You may want to be wary when ordering sushi. Luckily, Columbia scientists have the low-down. (Wired)

Not looking forward to the wrath of irascible travelers Wednesday afternoon? Not to worry, apparently we’re chemically programmed to be kind. (NYT)

“Things are moving extraordinarily fast” (finally…) at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. (National Geographic)

There’s a vaccine for swine flu — and you don’t live IN CANADA. (Gothamist)

Barack Obama thinks it’s cool. (Wired)

Then from 9 to 10:30, get yourself a science internship at the aptly named Science Internship Panel in Lerner’s Satow Room. What could possibly drag you from your room to such serious career/policy oriented discussions this close to Thanksgiving? Free. Food.

The scientists say that the joint (at right) is the first “complex, anatomically-sized bone” created using stem cells, and will create new ways for scientists to treat joint disorders, and repair various skeletal problems.Vunjak-Novakovic said, “We thought the jawbone would be the most rigorous test of our technique; if you can make this, you can make any shape.

Plus, even a stem cell bone is significantly less weird than a snake with a hand. 

Yes, to demonstrate that “not everyone is happy with the results,” the Times cites a comment from an old Bwog article. “[I]n 2007, a poster called “arch. major” wrote, ‘McKim, Mead & White will roll over in their graves,’ adding that the building made Uris Hall, the widely derided main building of Columbia’s business school, completed in 1961, ‘look like the Pantheon.’ ” Good thing there isn’t an article on Harmony in the works.

- Photo: schmuela/Flickr

Photo by AB

Bwogger Anish Bramhandkar started his year off right by heading up to the 12th floor of Mudd to catch a few minutes of Disney/Pixar’s Monsters Inc., spotted on one of those ubiquitous flatscreens.  Why is SEAS spending its considerable brainpower on kids’ movies?  Bramhandkar suggests the display is designed to convince freshman engineers that fun stuff happens in Gateway.  Let’s hope so.

• Sleeping light? According to Medical Center researchers, that makes you more likely to be fat.
• Researchers find that a coronary calcium scan might cause cancer in itself.
• Thought art history majors would be left out? Of course not:  a sociology doctoral student claims French modernists who bloomed later were also productive for longer.
• There’s no conclusion yet, but Columbia is partnering with the University of Michigan and Harvard (among others) to study suicide and mental health in the military.
• This last study is more than a month old, but there’s no time like the present for the obvious: abstinence-only education will stop contraceptives, but kids’ll keep on having sex.
  

Now go outside and feel enlightened!

Other professors are getting in on the act as well, including Hamid Dabashi, Phillip Bobbit, and Richard Bulliet. The most creative commentary, though, has come from Ph.D. candidates Alexandra Scacco and Bernd Beber, who argued in Saturday’s Post that the election results were likely rigged because the numbers did not look random enough. Trust us, it makes sense.

In non-Iran news, one group of Columbia professors have discovered two brain systems used to accurately predict others’ emotions, and another group has found that the subway is 15 decibels quieter than it was three years ago. Also, Meghan McCain appears to have dedicated her post-election career to one proposition only: embarassing herself as much as possible. 

Image via Parsons’ home page

Columbia physics professor John Parsons lectured Thursday night about the science behind the upcoming film Angels and Demons.  Bwog sent our Fu Foundation Bureau Chief Sean Zimmerman, who actually understands these sorts of things, to observe and report.

Hollywood and science aren’t known to be fast friends, and explanations of “the science behind” often devolve into appopleptic panegyrics decrying popular conceptions of, say, cloning, or invisibility. Professor John Parsons, however, drily admired the whiz-bang world of the movies.  Showing the trailer for Angels and Demons at the start of his talk Thursday night in Havemeyer, Parsons explained that the explosions and intrigue shown were part of any physicist’s “typical day.”

To summarize Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons: Antimatter is stolen from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run by CERN (that’s the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and hidden in the Vatican City during the selection of a new Pope. The antimatter will soon explode if it is not found, and Robert Langdon, the hero from Dan Brown’s other novel, The Da Vinci Code, is the man called in to do the job right.

