Could Superman Punch Someone Into Space

Quiz: The UN has decreed it International Happiness Day - so here's a literary quiz about happy endings to put a smile on your face When the Miami Heat won their first championship in 2006, then-coach Pat Riley decided to enter the following season without major roster changes.    This word has appeared in 734 New York Times articles in the past year. Samsung has taken the wraps off of its new Galaxy S 4 smartphone, which will support global LTE roaming and has front- and rear-facing cameras that can be used simultaneously, Samsung said. Samsung introduced the phone Thursday evening during a launch event at New York City's Radio City Music Hall. The event was also broadcast live to people watching in New York's Times Square. Quarks, bosons, muons, electrons, neutrinos: This is the stuff the universe is made of, and these particles fascinate MIT senior Christie Chiu.A physics and math major from Bedford, Mass., Chiu excelled in math and science from an early age and dreamed of attending MIT, her father’s alma mater. She and her best friend throughout grade school “would tell all our teachers — any adults, literally anyone who would listen — that when we grew up, we were going to become engineers, go to MIT, and be roommates,” Chiu recounts.In middle school and high school, Chiu’s interest in MIT grew when she attended Splash, an annual, weekend-long program at the Institute packed with classes taught by MIT students. “I really liked the atmosphere, the energy that was here,” Chiu says.As a freshman at the Institute, she found herself drawn to the physics department. “The professors were just so engaged in what they were teaching,” Chiu says. “I felt a lot of energy in the classrooms.”Now, Chiu channels that same energy as a teaching assistant for Junior Lab, the notoriously challenging lab class for physics majors. “I absolutely fell in love with it, while other people were maybe not liking it so much,” Chiu says. “That’s one of the reasons I became a TA — so that I could get people more excited about this and make them want to go into experimental physics.”Her efforts as a fervent ambassador for the Department of Physics have also included work as a counselor for PhysPOP, the department’s pre-orientation program for incoming freshmen. “It’s like summer camp for a week,” she says, smiling. “You get to play with all the cool things in the physics department at MIT!”When she’s not busy with physics-related activities, Chiu spends time with her sorority sisters in Kappa Alpha Theta and captains the MIT sport pistol team, which she describes as a surprisingly meditative activity. “There’s a forex-growth-bot mental focus and composure that’s required to excel in the sport,” she says. Neutrinos in the spotlightChiu is currently working with physics professor Janet Conrad on research related to neutrinos: tiny particles, primarily produced in the sun, that constantly shower down upon the Earth.Physicists have learned that these particles continually oscillate, or transform, among three types: electron, muon and tau neutrinos. To better understand this neutrino oscillation, researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Illinois, are conducting an experiment called MicroBooNE (Micro-scale Booster Neutrino Experiment). They use accelerators to generate a beam of neutrinos that then pass through very cold liquid argon, exciting some of the argon atoms. When the atoms return to a lower-energy state, they emit photons called “scintillation light” — which can give researchers valuable information about those neutrinos and their oscillations, helping to resolve discrepancies among the results from various neutrino experiments.But that scintillation light has a wavelength of around 128 nanometers — which might as well be invisible. “It’s in the vacuum UV; it can’t even pass through glass,” Chiu says. “So that makes it very difficult for us to detect it.”A chemical called tetraphenyl butadine, or TPB, provides a solution to the problem. When the scintillation light hits TPB, it is absorbed and re-emitted as blue light, at a longer wavelength of 425 nanometers — which can easily be detected. The only problem was that TPB seemed to stop working well after a while: For some reason, it degraded over time. Chiu’s lab bench is surrounded by piles of acrylic plates, some clear and some with a milky coating of TPB. “We found that if we just left these laying out, then over time, the amount of light that it would be able to wavelength-shift went down,” Chiu explains. “We thought there might be effects from humidity, light or heat.”Chiu’s research during her junior year finally identified the culprit: It was indeed light — specifically, the ultraviolet rays from sunlight streaming in through the large windows along one wall of the lab and from the overhead lights. Both are now covered with shielding material, allowing the TPB — and the researchers — to work uninhibited.Last summer, Chiu presented the results of her TPB study at Fermilab alongside graduate students and postdocs from all over the country — and received first-place recognition for her research and poster.New challengesNow that Chiu has finished her work with TPB, she’s working on computer-generated simulations of neutrinos in liquid argon for MicroBooNE. The scintillation light that researchers detect is actually produced through two different microscopic processes, she explains. “Knowing the breakdown of how the light is produced between fat burning furnace processes actually helps us identify the particle,” Chiu says. “We want to simulate the processes to verify that we fully understand the system.”After graduating this spring, Chiu plans to pursue a PhD in particle physics and hopes to one day combine her love of research and teaching as a professor.“There are still a lot of unanswered questions in particle physics,” Chiu says. “Believe it or not, the particles most people are familiar with — that is, protons, neutrons and electrons — compose very little of all the matter in the universe. There are so many things we don’t understand, like dark matter and dark energy, not to mention much about the elementary particles themselves. To learn more about these things — that’s what these experiments are here for.” An exhibit at the Met contains 600 baseball cards out of the 31,000 it holds.     Food-related events around New York.     