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Article on Big Bang Test & Rare Photos (Experimenting Creation)

2008-09-13T04:35:00.000-07:00

Wat is Big Bang Test?

We all are interested in knowing details on Big Bang test,here is the wonderful updated article with rare collection of photos on big bang test.To know about Big Bang Test we should know ,wat is BIG BANG THEORY.

BIG BANG THEORY :

The name "Big Bang" was coined in 1949 by British scientist Fred Hoyle to disparage a then emerging theory about origins that countered his own "steady state" view,that the universe had always existed and was evolving but not expanding.

According to the Big-Bang model, the universe expanded rapidly from a highly compressed primordial state, which resulted in a significant decrease in density and temperature. Soon afterward, the dominance of matter over antimatter (as observed today) may have been established by processes that also predict proton decay. During this stage many types of elementary particles may have been present. After a few seconds, the universe cooled enough to allow the formation of certain nuclei.

The theory predicts that definite amounts of hydrogen, helium, and lithium were produced. Their abundances agree with what is observed today. About 1,000,000 years later the universe was sufficiently cool for atoms to form.

Now, lets look wat is Big Bang Test

Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - (Reuters) - The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, on Wednesday began an experiment to recreate conditions surrounding the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth to the universe.

(An underground representation of the Large Hadron Collider, which stretches for 27 kilometres)

Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will seek to collide two beams of particles at nearly the speed of light. Scientists will circulate a beam in one direction around the accelerator, then the other, later sending beams both ways to cause collisions.

WHAT IS CERN:

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States, plus 6 actively participant observers including the United States and Russia.

Following are some facts about the Big Bang and CERN's particle-smashing experiment:

RECREATING THE BIG BANG:

The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project's accelerator into the 27-km (17-mile) beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter- clockwise around it for about 3 km (2 miles).

(The four main points of interest that will be utilised during the LHC experiment)

The collider aims to simulate conditions milliseconds after the "Big Bang" which created the universe around 13.7 billion years ago.

The collisions, in which both particle clusters will be travelling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible.

(ATLAS during its beam pipe installation)

The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the "Higgs Boson" after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.

(Inside the Large Hadron Collider)

Recreating a "Big Bang," which most scientists believe is the only explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believes.

Its essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a tiny speck about the size of a coin but in a state of extremely high temperature and density.

(ATLAS during the installation of its detector)

THE WORLD DIDN'T END

Physicists brushed off suggestions that the experiment could create tiny black holes that could suck in the planet.

"The worries that scientists had were nothing to do with being swallowed up by black holes and everything to do with technical hitches or electronic failure," said Jim al-Khalili, a physicist at Britain's University of Surrey.

"Now, after a collective sigh of relief, the real fun starts," al-Khalili said. "No matter what we find, we will be unlocking the secrets of the universe."

The LHC will send beams of subatomic particles called protons whizzing around the tube at just under the speed of light.

The hope is they will smash into one another and explode in a burst of new and previously unseen types of particles -- recreating on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

At full speed the LHC will engineer 600 million collisions every second. Data will be transmitted via a network called The Grid to scientists at 170 institutions in 33 countries.

"It is sort of a virtual United Nations," said Michael Tuts, a physics professor at Columbia University in New York and program manager for 400 U.S. physicists working on one LHC project.

The experiments could confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, a theoretical particle named after Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964.

Also referred to as the "God particle," the Higgs Boson could help explain how matter has mass. "I think it's pretty likely" that it will be found, Higgs told reporters at the University of Edinburgh, where he is a retired professor of physics.

Scientists halted the particle beam's counter-clockwise spin temporarily on Wednesday afternoon after problems with the machine's magnets caused its temperature to warm slightly.

CERN officials said such minor glitches were to be expected given the intricacy of the machine, which is cooled to minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Hence ,frnz..lets hope that the experiment will get ended in good manner..i hope this interesting article helps u to learn on the Big Tang Test

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Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing

2008-09-11T10:16:00.000-07:00

New research suggests that voice recognition is not as uniquely human as once assumed

The use of vocalizations, such as grunts, songs or barks, is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, humans are the only species in which these vocalizations have attained the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of speech. How did our ancestors become the only speaking animals, some tens of thousands of years ago? Did this change happen abruptly, involving the sudden appearance of a new cerebral region or pattern of cerebral connections? Or did it happen through a more gradual evolutionary process, in which brain structures already present to some extent in other animals were put to a different and more complex use in the human brain?

