Science Events Audio

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Angels & Demons The Science Revealed: Why Physicists Would Love To Trap Antihydrogen, But The Vatican Need Not Fear... "Angels & Demons" (2000) was Dan Brown's first thriller to feature Robert Langdon, a Harvard University professor enmeshed in a conspiracy to destroy Vatican City with antimatter stolen from CERN. As in Brown's later novel, "The Da Vinci Code" (2003), Langdon must decipher symbols left in ancient architecture and art that link medieval secret societies with a modern-day murder plot. According to Fajans, the amount of antimatter that the book's villains steal from CERN would be more than sufficient to destroy Vatican City and a portion of Rome. Antimatter is the ultimate explosive, annihilating completely when it comes into contact with ordinary matter to produce pure energy. No one has yet succeeded in trapping any antiatoms, he said. Two groups of physicists use the Antiproton Daccelerator at CERN - not the Large Hadron Collider - to slow down antiprotons enough

Leonard Konikow, Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey Abstract: Development of ground-water resources for agricultural, industrial, and municipal purposes greatly expanded during the 20th century, and economic gains from ground-water use have been dramatic. In many places, however, ground-water reserves have been depleted to the extent that well yields have decreased, pumping costs have increased, water quality has deteriorated, aquatic ecosystems have been damaged by reduced ground-water discharge, and land has irreversibly subsided. Some causes and effects of groundwater depletion, however, are neither obvious nor easy to assess. A surprisingly large fraction of ground water pumped from confined aquifers derives from storage losses in adjacent confining layers, but depletion in low-permeability layers is difficult to estimate, rarely monitored, and too often overlooked. A new simplified method for estimating depletion from confining layers was developed, tested, and applied. Results indicate that depletion