Helium

The sleepless nights spent worrying about helium started about a month ago. That's when Leon Sorin -- owner of Balloons by Sorin, balloon artist and vendor of these floating balls for events including Columbia University festivities and bar mitzvahs -- was told that he would get one or two tanks of helium instead of his usual weekly supply of 10. "People are panicking and the balloon stores are limiting you to 10 balloons per person," said Sorin, whose company is based in Queens, N.Y.

The Grand Canyon may be much older than widely believed, according to a new study that challenges the view that the American landmark was born 5 million or 6 million years ago. Analyzing helium levels in rocks chipped away from outcrops in the western portion of the canyon, geologist Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado at Boulder and geochemist Kenneth Farley of Caltech concluded that the gorge was already there - and within a few hundred...

It's raining on Jupiter. And probably on Saturn too. But it isn't raining rain, you know. It's raining . . . helium. Yes, droplets of that inert gas that keeps the Goodyear blimp aloft and that powers the runaway house in the movie "Up" are falling like a soft rain from the upper atmosphere of the planet into the gas giant's high-pressure interior. In the process, they're washing away the neon that should also be in the upper atmosphere, researchers from UC Berkeley reported Monday in the online version of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Reporting from San Diego -- A former schoolteacher who sold suicide kits that she once touted as leaving people "eternally sleepy" pleaded guilty Friday to a tax evasion charge and agreed to stop encouraging people to commit suicide. Sharlotte Hydorn mailed more than 1,300 of the so-called helium hood suicide kits to people around the world, concealing the true nature of the product by describing the boxes as "orchid humidifiers" or "beauty bonnets" or "plastic rain hoods" on U.S. customs forms, according to federal prosecutors.

Edwin E. Salpeter, 83, an astrophysicist whose work in the "Salpeter-Bethe equation" showed how helium changes to carbon, died of leukemia Tuesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor emeritus of physical sciences. Salpeter attended Cornell in 1949 as a postdoctoral student and spent his career there. In 1951, he and Cornell theoretical physicist Hans Bethe, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics, introduced an equation showing how helium nuclei fuse to form carbon in the interiors of ancient stars.

A team of UC Irvine scientists has performed a liquid-to-surface experiment with results that could one day improve millions of household products, from glues and paints to dyes and cleaners. Writing in the Oct. 24 issue of Science, Peter Taborek, James Rutledge and David Ross describe getting liquid helium to perform the scientific version of water on a duck's back: It beaded up and formed droplets instead of automatically wetting the surface.

It is like a giant gas bubble that won't burst. And for years, it has given Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) a lot of heartburn. But Cox may finally have succeeded in breaking up this bubble: the 31-billion-cubic-foot National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Tex. Just before Congress scooted out of town Monday, the House and Senate voted again to get the federal government out of the hot air business--a reserve that is $1.4 billion in debt to the federal treasury.

The Grand Canyon may be much older than widely believed, according to a new study that challenges the view that the American landmark was born 5 million or 6 million years ago. Analyzing helium levels in rocks chipped away from outcrops in the western portion of the canyon, geologist Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado at Boulder and geochemist Kenneth Farley of Caltech concluded that the gorge was already there - and within a few hundred...

Billy Jack Moore, general manager of the United States Helium Reserve, slides his government-issue Jeep Cherokee onto the gravel shoulder of old U.S. Route 66 and pulls to a stop 100 yards from Amarillo's most famous monument to absurdity, the "Cadillac Ranch." Twenty years ago, Stanley Marsh 3 (not III), the local eccentric rich guy, planted a row of 10 Caddies nose down in arid ranch land and called it art.

The recent dramatic announcement at a press conference in Salt Lake City, that nuclear fusion had been achieved at room temperature, seems to have produced a state of hysteria that interfers with normal scientific communication. Concerning the Utah experiments: If one accepts that heat is generated and that neutrons appear in far too few numbers to account for that heat, one is led to consider reactions in which the two deuterons form Helium-4, rather than Helium-3 and a neutron.

