their collaboration. The custom-built search engine lets more than 700 physicists working on Golutvin’s experiment instantly sift through about one-twentieth of the data they produce, and tailor searches by 600 criteria, such as time of collision. The Yandex software also produces QR codes to embed into scientific papers, so that other scientists can easily access the underlying data with their smartphones. Overall, the technology “can shorten the chain from idea to realization” of an experiment, says Golutvin.

Yandex is helping the research group for free, and even lending the scientists server capacity: About 13  percent of the computing power for Golutvin’s experiment is supplied by the Moscow-based company. Andrey Ustyuzhanin, a Yandex researcher, headed the search company’s five-person team, which created the CERN tool in three months. The software crawled tens of thousands of files spread across CERN’s servers, working at night while the scientists slept. Only a portion of CERN’s existing records have been crawled, but Ustyuzhanin wants to index all of the 20 billion or so particle collisions recorded this year—a number that exceeds the total volume of indexed Web pages.

The pro bono work could help Yandex hold its ground against Google (GOOG), which has slowly but steadily gained market share in Russia and now controls 26 percent of searches. (Yandex accounts for 60 percent.) Giving away technology to CERN—where a young Tim Berners-Lee wrote the paper that laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web in 1989—is a great marketing move, says Ram Akella, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Consumers might think, “If those smart people are using Yandex, maybe we should, too,” he says. “It’s about branding.” It could help Yandex abroad, too. Since its $1.3 billion U.S. initial public offering in May 2011, Yandex has opened two offices in Switzerland and launched its search service in Turkey.

Yandex’s Ustyuzhanin says the company hasn’t decided whether to undertake similar science projects in the future. There’s definitely demand for it, according to Akella. As research becomes more computational, especially in fields such as genomics and biomedicine, scientists “are drowning in data, and they don’t know how to find what they want,” says Akella. Customized search for scientists “is the Holy Grail,” he says. Google offers a tool called Fusion Tables that helps scientists collect, crunch, and share data. The company also donates some of its server capacity to run computations for select researchers.

For Yandex, building the technology was fairly straightforward; several of the team members had backgrounds in physics and understood the scientists’ needs. The hardest part was figuring out where CERN’s IT specialists stored the data. “You have to find the person who maintains the infrastructure, and to have coffee with him,” says Ustyuzhanin, who visited CERN twice during the project. “I drank lots of coffee.”

The bottom line: Yandex’s work at CERN is good marketing as it tries to hold back Google, which now controls 26 percent of the Russian search market.

Physics Demo Day charges up the crowd

From the Daily 49: Physics Demo Day charges up the crowd
Physics Demo Day, held on the second Thursday of every month, gives students and teachers an opportunity to network and share ideas in a profession where there is usually just one physics teacher per high school.

The most recent Demo Day on Thursday allowed current and prospective teachers and Cal State Long Beach physics students to watch demonstrations that could help them improve their lesson plans for thermo and nuclear physics.

A grant provided by the American Physical Society funded the event.

Chuhee Kwon, chair of the physics department at CSULB, said events such as Demo Day are important to encourage physics students to take on teaching positions and to give current physics teachers more knowledge of the subject for their lessons.

“We want [physics] teachers who are very passionate and have the knowledge of the subject to teach the class,” Kwon said.

Katie Beck, a physics teacher from Bolsa Grande High school, conducted one of the demonstrations. For her demonstration, Beck created a basic engine by using a flask, water, two bent metal tubes and a gas-powered torch.

Beck poured water in the flask and suspended the flask with a metal chain. The top of the flask was sealed with a rubber stopper. The two tubes were pushed through the rubber stopper and turned to face out in opposite directions, forming an L-shape, coming out the top of the flask in either direction.

Beck used the torch to heat up the water in the flask, turning it into steam.

The steam came out of the metal tubes and caused the flask to spin. Beck explained that this type of engine is called a “Hero’s Engine” and was invented in Alexandria.

“It’s the most basic engine that we have,” Beck said.

Beck used this demonstration to discuss some principles of physics, like action and reaction. When energy is put into the device (the flame produced by the torch), the steam expelled creates energy output (caused by the spinning motion of the flask).

Sophomore physics major and vice president of the Society of Physics Students at CSULB Stephanie Sodergren came to physics demo days to learn more about experiments she can do, if she becomes a physics teacher.

“I think the teachers are great and I wish I could have seen some of this stuff in my high school class,” Soder said.

