women-scientists-from-australia

"I always thought maybe I could transfer to medicine at some point but I never actually did in the end. When I started to work on some of these problems, I found it so interesting that I couldn’t break away. I was lucky I found a group of supervisors who had done some very, very interesting physics."

"A big problem in science is the inadequate recognition given to the female physicists who made groundbreaking contributions last century."

"My research group studies microbial communities, primarily using cultivation-independent approaches such as genomics (metagenomics) and community proteomics."

"I am a Professor in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Science and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (see contact information below)."

"There's this guy called Monsier Mangetout... a Frenchman who, according to Wikipedia ate all of these crazy things. Even he, though, wouldn't eat a particle accelerator because parts of the machine become radioactive, and while he seems to be fairly stupid, given the things he ate, even he wouldn't go that far."

"So when we're thinking about radiation and radioactivity, it is worth keeping in mind that just the fact that something is radioactive does not means it's harmful..."

"There are foods which are naturally radioactive, but most of us would like to think we've never eaten food that actually been in a particle accelerator. ...That sounds a bit crazy. ...In the UK we don't eat many things that have in a particle accelerator but things like herbs and spices, and some other things occasionally go through a process called cold pasteurization, electronic pasteurization, which uses electrons from a to treat the food. ...It is legal in the UK and in the EU, and it's fully authorized... [T]here's a number of foods... which have been irradiated, or could have been irradiated, and that goes... from bananas, sometimes... to slow down the ripening process... so they have a longer shelf life... [A]s you increase the amount of radiation that these things are treated with... from some grains, seafood to kill bacteria, herbs and spices are a more common one, and then even sometimes higher doses on things like poultry, to kill ."

"They developed this machine which was only about this big [~1 meter] and they used ultra-lightweight materials, and it only weighed about 50 kg. So compare that with a 27 kilometer long ring. ...It was only low energy but they... sent it up in a rocket and they actually tested it in space and brought it back down... and they tested it again on earth, and it still worked, which I think is an incredible feat of engineering... [P]eople really haven't heard of this experiment... It's called the BEAR (Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket) project in 1989, and I have a contact who worked on it..."

"[O]ne of the reasons we want to do this is because we want to drive... an . This is where you take a , a fission reactor. In the core, instead of having , it has an element called , which is... much more abundant, and you don't have to refine it. You can use all of it. Hook up to the reactor a particle accelerator, a very high power proton accelerator. So the protons come in and they smash into a heavy metal target and create s... [T]hose neutrons... drive the reaction in the reactor, so without the accelerator there, the reactor is subcritical. It doesn't produce energy. It doesn't sustain a , but once you add in the accelerator you can continue to drive the reaction and generate energy... [I]n fact you could transmute existing nuclear waste into something much shorter lived and much safer."

"What could you do... if you took particle accelerators, and you made them really powerful... [T]his is something that I work on, is taking proton accelerators of relatively low energy, but putting more and more particles in, and getting a really high beam power..."

"Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mostly for the reasons that I explained before. Even if you had the Large Hadron Collider in space, I have no idea how you'd get it up there, but even if you did, it would... be difficult to do damage with it. Mostly because beams would just go through things and out the other side."

"So we can't use it as a weapon of mass destruction. This is another one... that someone told me that you shouldn't do with a particle accelerator... [Y]ou shouldn't eat it, which is true."

"The interesting thing about radiation is it is naturally present in most of the things around us. ...How many bananas do you think you'd have to eat to get a dose of radiation that would make you sick? ...It's the in the bananas. ...A very small percentage of the potassium is naturally radioactive, but you... have to eat five million... in one sitting to get sick..."

"This thing... is a , and it will tell us whether these things are radioactive. ...There is something coming off [clicking noise from the thoriated rods] there. Just to demonstrate that the bananas are really only mildly radioactive, we can't pick them up with a Geiger counter. It's really is very mild."

"Now is the stuff that does us damage, and there's three... types... called alpha, beta and gamma radiation. ...Alpha radiation won't go through your hand, beta radiation won't go through a piece of aluminum [a few millimeters thick] and gamma radiation is penetrating and won't go through a big piece of ."

"This is not a dangerous process. In fact it's a really really useful process to kill the bacteria in our food and make it healthy for human consumption, and just because we've irradiated it does not mean that it becomes radioactive. So there's a distinct difference here between a naturally radioactive food, or something [like a thoriated rod] which would be genuinely harmful to me if I ate it, and food which has been irradiated, because it's only gone through that process to treat it to make it fit for human consumption."

