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An enormous cold spot in our universe could be explained by a cosmic defect in the fabric of space-time created shortly after the Big Bang, scientists say. If confirmed by future studies, the finding, detailed in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Science, could provide cosmologists with a long-sought clue about how the infant universe evolved. But other scientists, and even members of the study team, are skeptical of the new claim. Cosmic ice cubes Scientists think that shortly after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled and expanded, exotic particles transformed into the particles we know today via...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have produced the world's most powerful antimatter beam. "There is a reactor in Munich, Germany, that has been generating those types of radiation beams for some time now, and our analysis of the data shows that we have exceeded what they have reported," Dr. Ayman Hawari, director of the Nuclear Reactor Program at North Carolina State, told the university's Web site.

Home About Edge Features Edge Editions Press Edge Search A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President...

Australian researcher professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University... "We think it must be an explosion from something very compact like a supernova core or merging neutron stars because we know the size of the emitting region is less than 1,500 km" ...Or it could be something even more exotic and theoretical, like a final burst of radio emission from an evaporating mini black hole... "But this very, very bright flash occurred just once, picked up simultaneously across three detectors, and at a distance of up to three billion light years away, so it could be something completely new." ...Bailes sees...

When you consider that his committee's sole function was to advise whether or not research funds should be spent to investigate an entirely new area of physics and electrochemistry, and that this statement is one of his principal reasons for deciding not to invest such research funds, his statement takes on an almost Kafkaesque quality. It is unwise to invest research funds in any new area, unless we already have a thorough foundation in the basics of that new area? How could anyone ever get any money for research out of professor Huizenga's committee? By proving that they already know...

The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein. The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary...

Science fiction looks closer to becoming science fact. Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea. The work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. Every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his...

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.   In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University...

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies. "The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he...

Mysterious waves that help transport the sun's energy out into space have been detected by scientists for the first time. Researchers hope their discovery of the energetic ripples, known as Alfven waves, will shed light on other solar phenomena such as the sun's magnetic fields and its super-hot corona, or outermost atmosphere. A new video shows the ripples in action. "Alfven waves can provide us with a window into processes that are fundamental to the workings of the sun and its impacts on Earth," said Steve Tomczyk, a space scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Like a...

Radiation was used to pinpoint the normal matter, while the observation of gravitational lensing was used locate dark matter. Gravitational lensing allows matter to be oberved, even when it does not emit or absorb light, by examining the movement of galaxies as our line of sight passes through the area of interest. Massive objects will distort the image and cause it to move in unexpected directions. Because the normal matter could interact through electromagnetic radiation, it was found to have slowed violently during the collision while the dark matter sailed on through... In the meantime, other astronomers began using gravitational...

The team studied two gamma-ray flares in mid-2005 from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 501. They compared gammas in two energy ranges, from 1.2 to 10 tera-electron-volts (TeV) and from 0.25 to 0.6 TeV. The first group arrived on Earth four minutes later than the second. One team member, physicist John Ellis of CERN, says: "The significance of the time lag is above 95%, and the magnitude of the effect is beyond the sensitivity of previous experiments." Either the high-energy gammas were released later (because of how they were generated) or they propagated more slowly.

Science Daily — Australian and French scientists have made another breakthrough in the technology that will drive next generation computers and teleportation. The researchers have successfully superposed light beams, which produces a state that appears to be both on and off at once. Light beams that are simultaneously on and off are vital for the next-generation super computers which should be faster than current computers based on bits, that are either on or off. Previously, only smaller light particles had been superposed and the group has also proved a quantum physics theory known as Schrödinger's cat. This theory, named after...

Predictions Part I astronomy and climatology http://home.earthlink.net/~gravitics/LaViolette/Predict.html Superwave Theory Predictions and their Subsequent Verification Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. Prediction No. 1...

The "standard model" of physics views particles as infinitesimal points, some of which carry basic forces. In spite of the fact that it fails to include gravity and becomes gibberish at high energies, the time-tested theory is the best tool scientists have for explaining physics. "You hear people complain about how good the standard model is," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. "It's an incomplete model, and yet we can't find flaws in it." Turner explained that discovering a mass-inducing particle, called the Higgs boson, remains the next big test for the standard model. If discovered,...

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of...

[Jane H] MacGibbon's analysis indicates that if the electric charge quantum is changing, it is due to the coupling between the cosmic background radiation and electrons. The photon soup acts to partially screen the charge of the electron. At the beginning of the universe, these photons were highly energetic, and were more effective at charge screening than they are now that they have cooled to near absolute zero. Although not addressed by MacGibbon's paper, this indicates an avenue of future work, where the form of the coupling and the rate of change of the electric charge quantum is derived using...

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY [8.8.07]By Freeman DysonFREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. His most recent book, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Page Barbour Lectures), is being published this month by University of Virgina Press.Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY1. The...

Czech physicist Dr. Martin Schnabl has been selected to receive a EURYI Award by the European science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCS) to help him pursue his project and build on five years of hard work culminating in the solution of an equation in string field theory that had gone unsolved for 20 years... "It's a sort of field theory for the infinite tower of oscillatory modes of a string, each of them representing different particle species," Schnabl said. As Schnabl observed, string field theory, by explaining also how quantum mechanics is compatible with general...

Suppose it were possible to go back in time and meet the dead. To say all the things you never got a chance to tell a loved one who died before there was a chance to make your peace. Just think if you could go back and warn someone that their lifestyle, their smoking or heavy drinking was driving them into an early grave. You would not only be able to meet the dead - but to save them as well. A new book tells the story of an extraordinary man whose life work is inspired by a longing to...