Times of Trenton, a few more: Geoneutrinos display tiny cross section in media. Déjà vu too.
In Hollywood, about the only things that “special effects” utterly needs in “plausibility” is six letters. Hence, fans of an intellectually impoverished but vastly entertaining, continent-mashing movie of a season ago ought to get a special kick from the kicker in a Popular Science account out this week. It is by Rebecca Boyle on some news out of the underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory. It is beneath an Italian peak of the same name with neutrinos from the Sun, CERN, and supernovae its main quarries. Now, as a bonus, an international team with a large contingent at Princeton University says it has, via the lab’s system of nested, giant nylon and stainless steel spheres, 1000 photomultipliers, and 100 tons of fluid somewhat like benzene, detected the scintillations of a few geoneutrinos.
Okay, Boyle’s reporting – as seems to be the norm at Pop. Sci’s daily news monitoring operation – appears to be a rewrite of the Princeton Press release linked below in Grist. But her final line is witty and inspired with its reference to arks that may stump people with over-refined tastes in movies (she does provide a link toward clarity).
The news itself is a bit of a surprise to me, anyway. I don’t recall hearing the term geoneutrinos before. They’re from decay of such elements are uranium in the Earth and could, if detected in more numbers, tell science how much the Earth is heated by radioactivity, something on the composition of the planet’s deep interior, and fundamental, important things like that.
Second Time is No Charm Dept: Coverage, in keeping with the detectability of neutrinos, is sparse. Too bad. This may partly be due to the fact – discovered part way through this post hence this shift in tone – these results were formally reported in the April Physics Review B. But even then, there was hardly any coverage. Princeton didn’t get much more mileage from its release than UMass did back in late March.
Other stories:
- Trenton Times – Matt Connolly: Scientists unearth way to detect geoneutrinos ; That’s amazing – putting “geoneutrinos” in the hed. At least it doesn’t say geoantineutrinos, which is more fussily accurate. Maybe readers, without a clue what it means, read on for that reason. Its a short piece.
March 2010 stories:
- Times (UK) Hannah Devlin, Laura Margottini: Geo-neutrino anti-matter found by scientists at Borexino detector ;
- ANI (via SyFy.c0m): Physicists detect geo-neutrinos from deep within Earth’s core ; Hmm. From the core? Or from all that silicate stuff around it?
Grist for the Mill:
Princeton University Press Release ; Princeton Borexino Group page ; 2006 paper on Geoneutrino detection plans ; arXiv explanation of the Borexino detector ;
March 25 U.Mass Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
