Angels and antimatter
Angels and Demons gets a lot of its science right, says a local physicist, but we shouldn’t worry about antimatter blowing up the Vatican anytime soon.
Canada got its first look at the new film Angels and Demons last weekend. The film features a group of conspirators that try to destroy Vatican City using half a gram of antimatter stolen from CERN, the European lab that hosts the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
University of Alberta physicist Roger Moore explained the science of antimatter in a talk Saturday at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton. It was part of a series of talks held throughout North America in the wake of the film’s release on the science at CERN.
Half a gram of antimatter would make for an Earth-shattering kaboom, says Moore, who works at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), as it would annihilate on contact with matter and release vast amounts of energy.
“If we could make 0.5 grams of antimatter,” Moore says in an interview, “and if we could store it, then it would make a very powerful bomb” — one equivalent to about 21.5 kilotons of TNT, or the explosive yield of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
But those are two very big “ifs,” he says. It would take CERN about 10 million years to make 0.5 grams of antimatter, he said, as they make such a tiny amount of it. All the antimatter made at the lab in an hour would warm a cup of tea by about one degree if dropped into it. “We can’t even make a good cup of tea, let alone blow up anything!”
You can’t store the stuff easily either, he adds. Antimatter annihilates on contact with matter, so you can’t store it in a bottle. A magnetic field could hold it in place, but science has yet to create a field powerful enough to do so.
Apart from those problems, Moore says, the film has one of the most realistic portrayals of antimatter he’s ever seen outside of a documentary. CERN really does make antimatter (a by-product of the high-speed collisions it performs to simulate the Big Bang), and it really is looking for the “God” particle — the Higgs boson, believed to be the particle that gives matter mass.
They don’t wear nearly as many lab coats as they do in the film, however, he says.
Bees prefer cone-covered flowers to smooth ones because they offer better grip, finds a new study.
Previous studies have shown that bees prefer to feed at flowers with cone-shaped cells on their petals over those with flat cells, says Heather Whitney, a researcher with the School of Biological Science at the University of Bristol. Those studies were not able to explain why this happened.
Whitney’s study, published in last week’s Current Biology, presented bees with two almost identical snapdragon blossoms — a regular one with cone-shaped cells thinner than a human hair, and a mutant without them.
Her team found that the bees showed no preference for either flower when they were horizontal. When they turned the blossoms vertical, the bees went for the cone-surfaced flower 60 per cent more often.
A high-speed camera explained why. “If you were trying to gather food while climbing a cliff-face,” Whitney says in an email, “you would probably prefer the cliff with lots of handholds to the cliff with none.” When the bees flew to the smooth blossoms, their feet and wings wriggled constantly as they struggled for grip, causing them to burn more energy. The cone-shaped cells acted as Velcro, helping the bees find their footing in seconds for a relaxed feed.
This could explain why 96 per cent of insect-pollinated flowers have cone-shaped cells, Whitney says — they evolved to fit the bees’ needs. It also raises questions on how these flowers would be affected by the current decline in bee populations.
