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Publisert 2 kommentarer til Friday Facts is back!
After this week, when North Korea decided to do what they did, what else could be the theme for Friday facts than the hydrogen bomb?
  1. the hydrogen bomb is also called the H-bomb, a fusion weapon/bomb, or a thermonuclear weapon
  2. the point of a "real" hydrogen bomb is to get hydrogen to fuse, and to get a large portion of energy released from this reaction
  3. to get the hydrogen to fuse you have to make it hot enough (you try to recreate what happens in the sun) so that light nuclei will fuse and release even more energy than in a "normal" atomic bomb/nuclear weapon - the word thermonuclear means that the fusion takes place when the temperature is extremely high
  4. a hydrogen bomb is also an atomic bomb/nuclear weapon, but it was developed some years after the fission bombs ("normal" atomic bombs) that were used in 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the only time nuclear weapons have been used (a hydrogen bomb has never been used - only tested)
  5. the first step of a hydrogen bomb is a fission bomb, which makes the temperature so extreme that fusion may start
  6. I don't understand this mushroom cloud from the North Korean bomb test on Wednesday, since they did it under ground... I think they've either had fun with photo shop, or they just "borrowed" the pictures of the cloud from somewhere else (maybe Kim Jong Un really loves mushroom clouds?)
  7. in addition to a real fusion bomb (where most of the energy released comes from fusion reactions), you could make a fission bomb that is boosted with hydrogen - this means that there will be some hydrogen in the weapon that fuses, and from these fusion reactions you get more neutrons so that even more of the fissile material will fission. Almost of all the energy released in such a weapon comes from fission, so therefore it's called a boosted fission bomb
  8. there is in theory no limits for how big a hydrogen bomb can be; you can just put more and more fusion material in it - I state that the real hydrogen bomb is the deadliest weapon ever made, and the biggest ever bomb test was the Tsar Bomba, which had an explosive power of 50 million tons of TNT (around 1500 times the total explosive power of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined)
  9. the first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1952, by the USA - today there are at least five countries that have these types of weapons (USA, Russia, UK, France, and China)
  10. this book is about the hydrogen bomb, and I got it from my sweet colleague, Gry, and now I'm going to read it <3
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Happy weekend from Rose castle - we are going to watch West Wing and share a bottle of wine now 🙂
(I'm a frog :D)

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Publisert 2 kommentarer til 2 to the power of 5 (birthday)
I can now brag about being 25 (or 2 to the power of 5, or 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2), or 100000, or 32 years old... 
Yesterday was my birthday, and I celebrated by trying to work (but I was kind of tired from Wednesday), and having a very nice dinner with Anders at Brasserie France ( which was much easier than the working part - yum!). Also Alexandra called from her new tablet (that she got for Christmas, so that she can Skype me or her father whenever she feels like it) to wish me Happy Birthday <3
I wore the same statement necklace that I wore on TV on Wednesday. This was a gift from my mother for Christmas, and it was actually in one of the bags that were stolen from our car. I did not get it back, but my mother wanted me to have it, and went to the store and actually bought another one. I was so happy they still had it, and that my mother just did this, because I fell in love with it the moment I saw it.
The necklace is from ALDO.
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I really love Brasserie France, and I have to remember not to let it be too long until the next time I/we go there! 
The food is amazing - I mean, it's French. The wine is amazing - I mean, it's French, land of Champagne. The atmosphere really makes me feel like I'm in Paris; Brasserie France is for me the closest I can get to Paris without actually going there. When I think about it, it's way too long since I was there, and I have never been there with Anders; I should do something about that 😉 
I had one of my French favourites for a starter - a duck salad, and then I had a really nice sea trout with Parmesan and spinach for the main course. Anders had a classical onion soup for starter, and entrecôte with frites, green beans and bernaise for the main course. After this, there were only room for a coffee, so no dessert this time 🙂
We started everything with a glass of Champagne, of course - after all, this is probably the second last time I'm turning something that's 2 to the power of something, and it's 32 years until the next time.

