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Scientists have repaired the world's largest atom smasher and plan by this weekend to restart the fault-ridden Large Hadron Collider. The 'Big Bang' machine was launched with great fanfare last year before its spectacular failure from a bad electrical connection. This time the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is taking a cautious approach with the super-sophisticated equipment, said James Gillies, a spokesman. It cost about $10 billion, with contributions from many governments and universities around the world. Scientists expect to send beams of protons around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC,...

People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box. We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users. The humanities-graduate writer of this piece would like to stress that this is...

Sir Ambrose Fleming: Father of Modern Electronics --snip-- Sir John Ambrose Fleming was a leader in the electronics revolution that changed the world. As a professor at a major university, he carefully researched the evidence for Darwinism, concluding that the theory is not supported by science. He also influenced hundreds of students to evaluate the evidence in science for Darwinism. An outstanding scientist and creationist, he played a significant role in the development and maturation of the early creation movement. As Travers and Muhr wrote, he "had an unusually long and active life," and his life changed the world as...

Why Evolutionary-Based Science Is A Menace To Scientific Research, Discovery, and Progress Evolutionary-based research always begins with the inaccurate and unscientific presupposition that the Theory of Evolution, i.e. the Big Bang, the spontaneous generation of life, and common descent, is true. Due to this systemic problem, scientific discovery and progress is severely hampered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of research dollars that are squandered every year. In a time in which almost ANY alternative thought is given a platform, the evolution industry is silencing dissenting scientific evidence, even when it’s from fellow evolutionists! See the growing list of...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

Enlarge ImageConceptual bridge. This tiny silicon beam links light to vibration, potentially opening the way to technologies that combine optics and mechanics.Credit: M. Eichenfield et al., Nature, Advanced Online Publication (18 October 2009) A tiny ladderlike beam of silicon converts light into vibrations and vice versa with extremely high efficiency, physicists report. That may seem like an esoteric result, but the finding could open the way to new physics and someday serve as a key element in optical microcircuits akin to the electronic microcircuits in computer chips. Although the effect is ordinarily very small, light exerts forces on the...

Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light.The artificial 'black hole' sucks up microwaves.Q. Cheng and T. J. Cui Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat. The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University...

In the past 5 years, no material has excited more interest from condensed matter physicists than graphene, a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. Electrons zing through the stuff in an unusual way, and they flow so easily that graphene could someday replace silicon and other semiconductors as the material of choice for microchips. Now, a team of physicists has taken a key step in fulfilling graphene's promise as a hotbed of exotic physics by showing that the electrons within it can team up to behave like particles with a fraction of the electron's charge. The effect is called...

Weekend Roundup --snip-- Picture Highlight: the new Herschel Space Telescope, is seeing first light and creating dramatic images of gas clouds in the Milky Way...

From left to right: Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith. (Reuters) Three scientists who harnessed the power of light in ways that turned the Internet into a global phenomenon and launched the digital-camera revolution were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.Charles Kao, who was born in Shanghai and has both U.K. and U.S. citizenships, received half the total prize money of $1.4 million. Dr. Kao was lauded for a breakthrough that led to fiber-optic cables, the thin glass threads that carry a vast chunk of the world's phone and data traffic.The other half of the prize is shared...

US scientists have confirmed the discovery of element number 114, first made over a decade ago by a team in Russia. By smashing a high energy beam of calcium-48 ions into a plutonium-242 target, the US team managed to detect two nuclei of element 114, which is predicted by some to be bordering the so-called 'island of stability' for superheavy atoms.Yuri Oganessian and his team at Dubna, Russia, were the first to claim to have created nuclei of element 114 - but any such claim has to be thoroughly verified and the experiments repeated independently before the element can be considered for admission...

Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2009 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Contemporary astrophysics hold the scientific key to prove the existence of God, but unfortunately very few know the scientific facts, said Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J, PhD, during a conference delivered on Sunday at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver, Colorado. The Honolulu-born Jesuit is the past president of Gonzaga University and is also well-known philosopher and physicist who is involved in bringing science and theology together. Fr. Spitzer is currently engaged in an ambitious project to explain the metaphysical consequences of the latest astrophysical discoveries,...

