In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious – but completely paralysed.

“I screamed, but there was no one to hear,” he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben’s cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning. (The doctor has only just now made Houben’s story public.)

Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46. He has spent more than half his life trapped in his own body, and says he only survived this excruciating existence by dreaming himself away. In the interview, this is what he typed:

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say “no hope”. I meditated, I dreamed my life away – it was all I could do. I don’t want to blame anyone – it wouldn’t do any good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.

I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to speak about their boyfriends in front of “the extinct one”. That made me an expert on relationships.

According to Laureys, Houben’s case may be far more common than we’d like to think. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, says that while Houben’s doctors were “not good”, he’s not sure better ones using this same coma scale would have detected brain activity either:

In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3000 to 5000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage – they go on living without ever coming back again.

In his paper, Laureys writes that in about 40 per cent of “vegetative state” cases he has analysed, current brain-scanning techniques reveal signs of varying levels of consciousness. A case is being made, it seems, to stop relying on the Glasgow Coma Scale and start looking more closely at brain-scanning images.

Henry Markram, the Blue Brain guy, says in an email to IBM’s CTO, that the project is not even close to an ant’s brain and that the kind of simulations pulled off by IBM are trivial. He also calls the whole thing “stupid”, and “extremely harmful to the field”. [IEEE via Popsci]

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

1.2 tera-electro volts? Great. So until Christmas you can keep going with your normal beige lives, not taking any chances or risks, typing away in your hamster wheels. Two, remember that life can end at any moment, and get out of the wheel. To a beach. Preferably with another hamster. One with a nice butt and a pretty smile.

These are the computer images showing the first collisions:

Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC

Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronisation of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN* Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimisation, followed by LHCb.

“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years’ work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance,” said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

“The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.

“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions,” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

Whatever, I’m just happy we are not being sucked by a Black Hole right now. Life is good, my dear boys and girls. Life is good.

This video shows Earth’s weather from August 17-26, 2009. It also shows how beautiful this planet is and how insignificant we are. It was created at a 7km resolution with NASA’s GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model.

The GEOS-5 atmospheric model was developed by NASA Goddard’s scientists. It’s based on the Earth System Modelling Framework, an open-source project “for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation and other Earth science software applications”.

To really appreciate its beauty, you can watch the 1080p high definition video at NASA. [NASA via @NASAGoddard]

The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago. We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.

Wait wait wait. WAIT, Mr Director for Accelerators Steve Myers, Sir. What do you mean that the machine is “far better understood” now? How could they spend a billion bazillion dollars on this thing and not understand it in the first place? Do we really know what are we up to here? Should I book a ticket to Costa Rica and go watch the end of the world from the beach?

The LHC is now circulating beams for the first time since September 2008 when it suffered a serious malfunction. It has taken them a year to repair it, which will explain the origin of the Universe or kick all of our atomic arses out of it.

The LHC is back

Geneva, 20 November 2009. Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN*’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o’clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.

“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”

If you were hanging out outside in Utah on Wednesday night, chances are good that you witnessed a pretty rare astronomic event: a friggin’ huge meteor that lit up the entire sky.

Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the stony meteorite was probably travelling 80,000 miles [129,000km] an hour when it hit our atmosphere. He said it happened 100 miles [160km] up in the air; so despite the brightness, Utah was never in any danger. “These collisions can do damage, but they are extremely rare; and literally once in a century do you observe something that’s actually doing damage,” he said. Witness Andy Bailey said, “Oh, it lit up the whole sky, like almost brighter than the day. It was bright.” Don White was in Wyoming and told KSL Newsradio for a moment he suspected a nuclear strike. “With something that brilliant and that fast, it was like, whoa, did we just get hit or something? It would have been some bigger noise I guess if a nuclear device had gone off,” he said.

[KSL via Boing Boing]

Lego: It’s not really a secret that Lego building blocks are widely loved. They’re perfect for any age, but a particularly fun gift for an engineering or physics nerd who lacks some brightly-coloured fun. Whether you go for a Millennium Falcon, a Mindstorms NXT robot set, or a smaller kit, just be sure your beloved recipient has time for construction. Prices vary widely. [Lego; Image Source]

BuckyBalls: 216 pellet-shaped rare earth magnets may scream “physics lesson”, but in reality they’re a jar full of fun. Your science nut can construct all sorts of 3D shapes for hours of mindless — or extremely brain-intensive — entertainment. And should he ever manage to get bored with the balls, he can just use them for one heck of a refrigerator magnet collection. $US30 [Gizmodo; Busted Tees]

DON’T BUY A Star: I don’t know how you could imagine that getting someone a sheet of paper proclaiming that you’ve named a star after her is a clever idea. It’s a scam to begin with and even the most thoughtless gift certificate would be a better idea (and won’t leave you stuttering that you thought she “likes space and umm… stuff”).

Photo by jared

I’ve never seen a stocking that didn’t like being filled with a bit of awkward science-themed, cotton-based humour and somehow science nerds in particular have a soft spot for geeky shirts. You can head to ThinkGeek, Threadless and Snorg Tees if you’re looking for some of the shirts we’ve mentioned in the past — my personal favourite is still the ingredient shirt. $US19 [Snorg Tees]

Chemistry Experiment Kit: This one’s more geared to the younger lab rats, but no science nerd should miss out on a proper chemistry set. This C3000 set is a nice splurge and even guides you through building a DIY fire extinguisher for when experiments go wrong, but you can certainly go for a smaller kit or even put one together on your own. $US230 [Scientifics]

Casio EX-FC100: Science types want to document the entire world in pictures and video. Thanks to technological advancements, falling prices and MythBusters, high-speed slow-mo photography has carved out a nerdy niche in recent years. Casio’s EX-FC100 may not be an EX-F1, but it’s nice and small and has most of that slow mo covered, plus some nice nature-watcher tricks in still shooting, too. Despite the fact that still picture quality isn’t as high as a similarly sized Canon, the FC100’s set of unique talents make it a worthwhile toy for active observers of the physical world. $US226 [Review; Casio Exilim]

Giant Plush Microbes: If you’re in need of a stocking stuffer for a biology nerd, these plush microbes are a sure thing. They’re cute (just look at syphilis!) and add a bit of silliness to many all-too-serious subjects. $US12 [Think Geek]

Processing Time on a Supercomputer: If you’ve got a mad, crazy, number-crunching, super science nerd on your hands — along with your own pretty thick wallet — then you can go through a company like Exa and get them some quiet time with a supercomputer. Your nerd will be able to run her insane calculations using high-performance computing and save quite a bit of time, so be sure to have some hot chocolate for two ready for a calm evening after. Prices vary, but they’re gonna clean out your pockets. [Exa]

Photo by Argonne National Laboratory

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite gift ideas for science nerds in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favourite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We’ll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

[Big Picture]

I’m not quite sure what exactly is going on here, me being somewhat of a dullard and all, but I do know one thing: this there is one neat video.

[Random Good Stuff]