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Nuclear physicist or girly girl? (Crazy day)
My original plan today was something like this:
  • get up
  • meet Ingrid for an early coffee
  • meet my little sister, Carina, to get lash extensions (it was her Christmas present for me, and it's a good idea to do it now before the semester turns crazy)
  • go to the University and write on my paper (write, make figures, and maybe even do some more of the remaining analysis).

Then I woke up at 06:30, by the radio as we always do: "North Korea has tested what they claim to be a hydrogen bomb", and then this happened instead:
  • VG sent me an sms wondering if I could talk to them about the H-bomb
  • I got in the shower
  • VG called me - I talked to them
  • I read a little bit about about thermonuclear weapons
  • I realsized there would be no coffee with Ingrid, and Anders and i decided to have a coffee at Kaffebrenneriet at Sagene - where he could esily get to the University, and I could easily get to Bjerke (where I had the lashes date with my sister)
  • VG called again, wondering if I could come to their studio, but I was on my way to my appointment with Carina, so I had to decline
  • TV2 called, and I talked to them on the bus to meet Carina
At this time I realised that maybe this day would be mostly about hydrogen weapons, and not so much about the theory of the "Oslo method"...:P
I wanted to be a girly girl today <3
  • Carina and I got to the lashes place, I muted my phone (but not my Apple watch), and we started the treatment, where I had to lay still with my eyes closed for 2.5 hours...
  • my phone rang, but I couldn't answer it
  • my phone rang again, but I couldn't answer it
  • Carina's phone rang
  • I got an sms 
  • my phone rang again, but I couldn't answer it
  • I felt like I had to pee, and when I asked if I had to keep my eyes closed for much longer, the reply I got was 1.5 hours...
  • ...and so on...

We finished what we started, I could go to the toilet, and I could check my phone. It looked something like this:
I realised I wasn't going back to University, but home to Rose castle to charge my phone, my Mac, and talk and read.
  • interview with VG
  • interview with Stavanger Aftenblad
  • I showered and picked out an outfit I felt was appropriate on TV
  • went to TV2
  • got make-up on
  • interview for the news at 18:30
  • live interview for the 17:00 news
  • took a taxi from TV2 to NRK
  • Dagsnytt18
  • interview for Dagsrevyen
  • met Anders, and we saw the strange lights on the sky as we were walking towards the metro, in the freezing cold <3

thanks Mari, you're the best <3
Now I'm finally home, and of course I have a long list of un-ticked to dos from today, which I'm not doing today, since now I'm going to bed. I've done my best today, and tomorrow's a new day, and I'll continue on my writing and my analysis and everything 🙂
Dagsnytt18 (I'm at 9 something minutes) 
I think the "title" Nuclear Physicist and Girly Blogger has never been more suiting that today...

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til One goal…
Happy new year my dearest!
I've been quiet since Christmas eve, and there are two main reasons for that:

1) I needed the time to relax and be with my family - preparing my self for what will be an intense year. 

2) Someone broke into our car and stole half of the presents we got for Christmas (for example Anders' present for me 🙁 ), and our suitcase with clothes and stuff. This was a mentally exhausting experience, which also stole a lot of time since we've been on the phone with different insurance companies and the police and everything. End of the story is that even though we had the best travel insurance in the biggest insurance company in Norway, we got nothing, since we happened to be inside our own apartment when it happened (the car could have been parked at exactly the same place; if we had been somewhere else when it happened, we would have been covered). After the day when it happened (in the middle of the day, the 27th of December) when I cried most of the day, I've wanted to just put this episode behind me, and I've tried focusing on all the fantastic things I've got in my life - Alexandra, Anders, health, amongst others, and I haven't really felt I had any time for blogging. Hope you understand.

