Tara: The grid is like the next step up from the World Wide Web, if you like. Just as anybody with the computer and internet access can share information on the web so particle physicists can plug all their computers together. They have internet access and some special software that makes them all work together and come up with a distributed supercomputer that not only shares information but also the computing power of all the computers they have together. If you consider how big our experiments are, about 2000 people from 80 countries typically in the case of ATLAS. If all these institutions share their computers then they effectively make a supercomputer which is powerful enough to analyse the huge amounts of data that we need to analyse from the LHC to make our discoveries.

Ben: Everything isn’t round. Admittedly planets and stars and things are and a bubble of soap that you blow is as well. That’s essentially because tension pulls everything in and tends to make it spherical. If you’re talking about fundamental particles they’re not. When you see representations in a text book you’ll have a little round ball. That’s not what they’re like. They’re actually really weird. They travel as if they’re a wave. They get absorbed as if they’re a dot. It’s not really like a sphere and you’re talking about what’s happening at very small distance scales with quantum physics.

Chris: There was a paper in Nature recently where scientists were able to visualise hydrogen atoms with a stream of electrons. They were round balls.

Ben: yes, so a hydrogen atom isn’t fundamental. It’s made of a core and something orbiting round the edge. It’s a bit like a solar system and that does go round in a circle. There’s a force and it reaches equilibrium just like the Earth goes around the sun. It’s the same kind of picture.

Chris: What about the tiny bits inside? How do you know what shape they are?

Ben: You don’t they’re dots, they’re weird, they’re fuzzy and they’re quantum.

Helen: Wonderful question, thank you very much. The seas around Antarctica get incredibly cold. Because of the salt in it they can actually go down to -1.9 degrees centigrade. So how on Earth can things live there? In the 1980s scientists discovered that Antarctic cod or ice fish actually have antifreeze inside their blood. Since then scientists have been poking around trying to find out how it works. We’re still not quite sure. It basically seems to be something to do with these things called glycopeptides. They’re a protein covered in sugar which seem to stop ice crystals from growing any bigger by various ways of interacting with the water there. It also seems that the cod are able to survive with little tiny crystals in their blood. Their blood flows even if there’s some little ones, as long as they don’t grow any bigger they’re ok. What can we do with it? It’s something that it’s possible we might be able to use these antifreezes for preserving donor organs. It’s the idea of how do we stop things from freezing and not deteriorating whilst they are frozen? It could also be a better, more environmentally sensitive way of actually doing antifreeze for things like roads. Someone’s actually started putting the genes for it inside of yeast so they can create it artificially and create lots of it. It’s a possibility we might be using it. And on cars, perhaps!

Chris: I think that this is all down to mirror neurons. There’s a paper in Nature Neuroscience a few weeks ago and they were looking at Olympic sportsmen. They were looking specifically at basketball players. They showed that pro basketball players (when they were watching footage of people trying to put a ball into a basket) even though they didn’t show them all the footage, they just showed them the ball in the hand of the thrower and just up to the moment when they threw it. They stopped the footage and said, ’Which balls are going to go into the basket?’ The pro players were able to correctly, 70% of the time, just by looking at the hand position work out whether they were going to get a basket. What they did at the same time was to measure the activity of the muscles in the subjects hands and they found that what these people were doing was superimposing what they saw as the position of the thrower’s hands onto their own motor areas of their brain in order to work out and compare what that thrower was doing compared with what they would do in the same circumstances in order to work out what they thought was going to happen. This is an elegant way of showing that when we experience the world around us we superimpose what we’re seeing other people doing, what we’re seeing going on around us onto our own internal map of the world: these mirror neurone. These reflect the behaviour of other people, showing us what sorts of emotions they’re experiencing and what they’re thinking. This helps us to predict what they’re going to do and therefore how to react and respond to them. When someone feels sad it makes you feel a bit sad. You feel their pain and this means that you can then put yourself in their shoes so you know how to respond appropriately. It’s all about empathy. I think that probably what Gary’s feeling is the effect of his mirror neurons. Pretty much all bits of the brain have these neurons, especially the bits of the brain that sense anxiety, fear, disgust and maybe even motor and visual things.

Helen: A little part of us also wins those gold medals.