The Chinese submersible, "Sea Dragon"

China, reminding the world that we still have a lot of exploring to do on Earth, is poised to become the world leader in deep ocean diving, according to several news reports. The country has developed a three-manned submersible craft that on Tuesday, reached a depth of just over 5,000 meters. For the metrically challenged, that’s more than three miles. The current record holder for a currently working submersible is a Japanese craft that ventured down to 6,500 meters in 1989. The Chinese say they will send their craft down to 7,000 meters next year. The all-time depth record was set in 1960, by the U.S. Navy’s Trieste, now retired, which ventured almost 11,000 meters down in the Mariana Trench off the Philippines.

China’s State Oceanic Administration said the currently achieved depth will give the sub, named Jiaolong (sea dragon),  access to more than 70 percent of the world ocean’s floor. America’s prosaically named Alvin can dive to 4,500 meters and reach about 63 percent of the ocean bottom. China’s goals are thought to be primarily commercial, looking toward the day when mining the seabed will be practical.

A sampling of news accounts: Xinhua‘s unbylined English account is here. The Wall Street Journal looks at the business angles in a story by Jeremy Page.     Rowan Callick in The Australian.

-Boyce Rensberger

“Despite recent moves by some states to restrict access to abortion, more Americans now support a woman’s right to choose than they did two years ago,” writes Amanda Gardner of HealthDay News. Her story is based on a survey done by her publication and the Harris polling organization. In 2009 a similar survey found 23 percent of those polled agreed that a woman should have access to abortion under “all circumstances.” This year that proportion had risen to 36 percent.

Over the same period, the percentage opposed to abortion under any circumstances dipped from 21 percent to 17 percent. The poll also found that 47 percent of Americans favored allowing abortion under some, but not all, circumstances. Curiously, Gardner did not total the approvals and write that 83 percent of Americans favor allowing abortion under at least some circumstances.

As Gardner writes, “The poll results come against the backdrop of recent moves by some states to restrict access to abortion.”

The HealthDay story was picked up by USNews and Newsday among others. HealthDay appears to be an independent journalistic organization. It’s Web site lists eleven staff reporters and editors and 16 regular freelances.

Grist: Harris’s take on its own poll.

-Boyce Rensberger

Note: Corrects NPR to WBUR, an NPR member station–Paul Raeburn.

It’s called “skin shock” therapy. According to a story by Rachel Gotbaum on WBUR, it’s a treatment in which small electrodes are attached to the skin to deliver electric shocks remotely to curb dangerous or unwanted behavior. (Thanks for Rachel Zimmerman of Commonhealth for the heads-up on the story.)

Critics have claimed that the therapy amounts to the torture of children. Numerous lawsuits have attempted to shut down the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., the only school in the country that uses the treatment, Gotbaum reports.

So far, so good. This sounds awful; I’m against it–or I’m ready to be, as soon as Gotbaum tells me that studies show it doesn’t work. Sadly, Gotbaum doesn’t tell me that. Indeed, she doesn’t give me a hint of any evidence for or against the skin therapy treatment. Perhaps that’s because it’s never been studied–but if so, she should say that.

Here’s the evidence that Gotbaum gives us against skin shock: “It hurts, it’s like a little bee sting,” says one student. “It felt like an extreme piercing pain,” says another. Students “would get shocks for swearing or just saying ‘no’.”

Here’s the evidence Gotbaum gives us in favor of it: According to one state representative, the shocks “have kept his nephew alive.”

That’s it. No scientific evidence one way or the other. No further description of the treatment, including how strong the electric shocks are, or what the apparatus looks like. She tours the Rotenberg center with its director, but if she asked the director about skin shocks, she doesn’t tell us what the director said.

She tells us that the skin shocks have been the subject of lawsuits. Was there no expert testimony from those suits that she could have consulted? The Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services is considering barring shocks at the Rotenberg Center. Couldn’t Gotbaum have asked the department why it’s considering that move?

How many children have undergone the treatment? Is it really used on kids who simply say ‘no’? Does the Rotenberg Center keep statistics on its use and on outcomes? Have others studied it? Who devised it, when and where? All of which is to say: Does it work? That’s the question that matters here. If the shocks are mild, and it saves some children’s lives, or helps them lead better lives, maybe the trade-off is worth it.