But now I'm back! Back at the University, back on the blog, back with my research.
Maybe you've already guessed why I'm saying this will be an intense year... 
2016 is the year where I have really just one, main goal: to finish my PhD. There is a lot of work to do be done, and I think it will be hard, but with the support and help of especially Anders, and also my fantastic supervisors, I think I'll manage! I will of course share (almost) everything from the last part of this trip, from a Master of Science to becoming a Doctor 😉 Hope you will follow me!

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Publisert 1 kommentar til Merry Christmas!
First of all, the most important message to day is: MERRY CHRISTMAS to all my wonderful, fantastic readers - I love you all!
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To follow up on the last blog post about stars, here are two more facts about stars that I think suits the theme of this day (my favourite day of the year):
1) There is no “Star of Bethlehem”, or "Christmas star". What the wise men probably saw on their way to meet baby Jesus, was Halley's comet (there are other theories as well, but I like the comet theory 🙂 ), which was visible 11 or 12 years BC.
We told Alexandra this the other day, and she replied by instructing us to change the word "star" into "comet" in the songs 😀 (For the record: I have no trouble singing "star" - this was her choice...)
2) The most poetic fact is that we are all made of star dust (or we can call it starstuff), and Carl Sagan said it so beautifully and fantastic, I will just finish this holiday blog post with his words:

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Friday Facts on a Sunday (at least it's Sunday some places in the world)
It's getting close to Christmas now, and it's darker than ever (oh, how much I hate that - so happy it'll go the other way around in just 2 days), so I though now is a good time for 10 FACTS about stars:
1) Stars are born when huge clouds of gas start to collide because they are attracted to each other, because of gravity (short fact: stars exist because of gravity 😛 ) <3
- where stars are born -
2) Stars make electromagnetic radiation (like for example visible light) by fusion of hydrogen into helium.
3) Stars are pretty
4) Our nearest star is actually what we normally call the sun - the sun is a star 😉
5) There are more than 200 billion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way (that's huge!)
- our home in the Universe - the Milky Way <3  -
6) When we look at the night sky, we can only see 5000 of all the stars in the Milky Way :/ (However, 5000 is also quite much, even though it's super small compared 200 billion)
7) All those stars that we see in the sky are bigger than our own sun (there are stars with the same size as our sun, and smaller ones too, but they don't shine bright enough so that we can see them)
8) The things we see in the sky that shines the brightest are actually not stars. We see Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, for example, and they are planets 😉
9) The surface temperature of a star ranges from about 2100 degrees Celsius to 40 000 degrees Celsius (our sun has a surface temperature of about 6000 degrees)
10) Our closest star (besides the sun, of course) is called Alpha Centauri, and it is 4 light years away from us. This means that the light we see from this star today was actually emitted four years ago - we are really looking back in time when we are looking at the stars 🙂 If we "translate" this distance into kilometers, Alpha Centauri is about 40 000 000 000 000 km away from us - this is our neighbour...the Universe is simply enormous!

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Publisert 1 kommentar til Energy in an atomic bomb and energy in a nuclear power plant
Hi everyone 🙂
I got a question the other day about nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. There was some confusion about something I said on the radio (Abels Tårn) a couple of weeks ago, about nuclear power and nuclear weapons... Let me divide the question into two parts:

1) How much do you have to enrich natural uranium to make a nuclear weapon, and how much do you have to enrich to make nuclear fuel?
To make a weapon you have to enrich natural uranium, that consists of 99.25% uranium-238 and 0.72% uranium-235 (and the rest is uranium-234), to you get something like 95% uranium-235 - since this is the fissile isotope.
To make fuel you only have to enrich up to around 5% uranium-235.
In theory you could have made the 95% enriched uranium into fuel, and even though it costs money to enrich (and much more money the more you enrich), you would more or less get this money back since the higher enrichment, the longer it would last (and also, the less waste you would make - but that's another question 😉 )

