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Beamish and Day are the only researchers in Canada conducting experimental research in this area of fundamental physics. At very low temperatures, helium gas turns into a liquid. Put under extreme pressure the liquid turns into a solid. Physicists have been manipulating solid helium so they can study its unusual behaviour. In 2004, a research team at Penn State university in the United States, led by Dr. Moses Chan, electrified the physics world when it announced that it may have discovered an entirely new state of matter - supersolidity. The team made the discovery by cooling solid helium to an...

If the universe contains more than three spatial dimensions, as many physicists believe, our current laws of gravity should break down at small distances. Nothing seems more certain than the "fact" that there are three dimensions of space. But can we be sure that there are only three dimensions? Imagine a tightrope walker balancing on a cable high above the ground. To the tightrope walker the cable is effectively a 1D object, because he only needs one coordinate to specify his position as he walks back and forth. But an ant, for instance, sees the cable as a 2D object,...

It's the end of the world - but not as we know it. A Spanish scientist suggests that the universe's end will come not with a bang but standstill - that time is literally running out and will, one day, stop altogether. Professor Jose Senovilla, of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, has put forward the theory as a rival to the idea of "dark energy" - the strange antigravitational force that is posited to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists. It was noticed ten years ago that distant stars - the ones on the very fringes...

WASHINGTON - The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a "death star galaxy" blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy. A fleet of space and ground telescopes have captured images of this cosmic violence, which people have never witnessed before, according to a new study released Monday by NASA. "It's like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn't involved in the research. But ultimately, this...

Source: Imperial College London Date: December 17, 2006 Preparing For The Biggest Experiment On Earth An international team of over 2,000 scientists, led by Professor Tejinder Virdee from Imperial College London's Department of Physics is stepping up preparations for the world's largest ever physics experiment, starting next year at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The enormous CMS particle detector is being assembled piece by piece under the supervision of Imperial's Professor Tejinder Virdee.Ads by Google Advertise on this site Professor Virdee is the lead scientist on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) particle detector experiment, which will aim to find new particles,...

The void: Imprint of another universe? 24 November 2007 Marcus Chown Magazine issue 2631 IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of...

Dr Gaurav Khanna is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He has been renting supercomputers at NASA and the US National Science Foundation for US$20,000-$30,000 a year to run complicated calculations on just how much radiation is emitted in the process of a black hole swallowing a star... "For US$4,000 or so, I can get eight PS3s that can do the same task that I'd do on a supercomputer. For a one-time cost, I have this resource I can use privately. I can use it indefinitely over and over again. That's hugely attractive. That's why I considered the project....

The moon formed after a nasty planetary collision with young Earth, yet it looks odd next to its watery orbital neighbor. Turns out it really is odd: Only about one in every 10 to 20 solar systems may harbor a similar moon. New observations made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of stellar dust clouds suggest that moons like Earth's are—at most—in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems. "When a moon forms from a violent collision, dust should be blasted everywhere," said Nadya Gorlova, an astronomer at the University of Florida in Gainesville who analyzed the telescope data in...

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...