Especially with what I term "representative reality." I've had yet another unpleasant encounter with someone convinced the Apollo Moon Landings were faked. (OK, this was only my second one in two tech companies.) It was with gentlemen that up to that point in our shared occupations, I had a lot of respect for their intelligence (still do): just not on this subject nor their conclusions. However, I've come to find merely working in an industry doesn't make you immune to dogma and propaganda. The first posited his theory with a You Tube video.

This particular gent mentioned discussing the subject with "real NASA scientists and engineers" of whom he could not (or, did not) name in his diatribe. These real NASA personnel also don't have New York Times bestsellers blowing the lid off "the game" if the jig is truly up (and, nine-year-old Trek fans are still dreaming of becoming astronauts, I'd bet)! It was one of those break room conversations that started on one subject and went left rather rapidly. I'm quick to call BS on anything without the facts, but it tires me nonetheless.

1. I was there, and I'm afraid gents you weren't on the planet yet.

2. RedOrbit gives latest third-party evidence for the Apollo Moon landings.

3. Radiation shielding/Van Allen Radiation belt dilemma: debunked here on Clavius.

4. How do you fake something SIX times and NO ONE talk about it? (see unnamed "real NASA scientists and engineers")

5. It doesn't help the current state of affairs we find ourselves in as a nation: climate change, our credit rating and/or threatened default, economics, education, governance, income disparity, the middle class, the national debt, outsourcing, teen pregnancy and how NOT to prevent it; wars and rumors of wars are factual, REAL problems we have to grapple with. Facts and data are the only means I know of solving any problem; an appreciation of the reality that data is telling you and ACTING on that reality.

Our current state of affairs is moribund: we simultaneously complain about the same congress we keep reelecting - it's like political codependency. The mayors race in New York, the sexual deviant in San Diego (ELECTED mayor!) and the possible feud/field of GOP candidates for 2016 (we're already discussing 2016) ranges from the lucidly mundane to the blithely insane and looks more everyday like the conclusions in the study of celebrity chimps!

We have in the halls of congress one chemist, six engineers, one microbiologist and one physicist pulling up the rear in House and the Senate (source here). Not a single one - excluding the nine aforementioned - would be caught dead debating any science issue (few of them are clergy, but they seemingly have an endless, extemporaneous riff on that subject), hence they make up the science they want to believe. We have lawmakers - if they weren't "job creators" - getting their life and governing philosophy listening to bloviating college drop outs on AM and satellite talk radio, for the most part were lawyers that by training are not interested in finding truth or deeper meaning in a subject...

...just winning an "argument."

And in that stance, we're all losing.

“The universe is inevitable,” he declared. “The universe is impossible.”

The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50-year-old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass, which enables them to form big structures such as galaxies and humans. “The fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for experiment, it’s a triumph for theory, and it’s an indication that physics works,” Arkani-Hamed told the crowd.

However, in order for the Higgs boson to make sense with the mass (or equivalent energy) it was determined to have, the LHC needed to find a swarm of other particles, too. None turned up.

With the discovery of only one particle, the LHC experiments deepened a profound problem in physics that had been brewing for decades. Modern equations seem to capture reality with breathtaking accuracy, correctly predicting the values of many constants of nature and the existence of particles like the Higgs. Yet a few constants — including the mass of the Higgs boson — are exponentially different from what these trusted laws indicate they should be, in ways that would rule out any chance of life, unless the universe is shaped by inexplicable fine-tunings and cancellations.

In peril is the notion of “naturalness,” Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained. Without it, physicists face the harsh prospect that those laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time.

To explain this absurd bit of luck, the multiverse idea has been growing mainstream in cosmology circles over the past few decades. It got a credibility boost in 1987 when the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, calculated that the cosmological constant of our universe is expected in the multiverse scenario. Of the possible universes capable of supporting life — the only ones that can be observed and contemplated in the first place — ours is among the least fine-tuned. “If the cosmological constant were much larger than the observed value, say by a factor of 10, then we would have no galaxies,” explained Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist and multiverse theorist at Tufts University. “It’s hard to imagine how life might exist in such a universe.”