Darlington nuclear refurbishment drives Ontario construction worker demand

From Daily Commercial News: Darlington nuclear refurbishment drives Ontario construction worker demand The plan to refurbish four reactors at the Darlington nuclear generating station east of Toronto is one project that will increase the demand for labour, according to exhibitors at the recent Future Building job fair.

“The nuclear refurbishment at Darlington is going to require thousands of construction workers,” said Sean Strickland, chief executive officer of the Ontario Construction Secretariat (OCS), which hosted Future Building at the Better Living Centre on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds.

“Bruce Power is talking about doing a couple of their units as well. That’s going to require probably more than 1,500 construction workers.”

The definition phase of the Darlington Retube and Feeder Replacement Project is expected to generate $600 million for a joint venture between SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and Aecon Group Inc., according to an Aecon announcement in February. The definition phase is expected to last from this year until 2016, when Aecon will build a full-scale mockup while SNC-Lavalin will develop specialized tooling. The execution phase is expected to take place from 2016 until 2023. Aecon was one company with a booth at Future Building, offering information on careers to students in Grades 7 through 12.

“The timeline is going to be about 14 to 16 years,” Amanda Nagy, human resources administrator at Aecon Industrial, said at Future Building.

“We really see a deficit there.”

Several of the unions included hands-on demonstrations at their booths, allowing students to weld, lay brick and use heavy equipment simulators.

“Everybody’s waiting for Darlington (refurbishment) to kick in,” said Wayne MacDonald, an instructor with Ironworkers Local 721.

“The nuclear plant out there we will need people to man that.”

Boilermakers “see dollar signs” with projects such as the Darlington refurbishment, said Blair Allin, health and safety and upgrading instructor at Boilermakers Local 128.

A planned nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ont. is another major project that will require skilled trades. In November, 2010, Vale SA said it planned to spend about $3.4 billion to upgrade its mining and processing facilities, which it inherited when it acquired Inco in 2006. Up to $2 billion of that money is expected to be spent on the atmospheric emissions project.

“Northern Ontario is going to have a very robust construction market and long-term job market for the mining industry, hopefully for generations to come,” Strickland said.

“There are big projects coming up at Vale, formerly Inco and Xstrata, formerly Falconbridge. Quadra FNX has a big capital project that they’re looking at and those are existing mines. Over and above that, there’s the opening up of the Ring of Fire.”

Strickland said OCS, which includes representatives from government, unions and general contractors, was expecting about 8,000 students to attend Future Building over three days.

Ironworkers Local 721 did a demonstration of mechanical advantage, with a block and tackle system, and let students walk over an I-beam.

“This has been one of the most popular stations in the whole place,” MacDonald said.

“We have had lineups of 50, 60, 100 kids waiting to walk the beam.”

The Ontario General Contractors Association (OGCA) was at Future Building to promote professional careers, said Terry Doyle, director of human resources for Eastern Construction Company Ltd. Her firm, along with EllisDon Corp., PCL Constructors Inc., Alberici Corp., Maple Reinders, participated in the OGCA booth.

“We’ve been very successful reaching out to the college and university level to promote our industry and our sector,” she said.

“However, given the skills shortages in the workforce, we really feel we need to start at a much younger age to make them aware of the many rewarding professional careers in construction.”

One plumbing instructor with the United Association (UA) of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry booth stressed the importance of math, physics and chemistry, even for skilled trades.

“We’re expecting advanced level math, chemistry and physics,” said Mike Gordon a trade school instructor with Toronto-based UA local 46.

“Those are the types of courses and the types of skills that we hope you’ll have with you to avoid suffering when you go through the actual in school portion for your apprenticeship.”

Physicists discover dineutron decay

From R&D Magazine: Physicists discover dineutron decay
Nuclear physicists recently witnessed an atomic nucleus do something that nobody had ever seen one do before—two neutrons at the same time.

Emitting them, that is.

The experiment revealed a brand new form of nuclear decay, the process by which unstable atoms release energy and transform into more stable forms. But instead of emitting known patterns of radiation, the nucleus ejected two correlated neutrons simultaneously—a dineutron. Though physicists had long theorized about the existence of this form of decay, this was the first experiment to see the dineutron event in action.

“We have for the first time unambiguously observed dineutron decay and clearly identified it in beryllium-16,” said Artemis Spyrou, professor of nuclear physics.

