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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — A Colorado man who was killed when a 3-foot tree branch flew through his windshield and impaled him in the chest was able to steer the car to safety before losing consciousness. The wife of 61-year-old James Baker-Jarvis told the Daily Camera (http://goo.gl/WsaHg ) that her husband was able to pull the Subaru Outback over to the roadside, saving her from any injury. Baker-Jarvis died later at a hospital.

The world of physics is abuzz with speculation over an announcement expected Tuesday, Dec. 13, from the CERN laboratory in Geneva -- home of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The announcement, planned for 8 a.m. EST, will address the status of the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, sometimes called the "God Particle" because of its importance to science This particle, which has long been theorized but never detected, is thought to give all other particles mass. Scientists at the LHC have been hoping that when protons inside the machine collide together at extremely...

High noon is approaching for the biggest manhunt in the history of physics. At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass. The report comes amid rumors that the two competing armies of scientists sifting debris from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C., outside Geneva, have both finally seen hints...

Thomas Edison and his direct current, or DC, technology lost the so-called War of the Currents to alternating current, or AC, in the 1890s after it became clear that AC was far more efficient at transmitting electricity over long distances. Today, AC is still the standard for the electricity that comes out of our wall sockets. But DC is staging a roaring comeback in pockets of the electrical grid. Alstom, ABB, Siemens and other conglomerates are erecting high-voltage DC grids to carry gigawatts of electricity from wind farms in remote places like western China and the North Sea to faraway...

Enlarge Image Standing proud. The LHCb experiment has uncovered hints of "new physics," but will its results hold up? Credit: CERN In late 2008, a few onlookers believed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would bring the end of the world. Three years later, our planet remains intact, but the European particle smasher may have made its first crack in modern physics. If this crack turns out to be real, it might help explain an enduring mystery of the universe: why there's lots of normal matter, but hardly any of the opposite—antimatter. "If it holds up, it's exciting," says...

There is extensive evidence from physics for a beginning and fine-tuning of the universe. When the complementary nature of these insights is seen, it provides compelling evidence for a transcendent, intelligent Creator. Cosmic Origins features eight world-class physicists talking about modern physics and God. They include Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias (who discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang); Templeton Prize winners John Polkinghorne (Cambridge) and Michael Heller (Vatican Observatory); Owen Gingerich (Harvard); Lisa Randall (Harvard); Jennifer Wiseman (NASA); and narrated by Stephen Barr (University of Delaware).

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday. The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment. While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency...

A metallic lattice of hair-thin pipes is now the lightest solid yet created — less dense than air, scientists revealed. The strategy used to create these intricate structures could lead to revolutionary materials of extraordinary strength and lightness, including ones made of diamond, researchers added. Ultra-lightweight materials such as foams are widely used in thermal insulation and to dampen sounds, vibrations and shocks. They can also serve as scaffolds for battery electrodes and catalytic systems.

Twenty-three-year-old conjecture set to guide future quantum field theories. When John Cardy proposed a far-reaching principle to constrain all possible theories of quantum particles and fields1, he expected it to be quickly rebutted. But for almost 25 years that hasn’t happened — and it now seems that his theorem may have been quietly proved earlier this year. If the solution holds, it is likely to guide future attempts to explain physics beyond the current standard model. It will certainly have implications for any previously unknown particles that may be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle...

Enlarge Image Flipping brilliant! Using only light, scientists can switch this little bridge of silicon between its "bowed up" configuration (top) and its "bowed down" configuration. Credit: M. Bagheri et al., Nature Nanotechnology, Advance Online Publication (2011) The feeble force of light alone can flip a nanometer-sized mechanical switch one way or the other, a team of electrical engineers reports. The little gizmo holds its position without power and at room temperature, so it might someday make a memory bit for an optical computer. Other researchers say it also introduces a promising new twist into the hot field of...

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel. The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment. Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory...

Enlarge Image Watch out! A new forecast model simulates the approach of a coronal mass ejection (boomerang of color) to Earth (green dot) that would trigger a solar storm. Credit: Space Weather Prediction Center/NOAA It took a while, but space physicists who predict immense balls of solar debris smashing into Earth have finally caught up with their brethren who forecast terrestrial weather. Rather than simply relying on rules of thumb, space weather forecasters have begun running a computer model that actually simulates the development of conditions between the sun and Earth. They're following the lead of atmospheric weather forecasters,...

A video created by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel has the Internet buzzing. Though rather simple, it just looks really cool, hence all the attention. It’s a demonstration of quantum locking, though to non-science buffs, it looks more like science fiction come to life. In the video a disc, obviously frozen due to the vapor rising from its surface hovers over a surface. This is nothing new of course, everyone’s seen it in science class. What is new is that when the demonstrator turns the disc, it stays hovered at that angle. This is in contrast to the...

Enlarge Image Star power. Saul Perlmutter (left), Brian Schmidt (center), and Adam Riess share this year's Nobel Prize in physics. Credit: LBNL, ANU, JHU Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. At the time, many scientists expected that the gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to slow down the expansion. Today, researchers from both teams shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that dramatic observation, which has changed the conceptual landscape in cosmology, astronomy,...

Three researchers behind the discovery that our Universe's expansion is accelerating have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics. Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will divide the prize. The trio studied what are called Type 1a supernovae, determining that more distant objects seem to move faster. Their observations suggest that not only is the Universe expanding, its expansion is relentlessly speeding up. Prof Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half the 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize, with Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University and Prof Riess...

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 with one half to Saul Perlmutter The Supernova Cosmology Project Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, and the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt The High-z Supernova Search Team Australian National University, and Adam G. Riess The High-z Supernova Search Team Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae" In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed...

A 26-year-old Massachusetts man was arrested and charged today in connection with a plot to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol, the Justice Department announced.  Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen, is accused of planning to use a remote-controlled aircraft filled with explosives to attack the buildings. He was also charged with attempting to provide support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization — specifically al-Qaida, the organization behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I know what you're thinking, PC police: "That's unfair, you Islamophobe!  Just because his name is Rezwan doesn't mean he's a Muslim, or that his planned attacks were...

Neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles—may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week. If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois.

Roll over, Einstein? The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905. If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous. Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center...

Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light - a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's fundamental laws of the universe. Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done. "We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."