For the first time, astronomers have discovered clouds of pristine gas in the distant universe about 12 billion light-years away. The finding offers a peek at what primordial gas looked like just a few minutes after the big bang, before heavier elements formed — a time when star formation was very different than it is today. The gas clouds, which appear — surprisingly — to have survived for about 2 billion years after the big bang almost 14 billion years ago, were discovered through looking at the light from distant quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe.

April Fools' has been a busy "news" day for the airline industry. In the name of fun, many carriers worldwide are announcing groundbreaking innovations aimed at improving the passenger experience, cutting costs and even defying the laws of physics. Earlier, I wrote about Ryanair's move to offer child-free flights . Here's a roundup of more April Fools' airline news/gags: -- In a post on its blog, Southwest announced that its team of scientists (the kind who study time travel, not the kind who build planes)

Astronomer Leonard Searle, a former director of the Carnegie Observatories whose observations provided crucial information in determining the conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe and helped explain how heavy elements are produced in stars, has died. He was 79. Searle died July 2 at his home in Pasadena, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. No cause of death was released. Searle also played a crucial role in the construction of the twin 6.5-meter (255-inch)

It's raining on Jupiter. And probably on Saturn too. But it isn't raining rain, you know. It's raining . . . helium. Yes, droplets of that inert gas that keeps the Goodyear blimp aloft and that powers the runaway house in the movie "Up" are falling like a soft rain from the upper atmosphere of the planet into the gas giant's high-pressure interior. In the process, they're washing away the neon that should also be in the upper atmosphere, researchers from UC Berkeley reported Monday in the online version of the journal Physical Review Letters.

The Orange County Great Park's main attraction -- a giant helium balloon ride -- has seen more colorful days. Two years out in the sun on an old airfield in Irvine has faded the painted surface of the giant balloon from a vibrant orange to a pale peach. So the vessel is being outfitted with a bright-new envelope shipped in from France, which was inflated last week so it can once again carry visitors in a gondola 400 feet into the air. It will take a crew of 30 workers five days to replace the balloon and pump it full of helium, officials say. This time around, the city is using a dye-impregnated fabric with UV-protected pigment, which is expected to retain its radiant orange hue for at least five years.

As success follows success for animation powerhouse Pixar, the pressure to maintain the streak must be phenomenal. Will the next film be the one that stumbles, the one that breaks stride? No one need worry, however, about "Up," Pixar's 10th and latest effort. It's not only good, it's one of Pixar's best. Some films are an obligation to write about, "Up" is the purest pleasure. Though films such as "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters, Inc."

The article by Heppenheimer (Jan. 29), "It Is Time to Call the Shuttle Obsolete," is misleading. In his analogy of the explosion of the Challenger and that of the dirigible Hindenburg, the author states that the Hindenburg disaster "exposed the flaws in the dirigible as a passenger carrier." This is not entirely true. The Hindenburg explosion was caused by the fact that the dirigible was filled with highly explosive hydrogen rather than inert helium. This unfortunate situation was because the only source of helium in 1937 was the United States and, for various reasons, we refused to sell it to the Germans.

Reporting from San Diego -- A former schoolteacher who sold suicide kits that she once touted as leaving people "eternally sleepy" pleaded guilty Friday to a tax evasion charge and agreed to stop encouraging people to commit suicide. Sharlotte Hydorn mailed more than 1,300 of the so-called helium hood suicide kits to people around the world, concealing the true nature of the product by describing the boxes as "orchid humidifiers" or "beauty bonnets" or "plastic rain hoods" on U.S. customs forms, according to federal prosecutors.

Edwin E. Salpeter, 83, an astrophysicist whose work in the "Salpeter-Bethe equation" showed how helium changes to carbon, died of leukemia Tuesday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor emeritus of physical sciences. Salpeter attended Cornell in 1949 as a postdoctoral student and spent his career there. In 1951, he and Cornell theoretical physicist Hans Bethe, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics, introduced an equation showing how helium nuclei fuse to form carbon in the interiors of ancient stars.

The world's largest atom smasher, which was launched with great fanfare this month, has been damaged twice and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said. The European Organization for Nuclear Research said that a large amount of helium had leaked into the 17-mile circular tunnel that houses the Large Hadron Collider deep under the Swiss-French border. The massive collider had to be shut down only 36 hours after it began operating. A second failure took place midday Friday.