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Elon Musk is back again, tweeting out a meme calling CERN's Large Hadron Collider "demonic technology" and that should totally, totally not surprise us at this point. For those unaware of what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is, it's the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator located underground in Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research with over 10,000 scientists, hundreds of universities and laboratories, with the collaboration of over 100 countries. CERN recently turned the Large Hadron Collider back in 6 weeks ago, with Elon tweeting out the meme 6...

[T]he teams at CERN were able to make a number of updates and improvements to the particle accelerator to support new, next-generation science during the scheduled shutdown. As the most powerful accelerator in the world, the LHC can generate hundreds of millions of particle collisions every second. Although the LHC has led to new physics research throughout both of its previous, successful runs, teams at CERN hope to push their explorations with the new upgrades implemented during the shutdown. Included in these improvements, CERN has increased the power of the LHC's injectors, which feed the beams of accelerated particles into...

Meet the double-charm tetraquark, the longest-lived exotic matter particle yet discovered. Exotic particles like this can be created within accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, but they pop into and out of existence extremely quickly. This new particle is considered to have a long lifespan before it decays, but “long” in this case is still so short it can hardly be measured in human terms. Its lifespan is probably a little longer than one-quintillionth of a second... Like many other quark states, this double-charm tetraquark was found at LHCb using a method called bump hunting. Basically, the researchers fire up...

nitiated by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, the five-year FASER project is funded by grants of $1 million each from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation – with additional support from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. ASER's focus is to find light, extremely weakly interacting particles that have so far eluded scientists, even in the high-energy experiments conducted at the CERN-operated LHC, the largest particle accelerator in the world. Feng, a theoretical physicist, will be joined by CERN collaborators as well as other scientists from research institutions in Europe, China, Japan and the United States....

-snip- Alessandro Strumia, the physicist in question and a professor at Pisa University in Italy, gave his presentation to a crowd at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), one of the word's most important nuclear physics organizations. The topic of the day was gender in physics, and the crowd was mostly composed of women, according to The Guardian. Over the course of several slides of his presentation, which are available online, Strumia laid out an IQ-based argument for disparities between men and women in physics. "Physics graduates have top IQ," he wrote. "It's needed." He pointed to a study that...

A senior scientist has given what has been described as a "highly offensive" presentation about the role of women in physics, the BBC has learned. At a workshop organised by Cern, Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University said that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation". He said male scientists were being discriminated against because of ideology rather than merit. He was speaking at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics. Prof Strumia has since defended his comments, saying he was only presenting the facts . . .

The newly-discovered particles, named Σb(6097)+ and Σb(6097)-, are predicted by the quark model, and belong to the same family of particles as the protons that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates and collides: baryons, which are made up of three quarks. But the type of quarks they contain are different: whereas protons contain two up quarks and one down quark, the new particles are bottom baryons composed of one bottom quark and two up quarks or one bottom quark and two down quarks respectively.The LHCb researchers found these particles using the classic particle-hunting technique of looking for an excess of...

"Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it," he wrote. "The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets." "That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across." As if this wasn't bad enough, the atom smasher might even be capable of destroying space itself. "Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could...

Ten years ago, the world's largest scientific instrument was turned on and the start of a research dynasty began. On Sept. 10, 2008, a beam of protons was shot for the first time around the entire 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's largest and highest energy atom smasher ever constructed. Located at the CERN laboratory, just outside Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC was constructed to smash highly energetic beams of protons together at near the speed of light. The stated goal was to create and discover the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of...

The Large Hadron Collider suffered a power outage last night, after a luckless weasel decided to chew on a 66-kilovolt power cable. It’s not the first time the LHC, a 17-mile superconductor that smashes atoms together at close to the speed of light, has run into trouble because of something small and cute. In 2009, the power went down after a bird dropped a baguette onto a critical electrical system. Although the incident was widely reported and confirmed at the time by sources at the LHC, CERN is apparently now telling folks it may be apocryphal. “This was a story...

Cancel your plans for this weekend! CERN just dropped 300 terabytes of hot collider data on the world and you know you want to take a look. Kati Lassila-Perini, a physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (!) detector, gave a refreshingly straightforward explanation for this huge release. “Once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly,” she said in a news release accompanying the data. “The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data preservation...

Physicists around the world were puzzled recently when an unusual bump appeared in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing them to wonder if it was a new particle previously unknown, or perhaps even two new particles. The collision cannot be explained by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics. Adam Martin, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, said he and other theoretical physicists had heard about the results before they were released on Dec. 15, and groups began brainstorming, via Skype and other ways,...

The gigantic accelerator in Europe has produced hints of an exotic particle that defies the known laws of physics. A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the...

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Engineers have begun a major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Their work should double the energy of what's already the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. This will enable researchers here to move on to their ultimate goal: to find evidence of "new physics", which they believe will lead to a new, more compete theory of sub-atomic physics. The discovery of the Higgs last year was the end of a successful chapter of late 20th Century physics. This was the development of the current theory in the 1960s and 70s called the "Standard Model". This theory says...

No hints of “new physics” beyond the predictions of the Standard Model have turned up in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular tunnel at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland that slams protons together at high energies. (Photo: CERN) As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe.“My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm,” said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of...

A progress report from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has declared that the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle,” has been found. The discovery of the new particle is a major step toward confirming the Standard Model used in modern physics. Professor John Womersley said, “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson… That is confirmed...."

(Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year. In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists. Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height...

Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say. Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second. Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter. The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics. The current "standard model" of physics holds that each particle - protons, electrons, neutrons and a zoo of more exotic particles - has its mirror image antiparticle. The...

After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting. Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space. The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of...