The newly discovered dineutron decay mode joins the 15 other known forms of atomic decay, including double proton emission, double beta decay and double positron emission. The results hold promise to strengthen scientists’ understanding of the strong force that holds nuclei together and the processes taking place within neutron stars.

The researchers caught the act red-handed. Beryllium-16 is an unbound, unstable isotope with 4 protons and 12 neutrons that decays in less than a trillionth of a second. To produce the extremely short-lived nucleus, the physicists smashed a beam of boron-17 into a solid target, occasionally knocking out a proton and forming the desired beryllium-16.

The neutrons emitted by the newly produced but instantly decaying nucleus flew straight into the Modular Neutron Array (MoNA) neutron detector, while the remaining beryllium-14 nucleus was deflected by a powerful magnet into a separate device to be measured. The resulting events clearly showed two neutrons travelling closely together—a dineutron—through the MoNA detector at the same time that a beryllium-14 nucleus was detected, giving direct evidence of the dineutron decay. In addition, the neutrons were sure to have been emitted simultaneously because it requires more energy to emit one at a time, making the dineutron decay the preferred mode.

Or, as Spyrou explained it, “You have to use energy to break off just one neutron, but the two neutrons just go.”

Push to re-regulate state's nuclear plants

A letter to the newspaper:
From Syracuse.com: Push to re-regulate state's nuclear plants
To the Editor:

It was about a year ago that a tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, caused a meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. On March 11 (the actual anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Japan), three speakers from the Alliance for a Green Economy provided an enlightening and frightening presentation. They were: Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear in Washington, D.C., Tim Judson of Citizens Awareness Network and Steve Penn, physics professor at Hobart William Smith.

The speakers pointed out that three of our own state's six nuclear power plants are only 36 miles from Syracuse and that there is a real danger here of a nuclear disaster similar to the one in Japan. Two of the plants are among the three oldest nuclear plants in the country. They have severe embrittlement problems, more waste stored in fuel pools above the plants than in Fukushima, and inadequate containment structures. There does not have to be a tsunami; anything that can knock out power can cause a Fukushima-type explosion.

Paul Gunter noted that our community life and livelihood depend on a false assumption that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulates nuclear plants. All the speakers emphasized the NRC ties to the nuclear industry and that it puts the industry ahead of people. Vermont has taken back regulatory authority over its nuclear plant. We need to push for re-regulating plants in New York.

Nuclear power is a very dangerous and very expensive means of producing electricity. In addition to working for better regulation, we should support the use of much safer alternatives like wind, solar and geothermal energy as well as energy conservation.

Shelley Conture
Syracuse

Questioning the speed of light? Foran students Skype nuclear research scientist for answers

From the Milford (CT) Mirror: Questioning the speed of light? Foran students Skype nuclear research scientist for answers
Dr. Alvaro de Rujula, a preeminent theoretical physicist, spent time last week talking via Skype to George Benedetti's science class at Foran High School about a recent experiment that might have overturned one of Einstein's theories.

Scientists at the world's largest atomic particle smasher, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) had some evidence that a tiny sub-atomic particle, the neutrino, traveled faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe; they are similar to the more familiar electron, but they do not carry an electric charge. Science's current understanding is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. If neutrinos could beat this limit, it would certainly be news that would shake the scientific world, local scientists explained.

Benedetti's physics class had been following the news of the CERN experiments in the New York Times, and Benedetti, a career engineer-turned-teacher, was duly impressed: this could be big news. But, like all scientists, he was skeptical about the initial findings.

Benedetti explained, “The scientists fired many batches of neutrinos from CERN in Switzerland, right through the Alps mountains and two thirds of the way down the length of Italy to a detector — a distance of about 450 miles. Neutrinos are so tiny and non-interacting that they can pass through almost anything. They measured a velocity that exceeded the speed of light by 60 billionths of a second.”

In his 1905 theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that nothing could go faster than light. Since then, his theory has been tested many, many times and always found to be correct. It is now a foundation of modern science. If it was wrong it would be truly revolutionary.

“In science,” Benedetti continued, “big results require big proofs. The CERN scientists weren't ready to believe their own results, so they repeated the experiment. Same results. At this point, they announced their extraordinary measurement so that other scientists could check them. This was when I heard of the results and discussed how exciting it might be with my class. I thought it would be a great lesson to them in how science works. Every claim, even if put forth by some of the world's greatest scientists, even if it comes from extensive and intricate experimentation, must be put out there to be checked and cross checked by all the other experts in the world.”

