Snacking Bird Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider

I'm going to be really nerdy an assume more than a handful of my readers are familiar with the Large Hadron Collider. For those not in the know, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It is operated by CERN and sits on (or rather under) the French/Swiss border. The LHC was built to smash protons together at 99.9999991% the speed of light to split then into parts we we can learn more about the nature of the universe. Specifically the scientists are looking for the Higgs-boson particle. It is theoretical since it has never actually been detected. Some of you may remember the LHC being started up last year to some fan fair as well as some doomsday predictions by those who were concerned it would create strangelets that would devour the earth. The initial start-up had to be scrapped because of a liquid helium leak. Now, a few million dollars later they were ready to start it up again last week and had to do an emergency shut down, again.

When they went up above ground to investigate they discovered a bird sitting on a equipment munching on a piece of a baguette. A crumb of the bread had fallen into the compensating capacitor and caused the short-circuit that caused the temperature rise. When the temp rose the super cooled magnets shut down and everything ground to a halt.

Nice to know a 5.5 billion dollar machine can be foiled by a bird eating a baguette.

The system was re-cooled and some test beams of particles have been shot at least half way around the collider. They will bring the last sections online this week and then start doing low energy collisions shortly thereafter. I'll let you know if the universe unravels.

~Kirk

(photo credit: Arpad Horvath)

Read More

Steger on Global Warming Video

Will Steger answered questions this morning on KARE 11 news. Be sure to check it out and do your part for global warming.



~Kirk

Read More

Go check out I and the bird #113

Fellow naturalist blogger, Matthew Sarver, is host to the latest edition of I and the Bird over at The Modern Naturalist and wow did he ever work on this one. It will take a couple of days to digest it all. He found poetry to go along with the theme of all the submissions. Be sure to check it out. ~Kirk

Read More

Another Triceratops

I couldn't resist last night at the grocery store. In the little section with cheap toys I saw a box of dinosaurs on the bottom shelf. Damn you Ja-Ru! I dug though the box and sure enough there was a lone Triceratops. I have a little herd of triceratops on my desk and I didn't have this one. It is similar in size to the other "museum lines" that other companies make. It is about 40:1 scale. The price was right so I bought myself an early birthday gift. Behold the fierce Beast!



Note: Don't anyone go buying me triceratops stuff. I only have a few and they are all ones I have found on my own. I don't want this to become a thing where everyone thinks I am obsessed with these things and buys me a ton of them.

Here's the current herd. Interesting color choices.


For those interested in such things, the manufacturers are (from left to right) Ja-Ru, Schleich (Replica Saurus "Musuem Line") , Wild Safari, Schleich (Play World Dinosaur Series) and Ja-Ru (Explore Planet Earth Series)

If you are into toy dinosaurs, why not check out The Dinosaur Toy Blog. The Dinosaur Collector Site is also a great reference for historic and modern dinosaur toys.

~Kirk

Read More

Hiatus

The blog is on hiatus for a couple of days while I recover from whatever this is going around. Seriously, get out of my body.

The good news is that we recorded most of the November Podcast while at the Minnesota Naturalists' Association conference down at Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota. If I'm feeling better I'll try to mix it all this week and have it up soon.

~Kirk

Read More

Leonid Meteor Shower November 17th

The Leonid Meteor Shower will be visible this month in the Twin Cities (the rest of the world as well.)

Science has come a long way on these showers to the point that astronomers are getting better at predicting which years will be good and at what exact times the earth will encounter the most dense clouds of debris. The debris that burns up in a meteor shower is from dust trails left by passing comets.

There are two predicted peaks to the Leonids this year. Unfortunately, the best peak will be mostly visible to those in Asia. The predicted peak is 100 meteors per hour. Keep in mind though that these predictions assume you are in a really dark site. Many of the meteors will be faint. A second, less impressive, peak is predicted for North America. The peak will be on the morning of November 17th from 2:30 to 4:30 am CST. That's a pretty vague window but the comet stream that produces this peak is spreading out so the intensity is spread over a longer time period. The Asia peak and the North America peak are from the same comet (Tempel-Tuttle) but from trails left in different years. The predicted rate for the North America peak is about 12 per hour. Look in the southeastern sky. The meteors should appear to come from that direction.

People have asked me where the best place is to view meteor showers in the twin cities metro area. That's a tough question. It all depends on how many you want to see. I've seen plenty of meteors from my light polluted St. Paul back yard. Shield your eyes from any stray light such as street lamps and turn the lights off in your house. Most of all, let your eyes adjust to the dark. Fifteen to thirty minutes of letting your eyes adjust to the dark will let you see many many more meteors.

Suppose you want to drive a little though to get a good view? Check out the Minnesota Astronomical Society website. They have a really cool light pollution map created by Craig Cotner. If you look at the map, you can see light pollution is pretty bad anywhere near the metro. What direction to travel depends a little on where in the metro you live. Heading out to an area in the yellow zone on the map will at least give you somewhat darker skies. You need a minimum of a two hour drive to get to a truly dark site and likely it will take even longer. Think boundary waters for true darkness! At any rate, you can most likely easily see a few good "shooting stars." from your own back yard.

~Kirk

Read More

The Ghosts of the Forest

This is a video from PBS about albino deer in Wisconsin. Back when I first started working at the nature center we actually had a full mount of a white deer in our collection. We didn't really have a good spot for it so it went back into the collection at the Science Museum of Minnesota (which is where it came from originally.) Sadly, it isn't on display to the public there either. Seeing photos of albino deer is completely different than seeing the video. Very cool.

~Kirk

Read More