Science Update 5 February 2016
As we learn more about science we are also confronted with more mysteries. It is only natural, because the more we discover the more new doors open into other areas we didn’t know existed. It certainly makes us wonder what we will ultimately find. We are already beginning to find out things that seem more like magic than anything else. Recent tests have shown that scientists have been able to send a particle back in time. I can’t tell you much about this because quite frankly it is very hard to understand. I had interviewed a physicist named Dr. Mallett several years ago and he was also conducting these types of experiments, but unfortunately those papers you see at the supermarket got wind of the interview and twisted what he told me out of all recognition. He said he wanted to send one atom back in time and that was the entire thrust of his experiment. Those rags printed that he was trying to go back in time to visit his dead father which made him look like a complete fool and was totally untrue. Today scientists say they succeeded with this experiment by sending a photon, which is a tiny beam of light, into the past. My interview of Dr. Mallett can be found in the archives under interviews.
The Large Hadron Collider keeps coming up with unexpected results. When it was first built scientists were very excited, because it was so powerful and dwarfed anything before and this power was to be used to smash atoms. Since then scientists have come to believe they have discovered the most basic of all particles nicknamed the God particle. Scientists call it the Higgs boson and it is claimed it was discovered in 2012. Since then the collider has been overhauled and made even more powerful and there has been talk of creating microscopic black holes. While this talk has upset many of us, most in the scientific community claimed there was no danger. I personally wouldn’t want to bet on that. Now it has been discovered that two photons have hit the detector of this huge machine and the problem for the scientists is they have no idea where they came from. The scientists at the installation are all scratching their collective heads. When something hits the detector it creates a signature, but the signature that was created this time is not understood and it is making the scientists think that maybe they have discovered a whole new field in physics. One scientist said when he noticed the detector giving out a signal it was, “whoa, what was that?” Scientists were thinking what if it’s a new particle, what if its two new particles? The next few weeks and months should be very interesting.
Over a period of the past 30 or 40 years we have heard many stories about inventors creating a process which takes hydrogen from water and powers an automobile engine. While this has never been proven, there have been some strange events attached to these stories, like the death of inventors and the disappearance of their work. Today scientists are announcing that they have gotten closer to a process which will allow cars to run on hydrogen cheaply. This is one of the things the world could really use, because these cars would be environmentally clean. So far there has been no efficient process to make the fuel and it certainly has not been economical. There is no such thing as naturally occurring hydrogen gas on earth, which causes scientists to have to figure out how to separate hydrogen from other compounds. Most of the effort to separate this hydrogen has been by electrolysis which entails passing an electric current through water and doing some other things, but not only has this been difficult to do it is extremely expensive. The new effort by scientists is using a different method. They have created a biomaterial that can split the elements from water. The material is called P22-Hyd. The material breaks the chemical bonds and produces hydrogen and oxygen and also allows this process to be reversed to combine the two guesses if necessary. The only by-product of this process is water.
A theoretical physicist has proposed a new hypothesis for why we humans exist on this planet. Most of us are used to hearing that our bodies are made of the same material as the stars and the planets. Some say we evolved from apes, but Lisa Randall a theoretical physicist at Harvard University has a different idea. She says the dinosaurs had to die before humans could exist and according to her dark matter killed the dinosaurs. She believes that the extinction of one species gives a head start to another one. It is said that when something hit the earth, which many believed to be a comet, over 75% of all species on earth were destroyed. She believes the small primates which were left began to grow larger as their brains began to also grow and develop and eventually they became us. Quite frankly if it wasn’t for the fact she brought dark matter into the theory, I would think I was listening to Darwin.
There are a growing number of scientists who think the brain may be able to cure the body. Some of this may be based on the fact that there is something called the placebo effect. When drug trials are conducted some people are given non-medicinal pills which should have no effect at all while others are given the trial drug. The non-medicinal pills are called placebos. Even though they contain no drugs some of the people in a medical test who take these pills usually show improvement or even get cured. One thing the drug companies do not want to do is investigate the placebo effect and find out why it works, because then they would be out of business, because none of us would need drugs anymore. Studies are being conducted where people are being trained to shut off certain emotions and it is being said that in some cases it has a direct effect on the health of individuals. I guess we will need more research into this area before we can come to any firm conclusions.
Someday sleeping disorders may be a thing of the past. Scientists from Switzerland and Germany have discovered a mechanism which is responsible for the termination of light sleep and rapid arousal from sleep and they claim they may be able to use this to treat sleeping disorders like insomnia and hypersomnia. It turns out there is a neural circuit between the hypothalamus and the thalamus and that this circuit could be the cause for insomnia, because silencing it can cause chronic sleeplessness.
