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signal to background
Speed: It’s not just
for particles The team, known as the Draggin’ Runners, met at Pottawatomie Park in St. Charles, Ill., one Sunday in June to put their acceleration skills to work, skimming the waters in a 40-foot-long boat that resembles a Chinese dragon. This form of racing began about 2300 years ago as a religious rite in Southern China. Pairs of teams race head-to-head, striving to be the first to grab a flag at the end. Each crew consists of 18 paddlers, a flag catcher, and a drummer. For this year’s annual “Pride of the Fox River-Fest” competition, Fermilab’s boat carried postdocs, graduate students, and scientists from various parts of the lab. All but five of the Draggin’ Runners were rookies, Barbara Alvarez among them. A graduate student with the lab’s CDF experiment who watched the race last year, she said that while the activity was physically demanding, it was also “great fun.” The Runners were founded
in 2001 by J.J. Schmidt of CDF,
who proposed the idea to his
friends as a “fun large-group
activity,” and the team’s attitude
reflected this cheerfully competitive
spirit. Despite their lack of
experience, the Runners won
their qualifying match and barely
lost in the finals. Following the
race, Schmidt said the team had
been “in sync,” and confidently
stated, “We’ll be back.”
Pesky invaders Foreign to the Midwest and without any natural predators in the region, zebra mussels at Fermilab can become problematic when they coat the inside of the water cooling system pipes. One zebra mussel can produce more than a million offspring each year, says Fermilab’s Randy Ortgiesen, head of the Facilities Engineering Services Section (FESS). “If left untreated, they will eventually clog up the pipes, creating a huge problem,” he says. To remove the zebra mussels, engineers injected a chemical called EVAC into an intake pipe and opened hydrants along the system to draw the chemical through the pipes. EVAC works by coating the gills of the mussels, effectively eradicating them. EVAC is not toxic when used in low quantities and does not harm fish and birds. FESS engineers first treated the mussels in May of 2006 when they removed and flushed more than 15,000 pounds of them from the system. This spring’s treatment, which took a little more than 24 hours, was a follow-up measure to eliminate any zebra mussel offspring, called veligers, that made it into the system from the ponds. Fermilab engineer Anne
Lucietto says the treatment
program has been successful
so far. “It’s something we’re
going to have to keep up with,”
she says. “It’s been a challenge,
but I think we’ve won this
round.”
Russian quiz champ The show, What? Where? When? challenges a team of six to solve riddles and puzzles, using common knowledge and logic, in 60-second brainstorming sessions. The questions are submitted by members of a TV audience that numbers in the tens of millions. In addition, a competitive version is played by more than 5000 ranked teams throughout the world. For the past two years, Princeton University particle physicist Alexandre Telnov has been one of six players handpicked for the US national team that competes in the world championship, known as the Nations Cup. “One reason the show is so popular is because of the spirit of freedom that permeates the game,” says Telnov. It was the first live television program aired in the Soviet Union—no small feat in a country that, at the time, had government controlled broadcasts and only two national TV channels. Telnov recalls that when he was about 11, the show estimated the size of its Moscow audience by asking people to briefly turn off their TV sets. This decreased the load on the electrical system and sped up the turbines in the power plants; based on the resulting change in the frequency of the current, it was determined that 42.7 percent of households were tuned in. “The questions really cover the entire spectrum of human knowledge, except they do not require anything that only a specialist would know,” Telnov says. For that reason, it’s important to have people with diverse backgrounds and expertise on a team. His includes an accelerator physicist with a background in electrical engineering; a woman with an MBA from the University of Chicago; two computer scientists; and a retired Russian language professor. The Nations Cup is a weeklong extravaganza that attracts more television cameras than teams; competitors become local celebrities. Telnov declined an invitation to join this year’s US team, which will compete in Azerbaijan; however, his Silicon Valley-based team, the reigning US champion, will compete in a separate international championship in Russia. “It’s not, by any means, a major part of my life—not my reason for living,” says Telnov. More important, he says, are his soon-to-be-published work on charge-parity violation and his participation on the executive committee of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Users’ Organization, for which he lobbies in Washington, DC. Telnov says he does appreciate the time he has spent playing What? Where? When?, both for the fun of it and for the way it has sharpened his problem-solving skills. “Gaining experience working in a team of six, brainstorming solutions in less than 60 seconds, has great real-world applications,” he says. More information is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Where_When.
