The man who built the LHC

This feature was published on Elements, the website of the City University Science Journalism MA, in November 2011. Enjoy!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva is the arguably most famous experiment on Earth. It’s also, by many measures, the largest; a particle collider 27km in circumference and 100m underground, it took 16 years to build and cost £6bn.

The LHC was built to answer some of the burning questions facing particle physicists. Within the massive tunnels, protons travelling at near-light-speed collide with each other, and the physicists examine the resulting debris to try to work out what is going on. Hundreds of researchers scour the data for evidence of the Higgs boson, embraced by the media as “the God particle”. The Higgs, if it is found, would explain why everything around us has mass.

Diamond in Donuts

A little shout-out for a video Harriet Bailey and I made about the Diamond Light synchrotron. It’s currently had over 5000 views and has featured on Boing Boing.

And here is the delicious donut animation, which explains how Diamond produces intense beams of light to look at the structure of objects.

This is the first time I’ve exposed myself to Youtube’s notorious comments. I particularly enjoyed the input from johnclavis: “Right on. Science chicks are teh HAWTNESS.”

Go slow, says Dutch cycling report

In a report published this autumn, Dutch authorities consider how to make their roads safer for cyclists. Ideas include segregating cars and bikes, improving junction design and, quite simply, slowing down motor traffic. 185 cyclists died on Dutch roads in 2010, and while still one of the safest places in the world to cycle, the government thinks more should be done.

Oxford’s bike christmas lights

Oxford’s Christmas lights this year feature a local icon – the bicycle. Unlike London’s corporate love-in, these lights are rather elegant. They’ll be switched on at the City’s annual Christmas parade on 2nd December.
(The piccy was taken on a HTC Sensation while running for a train – so it’s rather good, considering)

The bus-bike

Twenty-five people on a bike. I don’t know why, or how, or how long it stood up for, but you can see it here:

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/10/07/mass-transit-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FutilityCloset+%28Futility+Closet%29

The end of the car?

The London Evening Standard carries an article today prophesising the downfall of the car – and calling for the government to get behind the trend.

In modern Britain, and London in particular fewer people drive, and they drive shorter distances. More can, and should, be done to make cycling safer for the increasing number of people on two wheels.

The LES claims BoJo has underspent his cycling budget by £80m in the last 3 years. I can think of plenty of things for him to do with it, just on my daily commute: resurfacing the bike lane under the bridge on Hornsey Rd, sorting out Highbury Corner, and putting a bike route around the buses at Angel Station.

Anyone else got ideas? We could present the butter-haired-one with a list…

A bike clock and a bike bag

To be a proper bike nerd, everything you own should be bike-related.

This clock, fashioned from an old bike wheel, is £40 in Boswells, Oxford. Boswells is a lovely old-fashioned department store, invaluable when I was a student for tea-towels. It’s a great place to mosey around for an hour.

And something I actually own: this bag from Gola. It’s a messenger bag, so I wear it like a rucksack, with a very short strap, to stop it swinging onto my knees as I ride. The strap is quite slippy, so it took a few goes to get it to stay put on my back, but the pattern is funny (“the bikes look like they are farting” said one friend). Gola claim it is a man’s bag, which I think means it is useful and portable.

More bike-y things to waste money on in a future post!

Paralympic cycling oversubscribed!

I was going to write a post about how everybody should go see track cycling at the Paralympics, because it’s incredibly exciting and the tickets are (relatively) cheap. But it seems the message has already got out: according to this Telegraph article, cycling and swimming tickets are already oversubscribed.

Paralympic track cycling began with tandems for blind athletes, but now includes handcycles, tricycles and others. Blind cyclists have a “pilot”, an able-bodied athlete. One such pair, Story and Kappes, won the British able-bodied tandem in 2006.

I saw track cycling at the Commonwealth Games in 2002. Imagine a cat watching a game of tennis. The experience is somewhat similar – the bikes move so fast, it’s difficult to keep up with your eyes.

There are still seven days left to go to apply to the ticket ballot – it’s done on a random draw per event – so I might apply for some more events, rather than miss out. The Olympics tickets proper were oversubscribed, with 250,000 people missing out. We were lucky to get a rowing event (man was happy) but the track cycling really is a sight to behold.

 

Christmas present request

I had an ace scalextric set when I was little. My sister and I would spend hours making the cars zoom round and round the track.

So I was very excited to spot this in the John Lewis Olympic Shop: a scalextric velodrome! The track banks and chicanes, and you get two wee GB cyclists to fight with your siblings over.

Sadly, it costs £69.99, so I stuck to the London 2012 water bottle, but if you have money to burn, it would make (me) an excellent present.

Look Mum, No Hands! – a curious cycling café

Old Street, London on a sunny September day

At the point where Old Street segues from a slightly rough East End highway to a City road for the middle classes, is Look Mum No Hands!, a café-cum-bike shop. Yesterday morning, prompted by its inclusion on a Time Out list of the best coffee in London, man and I paid a visit.

At Saturday lunchtime the place was full of lycra-clad cyclists and plebs. We ordered at the counter, where neon tyre-levers and winter cycling gloves sit alongside pies, vast croquettes and piles of stodgy-looking cakes and pastries, perfect for hungry cyclists. Bikes hang off the wall, some old, some new. The one behind man in this picture is a gorgeous sixties track bike from Birmingham. It was for sale, for what I thought a very reasonable £650; the bike’s design was cutting-edge at the time, and it has been beautifully restored. The bike curios around the room would keep me entertained for hours.

Man and his coffee, with a rather sexy bike

I’m a bit of a fusspot about coffee – it has to have a mild, but definite flavour for me to drink it. Sadly for man, LMNH strikes this balance perfectly (their coffee comes from Square Mile Coffee, just down the road) and I drank rather a large slug of his cappuccino. My jacket potato with baked beans (I’d done a spin class that morning and needed sustenance) came smothered in butter, almost making up for the lack of crispy skin. A café can be forgiven for not oven-baking its jackets if they put enough dairy fat on the skin to make it delicious nevertheless.

LMNH does beer and so on, and is open till 10pm. They do bike-y events – they’ve been showing the Tour of Britain – and have a bike repair workshop on site. And as the picture below shows, they had two happy customers.

Happy customers!