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REEDLEY – When Reedley code enforcement officers investigated a warehouse at 850 I Street on March 3 over an illegally attached garden hose, they had no idea what massive medical violations they would go on to uncover. “It was pretty clear right off the bat that something was going on we didn’t have a business license for,” Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba said. “They didn’t have any city approvals; that building was supposed to be vacant.” [snip] Over 900 mice were located at the facility. Court documents identify Wang Zhaolin as the Prestige representative onsite during the investigation. Zhaolin informed...

To make a space crystal, you need the immense pressures of the Earth’s surface bearing down on minerals and magma. But to make a time crystal, you need esoteric equations and ridiculously precise lasers. At least, that’s how physicists shaped the first self-standing time crystal in a lab last year. Now, they’ve turned into an even more tangible object by creating a time crystal from common elements that can withstand room temperature. If you’re wondering what a time crystal is (outside of pulp science fiction), most physicists also had the same question until pretty recently. It’s a form of matter...

In new study, UChicago astronomers find no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on gravitational wave data. Credit: Courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center CI Lab While last year's discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won't add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on the gravitational wave data. Their research, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is one of many papers in the wake of the extraordinary...

Researchers have been able to map how the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation are distributed in three-dimensional space for the first time, using new data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Given the tremendous size of this section of the Eagle Nebula and its distance from Earth (around 7,000 light-years), researchers previously thought we were unlikely to ever see the shape of it in anything other than two flat dimensions, as in Hubble's famous photograph.

Watch this. It's more brainbending than drugs.

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago. As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see? My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending...

(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...

In many ways, black holes are science’s answer to science fiction. As strange as anything from a novelist’s imagination, black holes warp the fabric of spacetime and imprison light and matter in a gravitational death grip. Their bizarre properties make black holes ideal candidates for fictional villainy. But now black holes are up for a different role: heroes helping physicists assess the real-world existence of another science fiction favorite — hidden extra dimensions of space. Astrophysical giants several times the mass of the sun and midget black holes smaller than a subatomic particle could provide glimpses of an extra-dimensional existence....

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...

The mysterious cosmic presence called dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe, might be lurking in hidden dimensions of space. The idea would explain how these dimensions remain stable - a big problem for the unified scheme of physics called string theory... quantum vibrations in the vacuum of space (called vacuum energy or the cosmological constant) that could produce repulsive gravity... should either possess a ridiculously high energy density - 122 orders of magnitude larger than are observed - or cancel out to exactly zero. To make them almost-but-not-quite cancel, in agreement with astronomical observations, means fudging...

For a long time, Itzhak Bars has been studying time. More than a decade ago, the USC College physicist began pondering the role time plays in the basic laws of physics — the equations describing matter, gravity and the other forces of nature.Those laws are exquisitely accurate. Einstein mastered gravity with his theory of general relativity, and the equations of quantum theory capture every nuance of matter and other forces, from the attractive power of magnets to the subatomic glue that holds an atom’s nucleus together. But the laws can’t be complete. Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory don’t...

ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago. It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

It seems like the most obvious physical fact: The universe has four dimensions--three spanning space and one ticking away time. But the ultimate theory of gravity should explain why the universe is four-dimensional and how those dimensions arose, say researchers trying to unify the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Now, calculations in the 24 September PRL [Phys. Rev. Lett.] show that when all possible microscopic contortions of spacetime are added together, a large-scale four-dimensional universe can emerge. For nearly 80 years physicists have struggled to reconcile the prevailing theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. According to Einstein's general theory...