Within weeks, on Feb. 23, another New York Times article appeared. The CERN scientists had found that, within the hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of experimental equipment and wires, one connector was loose and that had introduced the 60 billionth of a second error. A competing group had independently measured the neutrinos' flight time and had found that it was exactly the speed of light. Einstein's theory held.

“It was a great lesson in the way scientific truth-seeking is self correcting,” Benedetti said. “The kids really grabbed on to this. The idea that scientists could be wrong, that scientists ask for help, that competition and criticism can be friendly and can lead to the truth — all of that was invaluable in teaching the kids what doing science really entailed and how important it is to apply the same skeptical attitude in all the other areas of their life.”

Benedetti got the idea of getting his kids directly in touch with the real scientists, and Skyped CERN. Last Tuesday, a good natured Dr. de Rujula chatted with Foran students about the errors that compromised the results: a cable problem and an American-made clock, and he explained to them that mistakes happen, and that's why scientists test and retest their findings.

Dr. de Rujula said that since Einstein's theory had been so well tested and because this ”was far too much to believe,” his group should have been more careful with the experiment.

But, “It's a normal thing to make errors,” he told the students, “provided one is able to recognize them.”

Getting these astonishing results and then being able to announce them was sort of “like having your cake and eating it too,” Dr. de Rujula said. “This cake was too big to be eaten.”

Responding to a student's question, the scientist explained how the particle accelerator they used in the experiment worked. In simple terms, scientists give the particles a little “kick.” then another “kick” before sending them on their way.

Students asked questions about the safety of the particle accelerator, and the practical application of CERN's research. Dr. de Rujula said the accelerator is safe, and he said it sometimes takes years to realize the practical use of science. General relativity, or the general theory of relativity, for example, was published by Albert Einstein in 1916. In it, Einstein figured out that time goes more slowly where gravity is stronger. So, a clock on a satellite — away from earth's gravity — runs faster than a clock on earth. This correction has to be used to reach the accuracy required for GPS systems. Without this, ships, planes, missiles and cars would not know where they were. So, it took from 1916 until the development of GPS for Einstein's general Relativity to become useful.

The CERN scientists plan to conduct their experiment again, this time watching for the two factors they said threw their results.

“That was cool,” Benedetti said to his students as the scientist, speaking from Switzerland, signed off. His students agreed.

Easter Pause

So sorry to have missed so many days of posting - unexpected family matters cropped up.

And now it's Easter, so more family matters.

Will get back on track Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

Modest but uneven R&D increases proposed for FY 2013

From Physics Today: Modest but uneven R&D increases proposed for FY 2013
For the second straight year, President Obama has proposed increasing R&D expenditures despite an overall federal budget that remains frozen at its fiscal year 2011 level. But the $2 billion, 1.4% increase for R&D he is requesting for FY 2013 is considerably less bold than the $4.1 billion, 6.5% jump he had sought for FY 2012.

“The president thinks that it’s absolutely critical to the nation’s future to make these investments in research and development and STEM education in order to have the sort of future that I think all Americans want,” presidential science adviser John Holdren said at the 13 February unveiling of the budget. “The president has consistently stuck to the message that whatever else we’ve got to do to live within our financial means, we’re not going to skimp on investments in these crucial domains.”

As is the case each year, some federal agencies that fund R&D fare better than others. On the down side for the second year is the Department of Defense, whose massive R&D programs are trimmed by 4.4%, to $69.7 billion. As recently as FY 2010, the Pentagon had spent $80.6 billion for R&D.

In percentage terms, the big winners for FY 2013 are NSF, which is slated for a 4.8% increase, to $7.4 billion, and the relatively tiny laboratory programs of NIST, which would move up 14.3%, to $648 million. And although the Department of Energy, the largest federal funder of basic research in the physical sciences, grows 3.2%, its high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion-energy programs are squeezed. NASA is in store for another small reduction in funding, to $17.7 billion.

In the unlikely event that Congress enacts Obama’s budget proposal largely intact during an election year, appropriations for R&D, as with all other discretionary federal spending, could still sink in January 2013 by as much as 8% from their proposed level. That’s when mandatory reductions, or sequestrations, are due to take effect in accordance with last year’s Budget Control Act. Unless Congress and the president agree to change the statute, discretionary outlays are to be cut by $109.3 billion per year beginning in FY 2013. Half of that, $54.7 billion, will come from the Defense Department and half from the remainder of the budget. The act does not further specify how the reductions will be applied, and neither the White House nor lawmakers have begun to address that looming crunch.

