The Einstein@Home project has officially gone public! Go help find gravity waves!
I’ve had a couple of computers crunching part time for the past couple of weeks during the beta testing (2 computers 12 h/day) and like most other distributed computing projects, it’s pretty unobtrusive. Download and install the BOINC client and follow the instructions. With E@H, you can tell it the start and end times you want the client to crunch away. When the client detects any user activity it stops, giving you back the CPU until you’re finished. Then it goes back to work.
And if gravity waves aren’t your thing, well then check out the other BOINC projects
All about CANDU
The latest issue of Physics in Canada is a cool theme issue with 4 really interesting articles about the features and capabilities of CANDU‘s newest ACR-700™ reactor. The first article, The CANDU™ Reactor — Past, Present, and Future talks about the evolution of CANDU reactors and design considerations that went into the ACR-700.
Another article (that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet), ACR-700™ Reactor Physics and Fuel goes into some of the physics behind the various fuel core designs of the CANDU™ reactors.
It’s a very interesting and instructive series of articles that shows what makes the CANDU™ reactor design simple to build (relatively), easy to operate and cheap to run.
Talk about your big bathtubs
There’s a neat photo in the January issue of Physics Today that shows just how big the Super Kamiokande neutrino detector is. I’d heard that it was big, and even when I saw the pictures from the shattered PMTs incident, I never realized just how big it was.
There are more pictures that also show just how big SK is. Those are some guys in a raft at the far right of the this image. They’re cleaning the huge PMTs that make up the light detecting system of SK.
In the light of a blood red moon…
Get ready for it! Another lunar eclipse to ooo and ahh over. This one is happening relatively early too, starting October 27 just after 9PM EDT and ending just before 1 AM with totality somewhere in the middle (around 10:23 PM EDT).
I’ve always found lunar eclipses much more interesting than solar eclipses. For one, you don’t need dark welder’s glass to see them. They happen at night when it’s quieter, which isn’t a problem as long as you’ve got a decent supply of coffee or whatever your stimulant of choice is. And I like the colours.
So in two weeks, head out with your comfy lawn chair, some blankets and a thermos of coffee or other caffeinated beverage and find a nice dark field to plop yourself down into. Chill out, watch the moon slowly dissolve into an orange disk and enjoy.
The photo is a lunar eclipse on May 15, 2003, photographed by Loyd Overcash of Houston, Texas nabbed from the Lunar Eclipse Gallery.
Splat!
Oooo, sadly NASA‘s Genesis capsule went splat into the desert after the parachutes failed to deploy. There was video of the splattage at NASA TV (along with video coverage of other unrelated things). There is a press conference scheduled for 2:30 EDT (also on NASA TV) where presumably we’ll be told if there was anything salvagable from the sun-dust Genesis collected and what might have gone wrong with the parachutes.
Found via Slashdot