Dooms Day Device... is broken.

During a power test of the Large Hadron Collider sprung a leak of liquid helium. The leak was in one of the power bus that transfers the massive amounts of electricity needed to power the LHC. To use this power more efficiently it is transferred through superconducting niobium–titanium cables, which need to be cooled to 1.9 Kelvin or -271.3°C. This is where the liquid helium leaked from. When the helium leaked the cables could not withstand the load of almost 8,000 amps. The current began to arch and subsequently destroyed near by parts of the machine. Some nearby magnets where destroyed and the vacuum chamber was punctured. The current was so powerful that the wire was vaporized. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are confident that an accident like this will not happen again. Measures will be taken to ensure that electrical fluctuations in the bus will be monitored more closely. This is important because the LHC cannot be simply switched off, it takes nearly a minute for heating coils and bypass circuits to discharge the power stored inside the magnets.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081029/full/news.2008.1194.html?s=news_rss

Bees Can Count

Scientists in Sydney at the University of Queensland have discovered that Honey Bees can count, but only to a maximum of four. The Honey bees where placed in a tube with 3 white stripes food was placed on one of these stripes. When you remove the food the bees still fly to the same stripe.

"We find that if you train them to the third stripe, they will look subsequently in the third stripe," researcher Mandyam Srinivasan said.

The same technique works with the other stripes up to a maximum of four. It seems that bees cannot count past four. This is not surprising due to the extreme small size for their brain -- it is about the size of a sesame seed. However I find this truly amazing that something so small has the ability to count. I wonder what other animals have other yet undiscovered abilities.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE49P04V20081026

OPEC

The price of oil continues to fall from over a high of $140 per barrel this summer to a low price of $64 per barrel. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, had an emergency meeting on friday to try and protect their profits. So what they decided to do was to cut Oil production to try and artificially keep the demand for Oil higher then the supply. Before this cut OPEC countries were over producing by 600,000 barrels per day. This new cut would decrease the production level by 1.2 million barrels per day. OPEC in my opinion is essentially a cartel. They are trying to control the market and keep there revenues high by cutting the supply so the demand goes up. It is essential that the United States move towards alternative energies so organisations like this cannot continue to exist.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/10/24/international/i031722D17.DTL

India In Space!

India has launched its first moon mission. They are now a competitor in the newly developing asian space race. The space craft, Chandrayaan-1, is designed to study and map the moon. As of no we really do not have a complete picture of the moon and there are many things that we still do not know. One of the things that Chandrayaan-1 is going to do is to map the moon in three dimensions and take high quality pictures of the surface. It is important that we have a good map of the moon if we are ever to continue maned missions to the moon, or maybe even colonise the moon someday.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080428-pslv-cartosat-launch.html

Pirates!

Even today pirates exist on the high seas. While most of the world seas are safe from the threat of piracy, there are still dangerous places. The coast of Africa seems to be the modern hot spot for piracy. With more ships being borded and then robbed or held for ranson then any other place in the world. The cost of Somalia seems to be especially bad. Even as recent as today was a ship held for ransom. A Japanese tanker was released today after a ransom of £930,000 was payed to the Somalian gang who was holding it hostage. In response to this increase in piracy NATO has sent in war ships to try and stop this increase in piracy. NATO will now be escorting all World Food Project ships in an effort to increase aid getting to Somalia. More then 40% of the population is dependant on the food that these ships bring.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7650415.stm