LOS ALDAMAS, MEXICO -- Javier Martinez Gonzalez may have thought himself a lucky man as he arrived in pressed khakis for his first day of work as a police officer in this little country town. Despite the airstrikes, Gaddafi's forces were digging in outside Ajdabiya, which straddles highways that go north to Benghazi and east across the desert to Tobruk. Archaeologists excavating the Jamestown colony site have found in the remains of a 14-year-old girl the first physical evidence of cannibalism by colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.     Cyprien Gaillard’s solo show at MoMA PS1 uses film, photography and artifacts to show that the hubris of every civilization, including ours, will have its just reward. South Africa's parliament issued a reprimand to police Monday after media outlets reported that police stations across the country were running out of rape kits -- a disturbing problem in a country once called "the world's rape capital." Read full article >> Credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith Stocks tumbled yesterday as investor confidence in bank stocks waned, but Wall Street still closed the week in positive territory. Today's Microsoft reorganization marks another huge win for Julie Larson-Green, the 20-year company veteran whose pluck and team spirit helped her rise from rejected applicant to steward of Microsoft's core mission.     Tiger Woods did not express confidence about being 100 percent fit for next month's British Open but said on Wednesday his injured left elbow would be "good enough" for the year's third major championship.     The 24-year-old singer is hardly the first to push the buttons of the country-music establishment, but she might be the best at it. Legislators will consider rates totaling up to 30 percent, hoping to pay for new laws without driving customers back to the black micro niche finder News chief labels Joe Biden 'dumb' and Newt Gingrich 'a prick' in official book released ahead of unauthorised accountIt is the opening salvo in the most anticipated media book war of the year – a clash of biographies on the political consultant-turned-media tycoon, Roger Ailes. First out of the blocks is what amounts to an official account, by the columnist Zev Chafets. In a short extract published on the Vanity Fair website, the Fox News boss rails against a slew of top politicians and media figures, from President Obama, Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich to CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Soledad O'Brien."Newt's a prick," Ailes tells Chafets without mincing words. "He's a sore loser and if he had won [the Republican presidential nomination] he would have been a sore winner."Biden is "dumb as an ashtray". And, in the latest blast in the running dispute between the Fox News chief and Obama, he comes perilously close to adopting an old racist stereotype by calling the president "lazy". "Obama's the one who never worked a day in his life," he tells his biographer. "He never earned a penny that wasn't public money. How many fundraisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He's lazy, but the media won't report that."The Chafets book, Roger Ailes Off Camera, is due to be published on 19 March and was written with the benefit of many hours of interviews with Ailes as well as with his friends, family and colleagues.In the Chafets book, Ailes comes across as a cantankerous but witty game-player. Blitzer gets a nod of approval as a "good journalist" but is castigated for his rear end as it appears on camera: "I doubt if the audience really wants to see some size 42 short guy with his back to the camera." And O'Brien? She's "named after a prison".The left-of-center news channel, MSNBC, also gets a kicking. Ailes advised NBC not to go with that name, on the grounds that "MS is a damn disease".There has been much speculation that Ailes agreed to co-operate with Chafets in order to get in a rose-tinted version of his life before the unauthorised account gets onto the bookshelves. The Loudest Voice in the Room: Fox News and the Making of America, by the New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman, will be published in May without the benefit of access to Ailes but drawing on Sherman's prodigious skills as a reporter.Certainly, Chafets' account portrays the TV giant in positive light, if the extract is anything to go by. It opens with Ailes watching his son google sniper download play basketball in a school match and in highlights put out by Vanity Fair, Ailes is shown to be collecting memorabilia to leave his child when he dies.The collection includes a pocket-size copy of the US constitution with a note: "The founders believed it and so should you"; a couple of biographies of Ronald Reagan; and a plain brown envelope stuffed with $2,000 in cash that says: "Here's the allowance I owe you."The one person who doesn't fall foul of Ailes's caustic humour, apart from his son, is Rupert Murdoch, his boss and patron. No surprises there – the two men have been thick since Murdoch employed Ailes to create Fox News for News Corporation in 1996.But Ailes tells Chafets the secret of their enduring bond is not friendship. "Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn't matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I'm killed. Our relationship isn't about love – it's about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I've met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert's money like it is mine."Fox NewsNews CorporationBiographyUnited StatesUS politicsEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Meeting in Beijing, the presidents of the two countries agreed to work together to resume six-nation talks, stalled since 2008, aimed at ending the North’s nuclear programs.     NEW YORK, Jan. 13 -- Wall Street's growing angst about company earnings gave stocks a mixed finish Tuesday, with the Dow Jones industrials suffering their fifth straight loss. An eight-storey block housing factories and a shopping centre on the outskirts of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka collapsed on April 24, killing at least 87 people and injuring hundreds. When we asked to see what's in your school children's packed lunch, you gave us something completely different. Here's a round up of the best alternative tweets (see the real ones here)[Please note: this column is put together using Storify, which does not work on our mobile site and apps. If nothing loads below this paragraph, click here to go to Storify itself, or use the desktop version of the site.]To see the real UK packed lunch pictures go here.School mealsGuardian readersguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The country's benchmark stock average plummeted 10.6 percent after a 6 percent drop

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