May 09, 2004

SEAL Chosen For NASA's Astronaut Program
I wonder how high a beach ball will bounce in zero gravity
Just kidding.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced May 6 that Lt. Cmdr. Chris Cassidy, a Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) assigned to a locally based SEAL Team, was selected for NASA’s Astronaut Program [requires Flash].

So was Jose M. Hernandez. On leave from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work at NASA, he is one of 11 men and women selected by NASA today to join the 2004 Astronaut Candidate Class.

Cool Stuff I Know Nothing About
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have released results from the first experiment at Brookhaven’s Deep Ultraviolet Free Electron Laser (DUV-FEL), a facility that produces powerful ultraviolet laser light for research applications.

Facts and Figures related to the Fourth of July, from the US Census Bureau.
Lots of facts and figures.

Really Cool Stuff That I Really Know Nothing About
Researchers working at the University of California's Los Alamos Neutron Science Center and eight other member institutions of an international collaboration took a giant step toward their goal of constructing the most intense source of ultra-cold neutrons in the world, measuring ultra-cold neutron production in their new source for the first time.
"Ultimately, we want to be able to bottle ultra-cold neutrons and watch them decay, giving us new insights into particle physics," said Tom Bowles of Los Alamos' Physics Division, who leads the team.
* * * * *
The 800-million-electron-volt LANSCE proton beam strikes a tungsten target; each proton that hits produces about 14 neutrons at energies of a few million electron volts, which are reduced to typical cold neutron temperatures of 40 Kelvin by scattering in polyethylene moderators.
* * * * *
LANSCE is uniquely suited to the production of UCNs and fundamental research with neutrons, Bowles said.
Of course.

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