"So what about the heat from the beam? Well this is a challenge... [I]t's actually incredibly difficult to stop the beam, and if you put your head in front of the beam... it would actually go straight through and out the other side. In fact it has enough energy to go through your head and out the other side about 100,000 times before it loses all it's energy... [T]hat's actually one of the issues they had to deal with when designing the machine, is how do you stop the beam... [W]e want to stop it occasionally, intentionally..."

"In the U.S. if you see this green symbol on your food, that doesn't mean it's organic. It means it's been irradiated, which is a little bit misleading..."

"Radiation effects. ...There's this guy, , who... before the days of such strict health and safety, somehow managed to bypass a safety mechanism on an accelerator, and stick his head in a 76 GeV proton beam. Now that's quite a lot lower than the Large Hadron Collider beam, but the amazing thing is that he just saw a really bright flash, and he didn't feel any pain at all... Most people think, "Well, this beam, it's got lots of energy. It will just destroy you" but actually that's not quite what happened. ...[A]fter it happened his face swelled right up and the skin on that side pealed off, but he didn't die. ...[H]e went on to get his PhD and... he worked as a scientist for many years... [H]e's actally still alive in Russia, living in relative obscurity. ...A journalist interviewed him few years ago and... because the side of his face that the beam irradiated was paralyzed... and he hasn't been able to move the skin on that side of his face for so many years. That side of his face like it was... the day that this accident occurred. When I... read this, I was like, "Miracle cure for aging!" Yea, paralyzed face is probably not a miracle cure..."

"In the days of Cockroft and Walton, when they were first developing particle accelerators they didn't know about the dangers of radiation, and so one of the ways that they counted the events... what was happening in their experiments, was... to sit... under the beam. The beam would come down, some nuclear reaction would happen, and... his fluorescent screen... would light up every time what they were looking for happened... [T]hey would sit there and count each time it lit up, sitting underneath the beam, being irradiated. ...[T]hese people lived relatively healthy lives, and Cockroft and Walton got a for work, which doesn't justify it, but there have been people who have stuck their heads in particle accelerators."

"So you can actually put your head in the beam of an accelerator and survive it. And he's not the only one to have done it."

"So we can't use it as a weapon. ...No deployed weapon has ever used this technology."

"Now the radiation dose that the LHC beam could give you could kill you 76,000 times over, but the radiation dose you'd receive from a beam of say 200 MeV, a relatively modest proton beam, is much lower and can... be used to treat cancer... [W]e use this in... , which we're getting in the UK. We actually did pioneer it and... it hasn't quite come back onto the NHS yet..."

"If you use protons instead you can... get a much better defined distribution of the dose and this is really a fantastic treatment. It is more expensive than x-ray radiotherapy, but based on the basic physics of how a beam reacts inside... the body, or inside tissue... it's a fantastic treatment, and one that we should look forward to using in the future."

"[I]n cancer therapy usually you like to direct a dose of radiation exactly where you'd like it, so in this case... a child with a spine that needs irradiating. They've had a tumor removed from the base of the skull and they need to irradiate the spine in order to stop the cancer spreading down the spine... With... usual X-ray radiotherapy the dose distribution there is the best that we can do using all modern techniques. You can see that underneath the spine in... the stomach area there is quite a lot of radiation dose that we might not want..."

"The only problem is [that] the accelerator for this is about 10 times more powerful... than we can currently make. So there's lots of challenges for people like me who design accelerators, to try and come up with ways of making them more and more powerful, for very good reason."

"So it sounded like a crazy question, but if you had a brain tumor you might very well want to stick your head in the beam of a particle accelerator."

"People in the U.S. did think about building a particle accelerator (a neutral beam accelerator) that they would launch into space... and then they would use it to shoot down satellites and... missiles and destroy anything that they didn't like, because they were going to have this super powerful beam in space."

"Number three. Don't use a particle accelerator as a death ray. When I was putting together this lecture I asked... my very esteemed colleagues, "Has anyone ever tried to develop an accelerator as a weapon?" And they said, "Oh mumble, mumble cold war, space, Star Wars something or other... No" That was their conclusion... They were wrong."

"That thing... is radioactive. They're called thoriated rods, and they're used in welding. You can... just buy them."

"So what is ? It's energy in the form of moving particles or waves, emitted by an atom or another body as it changes from one energy state to another. That's the official definition."

"So they had to put a lot of effort into designing... the , which is a massive long block of very dense , which absorbs the energy. But even then there's so much energy that they can't just dump it directly on it, or the would make the thing explode. So they actually have to paint the beam in... a swirly pattern... to spread out the load of the heat from the beam on this huge graphite block."

