Agreement over the film 2012

Here’s my brother’s opinion of the film 2012.

Here’s what reviewers think of 2012.

Here’s Scienceblogs‘ Greg Laden’s comments on the scientific foundations 2012’s story.

LHC: Beams are back

From ScienceDaily:

Particle beams are once again zooming around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider — located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. On November 20 at 4:00 p.m. EST, a clockwise circulating beam was established in the LHC’s 17-mile ring.

From the BBC: pictures of the happy moment.

CERN’s Twitter feed shows that initial testing complete, and commissioning is now underway. Their tweets have links to info and animations.

Cassette Kids

The SMH says there’s been a lot of hype around a Sydney act called Cassette Kids. The article talks about them spending some time on the road with the Presets, adding some synths and electro sound, and taking plenty of time to record their first album.

I checked out some of their tracks and videos. It’s lightweight and fun, for sure. Maybe a bit too lightweight: the Ting Tings sound gets pretty old pretty fast. There’s interesting guitar work, though. You can tell they started as a guitar dance band, not a synth dance band. Singer Katrina Noorbergen has got the looks to be famous, too. She’s a better poser than singer but seems to have enough attitude to carry it off with confidence.

They feel more flash-in-the-pan than long-term legacy on initial listen, but who can tell? They’re a bit of fun while they last, anyway.

Pop music and truth in advertising

There’s been outrage and debate here in Australia in the wake of Britney Spears’s Circus tour shows. The outrage – and we know it exists because the newspapers tell us we’re outraged – is due to some folks finding out that Britney lip synchs most of her live performance.

As I think my tone – even in blog form – makes clear, I’m not sure there’s really that much outrage or debate. It feels like the papers have inflated a topic that involves one of their favourite celebs, is all. Most of the debate has been in response to the media reporting, not individual’s opinions, and has taken the form of, “We all know she mimes, we’re just going for the glitzy show.”

I hope that the stories about the government proposals for labeling concert posters and tickets for shows that will be mimed are true, though. That’s truth in advertising in action, and then no one can complain about what they’re getting.

"I hate it when my nipple tassels obscure my teleprompter." Photo from samlavi via Creative Commons license

Large Hadron Collider to get fired up again this weekend

Tests are going well, and it looks like CERN may fire up the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) again this weekend. They’ve shown that they can fire protons around the collider, and that the detectors are working. If things continue, they should soon be smashing particles.

You’ll remember that testing has been delayed because on 19 September 2008 a bad electrical connection caused a fault that damaged a bunch of the superconducting magnets. It’s taken over a year to repair that and put in safeguards in light of the fault. I’m sure CERN are anxious to move ahead (but to avoid further delays whilst doing so).

And if you’ve forgotten what they’re trying to prove with all this particle-smashing nonsense, let me remind you:

• to see if they can create quark-gluon plasma
• looking for speculated fundamental particles like the Higgs boson
• to figure out why the universe’s antimatter seems to have all but disappeared shortly after the Big Bang
• to understand some of the characteristics of proton-proton collisions

Italy’s metal monk calls it quits, blames Satan

Cesare Bonizzi is an Italian monk who – years ago, after seeing a Metallica show – decided his calling was to do God’s work through singing heavy metal. He formed a band called Fratello Metallo (“Brother Metal”) and has been wowing audiences ever since.

From the SMH, however, we learn that the 62-year-old Capuchin headbanger now thinks that the Devil has made the ensuing fame go to his head, so he’s calling it quits.

Squeezing light further than before

Squeezing light is indeed something you need to do, sometimes. In fiberoptic transmission – where you transmit information via light going through glass fibers, which essentially all telephone carriers, and many smaller companies, do – the light bounces around inside the glass “tube” as it zooms along. The smallest effective size you could make this tube was a few hundred nanometers across: go any smaller, and the wavelengths don’t reflect back into the glass properly.

However some researchers at the University of Adelaide have figured out how to make light transmit through an optical fiber less than half that size. This might make possible smaller or more efficient fiberoptic applications, and aids our understanding of how light operates at nanoscales.

Japan considers space station to collect solar energy

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Japanese government is moving towards a geostationary orbiting array that will beam power to earth by 2030. That’s a cool project. There’s lots of technology improvements needed, but there are plenty of years between now and then. And there’s a great deal more solar energy incoming outside the atmosphere than there is on land.

Album review: Them Crooked Vultures

I’m still pretty busy with all the tasks of moving to a new country: banks, health care, housing, jobs. But I finally fit in some time to listen to the Them Crooked Vultures album that leaked earlier this week.