If it’s child torture, so be it. If it’s a helpful treatment when used judiciously in rare cases, that’s good, too. Gotbaum’s story is likely to turn most people against this; as I said, it sounds horrible. But Gotbaum should have done more than that. It wouldn’t have taken too many phone calls to give us some information on whether skin shocks work, or not, or whether nobody knows. That’s information we need before we, as listeners, can make up our minds.

- Paul Raeburn

A simulated Higgs detection, from CERN.

Another unusual burst of stories detected by aggregators of the world’s news media may be a sign that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has detected the elusive Higgs boson. Or not.

Unlike the flurry of stories that zoomed past us last spring, this new manifestation was not a leaked e-mail but two actual announcements (of preliminary data) at a scientific conference. Lending credibility to the reports was the fact that the potentially tell-tale data blips were seen in two different LHC detectors and reported independently.

Ian Sample, science correspondent for the UK Guardian, has a compact, clear account with just enough caveats at the top and suitably cautious comments from scientists saying it’s exciting but far too early to draw any conclusions.

Alan Boyle, the pioneering science writer at MSNBC.com, has an excellent account with lots of background information and explanatory videos from outside sources. If you’re hazy on Higgs, the videos provide a good introduction. Boyle has all the necessary caveats and even a quote that tries to knock the whole thing down. But Boyle’s package, which includes a primer on how to read the actual data (graph shown), makes it seem as if he takes the new findings pretty seriously.

Jonathan Leake at The Australian may have gone a bit too far in writing that the researchers “may finally have tracked down the Higgs boson…” The “may” is good; the “finally” connotes, well, a bit too much finality. Whoever wrote the hed should get a rap on the knuckles for calling the Higgs the “holy grail.”

Geoff Brumfiel, of Nature News, strikes just the right tone with this good lede: “For now, physicists are only willing to call them ‘excess events’, but fresh data from two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hinting at something unusual — and it could be the most sought-after particle in all of physics.” Kudos to Brumfiel for avoiding the term “god particle” that nearly all the other writers couldn’t resist.

-Boyce Rensberger

The environment in which a tree is raised can affect how well it copes if transplanted to a different environment, Canadian researchers have found. In other words, nurture matters quite apart from a plant’s genetic endowment.

Amina Khan, writing in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, quotes a researcher not involved in the study who said, ”Turns out the trees have a memory, and they are adapted to the environment in which they’re grown.”

The trees were cultivated varieties of poplars (as in the photo) that were cloned, that is, grown from cuttings of parent trees to maintain the parent’s characteristics. But the products of one clone were grown over generations in one part of Canada with a given amount of sunlight and water and their genetically identical “twins” grown over the same time in another part with a different amount of light and water.

When presumably genetically identical trees from the two different areas were subjected to a simulated drought, those from the wetter place suffered more than those from the other. For example, the suffering trees took days longer to close their stomata, the pores through which leaves take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen and water vapor. The drought-adapted poplars closed their stomata more quickly, retaining more moisture in their leaves and wilting less.

The scientists looked at gene activity and found relevant differences between the two groups. Some of the genes in one group had been permanently shut down through a common epigenetic process called methylation. The trees were genetically identical, but they had different patterns of which genes could express themselves.

The experiments bear out what gardeners have often noticed, that plants of a named variety from one nursery don’t always grow as well as those from another nursery, though both are planted into the same environment.

-Boyce Rensberger

This one is worth attention, if only–so far–for the picture, from JPL. On July 15 the Dawn spacecraft, launched four years ago, swung into orbit around the asteroid, Vesta, becoming the first to attach itself gravitationally to any of these rocky bodies that orbit the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. It will stay at Vesta, the second largest asteroid sometimes called a protoplanet, for a year before heading off to Ceres, the dwarf planet formerly known as an asteroid.

The photo sent back on Monday, is the first Dawn took after entering orbit. Although Vesta looks as if it could be spherical, Hubble images from some time ago show it’s quite lop-sided. Vesta is about 330 miles long .

Elizabeth Flock blogs about it on WashingtonPost.com, quoting Dawn’s “tweet” on approaching Vesta.

