News Revisited

I was reading an MSNBC article about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when I noticed that they claimed that CERN could currently accelerate particles to the speed of light.  I did not believe that was possible so I started composing an email to MSNBC rebuking them for misleading the public like that.  Before sending the email I decided to visit the CERN site and find what had mislead MSNBC.  Sure enough I found a page that claimed:

Using accelerators we can make single particles (like a proton) go as fast as the speed of light (300′000 km/sec).

So, I redirected my mail to CERN and made it much more polite and humble.  A few weeks later I got the following response:

Dear Mr. dos Santos,

thanks very much for your query. We are sorry for confusing you here. As a matter of facts, in this instance, we are approximating both the speed of light and the speed of the protons in the LHC to 300000 km/s. In reality, protons at the LHC move at 0.999999991 times the speed of light (at top energy - 7 TeV) and the speed of light is 299792.458 km/s.
I hope this clarifies your question. Thank you very much for pointing it out. Your comment is very useful because we are just in the preparation of a new web site.

Wow!  99.9999991% of the speed of light!  I knew they had reached high energies (7 TeV) but I had not realized how close to the speed of light that meant!

If you drop identical spheres into water would you expect the same splash?  It turns out that a molecule thin layer can make a huge difference in the size of the splash.

New Scientist reports that Lydéric Bocquet at the Claude-Bernard University in Lyon, France, and colleagues studied this phenomenon.  They found that a glass ball, cleaned thoroughly with hydrogen peroxide, sulphuric acid and alcohol, would produce a very small plop when dropped in water.  However, adding a nano-layer of silane converted the ball from hydrophilic (water attracting) to hydrophobic (water repelling).  The hydrophobic spheres carried a layer of air with them into the water creating large splashes.

NewScientist has videos of the splashes.

Yoshiaki Sugimoto at Osaka University in Japan, and colleagues, have devised a way to discern not only individual atoms but also their chemical identity using an atomic force microscope at room temperature according to an article at NewScientist.

NewScientist includes a photo of individual tin, lead, and silicon atoms on a surface color coded blue, green, and red.  Very cool.

The microscope works by measuring how much the atoms attract or repel the pyramid shaped tin tip of the atomic force