If you’ve forgotten, TCV are a supergroup of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) on guitar, Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) on drums, and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) on bass. It sprang into being, fully formed, at live shows earlier this year. Their self-titled album comes out in a couple of weeks (you can preorder it from their web page: click the album cover below). It has, unsurprisingly, leaked.

I think it’s pretty good. It’s very much the Josh Homme show. Luckily, Homme has a pretty good show. QOTSA have always had a pretty hefty chunk of Zeppelin crunch, much as Grohl’s always seemed to channel a bit of Bonzo. Every song here is a burly, riff-tastic stomp. Everyone’s given lots of time in the mix. It’s a special moment, though, when Jones’s synths come in, because it’s the closest we’re ever going to get to a new Zeppelin song.

The album suffers a bit, though, from that other aspect of The Ginger Giant’s touch: sameness. Too many of the stomps sound the same as too many of the other stomps, with Homme’s multi-tracked vocals weaving above it all, same-y as always. The songs have impact, and they’re polyrhythmic (another QOTSA/Zep characteristic), and there are a few different bits, but I would’ve liked more variety.

Still, Them Crooked Vultures have made a fun, confident, very bold, mostly interesting rock album. Fans of low-frills power-trio crunch will love it. I’ll see how it grows.

Them Crooked Vultures album cover. Click for the band website and pre-order link

UK’s Royal Mail to release album cover stamps

The Royal Mail is always releasing new stamps with images of British life on them. I just heard – thanks to the Aussie – that they’re releasing a set featuring iconic rock album covers. They’ll even be shaped differently to show the image of a bit of vinyl album peeking out one side. Very cool.

Nashville Pussy returning to Australia

Psychobilly sleaze-rockers Nashville Pussy will be returning to Australia in March. There are a couple of festival dates; hopefully more will follow. Check them out for some hard-rockin’, trashy goodness.

Nashville Pussy. Photo from Dena Flows via Creative Commons license

Sukilove touring UK

Hey, Brits. Remember when I wrote about Belgian band Sukilove? They’re playing some UK dates soon: check them out.

• 29th Nov – LONDON – The Macbeth, 70 Hoxton Street, N1 6LP (With GIN PANIC and Silent Front)
• 30th Nov – READING – Sakura, 5-6 Gun Street, RG1 2JR
• 1st Dec – KINGSTON – The Fighting Cocks, 56 London Road, KT2 6QA (with GIN Panic and Ex-Libras)
• 2nd Dec – STOKE – The Old Brown Jug, Newcastle-Under-Lyme ST5 2RY (with Herzoga)
• 3rd Dec – STAINES – The Hobgoblin, 14 Church Street (with Miss Pink Shoes and Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Soundsystem)
• 4th Dec – CANTERBURY UNIVERSITY – Horizons, Broadstairs Campus CT10 2WA

The regular outlets don’t seem to be carrying tickets, but I’m sure you can show up on the night.

There’s an mp3 from the band’s new album in my Box, on the right-hand side of my blog page, where you can sample one of the songs. You can hear more here.

Bands at the Newtown Festival

Sydney’s Newtown has a community festival each year. Live music features heavily, so I went along to check it out. I was especially keen to see a couple of acts I’d read about in TimeOut recently, The Barons of Tang and Dead Letter Office.

I missed the very start of the The Barons of Tang’s set, but the  bit I did catch was a lot of fun. Lots of high-energy punked-up gypsy-folk, a la Gogol Bordello. “Dogs of Rotterdam” is a fun song, with lots of dynamics to keep your attention. Although the rain started, they had the crowd down front dancing. Lots of fun.

The Barons of Tang. Photo from *Insomnia via Creative Commons license

Next was a surprise: Canadian songstress Jill Barber. Her style is very mellow, very chilled-out. I thought it was a good entry for sitting on a lawn with a few thousand other people on a now dry – and increasingly sunny – Sunday afternoon. It gave everyone a chance to chill and have a cold beer and soak up the festival vibe properly.

We stuck around a bit for Dead Letter Chorus. Their gentle, country-tinged indie was well-played, but it didn’t strike the right note. They were neither rambunctious enough to get the crowd up and moving, nor happy-mellow enough to make us smile. Someone behind me said it was “dreary”. It was just misplaced, I think.

On the way out I stopped by one of the smaller stages and heard an excellent closing song from hip-hop/reggae guys Rumpunch. Loud, fun, shoutalong and catchy!

Rumpunch. Photo from chris frape via Creative Commons license

Antimatter signature detected around lightning

As reported on Wired.com:

During two recent lightning storms, [Gamma-ray Space Telescope] Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could only have been produced by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the first of their kind for lightning storms.

