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Bill Nye the Science Guy has filed a temporary restraining order against his ex-non-wife, author Blair Tindall, in Los Angeles Superior Court. Nye's filing—and the response from Tindall—tell a tawdry tale of mysterious liquids, poisoned gardens, and late-night visits from a troubled, black-clad woman. Blair Tindall describes herself as a "recovering oboist." She authored Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, a well-reviewed account of the life of a classical music freelancer working in New York. Tindall and the bow-tied Science Guy hooked up in 2005 after Nye (whose entertainment career began when he won a Steve Martin...

HAVE we hastened the demise of the universe by looking at it? That’s the startling question posed by a pair of physicists, who suggest that we may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and colleague James Dent suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the universe to revert to a state similar to early in its history, when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our...

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 14/11/2007 An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which as received rave reviews from scientists. The E8 pattern (left), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right) Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt). In winter, he heads...

European physicists have sent a neutrino on a 730-kilometre trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors... In 2006, CERN started beaming neutrinos from its accelerator complex near Geneva, and have so far detected several hundred impacts in San Grasso. But the scientists have now taken the venture a step forward by starting to fill the San Grasso detector with small film plates which measure with high accuracy the cascade of particles that are produced when a neutrino impacts. These plates, called bricks, are each made of a sandwich of lead...

These supermassive entities are known as high-energy quasars. These are a type of black hole, found in young galaxies, that are surrounded by a thick halo of gas and dust, which produces X-rays as it is sucked into the void. The presence of X-rays, even when the quasars themselves cannot be seen, is what tipped off the scientists to the fact they had stumbled across something extraordinary... The newfound quasars will help answer fundamental questions about how massive galaxies evolve. Astronomers now know, for example, that most of these galaxies steadily generate stars and black holes simultaneously until the latter...

Not only has a large chunk of the universe thought to have been found in 2002 apparently gone missing again but it is taking some friends with it, according to new research at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The new calculations might leave the mass of the universe as much as ten to 20 percent lighter than previously calculated. The same UAH group that found what was theorized to be a significant fraction of the "missing mass" that binds together the universe has discovered that some x-rays thought to come from intergalactic clouds of "warm" gas are instead...

Hydrino Theory, Which Overturns Quantum Theory, Is In Turn Overturned By Doofusino Theory by Scott Aaronson On December 28, 1999, The Village Voice, long respected for its hard-hitting journalism and unimpeachable scientific integrity, ran a cover article entitled "QUANTUM LEAP" by Erik Baard. The article relates the epochal breakthroughs of Dr. Randell Mills of Princeton, NJ, a "Harvard-trained medical doctor who ... says he's found the Holy Grail of physics: a unified theory of everything." The article continues: Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma...

Someday spacecraft will be powerful enough perhaps to journey at extraordinary speeds, spanning the vast interstellar voids. Our technology might develop until we become a vast, powerful intergalactic society, capable of resolving the deepest quandaries ever known. Only then could we definitely answer what is perhaps the ultimate question: "Is the universe shaped like a doughnut?" This last question pertains to an idea attributed to Homer and mentioned by guest star Stephen Hawking in an episode of The Simpsons. In the episode, Lisa Simpson joins Springfield's chapter of the brainy organisation Mensa, which assumes mayoral duties and vows to remake...

Black holes may harbour their own universes 15:16 31 October 2007 NewScientist.com news service Mason Inman Black holes may contain whole universes inside them, according to a theory called loop quantum gravity (Illustration: XMM-Newton/ESA/NASA) When matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests. What's inside a black hole is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. The theory that predicted black holes in the first place – general relativity – says that all the...

Physicists have created the heaviest isotope yet of magnesium, but in their experiments an unexpected isotope of aluminum also showed up. The findings could help astrophysicists understand occasional X-ray emissions from neutron stars that are growing in mass. The 7-day-long experiment took place at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), an atom smasher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Hoping to test the limits of how many extra neutrons will bind to an atomic nucleus, researchers were trying to create magnesium-40, a heavyweight element with 18 more neutrons than the most common isotope, magnesium-22. Standard theory says that magnesium-40...

Eve Curie Labouisse, a journalist and humanitarian best known for her biography of her mother, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, died on Monday at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 102. Mrs. Labouisse’s stepdaughter, Anne L. Peretz, confirmed the death. Published in 1937, “Madame Curie” chronicled the life of Marie Curie, who earned the Nobel Prize twice, first in physics in 1903 (the award was shared with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel) and again in chemistry in 1911. Mrs. Labouisse’s admiring portrait followed her mother (née Marya Sklodowska) from her birth and...

A ‘defect’ in spacetime may be one of the most curious findings of the data collected from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe. What WMAP gave us is the earliest image of the cosmos we have in our repertoire, showing temperature changes across the microwave background thought to be the aftereffect of the Big Bang. When Marcos Cruz (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria) and colleagues found a cold spot in the data, they launched an investigation to determine what in heaven could be causing it. A random fluctuation in the data? Possibly, but the Spanish and British team studying the cold spot...

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...