6 ms·
Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator
- subcosmos 8y agoTo ferret out a leak!
- rzzzt 8y agoferrite
- api 8y agoWay to introduce invasive species to parallel universes...
- tyingq 8y ago"A necropsy revealed a ruptured abscess in her intestinal tract." Makes you wonder if she ate some of those metal fragments.
- Griffinsauce 8y agoProbably not, some ferrets are keen to eat everything soft, including rubber, but metal? Not really. Could be due to a suboptimal diet though, ferrets have very short intestines, can't digest anything besides meat and easily develop problems because of that.
- tyingq 8y agoI was assuming something like licking shavings off its own fur, like a cat might. But I don't know anything about ferrets...
- imglorp 8y agoI've had six ferrets at a time. Whoever coined "barrel of monkeys" never met a business of ferrets: a swirling ball of play, character, and mischief looking for trouble. They'll steal anything not tied down and hide it under the couch usually. Their favorite toy is a length of dryer exhaust hose: they spend hours running through and ambushing whoever comes out the end.
- ada1981 8y agoWe had a brother and sister pair growing up. What fun and funny creatures.
- jxcl 8y agoThank you for introducing me to the fact that a collection of ferrets is called a "business". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology
- ada1981 8y ago>> A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet. Ferrets under one year old are known as kits. A group of ferrets is known as a "business", or historically as a "busyness". Other purported collective nouns, including "besyness", "fesynes", "fesnyng", and "feamyng", appear in some dictionaries, but are almost certainly ghost words. <<
- twic 8y agoThis reminds me, that an old name for a rabbit is a "coney", and an old name for a rabbit warren is a "coney-borough", a fortified town of rabbits. Over time, that became simply "burrow".
- exelius 8y agoFerrets absolutely love running through tight tunnels! I’ve heard stories (maybe apocryphal?) that ferrets are/were used to run pull cord in long underground fiber conduit runs.
- wolfgang42 8y agoDefinitely not apocryphal: "Ferrets: The World's Cutest Working Cable Guys | Superpets" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4 https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-secret-in-cabling/ https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-secre... https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1999-10-03-9910030091-story.html https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1999-10-03-99100... (warning: 90% ads) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7541455/Ferrets-key-to-bridging-the-digital-divide-between-cities-and-rural-areas.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/754... http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm
- dfox 8y agoIf I knew about ferrets before various endeavors that involved full-size fiber conduit, tenis balls, strings, duct tape and household vacuum cleaners, I would certainly have saved a lot of effort and research ;) [Edit: and obviously: lard ;)]
- rhn_mk1 8y agoI hate to be nitpicking, but "billion-electron-volt (BeV)" in the first sentence... hurts.
- anonytrary 8y agoIt should read GeV (giga) correct?
- rhn_mk1 8y agoIt's hard to tell without referring to external sources. It could be either GeV or TeV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
- petschge 8y agoYes. The early seventies is when we so tens to hundres of GeV and even the LHC has only reached 6.5 TeV (per direction), well short of the alternative interpretation of 200 TeV.
- Nbadal 8y agoThe ferret equivalent of a vacuum cleaner and a plastic bag and string being pulled through a pipe.
- thomasjudge 8y agoThings one doesn't read very often: "ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too"
- fiftyacorn 8y agoMy first thought was must be Yorkshire - wasnt disappointed - "Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who’d been brought on to NAL to find “shortcuts and money-saving ideas,” suggested a ferret, equipped with a cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if flushing rabbits out of a warren. “In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets,”"
- twic 8y agoThe Chappel Beer Festival, which is a beer festival in Chappel, Essex, is for some reason associated with a local ferret welfare charity, who turn up and run fundraising ferret events. There is a ferret tombola, where a ferret is put into a hexagonal hutch with pipes leading out of each side, and you bet on which one it will come out of, and ferret racing, where ferrets do two laps of a length corrugated pipe, and again, you bet on which will do it fastest: https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3199.jpg https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc... It's remarkably entertaining, although of course having money riding on it always heightens the thrill.
- Erwin 8y agoAnimals in hard science -- that reminds me of the "Always Mount a Scratch Monkey" story: https://edp.org/monkey.htm https://edp.org/monkey.htm (it did NOT end well).
- Lowkeyloki 8y agoI choose to believe that story is nothing more than apocryphal folklore. And nothing you can say will convince me otherwise. :-/
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoTitle is a bit odd. From what I can tell, they did put a ferret in a particle accelerator. :)
- combatentropy 8y agoAgreed. A better use of space would be, "In 1971, Fermilab used a ferret to clean its particle accelerator."
- Lowkeyloki 8y agoYeah, but then it's just a fact and nobody clicks on it. Personally, I'd love a website (or browser plugin or something) that reduced long articles down to a few sentences. That way I could choose whether the actual subject was interesting enough to spend the time reading the whole thing.
- Udik 8y agoThey could have used a string with a tiny piece of metal at the front, and simply "accelerated" it through the conduct. Slower than a proton though :). I wonder if they could activate each of the magnets independently.
- userbinator 8y agoI suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn't share much knowledge, otherwise they may have used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging instead. (That article contains a photo with an interesting caption when taken out of context: "Inserting a pig into a natural gas pipeline".)
- ncmncm 8y agoThey didn't "try". They did. (I did not.) Many times. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.
- decker 8y agoI wonder if they had a contingency plan for the ferret dying inside the tube.