2) (Which was really the question I got.) Why can't we make energy from a bomb?
First of all: you could take the fissile material from a bomb and make it into fuel - it was actually done for 20 years in the Megatons to Megawatts program, and during that time 10% of all of the electricity in the US came from nuclear power plants that were fuelled with old, Russian, nuclear war heads 🙂
Second: What I was talking about on the radio was not the normal fission bomb, but a fusion/hydrogen bomb. Actually, I was talking about wether or not we manage to make fusion here on Earth, and my point was/is that we don't (yet, but maybe in the future? 😉 ) manage to make energy from fusion the way the sun does it, but it's not correct that we don't manage to make fusion at all; since in a fusion weapon (also a type of nuclear weapon, also called a hydrogen bomb or an H bomb) we do get hydrogen to fuse. But to make the conditions right, so that the hydrogen nuclei get close enough and start to fuse, to form helium nuclei, and release energy, we have to "light it" with a "normal" fission bomb first - this is what I mean by we're putting in more energy than what we're getting out. So, we make hydrogen fuse in an explosion that we start with a nuclear fission bomb - not exactly a way to produce energy 😉

Was this any clarifying at all? Or more confusing? Please let me know, and tell me if there's something I should explain in more detail <3

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Today was the third (and last) day of the writing seminar. As I said yesterday, it takes time, a lot of time; and today I've spent most of that time working on a plot...
This stupid colon stole one hour of my #phdlife today... For those who know any programming you know it should be a semi colon there, and not a colon. For me, who's no where near to being an expert in programming, it took me one hour before I said to my self "I've tried everything now, and the error messages I get don't tell me what's wrong - I have to ask someone for help", and I turned to Gry, who was sitting next to me (thank god), and she saw my STUPID mistake in something like 58 seconds. And suddenly, instead of just giving me a completely blank canvas, I got exactly what I wanted - beauty, beauty, beauty:
Can I have it in pink, please? Oh, yes, I can - the magic code is "kPink+7" <3
There will be no plotting or writing tomorrow, 'cause then I actually have to go for some christmas shopping (now it sounds like I don't want, which is not true... I'm going with Anders, and I'm looking forward to it <3 ), but on Monday I'll be back at Blindern for a discussion with Sunniva Supervisor - and maybe Jon (my other supervisor) will get a draft of this paper as a christmas present 😉
But before anything else: SLEEP!

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Publisert 2 kommentarer til Pink – part 3: Why can we see pink?

Good morning, Wednesday!

It's cold, not too late, and I'm at the university library with my first latte of the day, and ready for the second day at the last writing seminar before christmas. I'm happy with yesterdays efforts (I finished all my Pomodoros), but I do realise that this takes forever... I'm seriously hoping that during the next months my "output" will grow more or less exponentially, or it'll be very hard to finish my thesis by the beginning of September (OMG!). At least I have to dedicate more days completely to just writing, like I'm doing today and tomorrow (and yesterday!) 😉
- dress: Vila // west: Gina Tricot // tights: HM (200 denier!) -
One thing I don't like about the cold is that it becomes so extremely difficult to find something to wear - I freeze, like, all the time. But on Monday I found this dress at Vila that's comfortable, cheap (199,-) and since it's made by cotton I think it works very nicely with warm winter boots. When I'm outside I put a big sweater on top of it, and it just looks like the perfect skirt. I love that it's quite straight - it's a little loose around the waist (which I think is nice when I'm at work, and will be sitting for hours and hours), but a little tight around the derrière. With my west from Gina Tricot, it's a perfect, comfortable winter work outfit 😉
They had it in several colours (like dark grey, black, dark blue, and others), and I also bought one in orange. Now that I know how much I like it already, maybe I'll even buy another one.
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Ok, over to todays title: the last guest blog post from my sister <3
(Read number 1 HERE, and number 2 HERE, to get the entire story about my favourite colour)

But why can we see pink?

Pink is a negative colour, if you will. When we look at a colour spectrum we see that the spectrum goes from gamma- to radiowaves, and visible light goes from red to purple, but nowhere is there pink. If an object absorbs all colours but green you get a sort of anti-green. Your brain interpret this as pink. Thus this is why we can see pink after all.
Lastly, I want to make a case for PINK. Even though pink is really a colour made by our brain, and not a real, visible wavelength, that doesn't make it any less of a colour. There are a lot of things that our brains make. Pictures and sounds are interpreted all of the time - that doesn't make the unreal! It is. however, neat to know how our brain works; if not for other reasons but to know what an amazing job it does every single day, and to understand how incredibly easy it is to trick a brain...

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til 15th of December – 9 days to go…
Only nine days left to christmas. No christmas shopping for me yet; I'm spending all of today and tomorrow and Thursday writing writing and writing - I. WANT. TO. GET. A. REAL. DRAFT. OF. MY. PAPER. BEFORE. CHRISTMAS. - but maybe there'll be time for some christmas preparations on Friday...:)
Some of you probably still have an exam (or two?!?) left, and to all of you: A big good luck! I'm at the University Library right now, and from the number of people here, there are obviously a lot of students that are not finished with their exams just yet.
Since it's the 15th today, there are two things from nuclear history I want to share:

1) On this day, in 2000, the reactor number 3 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was shut down for good. Yes, you got it right; Chernobyl wasn't closed after the accident in 1986 - the reactor number 4, where the accident happened, was of course shut down (it was completely destroyed), but the other reactors continued to operate. Reactor number 1 ran until 1997, number 2 until 1991, and number 3 until 15th of December 2000. (Read more about the shutdown of the Chernobyl NPP HERE)



2) Today is also the birthday of Henri Bequerel - the discoverer (together with Marie and Pierre Curie) of radioactivity. He got the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery, in 1903, just five years before he died. It was just an accident that he, in 1897, actually discovered that uranium salts emit some kind of radiation - a penetrating type of radiation that could be registered on a photographic plate. Bequerel wanted to, and first thought that he was studying a type of X-rays, but the radiation that came from the uranium salts turned out to be the new phenomenon called radioactivity 🙂 (If was actually spontanious radioactivity that he discovered; radioactivity can also be induced - if a material is bombarded with for example neutrons it can become radioactive, and this discovery was done by Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Cuire.) 





Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til 10 days to go – 14th of December
Monday again, and this week I promise to (try to :P) be better at blogging than last week! My excuse is mostly Anders' exam, which affected me quite a lot too... It's just so much better when you're sort of working on a team with someone - but that's almost impossible when one person has an exam and works constantly except for the 8 hours he needs for sleeping, and the other one has a child 😉 Now he's finished with exams for quite a long time, and we're back to being a team again - working together in the evenings in our living room, going to bed early, and getting up early in the morning <3
Anyway, I'm super happy to have my team mate "back" from quantum field theory, it's the last whole week before christmas (for many, maybe the last week before vacation?), and it's the 14th of December, meaning there are only 10 days left to christmas. So I thought I should give you the 14th element today 🙂
Element number 14 in the periodic table of elements is silicon (short: Si). The reason why it's the 14th element is because it has 14 protons in its nucleus. There are 24 different isotopes ("types") of silicon that we know of, and the stable ones (the non-radioactive) are silicon-28, silicon-29, and silicon-30.
If you want to make stable silicon, the recipe is 14 protons, and either 14, 15, or 16 neutrons. If you use 14 neutrons, you'll make silicon-28 (14+14=28), and this is the most abundant type in the universe - actually 92.23% of all silicon is silicon-28. If you use 15 neutrons, you'll make silicon-29 (4.67% of all silicon), and if you use 16 neutrons, you'll make silicon-30 (3.1% of all silicon). If you mix your protons with less than 14, or more than 16 neutrons, you'll end up making radioactive silicon.
Silicon is the eight most common element found in the universe, if you sort by mass (before silicon, there's hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, and nitrogen). Even if there is a lot of it here on Earth, it's not common to find it as pure silicon - meaning not as part part of some chemical compound (which is a substance that consists of two or more different types of atoms, like for example water, which consists of both hydrogen and oxygen). Pure silicon is actually quite important for us today, since we use it in all kinds of modern technology, and we like <3 technology...