The Atlantic‘s Nicholas Jackson has the story as well, with a hed that says Dawn is on a “mission to the birth of the solar system.” That’s nice, since Vesta is thought to be little changed from the formation of our solar system, but then, so’s the Moon. The Atlantic picks up a good infographic from Space.com.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to the Spanish lang. post) In the late 90’s a group of Harvard astrophysicists proposed that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, leading to the concept of dark energy. In his book “The 4 Percent Universe”, Richard Panek (visiting Chile this week) explains the important contribution of two Chilean astronomers in showing that certain type of supernovae can be used to measure precise distances in the universe. This was a key finding, that was published in two papers by two independent groups. The book relates also that Hamuy and Maza published their paper at the same time than another one from Kirshner and Riess (Harvard), even that both groups had agreed to give priority to the Chilean one. (*)

A reporter from La Tercera has done a great job talking to Panek prior his visit, but also with the Chilean astronomer Mario Hamuy and Adam Riess now at Johns Hopkins. The story says that during the early 90’s a team of Chilean astronomers developed a tool to use light from Supernovae to measure cosmological distances. By 1994 they had collected data 50 supernovae, and they were invited to Harvard to make a presentation. Once there, Riess asked Hamuy to use his measurements to check a model he was testing. Hamuy explains in La Tercera that he agreed and gave all his data, but with the condition that Riess and Kirshner were not going to publish them until his group in Chile finished the paper they were working on. Hamuy and Maza submitted their paper in July’94 and it was accepted in late August. Then, early september, Riess and Kirshner submitted their paper to another magazine. But at the end, due to some delays in publishing, both papers were published at the same time. Even that after the years both articles have been cited equally, the reporter in La Tercera says they have not been recognized enough for their contribution. Hamuy declares that he felt desolated to “see the lack of loyalty in a scientific community where you expect some nobility”. Of course, that’s the Chilean version of the story. But the reporter in La Tercera interviewed Riess too, and he includes a quote where he says: “at that time I was a grad student and I didn’t know very well about the timing of magazines. I assumed that his work was going to be published a couple of months before. I was surprised and very sad when I saw both papers published at the same time. I hope Mario don’t feel bitter about it yet”.

(*) Updated after Robert Kirshner’s comment in this post

Fantástica historia que nos llega desde La Tercera en Chile. De verdad; no es fácil encontrar nuevas historias de temática científica. Y cuando todo lo que vas leyendo te empieza a sonar repetitivo, cuando encuentras un reportaje con algún ángulo que no ha explicado nadie, te tiras de cabeza.

En este caso el mérito es compartido, y la mayor parte de él se la lleva el periodista estadounidense Richard Panek. Él es quien en su recién publicado libro “El 4% del Universo” nos descubre que astrofísicos chilenos fueron clave en el histórico descubrimiento de la energía oscura hace poco más de una década, pero fueron ignorados tras una cierta polémica con investigadores en Harvard. La otra parte del pastel de méritos se la lleva muy merecidamente Francisco Rodríguez I., quien en “La historia desconocida del hallazgo científico que enfrentó a astrónomos chilenos y de EE.UU” (pdf) se anticipa a la visita de Panek a Chile con motivo de la presentación de su libro, y logra sacar de él algunas declaraciones para completar un texto en La Tercera cuya principal crítica es que se queda cortísimo. La historia (en el sentido más amplio del término; con personajes, intriga, traiciones, carreras…) bien merece un capítulo entero de libro. El resumen es el siguiente:

En 1994 los astrónomos chilenos Mario Hamuy y José Maza habían puesto a punto una técnica para medir distancias en el Universo utilizando luz de supernovas, y medido una cincuentena de supernovas desde el Observatorio Chileno de Cerro Tololo y Calán. Esto generó interés en astrofísicos estadounidenses, que invitaron a Hamuy a presentar sus resultados en Harvard. Según cuenta Francisco que cuenta Panek que cuenta Hamuy, un estudiante de doctorado llamado Adam Riess le pidió los datos de estas 50 supernovas para comprobar una técnica con la que estaba trabajando. Hamuy accedió y se los prestó con la condición que fueran sólo para contrastar esa técnica, y no para publicar.

