I had seen a video of Pixel(the one with the four spherical tanks) attempt one of the Lunar Lander Challenge competitions. It landed about a foot off the pad and busted one of it's legs, they tried a repeat, but the missing leg threw off the flight charateristics and caused a crash.

They have a lot of videos at their site:
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=337

Good crash video, of one of the other designs:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2004_08_08/48InchCrash.mpg

His delivery is a little slow for me but I've always found his material amusing:


"When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me."
...
"My girlfiend said to me in bed last night' 'you're a pervert' I said, 'that's a big word for a girl of nine'."
- Emo Phillips

It's not a bucket-wheel, it's a TRANFORMER:
http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2133/transformerminingof0.jpg

The only part I found objectionable would be the "mud baby" comment, but then I'm not one for censorship so, whatever...shrug.

To find out, we went to the Mechanical Engineering Department at Kettering University, in Flint. Dr. Greg Davis thought it would be good experience for his students to verify the claims about acetone in the department's test engine, a Buick 3.8 liter V-6 that is equipped with all kinds of probes and sensors.

For several weeks the students experimented with various strengths of acetone in gasoline. The findings were disappointing.

"Our current preliminary data suggests essentially no improvement running acetone in the fuel," Davis said.

Professor Davis wasn't surprised. "If you notice, it's a very small amount and when you add a very small amount of anything to your fuel, you wouldn't expect a large impact. So it's not really a surprise today."

We wanted to see if it made a difference in a real world situation, so a student who knows what kind of mileage to expect from his Ford pickup and Volkswagen tried acetone in the gas. "The results, when you add three ounces per ten gallons, there were no effects," said Josh Goudzwaard.

Aside from having no effect on mileage, acetone could actually do harm by damaging hoses and fittings. Carmakers don't like acetone either.

"If they know you did it, they could void the warranty," Davis warned.

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=automotive&id=3951510

This was on Mythbusters, admittedly not the most scientific of guys.
Episode 53
Great Gas Conspiracy

Myth: Automakers and fuel suppliers are in collusion to keep us dependent on expensive gasoline and inefficient cars. There are many devices that one can use to cut your fuel consumption.

They got a carbureted car and a fuel-injected car to test several types of devices. The cars were placed on a dynamometer, which allows the car to drive without moving anywhere.

Test devices and additives:

* Fuel line magnets: working on the "principles of hydrodynamics," they are supposed to align the molecules for more efficient consumption.
* Acetone additive: supposed to make gasoline burn more efficiently
* 300mpg 'super' carburetor
* Hydrogen fuel cell generator: flammable hydrogen gas produced by electrolysis. Adam labeled it "Gasbuster: Stickin' it to the Man"

They tested each car on the dynamometer at 35mph and 55mph with each 'device.'

Carburetor car:

* Baseline: 17mpg at 35mph and 25mpg at 55mph
* Magnets: exactly the same as baseline busted
* Acetone: 16.7mpg at 35mph and 24mpg at 55mph busted
* Super carb: much worse than baseline, 12mpg at 35mph and 17.7mpg at 55mph busted

Fuel-injected car

* Baseline: 19mpg at 35mph and 27mpg at 55mph
* Magnets: 18mpg at 35mph and 26mpg at 55mph busted
* Acetone: 18mpg at 35mph and 26mpg at 55mph busted

Impressive.

"Many effects shown in this paper are commonly created by folks in the visual effects industry using software packages such as Shake, BouJou, and AfterEffects. While the degree of automation in these packages has grown considerably in the past decade, they still rely heavily on manual effort (e.g., matting, rotoscoping, etc.) and specialized capture equipment (e.g., blue screen filming, steady cams, use of robotic arms to capture precise video paths, etc.); all are highly unappealing solutions to the amateur user."

Though similarly unappealing is prohibitively expensive software for the "amateur user." You undoubtable have more of a pulse on the industry that I. Do you suspect that we will be seeing significant cost reductions in this industry anytime soon? Sadly, even entry level video editing software of any decent quality has yet to manifest in the open source realm.

Thanks animalsforcrackers, I haven't laughed that hard in a while

Great find gluonium, thanks.

Thanks gluonium, I've read so many estimates as to mass of the Higgs from various sources that I was having difficulty. Everything becomes dated so quickly:

"With those effects taken into account, the Tevatron should be able to unearth evidence of the Higgs if the particle’s mass is less than 125 GeV. “While a Higgs search up to 125 GeV may sound limited, that’s exactly the range where we would expect to find it,” Buescher says. With 8 inverse femtobarns of data, researchers should be able to spot solid evidence, if not incontrovertible proof, of a Higgs in that range—if it’s there."

SCIENCE VOL 312 2 JUNE 2006
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~awarburt/Science_20060602.pdf

The ATLAS Experiment - Episode 2 - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB84WmAjGg

The ATLAS Experiment - Episode 2 - Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnNfXwaCRtw

LOL, I completely forgot about that song.

An interesting article about Peter Higgs, a humble guy who says:

"Most of what has been attached to my name should not have been," he replies, "but probably the Higgs boson is correctly attached because I was probably the person who drew attention to it most in my papers. However, as far as the mechanism of generating vector boson masses is concerned, I usually write down a whole string of names, starting with Anderson and including Englert and Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen and Tom Kibble, and also Gerard 't Hooft."
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/7/6

The physicist in the video, Kim Griest, says the typical theoretical upper bound for mass of higgs boson is around 1 TeV. He, personally thinks around "1000 GeV" is where it should be, "maybe up to 2000 GeV". Yet, Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer, who's been at CERN since 1971, say's "LEP showed that the Higgs was heavier than 114.4 GeV, and we can also guess its mass from other experiments. Within the Standard Model we know that it is not heavier than 240 GeV at the 95% confidence level." Engelen says that the LHC will only be able to produce pairs of Higgs bosons if the Higgs mass is less than 500 GeV. Hmmm, I remain thoroughly confused
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/9/7

The New York Times has a suprisingly good, and lenghty, article about the LHC with nice multimedia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/science/15cern.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

CERN has a metric shitload of media and info here:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/
- It kinda bugs me that they have such a strict copyright on their media. Isn't it predominantly publicly funded?

Perspective on collision energies:
The LEP, the predicessor to LHC, prior to going offline in 2000, topped out at --- 104 GeV.
The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is running at ---------------- 1.96 TeV.
The LHC will initially be capable of colliding beams of protons at an energy of -- 14 TeV.
The abandoned SSC project here in the US would have been capable of --------- 40 TeV.

Here's a link to the 1997 Nobel Prize that was won as a result of the developement of the laser cooling method:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/press.html

Yes, I researched it in some length. It was the non-intuitive part that compelled investigation. I seriously doubt, personally, that it will find it's way into bulk commercial refrigeration though.

They use exceptionally pure, rare earth materials, very expensive, highly tuned lasers, and are only cooling infinitesimal amounts of material. The lasers only cool the atoms directly exposed to the beam which is why the Feshbach resonance method of fliping the spin of the more energetic atoms in the center of the material and ejecting them out of the system with magnets is necessary. As far as the laser cooling is concerned it was the ingenious use of the Dopler effect that really impressed me. Both the magnetic and laser methods are seriously cool...pun intended.