Laser pulses fired into hydrogen produces intense x-rays.Tom Tracy Photography / Alamy A team of physicists has built a small, powerful X-ray source — a prototype of the sort of machine they hope could replace much larger facilities.The technology has the potential to revolutionize everything from microbiology to materials science by giving scientists easier access to high-quality images of the things they are studying.Researchers use X-rays to probe all manner of things — from comet dust to fossilized animals trapped in amber. But making high-quality images requires much brighter and better controlled sources than those available in most institutions. So...

Many of us had just the grandest time conducting worthless research for the old monopolistic phone companies.  Dr. Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy was one of the typical products of that era of unfocused industrial research.  He nurtured his career in what had become the most arrogant and unfocused lab of them all, Bell Laboratories.   If you landed one of those storied jobs as a newly minted Member of Technical Staff, you could expect to conduct research indistinguishable from that of any academic scientist supported by government agencies like the National Science Foundation. That a once glorious Bell Labs...

Enlarge ImagePeer pressure. Magnetic domains in steel (vertical bans) arise when neighboring electrons point their magnetic poles in the same direction. Credit: Zureks, Chris Vardon/Wikimedia It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim. Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to...

Phase-change memory's 40-year journey from bright idea to mobile phone. Is phase-change memory about to appear in your mobile phone?Samsung South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s. Here, Nature explains how PCM works, why it has taken so long to develop and how it could change your mobile phone forever.What's the big idea behind PCM? PCM was first proposed by physicist and...

And now for something quasi-serious. A fascinating concept, perfectly executed: Hardly a relative theory. Click here!

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the word “transistor” appeared in print was in The New York Times on July 1, 1948, in a Page 46 roundup headed “The News of Radio.” The unsigned article opened with a report of two new radio shows, one called “Mr. Tutt,” and the other titled “Our Miss Brooks,” “with Eve Arden playing the role of a school teacher who encounters a variety of adventures.” The column’s last item began, “A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for...

Report hints at the existence of a new and massive elementary particle In a weak moment, researchers have found an unexpected asymmetry in particle production that could hint at exotic physics. The tentative evidence, announced August 21, could be the fingerprint of a massive elementary particle that would help unify three of the four known forces in nature. The physicists collected data for nearly a decade at the Belle particle accelerator experiment in Tsukuba, Japan. In the experiment, known as a B factory, beams of electrons and positrons collide to produce millions of pairs of B mesons and anti-B mesons....

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

The Invariant Set Postulate differentiates between reality and unreality, suggesting the existence of a state space, within which a smaller subset of state space (reality) is embedded. (PhysOrg.com) -- Since the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists have been trying to understand the many strange implications of the theory: superpositions, wave-particle duality, and the observer’s role in measurements, to name a few. Now, a new proposed law of physics that describes the geometry of physical reality on the cosmological scale might help answer some of these questions. Plus, the new law could give some clues about the role of...

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean. After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all. But soon? This week, scientists and engineers...

LOS ANGELES — As a promising Caltech graduate student in applied physics, Stephen Kurtin could have taken a job offer from Intel at the dawn of the microelectronics era 40 years ago. Instead he followed the path of a lone inventor, gaining more than 30 patents in fields including word processing software and sound systems, culminating in the pair of glasses resting on his nose, which he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses. The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible...

Enlarge ImageBoom! A drop of water flies apart in midair. Credit: Emmanuel Villermaux Here's a question for a rainy day: How do clouds create such a wide variety of raindrop sizes? The answer, according to stunning new high-speed movies, is much simpler than physicists thought. The idea has been that raindrops grow as they gently bump into each other and coalesce. Meanwhile, more forceful collisions break other drops apart into a scattering of smaller droplets. All this action would explain the wide distribution of shapes and sizes. But trying to unravel how the drops crash and break up led...