Cordless juice “It was just a theory talk,” Fisher says, “and I wasn’t really paying attention. But at the end he started talking about what it might look like. I thought, ‘We could build that, easily.’” That’s how Fisher, a particle physicist whose normal preoccupations run to dark matter, neutrino oscillations, and cosmic rays, became part of a team that demonstrated how to transmit electrical power without wires. Their paper, published June 7 in Science Express, made quite a splash. The initial experiments successfully lit up a 60-watt bulb from a power source more than two meters away (see photos). But the potential applications are much broader: Smaller, lighter laptops that never run out of juice. Cell phones that start charging the moment you walk into a room. Cordless table lamps: Plop them anywhere! “The idea is to get rid of cables and batteries,” Fisher says. “We found this undergraduate named Robert Moffatt who did most of the work” with the aid of graduate students Aristeidis Karalis and Andre Kurs, he says. “ Once we got going it took maybe three months to build the thing. It’s not at all sophisticated; it’s something almost anyone who had an interest in experimental physics could think up and execute.” In fact, the idea dates back to the late 1800s, when Nikola Tesla experimented with the wireless transmission of electrical power. Here’s how the team’s method —called WiTricity—would work: Put a loop of coiled wire up near the ceiling and run an oscillating current through it to create a magnetic field. This is your power source for everything in the room. The magnetic field must oscillate at exactly the right frequency to resonate with similar coils in your computer and other gadgets. It pushes the electrons within the coiled wire back and forth, as if pushing a kid on a swing, creating a current that can be used to do work. Fisher says it’s not the first time he has ventured out of basic research to tackle something practical. “About 10 years ago we had a scheme for tracking nuclear submarines that we talked to the Navy about. That didn’t go anywhere,” he says. “There was a guy who wanted to inflate tires with vinegar and baking soda. He paid me about $5000 to convince him it wasn’t possible.” But now, he says, it looks like he’s found a project that could fly. “We don’t have a business
model yet,” Fisher says. “But
just look at WiFi. If you can build
something where the transmitter
is $200, and the receivers
can fit into existing equipment
and cost $30, people would
buy them.”
Rig, and rig alike “We always try to wear the same helmets,” says rigger Scot Johnson. “It helps us identify each other on the job site and is also a form of solidarity.” The group first began following the helmet design of lead rigger Dave “Davey” Engesser, who has been at SLAC the longest and knows all the ins and outs of hoisting and rigging. “He has a mind like an elephant,” says Johnson. “He can remember where he put equipment in the grass from 20 years ago.” Engesser began wearing an American flag helmet to work every day, and soon the rest of the riggers followed. When Engesser’s helmet had to be retired because of chips and cracks, the whole team ordered white helmets. Stickers are not allowed on helmets because they can hide defects, so wearing the same color is one way the team can express its camaraderie. No one remembers how the tradition began or who came up with the idea. “It just sort of ended up that way,” says Johnson. Recently Engesser went back to an American flag-style helmet, though the rest of the team still tends to wear plain white. “He just likes to get saluted,”
Johnson jokes.
Run, Rabbit, run At the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the solution is the Rabbit—an old-fashioned pneumatic tube that zips freshly made radiopharmaceuticals at 75 kilometers per hour from triumf national laboratory to the university’s Health Sciences Center. Pneumatics–using pressurized gas to do work–is a concept dating back to Hero of Alexandria in 60 A.D. Pneumatic tubes were first used in the 1800s to carry mail across European cities; Paris alone had 467 kilometers of tubing in its system. People even envisioned a future in which pneumatic tubes transported people across the globe. The tubes are still used, more modestly, to transport small parcels in banks, hospitals, and office buildings. triumf’s Rabbit has been making the hop across campus since 1983. As part of a collaboration between the laboratory and the medical center, radioactive isotopes are created in triumf’s cyclotron, which is dedicated to this work, and processed in a chemistry lab on site. Then they’re rushed to the hospital for use in Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a technique that allows doctors to create real-time images of the brain at work. Why the haste? The radioactive isotopes have half-lives as short as 20 minutes; if a shipment is delayed, the drug will be useless. “It can take quite a long time to meet regulations for the transportation of dangerous goods—to package, carry out the paperwork, and actually get it to the place you want it to go,” says Mike Adam, head of PET Chemistry at triumf. Although pulling thousands
of meters of tubing through
existing pipes beneath
Wesbrook Mall Road was difficult,
and the Rabbit’s route has
shifted as the campus grows
through construction, the results
are worth it, Adam says: “The
system is a great advantage in
our research on cancer and
movement disorders.”
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