A recent study in Nature Neuroscience yields critical new information, uncovering what could constitute the “missing link” between the brain of vocalizing nonhuman species and the human brain: evidence that a cerebral region specialized for processing voice, known to exist in the human brain, has a counterpart in the brain of rhesus macaques.

Neuroscientist Christopher I. Petkov of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the macaque brain. They measured cerebral activity of awake monkeys that were listening to different categories of natural sounds, including macaque vocalizations. The researchers found evidence for a “voice area” in the auditory cortex of these macaques: a discrete region of the anterior temporal lobe in which activity was greater for macaque vocalizations than for other sound categories.

This region was observed in several individuals, even under the condition of total anesthesia. More surprising, the region showed repetition-induced reduction of activity—or neuronal adaptation—in response to different calls coming from the same individual. This finding suggests that this brain region processes information about the identity of the speaker, a phenomenon that is also observed in the human voice area.

Perhaps the most remarkable implication of these findings is that the voice area previously identified in the human brain is not uniquely human and that it has a counterpart in the brain of nonhuman primates. That discovery, in turn, implies that the voice area has a long evolutionary history and was probably already present in the common ancestor of macaques and humans some 20 million years ago. It is known that the cognitive talents underlying voice perception, such as speaker recognition, are shared with many other animal species, but the findings of Petkov and his colleagues provide a cerebral location for these abilities.

Ironically, most of the research into the evolutionary basis of language has focused so far on a single function—speech perception—which is unique to humans, and thus evolutionary precursors are hard, if not impossible, to identify. The present findings hint at another, possibly more rewarding, strategy: perhaps looking at what we have in common with other animals—that is, a rich cerebral substrate to process vocalizations and extract speaker-related information—will allow us to understand the evolution of speech. Indeed, Petkov’s findings indicate that when our ancestors began to talk, they already were equipped with sophisticated neural machinery specialized in voice processing.

Another important implication of Petkov’s findings concerns the functional lateralization of the macaque voice area. A well-established property of the human cerebral substrate for speech (particularly speech production) is its lateralization to the left hemisphere. This known asymmetry has led researchers to investigate whether a similar left-hemispheric bias could be found in other animals, as a possible evolutionary precursor of human language. Unfortunately, this long-standing belief has possibly resulted in a strong bias in the literature, whereby studies uncovering any leftward asymmetry in nonhuman primates are much more likely to be published in leading journals.

A Role for the Right

A counterintuitive but essential feature of Petkov’s results, similar to the corresponding findings in the human brain, is that voice-selective activity was stronger in the right hemisphere. Furthermore, the identity-specific neuronal adaptation was observed only in the right hemisphere of the macaque brain, exactly as in the human studies. This finding means that the right hemisphere may well have played a major role in how speech appeared in our ancestors and that a response to the puzzle of speech evolution may lie not only in the left hemisphere.

We have much work ahead before we can attain a complete understanding of the functional role of the voice area, in macaques as well as in humans. Several alternative hypotheses remain to be tested: Does the voice area represent a hardwired preference for the particular acoustical structure of vocalizations from one’s own species? Or is it more simply a “formant” detector, a structure specialized in detecting vocal features in general? Another possibility is that this voice area is actually a “social” structure, tuned to vocalizations because they are cues for social interaction and not because they share a particular acoustical structure.

In conclusion, Petkov’s findings provide an exciting common substrate for high-level, or complex, auditory cognition that can be studied in parallel in humans and in macaques. Now that the location of the voice area in the macaque brain has been established, researchers will obtain critical additional information in the near future by exploring the monkey’s voice area using more conventional electrophysiological techniques, such as recording directly from neurons. Even more important, this seminal work opens the road for comparative neuroimaging studies in which humans and other animals perform similar tasks using similar methodologies, and the results can be analyzed using similar strategies.

Article on LAMBORGHINI Sports Car

2008-09-10T05:44:00.000-07:00

Lamborghini sports cars are to some the “other Italians,” fated to exist in the shadow of glamorous Ferrari. But in this article, you will learn that Lamborghini sports cars had their own identity, and on occasion even influenced Ferrari.

Legend has it that Ferruccio Lamborghini, a wealthy self-made Italian industrialist, had mechanical trouble with a Ferrari he owned and was rebuffed by Enzo Ferrari himself when he sought to complain.

In a pique, Ferruccio decided to start his own damn sports car company.The first result of that tantrum, the Lamborghini GT 350 of 1964, a debonair two-seat coupe with a magnificent V-12 engine designed by former Ferrari engineer Giotto Bizzarrini. The early Lamborghinis showed Ferrari how refined a fast, powerful road car could be, but it was the Lamborghini Miura of 1966 that showed the world how startingly beautiful and technically advanced a midengine road car could be.