Gamma-ray spike in Fermi telescope data hikes anticipation.The jury is still out on whether Fermi has spied dark matter.NASA/DOE/International LAT Team The murky hunt for dark matter has just got a little bit brighter. New gamma-ray results from the FERMI telescope fit with previous tantalizing hints of a detection of the mysterious stuff.Last year, a series of independent experiments caused a stir because they seemed to have detected signals of dark matter, which is believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter."There's been tremendous excitement about cosmic ray signals that have dark matter as one possible explanation," says Neal...

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency believe they may have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity. Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the effect is virtually negligible. However, Martin Tajmar, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria, and colleagues believe they have measured...

Baroque field gets fresh lease of life in condensed-matter physics. String theory - more than just a 'theory of everything'?Alamy Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. String theory suggests that vibrating strings that exist in 10 dimensions underpin the observable Universe. Although that basic premise is still...

Fission and quarks figure into quirky caseIt's not every day that disputes over particle physics leads to assault charges. But that's what happened when Jason Everett Keller, 40, joined a conversation about quantum physics in South San Francisco in March. Keller was accused of attacking Stephan Fava while Fava and his friend were discussing physics in the Bay Area town. The charges didn't stick, however, as Keller has been acquitted by a San Mateo County jury. The verdict is still out string theory, however, so there's no indication that physics-related violence will abate any time soon. Related Stories Jackson West...

A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.

Inside the sun: more than just a glowing ball The unusually long quiet period of the Sun’s present activity may be due to the motion of “sluggish� jet streams beneath the solar surface, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Arizona, US. The scientists’ observations, which show an east–west jet stream has taken a year longer to migrate south by 10° than in the previous solar cycle, also indicate that the sun is moving into its next cycle. “We need to continue these observations for many, many more years to fully understand what is going on,� said...

It was an idea born out of curiosity in the physics lab, but now a new type of ‘laser’ for generating ultra-high frequency sound waves instead of light has taken a major step towards becoming a unique and highly useful 21st century technology... ...have produced a new type of acoustic laser device called a Saser. It’s a sonic equivalent to the laser and produces an intense beam of uniform sound waves on a nano scale.

A dispatch from my colleague Dennis Overbye: As fans of the late, great “Seinfeld,” know, there is a lot to say about nothing. At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all? “Nothing is unstable,” Frank...

Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, and two colleagues were named this month as recipients of the $500,000 Gruber Prize, one of the world's top awards in the field of cosmology. The Freedman team's work helped scientists to arrive at the currently accepted age of the universe: 13.7 billion years.

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

There are a lot of fusion experiments going on in the world that don't get much publicity. Among these is Polywell Fusion. All you see in the papers is the billions spent on ITER or the billions spent on Laser Fusion. Small projects like Polywell where the spending is in millions and where the prospects for viability are near near term (years vs decades) don't seem to attract much attention from the giants of the media. I have been studying the Polywell Fusion Reactor intensively since November of 2006 when I first saw a video of Robert Bussard, the inventor...

Since its discovery in 2004, the carbon-based material known as graphene has revealed a stream of attractive properties. Now, researchers in the US have shown that a two-layer version can deliver yet another: a wide, tunable bandgap. The discovery paves the way for new electronic devices, from lasers that change colour to electronic circuits that rearrange themselves. Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, with a structure that resembles chicken wire. Single sheets of the material have proved to have record-breaking strength, high conductivity and high transparency. But recently some scientists have come to suspect that the most interesting...

A recent visit by a Vatican delegation to CERN -- one of the world's largest centers for scientific research -- has opened up an important channel of communication between science and faith, said the Vatican representative to U.N. agencies in Geneva. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the representative, was part of the delegation led by Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, president of the commission governing Vatican City. The head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Father Jose Funes, and a Vatican astronomer, U.S. Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, were also part of delegation visiting the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva June 3. The director-general...

Enlarge ImageSpooky connection. Physicists forged a quantum link called entanglement between the mechanical oscillations of one pair of ions and another distant pair. Credit: John Jost and Jason Amini/NIST Quantum mechanics and its bizarre rules explain the structure of atoms, the formation of chemical bonds, and the switching of transistors in microchips. Oddly, though, in spite of the theory's name, physicists have never made an actual machine whose motion captures the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. Now a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, has taken a step in that direction by forging...