Obama’s FY 2013 budget purports to keep R&D funding at three agencies—NIST, NSF, and DOE’s Office of Science—on a path to doubling in size, through “fiscally responsible increases.” With austerity now the watchword, however, the doubling period is being stretched out well beyond its originally envisioned 10 years. Holdren, who calls those three agencies’ portfolios “absolutely critical to contributing to fundamental research,” allowed that their growth “is not at the rate of increase we would have preferred.” At the 2.4% growth proposed for the Office of Science in FY 2013, doubling its current $4.9 billion budget would take about 30 years.

The White House proposes a federal portfolio of basic and applied research totaling $64 billion—a $2 billion, 3.3% increase from the current year. The budget for the National Institutes of Health, by far the largest supporter of basic research, would stay exactly even with this year’s level of $30 billion. Holdren told reporters that he was “rather relieved that [NIH] didn’t go down because of the pressures on the budget.”

The budget would allocate $3 billion in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs government-wide, an increase of 2.6% from the current year. Carl Wieman, the associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the request reflects Obama’s call for the training of 100 000 new, effective STEM teachers and a 1 million, or 33.3%, increase in the number of well-prepared STEM college graduates over the next 10 years. A five-year strategic plan for STEM education, to be released by the White House in the spring, will propose ways to increase coordination and collaboration and to improve the efficiency and impact of the 235 STEM education programs currently operated by 13 different agencies, Wieman said. Through consolidation or elimination, the budget proposes to reduce that number by more than two dozen in FY 2013. NASA’s STEM education funding would be cut 21.3%, to $117 million, and NSF’s STEM programs would grow 3.4%, to $1.2 billion next year. The Department of Education would receive a 21.5% increase, to $628 million, for STEM education.

NSF and the Department of Education are set to launch a joint $60 million evidence-based initiative to improve K–16 mathematics education. The program will support collaborations between education researchers and practitioners to develop and test promising approaches and support widespread adoption of practices found to be effective. The multiagency model will be expanded in the future to include other STEM programs and agencies as part of the strategic plan.

The 2013 budget would provide $2.6 billion for the multiagency US Global Change Research Program, an increase of 5.6%. The interagency Networking and Information Technology R&D program would increase 1.8%, to $3.8 billion, and the National Nanotechnology Initiative would receive $1.8 billion, $70 million more than the current year.

The request calls out a total of $2.2 billion for R&D related to advanced manufacturing at DOE, NSF, DOD, NIST, and nine other agencies. The focus on manufacturing follows Obama’s announcement last summer of an industry–government Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (see PHYSICS TODAY, August 2011, page 27). The initiative calls for collaborations that will invent and scale up new manufacturing technologies and provide shared facilities to help small- and medium-sized manufacturers become internationally competitive.

Department of Energy. There is a wide disparity in the distribution of the 2.4% increase proposed for the Office of Science, which funds DOE’s nonweapons basic research. Declines are in store for the high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy programs. The $14 million cut for high-energy physics, to $777 million, imperils the Fermilab-led Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on 1 March that DOE and Fermilab are trying to come up with a plan to keep the experiment alive despite the reduced funding.

With its 3.7% decline, the nuclear-physics program would provide enough funding to operate the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory for just 10 weeks next year—half this year’s run time. But Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven’s associate director for nuclear and particle physics, says the lab has found sufficient internal money to operate the collider for 15 weeks. That’s about the minimum required for physics experimentation, he says, given that five weeks are required just to cool down the superconducting magnets, tune the beams, and shut the machine down. The nuclear-physics budget provides just $22 million for the $650 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, an accelerator project just getting under way at Michigan State University. That’s less than half the $55 million the university had been expecting next year. Budget documents state that the funding will support engineering and design efforts that are needed before DOE formally decides whether to approve the start of construction.

A $3 million trimming of the fusion energy research budget, to $398 million, masks a big cut proposed for the US fusion laboratories. The request would raise the annual US contribution to the ITER fusion test reactor by $45 million, to $150 million next year, but would simultaneously cut back the domestic research program by $49 million. One of three US experimental fusion devices, MIT’s Alcator C-Mod, would be shut down altogether in 2013, halting work for the 100 staff members and 30 graduate students there, says Miklos Porkolab, director of the MIT plasma fusion center. In a 27 February letter sent to Holdren and Chu, Porkolab, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory director Stewart Prager, General Atomics vice president Tony Taylor, and other US fusion scientists warned, “If implemented, the $49 million cut contained in the budget request will result in the layoff of hundreds of fusion scientists, engineers, graduate students, and support personnel” and “will demote the US program to a second-tier player in the world fusion effort.”