Lamborghini redrew the rules and created in the Lamborghini Espada of 1968 a genuine four-seat exotic, and found continued success with the Lamborghini Islero and Lamborghini Jarama -- powerful and plush 1970s grand touring models. It wasn't all smooth sailing, however. Compact supercars like the Lamborghini Urraco and Lamborghini Silhouette of the period were less than successful.

Lamborhini quickly found a way to rebound. This small and often financially challenged automaking offshoot found a way to produce not just one sports car milestone in the Miura, but a second, with the 1974 launch of the Lamborghini Countach. This wildly aggressive midengine rocket ignited an anything-goes era of ultra high performance, once again goosed Ferrari into responding, and became the poster child for the same renegade automotive spirit that drove Ferruccio Lamborghini in the first place.

The first Lamborghini car made is 350 GT

Top 5 BLUETOOTH Devices

2008-09-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Although it may seem like a fairly new tool, Bluetooth technology has been around for quite some time. In the wake of its 10th anniversary, there are a number of useful and fun Bluetooth enabled products that demonstrate how the technology has evolved and improved over the years.

In fact, this past January, Bluetooth SIG (a trade organization that qualifies Bluetooth products) announced the Best of CES 2008 winners, which included some of the best Bluetooth products that are functional in both the home and the office. For the Bluetooth fanatic, there's an endless assortment of Bluetooth gizmos and accessories that are worthy of discussion, but for now here's a list of the top five Bluetooth gadgets of 2008:

Samsung YP-P2 Widescreen Music Player -- this MP3 player boasts a number of features including a large touch screen, video playback, FM radio/recorder and a photo text viewer. Enabled with Bluetooth 2.0, it's capable of pairing with compatible stereos, headphones and speaker systems within a range of 32 feet.

Plantronics Voyager 855 Bluetooth Headset -- this headset is a great find for people who need a hands-free solution for juggling between cell phone calls and music play lists. This lightweight headset features an ear-bud headphone, boom microphone and a stereo audio output. Aside from great sound quality, this headset is useful because it allows music-enabled cell phones to switch effortlessly between songs and calls through one touch buttons.

Logitech Cordless Desktop MX5500 Revolution -- this desktop set (which includes a wireless mouse and keyboard) is a sleek and easy alternative to office clutter. Both the mouse and keyboard boast a comfortable design and showcase a number of different features. For example, the mouse comes with a rapid charging stand (which eliminates the need for batteries) and the keyboard offers a soft palm rest for an optimal typing experience. Both allow for wireless connectivity from up to 30 feet away which makes it an excellent addition to any home or office.

Parrot DS1120 Stereo Bluetooth Speakers -- these speakers are the perfect solution for music enthusiasts who enjoy great sound quality and wireless technology. The speakers feature a 30-watt power output capability and Class-D amplifiers. Although they work best in conjunction with the Parrot DS3120 stereo (and certain other Bluetooth enabled devices such as cell phones and MP3 players), they also come equipped with USB and RCA hookups so they can be used with other non-Bluetooth devices. With their modern design and product versatility, these speakers are a great find.

Motorola T815 Navigation Unit -- this navigation unit is a great device for those who need a little sense of direction. Its compact size and discreet design allow it to travel with motorists and pedestrians alike. It's portable, fast-charging device works wonders in conjunction with any Bluetooth enabled smart phone. When activated, it sends visual maps to the connected smartphone along with turn-by-turn voice directions.

Worlds Smallest Creature

2008-09-09T10:54:00.000-07:00

Worlds Smallest Creature

When his owner shouts "Heel!" Ducky the dog has little choice but to take things literally. At just over ankle height, the three-year-old short-coat chihuahua from Boston in the U.S. has just been named the smallest living dog in the world by Guinness World Records.

At only 4.9in tall, Ducky weighs less than 1lb 6oz. His head is the size of a large strawberry. "He is such a funny little guy," says his owner Lisa Messier, who bought him for £2,500 when he was 13 months old. "He doesn't go out for walks, but if you want to go out, you can just put him in your bag."

Chihuahuas are the smallest dogs in the world - in fact, the only "natural" toy breed. Other small pups are the result of breeding down larger breeds. Celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Madonna are well-known fans of chihuahuas. Ducky succeeds Danka Kordak, a 5.4in chihuahua from Slovakia, in the record books.