Heather Fulton gives you the scientific facts, without sending you to sleep…

If you don’t do a science subject, and you aren’t one of Sir Patrick ‘I bloody love the moon’ Moore’s offspring, a lot of ridiculously fascinating events can completely pass you by. Stars exploding, potential black holes being created on earth, that sort of thing. Enter Heather Fulton, a science student with just enough free time to condense the Institute Of Physics magazine into a few headlines that anyone would find interesting. This week, stars explode and potential black holes are being created on earth, that sort of thing. 

So here are the headlines, selected and brought to you by Heather..

 The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is turned on. World survives.

After decades of waiting, the machine set to reach the highest energies created on Earth has been successfully switched on. It’s been a bumpy ride – when it was first turned on over a year ago a slight technical error caused a fault costing a mere £14million to fix, and despite support from 111 different nations in engineering the project, it has faced a lot of opposition. For instance, a botanist and part-time physicist from Hawaii filed a law suit against CERN, concerned that by activating the machine, scientists would accidently create a tiny black hole that would rapidly consume the Earth. Although this sounds absurd, considering the enormous energies reached in the LHC, the creation of a black hole is theoretically possible, but they decided to turn the machine on anyway and, alas, we’re all still here.
Millions of scientists have their hopes pinned on the LHC for proving their (fairly fundamental) theories right. One of the many things it will be doing is searching for the ‘Higgs Boson’ – a particle supposed to give things mass, and a key ingredient to almost all current theories. If it’s not found, scientists will have an embarrassing amount of backtracking to do!
Now for the science… In the LHC, Hadrons (or the substance we are made up of. The official definition is a particle made from three Quarks, a fundamental particle that can’t be broken up any further) are accelerated to speeds a fraction of the speed of light (about 300,000,000 m/s) and, surprisingly, collide with each other. These collisions occur at such high energies that all sorts of crazy reactions can happen and it’s the closest scientists have been to re-creating the ‘Big Bang’. It’s early days, but watch this space… unless they succeed. Then you won’t be watching much, that’s for certain.

Star explodes. Scientists about to find out whether they got the solar system idea completely wrong.

Scientists are currently observing a star in the last days of its life as it nears the supernova explosion stage. In its death-throws, the star has expanded to a ridiculously huge size; if placed in the sun’s position, its surface would be roughly where Saturn orbits.
The reason for the excitement is the emergence of new toys allowing scientists to analyse the elements spewed out by this giant star, elements which will then go on to form new planets and give a rare insight as to whether our models for the formation of the solar system are correct…
However, this is hardly breaking news. The star is 4,500 light years away from Earth, so the light scientists are observing was emitted approximately 4,500 years ago!

The Royal Society uncover documents which make Franklin appear mental.

Just to finish off, the Royal Society celebrated its 350th birthday by making public scientific documents from hundreds of years ago. Highlights include revolutionary papers by Einstein, Isaac Newton, and even Franklin’s (fairly irrational) experiment which involved him flying a kite in a thunder storm to prove that lightening was electricity. They also unearthed a study of Mozart when he was 9 years old, in an attempt to discover whether he was, in fact, a child prodigy. So if you’re like me and think these sound much more interesting than any dissertation-related papers, have a look at http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/.

Heather Fulton