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics "Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the...

In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barack Obama claimed: “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing.” Obama is not much of a “student of history” if he believes this. Almost every advance he attributes to the Muslims was...

There's a tour at the source from the history of microscopes to the present with nine images and captions.

Scientists have discovered a rare form of solid - a quasicrystal - in a rock sample from Russia's Koryak mountains. Quasicrystals have unusual properties and have previously only been made in the laboratory. The discovery could redefine the field of mineralogy and expand our understanding of how quasicrystals form, leading to new applications.Quasicrystals are a type of solid with structures in between those of crystals and glasses. They are often compared to Penrose tilings, where two different shapes of tile are tessellated in patterns with local symmetry but more complex overall periodicity. The materials have interesting properties, often being harder or...

The rare earth metal is the 53rd naturally occurring element to possess the property An old element just learned a new trick under pressure. When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor, allowing electrons to flow unfettered by resistance, a study appearing May 13 in Physical Review Letters shows. The results make europium the 53rd of the 92 naturally occurring elements to possess superconductivity, which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer. Europium, a rare earth metal with a silver color, is strongly magnetic at everyday temperatures and pressure. Study coauthor...

Enlarge ImageColor code. A new data-storage technique encodes multiple sets of data in the same area using different colors and polarizations of light.Credit: Adapted from Peter Zijlstra et al., Nature 459, 410 (2009) Better clear a shelf in your basement for that high-end Blu-ray DVD player you just bought. Researchers report that they can boost the amount of data stored on a disc 10,000-fold by using gold nanoparticles. If commercialized, the technology could allow a single disc to hold as many as 300 movies or 250,000 songs. Today's CDs and DVDs store data as a string of pits burned...

Two months ago I did what most environmentalists would consider unthinkable. I purchased my first 4X4 vehicle. Since I wasn't planning on using it as my primary vehicle, I wasn't willing to shell out the multiple thousands of dollars involved in purchasing new. The logical choice was to pick an early 1990's model which was still in good condition. I found one with electronic fuel injection, A/C, and power everything. Even though it's verging on its twenty year birthday, it is still a sharp looking vehicle in very good condition. So, imagine my surprise at the responses of my friends...

Obama's plan to put everyone in high-mileage vehicles by 2016 is much like any utopian dream. The goals are noble -- saving the planet, reducing fuel consumption, yada, yada, yada... BUT, as with most liberal fantasies, it is the unintended consequences that come back to haunt us. In this case, it is the safety issue. This CBS video report from the Insurance Institute should sound a warning to everyone.

The Obama administration will issue new national requirements for the emissions and mileage of cars and light trucks in an effort to end a long-running conflict among the states, the federal government and auto manufacturers, industry officials said Monday. President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California’s tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard, the officials said. As a result, cars and light trucks sold in the United States will be roughly 30 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016. The White House...

The Problem There’s a scene—so I am told—in Angels and Demons where Tom Hanks is trapped in a glass room in which the oxygen has run out! To save himself, with his last breath he pulls out a gun and shoots the glass. It obediently cracks and then breaks. The day is saved! Bang! Do you know what would really happen if you pulled the trigger in an oxygen-free room? It would go click, and if you had any O2 left circulating in your little grey cells, you’d realize that explosions—such as those happening inside bullet casings that propel slugs...

Enlarge ImageNano vibrator. A tiny device called a zipper cavity can convert laser light into mechanical energy. Credit: Matt Eichenfield and Jasper Chan, Nature Researchers have built a nanoscale device that vibrates when struck by incoming laser light. The contraption, which is sensitive to the energy of a single photon, could speed the development of new optical communications systems. It could also help scientists probe some of the fundamental properties of matter with greater precision. Light beams might not seem capable of performing mechanical work (photons, the carriers of light waves, have no mass), but at the atomic level...