The search for dark matter involves a dizzying array of experiments, a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms, all using different techniques and technologies. This is how physicists look for something when they don’t know its precise properties. The problem is that although several experiments have detected possible hints of dark matter, the hints don’t agree with one another. Plot the color-coded results from various experiments onto a single graph, and it looks like abstract art.

Two years ago, Juan Collar of the University of Chicago was hopeful that dark matter was on the verge of being detected. But every subsequent new result seemed to point in a different direction. Small wonder that he opened a recent talk with a slide paraphrasing “The Big Lebowski”: “We are nihilists. We believe nothing.”

Ordinary visible matter — the planets, stars, galaxies and everything else that we see — makes up a mere 4.9 percent of all the matter in the universe. Most of the universe (68.3 percent) is made up of a form of energy dubbed dark energy, which is believed to be causing the expansion of the cosmos to accelerate. The remainder — roughly 26.8 percent of the universe — is made up of dark matter.

Physicists might not know precisely what the dark matter is, but they are confident that it exists. The notion made its debut in 1933, when Fritz Zwicky analyzed the velocities of galaxies in a certain cluster and concluded that the gravitational pull from visible matter alone could not prevent the speeding galaxies from escaping the cluster. Decades later, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found further evidence of Zwicky’s “dark matter” in the stars orbiting the outskirts of spiral galaxies.

The result is a stunning success for the Standard Model of particle physics and yet another blow for those hoping for signs of new physics from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHCb and CMS experiments at the LHC have made the first definitive observation of a particle called a Bs meson decaying into two muons, confirming a tentative observation made by LHCb last autumn. The discovery has far-reaching implications for the search for new particles and forces of nature.

Beyond the Standard Model

There are many reasons to believe that the current Standard Model of particle physics is an incomplete description of nature at the fundamental level. Despite its excellent agreement with almost every experimental measurement to date, it has several gaping holes. It fails to describe the force of gravity and has no explanation for the enigmatic dark matter and dark energy that are thought to make up 95% of the Universe. The theory also requires a large amount of “fine-tuning” to match experimental observations, leaving it looking suspiciously like the laws of physics have been orchestrated in a very unnatural way to produce the Universe we live in.

In the last few decades a number of theories have been proposed that solve some of the Standard Model’s problems. One particularly popular idea is supersymmetry (SUSY for short), with posits the existence of a slew of new fundamental particles, each one a mirror image of the particles of the Standard Model. SUSY has many attractive features: it provides a neat explanation for dark matter and unifies the strengths of the three forces of the Standard Model. However, the main reason that physicists were first attracted to it is that it is aesthetically pleasing or “natural” – in other words it doesn’t require the same awkward fine-tuning as the Standard Model.

Note: it is my usual habit to italicize articles, with obvious attribution of their origins at the link after its text. However, in the two quotes following, the authors are recognizable and famous enough I think to depart from that format. Their poignant prose (sadly) relates.

*****

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand children's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"

Combining experiment and theory, Cornell researchers have moved a step closer to making graphene a useful, controllable material. They showed that when grown in stacked layers, graphene produces some specific defects that influence its conductivity.

On the experiment side, a research group has imaged and analyzed the structure and behavior of graphene sheets stacked one on top of the other, called bilayer graphene. The group, publishing online June 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, includes Paul McEuen, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science; David Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics and Kavli co-director; and Jiwoong Park, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology and Kavli member.

They showed that instead of flat sheets of repeating carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire, when graphene grows layers, it ripples, like wall-to-wall carpet exceeding room dimensions. These ripples, called solitons, are like electrical highways that allow electrons to shoot from one end of the sheet to the other. The rest of the non-rippled graphene, when stacked, is semiconducting.

An international team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn have detected burst of radio waves that appear to have originated billions of light years away - when the Universe was just 6 to 9 billion years old. The researchers are still baffled about the origins of these emissions. In the future, they intend to use these flashes to probe the intergalactic space.

Four Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs with durations of only a few milliseconds were detected at high Galactic latitudes in the southern sky. The extremely short duration of the bursts and the inferred great distance imply that they have been caused by some cataclysmic cosmological event, such as two merging neutron stars or a star dying or being swallowed by a black hole.