What’s more, the US commitment to ITER is slated to ramp up to a peak of $350 million in FY 2016—more than the total US fusion energy budget—according to the ITER agreement. “ITER is too expensive to be paid for out of the domestic program,” says Stephen Dean of Fusion Power Associates, an industry group.

Asked about fusion, Holdren said that “the cutting edge of fusion right now is determining whether we will create a burning plasma,” and that ITER is “the only machine in the world that has a prospect of doing that.” Chu, testifying before the House Science Committee, noted that 80% of the US ITER contribution will be spent on components to be manufactured in the US. Funding for inertial confinement fusion would decline 3.1%, to $460 million.

According to budget documents, the campaign to achieve fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility will conclude at the end of FY 2012, when the facility will transition “to routine operations” in support of stockpile stewardship. Should ignition not be achieved by 30 September, researchers will work to develop a detailed understanding of the remaining physics challenges and will also consider alternative ignition concepts. “This will allow a discovery- rather than schedule-driven program that will provide more opportunities for comparison with simulations and feedback from them to resolve the outstanding physics questions,” the documents state.

Coming out on the winning side at the Office of Science are the materials sciences, chemical sciences, geosciences, and energy biosciences research programs in the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, all of which would receive double-digit increases in FY 2013. All but 1 of the 14 scientific user facilities supported by the office would receive more funding, and the 46 energy frontier research centers would split a 20% increase, to $120 million. Funding for construction of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven would ramp down on schedule as it nears completion.

DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs are proposed to jump 29.1%, to $2.3 billion. A sixth interdisciplinary energy innovation hub, funded at $20 million, will be launched next year to address the research challenges associated with modernizing the electricity grid. The budget would provide the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which funds high-risk, potentially high-payoff clean energy research, with $350 million, compared with $275 million currently.

A 7% increase is proposed for R&D activities of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Its nonproliferation and verification R&D programs would swell more than 50%, to $548 million. Those programs develop the technical capabilities to detect foreign nuclear weapons development, nuclear detonations, and the movement or diversion of weapons-usable materials; to monitor compliance with nuclear arms control and nonproliferation commitments; and to discourage the unnecessary spread of enrichment technology.

Construction of the $6 billion Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory has been deferred for five years. The plant was to have the capacity to manufacture dozens of replacement plutonium pits for nuclear warheads annually. NSF. Agency director Subra Suresh said he hopes the bipartisan congressional support for the 2.5% increase NSF received in FY 2012 is a sign that lawmakers will approve the 4.8% raise in the FY 2013 request. But the $7.4 billion request is a scaling back of the nearly $7.8 billion that Obama had wanted for NSF in FY 2012. An estimated $3.2 billion is provided for the individual-investigator-initiated research grant programs that make up NSF’s Research and Related Activities and Education and Human Resources accounts. Every field of science and engineering supported by NSF will see an increase in support, said Suresh. In 2013, he estimated, the agency will support 285 000 researchers, postdocs, trainees, teachers, and students, or 10 000 more than this year. NSF expects to award 12 000 new grants in 2013, an increase from the 11 700 awards the agency projects to make in FY 2012. Due to anticipated growth in the number of proposals received, from 53 400 this year to 55 000 in 2013, the success rate for applicants is expected to remain at 22%. A new emphasis is placed in FY 2013 on the OneNSF Framework—a set of seven research focus areas that cut across the agency’s organizational and disciplinary boundaries. Collectively, funding for those seven areas would surge by 56.3% above this year’s level, to $807 million. The Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability program, which addresses clean energy and sustainability issues, would rise to $203 million, from $157 million. A second OneNSF component, Cyber-enabled Materials, Manufacturing, and Smart Systems, would grow to $257 million, from $142 million; and a third, Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering, would climb to $106 million, from $78 million. The expectation is that NSF will devote $355 million altogether for clean energy research, with particular emphasis on energy conversion, storage, and distribution. The $148 million requested for advanced manufacturing research at NSF includes robotics research, materials processing and manufacturing, and advanced semiconductor and optical device design. Support for major facilities and research equipment funding is just below 2012 levels, at $196 million. NSF’s Education and Human Resources division will see an increase of 5.6%, to $876 million. NASA.

