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The mystery of why a $300,000 Bentley crashed into the US-Canada border crossing at 100mph and exploded, killing a couple inside, may never be solved as police close the case. **SNIP** Betsy Ertel, a spokesperson for the Cincinnati Insurance Companies, which insured the Bentley, declined to discuss details of any claim 'out of respect for the privacy of our policyholders'. Police said the Villanis were killed instantly in the crash and pronounced dead at the scene. Whether any of their relatives will file a lawsuit is unknown. The 2022 Flying Spur can go from zero to 60mph in four seconds...

WASHINGTON – During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI. Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed. Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream...

Auto Safety: As a Toyota Prius with a stuck accelerator races down a California freeway, no one mourns the victims of the fuel economy standards imposed by Congress. Forced into smaller cars, thousands have died. We can barely imagine the panic felt by James Sikes, 61, as his Toyota Prius accelerated uncontrollably while he drove down Interstate 8 in San Diego County. We can imagine the continuation of the grandstanding by the owners of "government motors" as they further browbeat a competitor of government-run GM and Chrysler. We do not minimize the safety issues here that need to be addressed,...

Scientists celebrated at the world's biggest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva on Tuesday as they started colliding particles at record energy levels mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang, opening a new era in the quest for the secrets of the universe. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) accelerator collided at close to the speed of light. "This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we...

A senior Vatican delegation visited the world's biggest nuclear physics laboratory, proclaiming that true faith has no problems with science. The Roman Catholic Church was represented by Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City's governor, as it toured the CERN facility and its 17-mile (27-kilometer) proton accelerator this week. It welcomed any breakthroughs physicists could provide on understanding the basis of the universe, and said they would also advance religion. "The Church never fears the truth of science, because we are convinced that all truth comes from God," Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City's governor, said Thursday in Geneva. "Science will help our...

November 14, 2007 In what could be seen as a stepping stone on the road to the replacement of traditional platter based hard drives with flash based drives, SanDisk has unveiled a solid-state storage solution that works in conjunction with a PC's hard drive to store and launch the computer's operating system and software applications. Presently the cost and size limitations of flash storage prohibit the complete replacement of traditional hard drives in PCs, but the new SanDisk Vaulter Disk offers the performance advantages of flash memory by tag-teaming with a PC’s existing hard drive. Both Vaulter and the hard...

Imagine a car that accelerates from zero to sixty in 250 feet, and then rockets to 120 miles per hour in just one more inch. That's essentially what a collaboration of accelerator physicists has accomplished, using electrons for their racecars and plasma for the afterburners. Because electrons already travel at near light's speed in an accelerator, the physicists actually doubled the energy of the electrons, not their speed. The researchers—from the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering—published their...

Scientists could generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007. This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole ... But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," ... For one thing, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should emit radiation, and that tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb, evaporating within a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, "before they could gobble up any significant...

SAN FRANCISCO – Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers. Over the past week, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park have been using X-rays to decipher a fragile 10th century manuscript that contains the only copies of some of Archimedes' most important works. The X-rays, generated by a particle accelerator, cause tiny amounts of iron left by the original ink to glow without harming the delicate goatskin parchment. “We are...

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. 2002 August 6 Muon Wobble Possible Door to Supersymmetric Universe Credit: R. Bowman, g-2 Collaboration, BNL, DOE Explanation: How fast do fundamental particles wobble? A surprising answer to this seemingly inconsequential question is coming out of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, USA and may not only that indicate that the Standard Model of Particle Physics is incomplete but also that our universe is filled with a previously...