Semanas más tarde Riess contactó con Hamuy diciéndole que todo encajaba perfecto y que quería publicar un artículo utilizando los datos que le había prestado. Hamuy le dio el ok, pero con la condición de que esperara a que ellos publicaran primero el artículo que estaban ya terminando para la revista Astronomical Journal. Riess accedió, y envió su paper 7 semanas tras la aceptación del artículo chileno, pero a otra revista cuyos tiempos de publicación son menores. Resultado: ambos artículos científicos salieron prácticamente a la vez el 1 de enero de 1995, pero la repercusión y fama mundial se la llevaron el paper de Riess y su profesor Richard Kirshner, que un par de años después al medir y comparar distancias de supernovas más lejanas, propusieron que una fuerza misteriosa estaba acelerando la expansión del Universo; algo contrario radicalmente a lo que en ese momento se creía. 15 años después, posiblemente el crédito recibido por los astónomos chilenos es bastante menor del que merecerían.

No es un caso cualquiera. El descubrimiento de la existencia de energía oscura ha sido uno de los hallazgos más revolucionarios de la última década. Los científicos estadounidenses han recibido prestigiosos premios por ello, y pronto caerá el Nobel. Mientras tanto, Hamuy explica a La Tercera que se siente decepcionadísimo por la deslealtad del equipo estadounidense. Francisco Rodríguez hace un meticuloso trabajo y también consigue hablar en exclusiva con Adam Riess, quien reconoce el acuerdo y que esperaba que el artículo chileno saliera primero. Se defiende diciendo que él no tenía experiencia y no sabía que su artículo se publicaría tan pronto. Incluso dice esperar que sus colegas chilenos no le guarden rencor.

Lo cierto es que los que hemos estado siguiendo de cerca la literatura y descubrimientos sobre energía oscura, incluso los que hemos atendido a clases y hablado con Robert Kishner en Harvard, no teníamos conciencia de esta parte de la historia. La contribución de los investigadores chilenos fue olvidada inicialmente y es ahora que se está recuperando gracias a libros como el de Paneñ o textos como el de La Tercera. Uno podría decir que más que los datos, lo importante son las ideas y la interpretación de esos datos. Quizá en este sentido los investigadores estadounidenses fueron más visionarios y quienes formularon que el Universo se estaba expandiendo debido a una energía oscura. Pero inmediatamente a uno le viene en mente el caso de los ingenieros de antenas Penzias y Wilson, que descubrieron por pura casualidad una señal que luego otros interpretaron de manera independiente como la radiación de fondo de microondas que probaba la teoría del Big Bang. Penzias y Wilson ganaron igualmente el premio Nobel y pasaron a la historia como quienes descubrieron la prueba empírica de la expansión del Universo sin saber nada de cosmología.

No es lo mismo, porque en el caso de Wilson y Penzias sí fue un descubrimiento inesperado y en el caso de Hamuy y Matas sólo la técnica de medir distancias estelares que a posteriori hizo posible el descubrimiento. Pero no es poco. Y sea como sea, la historia da mucho juego. Está perfectamente planteada por Francisco, y nos gustaría incluso que le hubieran dado más espacio para profundizar en las explicaciones de Riess y Hamuy. Seguro que con la visita de Panek habrá oportunidad. Aunque sea difícil, merece mucho la pena ser cuidadosos en dar la visión objetiva de lo que ocurrió, y no barrer mucho hacia casa. El lector puede desconfiar. En este sentido las opiniones de otros astrónomos de la comunidad internacional pueden ser muy valiosas.

(*) Actualizado tras el comentario en este post de Robert Kishner, matizando que no hubo mala intención en absoluto y que los astrónomos chilenos sí mantienen mucho reconocimiento dentro de la comunidad de cosmólogos investigando en la expansión acelerada del Universo.

- Pere Estupinyà

The next Mars rover, NASA announced on Friday, is expected to land at the foot of a huge mountain inside a 96-mile-wide crater. The site is inside the ellipse in the photo.

The new lander, called Curiosity, is huge–10 feet long, 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall. It weighs a ton and is expected to be able to drive up the mountainside, sampling along its way.

The choice of a landing site isn’t a major peg for a science news story (see John Antczak‘s take for AP, as one example), but it is worth noting because it indicates that despite the Shuttle program’s demise, actual science is continuing at the American space agency. Curiosity is to be launched–aboard an unmanned rocket–late this year and expected to land on Mars in August 2012. Should be quite exciting and, if all goes well, it would demonstrate in an election year that government science and engineering is first rate.