The results point to some of the most extreme events in astrophysics involving large amounts of mass or energy as the source of the radio bursts.

The team used the CSIRO Parkes 64metre radio telescope to obtain their results. Swinburne's Professor Matthew Bailes thinks the most likely source of the bursts are cataclysmic explosions in the Universe's most magnetic neutron stars otherwise known as magnetars. "Magnetars can give off more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does in 300,000 years and are a leading candidate for the bursts", he says.

Yesterday's edition of Science includes a demonstration of an all-optical transistor that can be switched between its on and off states using a single photon. Although it's an impressive demonstration of physics, the work also indicates that we're likely to stick with electrons for a while, given that the transistor required two lasers and a cloud of a cold atomic gas.

The work relied on a cold gas of cesium atoms. These atoms have an extremely convenient property: two closely separated ground states, each with a corresponding excited state. All of these states are separated by an energy that corresponds to a specific wavelength of light, so using a laser of that wavelength allows you to shift the system into a different state.

Childhood experiences, both good and bad, can affect the developing architecture of the brain. When parents and other caregivers read frequently to a child, it reinforces the brain connections that will help the child develop reading and thinking skills. Experiences and environment also determine whether neural circuits involved with motor skills, behavior control, memory and other functions form robustly. Experiences also can influence gene expression in the developing brain by affecting the production of proteins that bind to DNA in the neurons, Cameron said. Scientists are just starting to understand such "epigenetic" factors in brain development.

When the body's response to stress — the rush of adrenaline, the increase in heart rate, the elevation of certain hormone levels — is constantly active, Cameron said, the result is "toxic stress" that can reduce the number of neural connections in the cognitive areas of the brain at a time when they should be proliferating.

A Kaiser Permanente study on adverse childhood experiences with 17,000 participants found that childhood exposure to violence, domestic abuse, family neglect or other stresses can have life-long consequences, including a higher probability of alcoholism, illicit drug use and depression. Cameron said the research suggests that children exposed to many adverse events early in life even have an elevated risk of heart disease in their 50s.

There are ways to prevent such outcomes. Good parenting, better nutrition and more cognitively stimulating experiences can "contribute very positively to a healthy trajectory" in life, Cameron said.

The most important influence on a neighborhood's crime rate, the researchers found, was the neighbors' sense of "agency" or willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good.

Earls and his colleagues found that some neighborhoods were functioning well and that the entire city was not under siege as some news reports might suggest. "We found that collective efficacy was, indeed, operating as a protective factor," he said.

The researchers also found that the benefits of collective efficacy go beyond easing violence. It also seems to be associated with more use of parks and recreational spaces in neighborhoods, initiation of sexual activity at later ages among youths, and even less obesity and fewer admissions to hospitals for asthma attacks.

I experienced my own personal collective efficacy from parents, a sister, a faith community that cared about me despite my circumstances. That charity was also extended to my closest friends.

"United States" seems idealistic to the point of oxymoron. We are divided: between sound science and utter fantasy; facts and ideology. I've read the most inspiring as well as inflammatory postings since the Zimmerman verdict (some calling him a "patriot"; Coulter tweeted "hallelujah"). It is more than just a tragic event centered on iced, tea, skittles and profiled suspicion. It is our addiction to talking points; our predilection to making sensation provocateurs equivalent to journalists; our treatment of Americans as aliens on their own soil: never mind immigration reform.

New York has just experienced one of the warmest days on record, but the doubt of climate research has been planted by forces that want to confuse the issue to maximize energy industry profits. Fracking used to be a curse on Battlestar Galactica, and has been studied with as much resolve. We're falling behind in science, technology, engineering and mathematics largely, unlike other countries we completely lack a "collective efficacy": we don't encourage women and minorities into the sciences; we fight political chimeras and windmills with the resolve  of quixotic dragon slayers; we want the usual suspects and magical thinking to keep us on top as whole industries are shipped overseas; we have an "us-versus-them" mentality so that we don't see the value in our fellow countrymen and women to pursue liberty, happiness...and life (reorder intentional).

And, our fast-approaching last place has never been a good place to start a sprint.