"What about the ? ...People have done studies in outer space of astronauts and how long they could survive in the vacuum... That information say that you can survive in outer space with your spacesuit open for about ten seconds before you're ripped apart by the vacuum. So I don't think that's going to get you first."

"So there's some really interesting applications of accelerators, way outside of the realm of particle physics, that we're starting to get a handle on."

"If you just put this beam onto a massive block of copper, you could actually melt 600 tons of copper from solid to liquid, just using the Large Hadron Collider beam."

"Nowadays you wouldn't want to do that voluntarily, and you wouldn't want to do it without understanding the consequences, but there are some situations that you might want to do it in... [T]here's a very good reason for that, because if you take a much lower energy beam that the Large Hadron Collider beam, and you put it into water, or into the human body, or into tissue and you start it with the correct amount of energy, it will actually slow down and stop, and deposit almost all of its dose (or its energy) in one spot... [W]e call this the ."

"So it's interesting, even though it seems like a stupid question to say what would happen if you stuck your head in it. It does actually present some interesting real problems in engineering, in actually designing these machines."

"What is a particle accelerator? ...This is the ...the world's biggest particle accelerator. It's 27 kilometers in circumference ...buried about 100 meters underground between the borders of France and Switzerland, near Geneva."

"That's only one particle accelerator. There are actually over 26,000 of them in the world."

"I'll tell you very briefly how they work. ...The first thing we need is some ...s, or even atoms themselves perhaps."

"Four different types of particles: electrons, s, s and gold atoms. ...Can anyone suggest which one you can't put in a particle accelerator? ...A . Yep! Do you know why? Because it isn't charged. Thank you very much. ...[I]t doesn't have an ."

"Now there's another one... that might not have an electric charge... The gold atom, yes. Can anyone suggest a way to get that gold atom into a particle accelerator? ...You can ionize it. Thank you. So to ionize a gold atom you can rip the electrons off or add more electrons on... Give it an electric charge, and then we can put it into a particle accelerator. So that's the kind of particles we need."

"The next thing we want to do with those particles is to give them some energy. That's the basics of how an accelerator works. I've got a machine here called a which does that..."

"Building up charge, actually building up , is the key to giving particles energy in a particle accelerator. ...Now some of the first particle accelerators were actually genuinely using this mechanism of having a belt and some rollers, and building up lots of voltage. They were called Van de Graaff accelerators. They still exist. I've worked on one... If they're the same charge, which get repelled, and there's force there, they're pushed away and they gain some energy... [I]n the case of an accelerator we'll get our particles... going faster and faster and faster toward the speed of light."

"I have a demonstration... which is the simplest particle accelerator I could make.... in a giant salad bowl. ...[W]hen it goes over the charged strip it picks up the same charge and it gets repelled ...then it hits the grounded strip and it dumps all of that charge, but it keeps its momentum, it keeps rolling around ...So every time it goes over one of those four [repelling] strips ....it gets a kick, or gets accelerated and it gains energy again and again. ...In this demonstration, the ball has to change charge, and fundamental particles don't change charge, so in this case my voltage in constant and the ...[ball] changes charge, in a real accelerator we have a constant charged particle, and that means we have to change the voltage."

"Why couldn't you put your pet in a particle accelerator? ...It doesn't have an electric charge. ...He's slightly too big, and the other thing... he's going to be affected by the vacuum in the pipe of the machine..."

"What I'm going to do is suck out all of the air out of this container and see what happens to marshmallow man, or indeed, what might happen to our pet bunny rabbit in a particle accelerator. ...Oh my gosh it's huge! That's amazing! Sorry, we haven't tested this. I didn't realize it was going to be this good. ...That's probably what would happen to your little bunny rabbit, but in a slightly more horrific fashion."

"So my number two thing you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator. You probably shouldn't put your head in the beam... On this one I want to have... a vote... What might kill you first? ...Would your head freeze because of the ? It's at minus 271 degrees Celsius] in some accelerators... take the Large Hadron Collider for example. There the magnets are pretty cold, or would the heat from the beam make your head explode, or would your head explode from the , or would you die from the dose? ...I want a show of hands for which one you think would get you first."

"It depends on which accelerator we're talking about, but let's consider the . ...It's minus 271 degrees. ...This is a picture of one of the 15m long s, one of the [beam] bending magnets in the machine... but it's extremely difficult to get your head in there. So... you wouldn't stick your head in the dipole. You'd stick it in somewhere easier... that wasn't cooled down to minus 271."

"But they did, in fact. One of the interesting things I discovered, they did put a particle accelerator in space, which I think is fantastic."