The space agency’s budget involved “some very difficult choices,” Holdren acknowledged, though he asserted that investments needed to sustain US leadership in space science and exploration will continue. NASA’s R&D programs, which include aeronautics research and the development of new space vehicles and technologies needed for human space travel, would increase $203 million, or 2.2%, to $9.6 billion. But the basic science programs would dip by 3.2%, to $4.9 billion. Planetary science would plunge more than 20%, mostly due to the administration’s decision to back out of participation in two European Space Agency–led missions to Mars, scheduled for launch in 2016 and 2018. Holdren insisted that the news didn’t augur the end of US interest in the red planet. “Mars is clearly the centerpiece of our planetary exploration program,” he said, citing the Mars Science Laboratory rover now on its way to the planet, two satellites presently orbiting Mars, and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe due for launch in 2013. The NASA budget provides $628 million to keep the James Webb Space Telescope on track for a 2018 launch.

Department of Defense. Although the Pentagon’s overall R&D budget would decline 4.4% to $69.7 billion, the basic research component, designated 6.1, is maintained essentially unchanged at the current year’s $2.1 billion level. The 6.1 account provides about one-third of all federal support for research in computer science and engineering and an even greater share of funding for specific fields of electrical and materials engineering. Applied research (6.2) would decline by 5.5%, advanced technology development (6.3) would decrease 2.7%, and weapons system development would see a 4.6% reduction compared with FY 2012 levels. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would be funded at $2.8 billion, essentially unchanged from the current year.

Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security R&D rebounds 19.6%, to $1.2 billion, which partially restores steep cuts enacted in FY 2012 appropriations. The budget does not fund construction of the $150 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, a replacement for an aging facility used to develop measures to counter emerging agricultural diseases. Instead, DHS will conduct a comprehensive reassessment of the need for the new lab. The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office budget would increase by 13.1% to gain back some of the 29% reduction it had incurred in FY 2012.

NIST and NOAA. NIST director Patrick Gallagher said that more than half of the $106 million increase proposed for his agency is to be focused on advanced manufacturing research. The request includes $21 million for a new program to provide cost-shared funding to industry-led consortia. Those teams are to conduct precompetitive research addressing major technical problems that are preventing small- and medium-sized US companies from more widely adopting advanced manufacturing capabilities. NOAA’s R&D budget would decline 3.8%, to $552 million, but the loss to basic and applied research components would be a steeper 6.3%, to $384 million.

Other agencies. The Department of Transportation would receive $1.1 billion for R&D, a 14% increase from the current year. Its request includes funds for several activities that are part of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Next Generation Air Transportation System. The Environmental Protection Agency R&D program would increase $12 million, to $580 million. The US Geological Survey, the lead science agency in the Department of the Interior, would receive a $35 million increase, to $854 million.

Neutrinos claim: physicist resigns

From The Hindu: Neutrinos claim: physicist resigns

An Italian physicist at the head of a team that made a cautious but hugely controversial claim that neutrinos may travel faster than the speed of light has resigned following calls for his dismissal.

Antonio Ereditato submitted his resignation before a vote on a motion by some members of his OPERA team that he be removed after tests this month contradicted the claim that the universe's speed limit had been broken.

“I hope OPERA will find new unity and a new leadership to pursue its main target of observing the appearance of a new type of neutrinos,” said Antonio Masiero, the deputy head of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics.

Mr. Masiero said another test on the speed of neutrinos, a type of sub-atomic particle, would still be carried out later this year to check OPERA's findings.

OPERA is part of the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) and carried out its experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.

A headline in Corriere della Sera called Mr. Ereditato “the physicist of flop.”

Mr. Ereditato's team last September announced that neutrinos appeared to have travelled faster than the speed of light, a claim that would have upended Einstein's theory of relativity — a cornerstone of physics.

The neutrinos were timed at their departure from CERN's giant underground lab near Geneva and again, after travelling 732 km through the Earth's crust, at their arrival at Gran Sasso in the Apennine Mountains.

To do the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected. Knowing their findings would stir a storm, the OPERA team urged physicists to carry out their own checks to corroborate or refute it. CERN said technical hitches may have skewed the initial measurements, something that critics of the findings said they had always suspected.