-Boyce Rensberger

I just watched a special-effects video, from NASA, imagineering what a mission to an asteroid with astronauts on board might be all about. The first thought, on seeing people in a big-windowed contraption bolted to the side of a minimally gravitational rock in space, was Alvin. Or some other manned submersible, poking around a hydrothermal vent or deep marine canyon.

The AP‘s Seth Borenstein wrote it. It has links to videos. He notified us that he found no press package or other easy guide to such a mission, the cornerstone, or sop some would say, of the Obama Administration’s offering as a replacement for the cancelled project to return people to the moon and prepare for Mars. It’s unclear whether his yarn is a scoop, exactly, as the info is all public. I’d guess that insiders know it, that specialty outfits such as space.com or Aviation Week may have stitched up similar accounts of this mission. Borenstein appears enthusiastic, for the story has a rhythm and beat to it, building the argument for doing this. It is one that he could not find ever having been told by NASA itself in Congress or any other stage. It’s as though he is whispering out the side of his mouth Hey! NASA pr people! Why haven’t YOU been crowing about this??? With the shuttle shuttered,  and NASA’s automated Dawn spacecraft now circling the asteroid Vesta, it has a double news hook. That pic there is lifted from a 2010 NASA workshop on the mission that I found with about two strokes of the search routine.

I’m unsure whether the argument that robots can do anything people can do out there – cheaper if not faster nor nearly as resourcefully or cleverly as can a complicated machine with smart people sitting in it – entirely holds as impeccable objection to such a mission. That lofty discussion aside, this is a good enterprise story, with hints that a trip to an asteroid can be as challenging technically, and grand, as to another planet or our Moon. More important, the saving of civilization comes up.

Plus, my two cents worth, some say a more sensible Mars goal than driving around on it is to get some people in orbit around it, remotely operating machinery below. Maybe. The merits of that need long debate. But certainly, after a visit to a near Earth asteroid, NASA would have the skills to build Phobos Station.

Yes, I’m on vacation in Oregon as declared in the next post down. We hiked this morning with kids and grandkids into the Crooked River Gorge and back up and oh boy is that a lot of basalt, pahoihoi, a’a, welded tuff, and other stuff volcanic from the Miocene and earlier (a petroleum geologist on vacation, who I happened along and struck up a conversation with on account of his having a genuine western grip revolver strapped to his hip – just a .22 with birdshot he said, to shoo any stubborn rattlers – told me the Miocene part). But I worked a short day Friday, this is a nifty cool piece on the AP without great complication and considerable resourcefulness in the reporting. Couldn’t resist. See y’all next Thursday.

- Charlie Petit

I’m off early today, gotta get to Oregon for a family reunion and campfire celebration of a loved one’s too-brief life. The tracker’s lights will be on, the switch in good hands from both our other regulars Paul Raeburn and Pere Estupinya, and from Boyce Rensberger – ksjtracker’s founder and former director of the Knight Fellowships. I’ll be back next Thursday.

- Charlie Petit

At Scientific American‘s blogsite, under Assignment: Impossible,  Charles Q. Choi, a science writer of considerable experience for one so early in his career, takes a deep dive into the foundations, wiring, and plumbing of the trade.

He asks a lot of questions – including what if any essential and reliably evident differences can be found between what an old-fashioned MSM reporter brings to an interview, and what a blogger does when rousing himself or herself to ring somebody up and talk about things before writing about them.

His piece does not provide all the answers. What is comforting and reassuring is to see some of those that nag many of us laid out in clear fashion, and to sit in on his internal ruminations (his word for what this piece is).

One central issue he tackles is whether there is one quality, or just a few, that is markedly more common in a blogpost than in a story written for a standard editor at a standard pub,  in standard news style. Choi settles on express, open emotion that the writer shares with his or her readers.

That’s pretty good. Such baring of soul was hardly invented by bloggers, as columnists and op-ed writers and innumerable book authors and magazine feature writers, not to mention their equivalents in broadcasting, do that too. But while there were more reporters in the old days than there were columnists, bloggers have the numbers now.