Angels and Demons would have you believe that CERN gets its kicks from high-tech superweapons, secret underground bases, and fluffy white cats; Parsons, however, explained that although CERN is advanced, it is, in truth, anything but secret.  Founded in 1954 and located on the border of France and Switzerland, the international facility hosted 76,000 visitors/tourists during its “open weekend” last year. CERN’s scientific clout is publicly credited with the creating the World Wide Web in the late eighties and early nineties (maybe they let Al Gore help a little).

From CERN, Parson went on to talk about Angels and Demons‘ portrayal of antimatter. Far from being, as the film asserts it is, a fancy new discovery, antimatter has been haging around in the brains of scientists since 1928; its existence was experimentally validated four years later. Parsons explained antimatter’s behavior using an analogy with Tom Hanks: if we had Tom Hanks, and he met the Anti-Tom Hanks, they would annihilate each other and give off an enormous amount of energy. The film is correct in that CERN’s LHC does, in fact, create antimatter, and also that enough antimatter (that is, about a quarter of a gram) could destroy Rome.  However, the LHC produces only 2 nanograms of antimatter each year, so it would take 125 million years to stockpile the Rome-destroying amount.

After showing how friendly antimatter can be, Parsons launched into a quick explanation of his role in the current particle physics work at CERN as well as that work itself. CERN’s LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, capable of slinging subatomic particles in a 17-mile loops at just below the speed of light. Once the particle has reached its top speed, scientists then add another particle to the reactor; the two particles smash together, and researchers like Parsons and his colleagues in the ATLAS program use their brand new detector to examine the debris.  Their discoveries will, he asserted, “revolutionize our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of nature.” Parsons went into some more detail about the ATLAS program, but that portion of the lecture veered into science that would be difficult to explain without some complex charts and graphs, and a PhD in physics.

Parsons also admitted that yes, the LHC might create micro-black holes, but those of you who wake up in a cold sweat from dreams of your house, your pets, or your computer being sucked into oblivion, not to worry:  if the little guys do show up, Parsons assures us that they will dissipate quickly and harmlessly, and we won’t feel a thing.

As for the future of particle physics at CERN, Parsons could only borrow an expression from Hollywood – “Stay tuned.”

Anyone sauntering into Levien yesterday afternoon to shoot some hoops got a little more than they bargained for: a gym full of high-tech paper airplanes.  Red Bull’s Paper Wings Contest gathered a crowd of 20 or so engineering-types who spent an hour and a half battling it out for a free trip to Salzburg, Austria (home of the Red Bull Headquarters, where they put the real lightning into the cans), and the chance to compete with other schools’ engineering-types in some sort of world finals. 

From what Bwog hears, Columbia’s resident paper airplane geniuses–Mikey Antonakakis, Austin Brauser and Menachem Kaiser–have a decent chance of hopping a larger plane and flying to the edelweiss capital of the world.  Columbia-Red Bull pontifex and CU Formula SAE associate Nicholas Chang promises to alert us as soon as he knows how Columbia’s scores match up to the 200-or-so other schools’.

The judges, a trio of slim, heavily made-up, imported Red Bull babes, judged our boys’ designs in three categories: total flight distance, amount of hang time, and “aerobatics,” or, fancy tricks.  Brauser’s spinning paper ring took the Columbia prize for aerobatics, and Antonakakis, decked out in a Formula One driver’s jumpsuit and helmet, swept up in both distance and hang time; one of his planes flew 110 feet, and another stayed in the air for a glorious 6.63 seconds.  Kaiser’s impromptu entries–he showed up for the basketball and stayed for the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat–came in close behind Antonakakis.  Check out some pictures after the jump!

Each university is only allowed to nominate four students, and this is the first time in six years that Columbia has had three of its nominees selected. Perry is pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics, Prywes in chemistry, and Richard in biochemistry. Congratulations to them!