My understanding is that particles of antimatter occur very rarely in nature (at least in this observable part of the universe), usually in the radiation belts of charged particles held in place around bodies (like planets – the Earth’s is the Van Allen belt) by their magnetic fields. Finding them closer to home, so to speak, might hold some clues.

Photo from phatman on flickr, via Crative Commons license

Scientists fighting back after government attack in the UK

Looks like I left behind a storm of public policy on science in the UK.

Professor David Nutt is the chairman of the government-sponsored Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He’s been trying to put into perspective some of the hysteria around the relative levels of harm of cannabis and ecstasy – drugs to which the UK government had softened, then recently re-hardened, their stance.

It seems that caused some public arguments that resulted in Nutt questioning the UK’s drug policy. That, in turn, got him fired from his position on the Council.

The BBC reports that senior UK academics are now urging the UK government to live by principles of scientific independence, and not to politicise the viewpoints of experts.

Of course, that paper-based collection of excrement The Daily Mail – which loves a good drugs panic – indulges in some deep moral and intellectual relativism about how those arrogant scientists don’t know everything. Unbelievably, they even break Godwin’s Law.

triple j Unearthed

Sydney radio station triple j is a well-known rock and indie radio station here. They claim to have done their part in breaking new artists.

The whole month of November they’re focusing – on a website and digital radio station called triple j Unearthed – on these new and unsigned artists. It’s my new one-stop shop for up-and-coming Aussie acts!

Australian music

In between looking for a job and a place to live, I’ve been trying to dip my toe into Australian music. If you look at my recent Blip.fm stream you’ll see some of the results of that dipping: a playlist of alternating older and newer Aussie rock tunes.

The classic tracks from that playlist were:

• GANGgajang – Sounds Of Then (This Is Australia)
• Cold Chisel – Khe Sanh
• INXS – Original Sin
• Pseudo Echo – Living in a Dream
• Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs – Poison Ivy
• Midnight Oil – Truganini
• AC/DC – Thunder Struck

The newer bands’ tracks – some of which are brand new to me in the last few days – were:

• Bag Raiders – Shooting Stars
• Tame Impala – Sundown Syndrome
• Jonathan Boulet – Ones Who Fly Twos Who Die
• Barons of Tang – Dogs of Rotterdam
• Dead Letter Chorus – Down In Your Valley
• The Presets – Down Down Down
• Wolfmother – New Moon Rising

Barons of Tang and Dead Letter Chorus are both playing at the Newtown Festival this weekend. I’m going to make an effort to catch both.

Billy Gibbons talks about the Tube Snake Boogie in London

It seems Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s guitarist, likes being a tourist, and took the tube to Wembley before the band’s big gig last week [BBC story]. In true London fashion, the line he wanted to take was down, and he had to detour. He still beat his bandmates to the stadium.

Thanks to the Aussie for the story tip.

New technology targets cancer cells, leaves healthy ones alone

From ScienceDaily:

Two University of Rhode Island associate professors, biophysicists Yana Reshetnyak and Oleg Andreev, have discovered a technology that can detect cancerous tumors and deliver treatment to them without the harming the healthy cells surrounding them, thereby significantly reducing side effects.

The key lies in the acidity level of cells. While normal cells maintain a pH of 7.4 with little variation, cancer cells, expend a great deal of energy as they rapidly proliferate, pumping protons outside and creating an extracellular pH level of 5.5 to 6.5.

While scientists have known about tumor acidity for years, they had not devised a way to target it.

After making some modifications to [pHLIP, the peptide that targets acidity, Reshetnyak and Andreev], they demonstrated that pHLIP could find a tumor in a mouse and deliver imaging or therapeutic agents specifically to cancer cells.

In addition to targeting cancerous tumors, the couple has discovered a novel delivery agent, a molecular nanosyringe, which can deliver and inject diagnostic or therapeutic agents specifically to cancer cells.

Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi using stem cell therapy to regrow cartilage

Pioneering metal guitarist Tony Iommi owes at least part of the Black Sabbath sound to the fact that he lost two fingertips in an industrial accident when he was a teenager. Rather than give up playing guitar he fashioned artificial plastic- later leather-covered – fingertips and kept on strumming. He still uses them today.

Now into his 60s, Iommi has experienced cartilage degradation due to the repeptitive strain of rockin’ out all these years. But he claims he’s undergoing adult stem cell therapy to regrow some of that cartilage.

There have been successes in using adult (as opposed to the fetal ones that still freak some people out) stem cells to grow replacement knee and windpipe cartilage. And see that first link for a mention of new procedures on how stem cells are guided to areas that need cartilage regrowth.

Good luck to Iommi.