Archives for July, 2010
RHICrolled: Get Low
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 22, 2010 This is the first in an occassional series about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or, as it’s affectionately called, RHIC. Lil John has a theme song for RHIC’s latest experimental run. Sorry, sorry! I couldn’t resist. RHIC’s actual ditty of the moment goes more like this. (Clean version, of course, RHIC doesn’t want any soap…
Fall into the (pseudo)gap
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 14, 2010 Despite their name, “high-temperature” superconductors require pretty darn cold conditions — all far below freezing temperatures, some near absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) — to operate without energy loss. As a result, they’re not practical for everyday uses like more efficient power transmission — that is, unless you have a stockpile of liquid helium or…
Nanomaterials Revealed
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 14, 2010 Thanks to the smart nano detectives out there who took a stab at solving yesterday’s picture puzzle. Mystery image #1, aka the “Nano Vortex,” shows the different magnetization directions of an arrangement of nickel and nickel oxide. Captured by Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) scientist Yimei Zhu, this photo reveals the local distribution of electromagnetic…
Name That Nanomaterial
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 13, 2010 It’s time for a little fun. Well, that is, if you consider marveling at modern-art-esque images of extremely small (i.e. on the order of billionths of a meter) materials fun. I do, so I’ll assume I’m not alone here. Take a gander at these two nano images produced at Brookhaven. What are they? Why don’t…
A Clarification
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 8, 2010 Based on some of the (many) comments spurred by the appearance of PepsiCo on ScienceBlogs, we want to clarify Brookhaven’s involvement on this site. In April, Brookhaven was invited by ScienceBlogs editors to join the community as an institutional blogger, along with the Weizmann Institute of Science and the SETI Institute (and later, CERN and…
Science from the Sky
Posted by Kendra Snyder on July 2, 2010 If you’re American, chances are you’ll be looking up this weekend for a spectacle of physics. But you also can look down from above — way, way above — to see the homes of some of the greatest physics experiments on Earth. Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is probably one of the most visible…
