[url=www.businessinsider.com/new-supersymmetry-particles-we-might-find-2015-3]Here are all the new particles we might discover when the world's largest atom smasher turns back on[/url]
[quote]Supersymmetry predicts a partner particle for each particle in physics that we already know about. And these partners have some hilarious and hard-to-pronounce names. For example, for electrons and quarks, physicists simply put an "s" in front of the words to name their partners. So an electron's supersymmetric partner is called a "selectron" and a quark's partner is called a "squark." Collectively, physicists will be hunting for the "sparticle" partners of particles.

[u]Scientists think we haven't seen any of these sparticles yet because they're much heavier than regular particles[/u].[/quote]
I guess the "maybe this particular TOE is all a bunch of hooey" option never occurred to them. /sarc

(But perhaps I'll be in a less curmudgeonly mood once I've 'slepton it.')

[QUOTE=ewmayer;398359][URL="http://www.businessinsider.com/new-supersymmetry-particles-we-might-find-2015-3"]Here are all the new particles we might discover when the world's largest atom smasher turns back on[/URL]

I guess the "maybe this particular TOE is all a bunch of hooey" option never occurred to them. /[STRIKE][B]sarc[/B][/STRIKE][U][B]squark [/B][/U]

(But perhaps I'll be in a less curmudgeonly mood once I've 'slepton it.')[/QUOTE]

Fixed that for you. :razz:

Our power cut this morning has become international news:
[URL]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32086164[/URL]

Power outages in the Netherlands are relatively rare and also relatively short, partly because we invest in putting cables in the ground where they are less susceptible to bad weather, and partly because our national electricity grid has a lot of redundancy built in. Brian and I had our power back on this morning after just 38 minutes.

Perhaps the airport was less well prepared precisely because this is such a rare occurrence.

[QUOTE=Nick;398781]Our power cut this morning has become international news:
[URL]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32086164[/URL]

Power outages in the Netherlands are relatively rare and also relatively short, partly because we invest in putting cables in the ground where they are less susceptible to bad weather, and partly because our national electricity grid has a lot of redundancy built in. Brian and I had our power back on this morning after just 38 minutes.

Perhaps the airport was less well prepared precisely because this is such a rare occurrence.[/QUOTE]

That... doesn't sound like a lot of redundancy if one substation fault can take down everything, and I mean everything, for 100-200 km around it. Subways, trains, traffic lights?! Surely each of those relatively important things should have an independent backup...

[QUOTE=Dubslow;398785]That... doesn't sound like a lot of redundancy if one substation fault can take down everything, and I mean everything, for 100-200 km around it. Subways, trains, traffic lights?! Surely each of those relatively important things should have an independent backup...[/QUOTE]
Yes, in theory there should have been backup. There will now obviously need to be an investigation into why the backup failed when it was needed. (By the way, the radius of the affected area was more like 20-30 km. 200 km would be the whole country. We're a bit smaller scale here.:smile:)

[QUOTE=Brian-E;398787]Yes, in theory there should have been backup. There will now obviously need to be an investigation into why the backup failed when it was needed. (By the way, the radius of the affected area was more like 20-30 km. 200 km would be the whole country. We're a bit smaller scale here.:smile:)[/QUOTE]

Heh, the scale always throws me off. I grew up 40 miles (~65 km?) from the nearest city, but I was still firmly in the suburbs, and I generally tell people I'm from that city.

Apparently that's further than from Schipol to Driebergen :surprised: it sure felt like longer when I was a kid...

[URL="http://phys.org/news/2015-03-scientists-elusive-secret-continents.html"]Scientists discover elusive secret of how continents formed[/URL]

[QUOTE]An international research team, led by a Virginia Tech geoscientist, has revealed information about how continents were generated on Earth more than 2.5 billion years ago—and how those processes have continued within the last 70 million years to profoundly affect the planet's life and climate.

Published online today in Nature Geoscience, the study details how relatively recent geologic events—volcanic activity 10 million years ago in what is now Panama and Costa Rica—hold the secrets of the extreme continent-building that took place billions of years earlier.

[/QUOTE]

Fascinating story and site. Thanks! :goodposting:

[QUOTE=Brian-E;398787](By the way, the radius of the affected area was more like 20-30 km. 200 km would be the whole country. We're a bit smaller scale here.:smile:)[/QUOTE]

LOL... For Barbados a radius of 20 km IS the entire country (24 km by 36 km). We've even smaller scale! :smile:

And, as an aside, we often have country-wide power outages (although it's getting better). In 2006 we were without power for seven hours because of a monkey shorting out a high-tension line (poor little monkey...).

[url=www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/backpacking-birds-prove-long-shot-theory/article23724723/]Backpacking birds prove long-shot theory[/url][quote]Tiny birds, even tinier backpacks, and a heck of a lot of air miles.

Those are the essential ingredients behind a Canada-U.S. study that appears to have convincingly solved a 50-year-old mystery while at the same time discovering one of the most impressive animal migrations on Earth.

The bird is the blackpoll warbler, a small but tuneful denizen of the boreal forest that can be found in summer months from Alaska to Newfoundland. The mystery has to do with how they get to South America every fall, where they overwinter.

Now, with the help of some clever technology, scientists have the answer: The intrepid warblers take the direct route, flying across the Atlantic for up to 2,800 kilometres at a stretch.

“The idea that a 15-gram bird can fly non-stop over water for days is astounding,” said Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, who was not involved in the study. “It’s the first time anyone’s directly proven that that’s what these birds are doing.”[/quote]
But more importantly, how many of the tiny birds would it need to carry a 1-lb coconut across the ocean? (As coconuts are not themselves migratory, they would need to be carried thence somehow, and the 'who or what, and how?' here has been another longstanding scientific mystery). "There is no way the birds could carry such a burden!" you object. "Even if they could securely grip it by the husk, that would force too many of them into close proximity to allow them to fly." Ah, but what if they used a lightweight carrying harness, created say by weaving together strands of creeper or other natural fibers? Then simply roll the coconut onto the manufactured net and have each bird hold a bit of the edge of the net between its dorsal guiding feathers. Think a bird version of the set-up in the Godzilla movie where a bunch of Japanese air force jets (only small plastic models, obviously, but the physics is quite sound) carry the G-man around in a giant net. And thus the mystery of how the coconut arrived in the Americas is solved. 'Tis but a few short hops from England (by way of whose medieval knights the coconut became available there) to Newfoundland by way of Iceland and southern Greenland - both of which could serve as a waystation - and thence into the hands (or claws) of the hero bird-protagonist of the above tale. Science can be so much fun...

The coconut was carried to the Americas by a ticking crocodile - as is well known.