AAAS: Experts Describe Long-Term Impacts of Stress on the Young Brain
Chicage Tribune: CPS lays off more than 2000, including 1000 teachers

NASA's Green Propellant Infusion Mission, or GPIM, has passed its first thruster pulsing test, a major milestone that paves the way for a planned test flight in 2015, agency officials said. NASA unveiled the rocket thruster success Tuesday (July 9) in Washington, D.C., during a briefing with aerospace industry officials and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO).

The GPIM initiative aims to demonstrate that a green fuel with nearly 50 percent better performance than hydrazine could power Earth-circling satellites and eventually deep space missions.

Vincent and Victor are still competing to learn about the world, but they have chosen different ways of learning. Victor became a chemical engineer, while Vincent became a physicist. “[Victor] wanted to be much more practical with his way of handling things, and I wanted to really learn what was going on in a fundamental level,” Rodgers said. Vincent studies an offshoot of superstring theory, a theory that says the universe's fundamental constituents are tiny vibrating strings. He studies the way gravity works in various conceptions of string theory. He uses mathematics to describe his theories, and he sometimes takes a pen and paper to bed with him at night to make calculations. “It's fun,”Rodgers said. “I think there's some really great stuff [in physics] to play around with.”

Vincent Rodgers teaches a class at Iowa called “Physics from Head to Toe,” which studies how physics can apply to the human body.

Rodgers greatly admires Albert Einstein, who in addition to discovering new ideas in physics such as the theory of relativity, also campaigned for world peace and wrote about the society around him. In his 1950 book, Out of My Later Years, Einstein wrote about racism in segregated American society. “What can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice?,” Einstein asked. “He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.” “He's much bigger than people already think he is," Rodgers said. “When you read the way [Einstein] acts throughout his life - this guy was really on it.”

By Josh Howgego and Nature Magazine

Water droplets, coffee granules, fragments of polystyrene and even a toothpick are among the items that have been flying around in a Swiss laboratory lately — all of them kept in the air by sound waves. The device that achieves this acoustic levitation is the first to be capable of handling several objects simultaneously. It is described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Typically, levitation techniques make use of electromagnetism; magnetic forces have even been used to levitate frogs. It has long been known that sound waves could counter gravity, too, but so far the method has lacked practical application because it could do little more than keep an object in place.

To also move and manipulate levitating objects, Dimos Poulikakos, a mechanical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and his colleagues built sound-making platforms using piezoelectric crystals, which shrink or stretch depending on the voltage applied to them. Each platform is the size of a pinky nail.

Scientific American: Sound Waves Levitate and Move Objects

Dr. Alexander is the Project Scientist for the U.S. portion of the international Rosetta mission. She has also been the Cassini Project Staff Scientist and as the final project manager of the Galileo mission, overseeing its fiery crash into Jupiter. Her scientific interests include gaskinetic theory, theory of gaseous escape from planetary and cometary regoliths, theory of surface bound exospheres, magnetospheric plasma theory (terrestrial and planetary), exobiology, interdiciplinary science, and oxidation / reduction potential of planetary and cometary regoliths.

Her most recent publications include:

• C. Alexander, A. Chmielewski, S. Gulkis, P. Weissman, D. Holmes, J. Burch, R. Goldstein, P. Mokashi, S.A. Stern, J. Parker, S. Fuselier, M. Kueppers, A. Accommazzo, “The U.S. Rosetta Project at its second Science Target: Asteroid (21) Lutetia,” IEEE Conference Proceedings, in press.
• C. Alexander, D. Sweetnam, S. Gulkis, P. Weissman, D. Holmes, J. Burch, R. Goldstein, P. Mokashi, J. Parker, S. Fuselier, L. McFadden, “The U.S. Rosetta Project at its first Science Target: Asteroid (2867) Steins,” IEEE Conference Proceedings, 2010.
• C. Alexander, R. Carlson, G. Consolmagno, D. Morrison, 400 Years of Discovery at Europa, Europa, Pappalardo, McKinnon, Khurana eds., University of Arizona Press, 2009.

NASA Science News: Mission to Land on a Comet
European Space Agency: Rosetta

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