For my part, I blog in the same mental mode I’d have when sitting down with a buddy or relative and prattling on about the story I just wrote or what happened to me today. But journalism – that’s different. It’s something that has to pass muster with a weary editor, that has to compete for space with other news, that isn’t supposed to be about me, and is meant to engage readers with both information and style but to do so with great discipline, efficiency and as much impartiality as one can feign. (Feigning is not quite the same as falsehood – it can be an adopted posture that improves ones effect).

There’s much more to his piece than that. Take a look.

By the way, Choi is also experimenting with other variants on standard reporting and news analysis, including mashing up the conventions of the novel and the short story with fact-based journalism. A second example here.

- Charlie Petit

Confession: I do not get it. Not the cloaking development that has been in the news the last few days. Regular cloaking occurs when a device of some kind deflects waves of light or other pulsating signal around a thing, reconstructs the waves to proceed as though they’d been undisturbed the whole while, and the cloaked object is thus rendered invisible to viewers downstream.

Now we are reading about space-time cloaking. A light beam gets its waves slowed so that a gap opens. That is, the light gets a localized blink inserted into it. The blink is temporary, timed to pass as something happens. Then trailing waves somehow catch up, in a non-superluminal way that I cannot grasp but with the aid of so-called split-time lenses, and when they reach eyes or other detectors it looks like all was peaceful at the moment the event transpired. No blink anymore so no clue of something amiss.

Forgive me, but that sounds pretty much like the same thing. Both sound a little like the way photo editors take out the red-eye – they fill in the thing with the colors around it. But it is cloaking, with a twist. Ergo news in the department of weird physics. Lots of reporters who must have understood it better than I wrote it up. Most of the news, but not all as we’ll see, seems to result from a research paper by a pair at Cornell University, published on the arXiv preprint server. The news flow itself seems to have been weirded, obscuring its wellspring.

With all the hubbub the UK magazine Physics World, published by the Institute of Physics,  suddenly late this week drew press attention to its own, special issue now out on the theme of invisibility or cloaking. You should be able to download a PDF here. One article by two physicists describes this time cloaking phenomenon, but appears to be a general review not explicitly tied to the breaking news this week.

So what I also do not get is: why now with all the cloaking stories?

Stories:

•  AAAS-Science ScienceNOW – Ron Cowen: Punching a Hole in Time ; Chickens invisibly crossing the road. I wonder if to the observer it would seem as though the chicken were on one side, then instantly the other, but with no blink in position among the cars passing along. He reports some of the history of the idea  He reports that in one experiment a hole in time, so to speak, lasted 15 trillionths of a second. When you think about it, it could never last long with anything this side of a distant moon – wait too long to re-close the gap in light waves, and the blink has already reached every nearby detector. That’d be a hint the viewer might have missed something.
• MIT Technology Review , The Physics arXiv blog : First Demonstration of Time Cloaking. This is the one to read – mostly for the well-informed comment string. This blog also seems to be the catalyst for at least part of the coverage.
• NPR – Mark Memmott: Resarchers Say They’ve Been Able To ‘Cloak” Time ; Memmott starts to try to explain – then refers readers to another blog called 13.7, where Adam Frank picks up the baton. He puts the gist well: “Light can be taught to lie.” Interesting metaphor, but how does that differentiate this time cloaking from regular cloaking? The distinction eludes me.
• Forbes – Alex Knapp: Physicists Create a Hole In Time to Hide Events ;
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Invisibility gets a reality check ;
• Florida Today – Scott Tilley: Fictional devices advancing toward reality ;I think we’re all being spoofed by a violation of causality. Something is happening but the eventg itself fell into a time cloak, a spatial cloak, or maybe a mind-meld restricted to my own cranium’s warring factions. All I can say is this article, by a physicist, is all about cloaking, cites no specific paper or event as reason to be discussing it, yet it pops up the same week at this big Physics World theme issue and the time cloaking paper from the Cornell group.

I need somebody to make me a Feynman diagram to explain precisely what interacted with what, exchanging what information, to trigger so many cloaking stories with no clear sign of connection. It’s like cosmic inflation’s puzzle – how’d all those scattering domains ever talk to each in the way back when? Or is this mere synchronicity acting mischievous as usual?

Grist for the Mill:

Paper in Arxiv ; Issue of Physics World download ; Institute of Physics Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit