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Forget the superfast electrons or bosons or whateverinos and 17 miles of magnets. Just get yourself two cats at 10 pm; let them know that you are phenomenally tired, and go to bed. The only trick is to arrange their trajectories so that they are on a collision course. You’ll get your Big Bang. I guess you could call them mewons.

European physicists have sent a neutrino on a 730-kilometre trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors... In 2006, CERN started beaming neutrinos from its accelerator complex near Geneva, and have so far detected several hundred impacts in San Grasso. But the scientists have now taken the venture a step forward by starting to fill the San Grasso detector with small film plates which measure with high accuracy the cascade of particles that are produced when a neutrino impacts. These plates, called bricks, are each made of a sandwich of lead...

The ancient sea floor was discovered in southwest Greenland A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth.The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-day geology,...

Physicists have confirmed that neutrinos, which are thought to have played a key role during the creation of the Universe, have mass. This is the first major finding of the US-based Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (Minos) experiment. The findings suggest that the Standard Model, which describes how the building blocks of the Universe behave and interact, needs a revision. Neutrinos are believed to be vital to our understanding of the Universe. But scientists know frustratingly little about these fundamental particles. The findings build on work carried out by Japanese physicists. Different 'flavours' Neutrinos are sometimes described as "ghost particles"...

Newswise — Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says. No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string...

SOUDAN, MINN. -- How long does it take to get from Chicago to Soudan? For tiny subatomic bits called neutrinos, 2.5 milliseconds with never a weather delay. Among the smallest known particles in the universe, neutrinos can take shortcuts straight through the Earth. Scientists hope they'll also provide a shortcut to solving some of the most intriguing mysteries of the universe. Today, at the federal Fermilab outside Chicago, U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., and other dignitaries will dedicate a $180 million project that will involve flinging trillions of neutrinos through the Earth to a massive detector in Soudan. The 6,000-ton...

Using observations of 3,000 quasars discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), scientists have made the most precise measurement to date of the cosmic clustering of diffuse hydrogen gas. These quasars--100 times more than have been used in such analyses in the past--are at distances of eight to ten billion light years, making them among the most distant objects known. Filaments of gas between the quasars and the Earth absorb light in the quasar's spectra, allowing researchers to map the gas distribution and to measure how clumpy the gas is on scales of one million light years. The degree...

<p>STOCKHOLM, Sweden — A Japanese and two American astrophysicists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for using some of the most obscure particles and waves in nature to increase understanding of the universe.</p> <p>Riccardo Giacconi, 71, of the Associated Universities Inc. in Washington, D.C., will get half of the $1 million prize for his role in ``pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.''</p>