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Berkeley Lab scientists join their KamLAND colleagues to measure the radioactive sources of Earth's heat flowWhat spreads the sea floors and moves the continents? What melts iron in the outer core and enables the Earth's magnetic field? Heat. Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from? Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in...

Like exploding stars, black holes, dark matter? How about cosmic intrigue, deep space astronomy , or origins of the universe? Then you’re gonna love this. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are putting the finishing touches on a giant underground telescope buried beneath the South Pole to help understand said phenomenon.

The CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has completed a search for microscopic black holes produced in high-energy proton-proton collisions. No evidence for their production was found and their production has been excluded up to a black hole mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts) in a variety of theoretical models. Microscopic black holes are predicted to exist in some theoretical models that attempt to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by postulating the existence of extra “curled-up” dimensions, in addition to the three familiar spatial dimensions. At the high energies of the Large Hadron Collider, such theories...

Today physicists announced that they may have found the key to explaining dark matter in the universe. It all has to do with the potential discovery of a "sterile neutrino." According to a release about the new study: Neutrinos are neutral elementary particles born in the radioactive decay of other particles. The known "flavors" of neutrinos are the neutral counterparts of electrons and their heavier cousins, muons and taus. Regardless of a neutrino's original flavor, the particles constantly flip from one type to another in a phenomenon called "neutrino flavor oscillation." An electron neutrino might become a muon neutrino, and...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 August 3 Ice Fishing for Cosmic Neutrinos Credit: Robert Morse (U. Wisconsin) The Amanda II Collaboration Explanation: Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. In fact, several holes have been melted near the South Pole, and they are now being used as astronomical observatories. Astronomers with the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) lower into each vertical lake a string knotted with basketball-sized...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 June 23 KamLAND Verfies the Sun Credit: KamLAND Collaboration Explanation: A large sphere beneath Japan has helped verify humanity's understanding of the inner workings of the Sun. The KamLAND sphere, shown above during construction in 2001, fails to detect fundamental particles called anti-neutrinos that are known to be emitted by nearby nuclear reactors around Japan. This triumphant failure can best be explained by neutrinos oscillating between different...

A super-powered neutrino generator could in theory be used to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, according to a team of Japanese scientists. If it was ever built, a state could use the device to obliterate the nuclear arsenal of its enemy by firing a beam of neutrinos straight through the Earth. But the generator would need to be more than a hundred times more powerful than any existing particle accelerator and over 1000 kilometres wide. "It is really quite futuristic," Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. "But the maths and physics...

A team of nearly 100 physicists from around the world have achieved results verifying that the elementary particle known as the neutrino exhibits a distinctive pattern of oscillation. This discovery shows that it is likely that the Standard Model, proposed in the 1970s to describe the fundamental forces and particles that make up all matter, is incomplete. The findings provide the needed confirmation to their previous discovery of neutrino oscillation and give the most precise measurement yet of neutrino mass. “These findings show that the Standard Model needs to be modified to better explain the fundamental forces that make up...

“In 1990 they found that the Earth goes through abrupt temperature changes from deep ice samples in Greenland of about 10,000 years ago the Earth’s temperature dropped 19 degrees” (research found by weather channel) taking 5-10 years (weather channel) but from analytical data, I intend to show this could take for the most part one year (Robert T Bailey) and more shocking a large part of the temperature change will happen this year! The End of the World as we known it is coming; an ice Age will change the face of the Earth. We have a crisis here. In...

French and Italian scientists are planning a large underground laboratory beneath the Alps designed to detect elusive particles from the Sun's core. It would consist of a huge tank filled with several hundred thousand cubic metres of ultra-pure water. Detectors lining the tank would be sensitive to flashes of light caused by the passage of sub-atomic particles. The lab would test theories in solar physics and help scientists understand the fundamental forces of nature. Sun stream It would be built adjacent to a road tunnel under the Frejus mountain near the French-Italian border. The ambitious project has entered its earliest...

Two of the biggest physics breakthroughs during the last decade are the discovery that wispy subatomic particles called neutrinos actually have a small amount of mass and the detection that the expansion of the universe is actually picking up speed. Now three University of Washington physicists are suggesting the two discoveries are integrally linked through one of the strangest features of the universe, dark energy, a linkage they say could be caused by a previously unrecognized subatomic particle they call the "acceleron." Dark energy was negligible in the early universe, but now it accounts for about 70 percent of the...

Astronomers have spotted a signature of neutrinos created just seconds after the Big Bang. The find supports current models of the origins of our Universe, and may provide a glimpse of its birth. The fundamental particles called neutrinos are difficult to study, because they interact so weakly with normal matter - trillions whizz straight through your body every second. But Roberto Trotta, an astrophysicist from Oxford University, UK, and his colleague Alessandro Melchiorri of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy, say that the signature of primordial neutrinos is written in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These microwaves are the...

EARTH'S natural radioactivity has been measured for the first time. The measurement will help geologists find out to what extent nuclear decay is responsible for the immense quantity of heat generated by Earth. Our planet's heat output drives the convection currents that churn liquid iron in the outer core, giving rise to Earth's magnetic field. Just where this heat comes from is a big question. Measurements of the temperature gradients across rocks in mines and boreholes have led geologists to estimate that the planet is internally generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat. Some of this heat comes from...

Physics giant Wolfgang Pauli told a friend in 1930, "I have done something very bad today." Pauli's sin was "proposing a particle that cannot be detected," which he lamented "is something no theorist should ever do." Three years later, Enrico Fermi christened Pauli's ghost particle the "neutrino." In 1951, physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowen first detected man-made neutrinos in an experiment at a nuclear reactor in South Carolina. Later, researcher Ray Davis detected solar neutrinos at his famous experiment 4,850 feet underground in the Homestake gold mine in Lead. The Homestake rock shielded his detector from interfering cosmic rays....

The Belle collaboration at the KEK laboratory in Japan has discovered a new sub-atomic particle which it is calling the "X(3872)". The particle does not fit into any known particle scheme and theorists are speculating that it might be a hitherto unseen type of meson that contains four quarks (arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0309032; Phys. Rev. Lett. to be published). The discovery has been confirmed by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab in the US, where the new particle is being called the "mystery meson". Mesons are particles that contain a quark and an antiquark that are held together by the strong nuclear force. Since...

For several decades scientists have been using telescopes to scan the heavens for unnatural-looking radio or optical transmissions coming from intelligent alien life. With this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) having so far failed to pick up a single signal, however, researchers in the US now believe it is worth extending the search beyond electromagnetic waves and start paying attention to neutrinos. John Learned of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have worked out that advanced alien civilizations could send messages within the Milky Way using neutrinos, and that these messages could be picked up using neutrino detectors currently under...

Antarctic telescope delivers first neutrino sky map UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON NEWS RELEASE Posted: July 30, 2003 A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky. The map, unveiled for astronomers at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high-energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe -- crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the violent cores of distant galaxies. The first map of...

Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...

A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space. For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet. more at Telegraph.co.UK

The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B.C. and 50 B.C. off the coast of Sardinia. As a testimony to the extent of ancient Rome's manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia. What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost...