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Two British researchers challenged the conventional history of mathematics in June when they reported having evidence that the infinite series, one of the core concepts of calculus, was first developed by Indian mathematicians in the 14th century. They also believe they can show how the advancement may have been passed along to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who are credited with independently developing the concept some 250 years later... historian of mathematics George Gheverghese Joseph of the University of Manchester, who conducted the research with Dennis Almeida of the University of Exeter... says that no one has yet firmly...

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic...

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. 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). rr The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right) In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi...

A new study using results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provides one of the best pieces of evidence yet that many supermassive black holes are spinning extremely rapidly. The whirling of these giant black holes drives powerful jets that pump huge amounts of energy into their environment and affects galaxy growth. A team of scientists compared leading theories of jets produced by rotating supermassive black holes with Chandra data. A sampling of nine giant galaxies that exhibit large disturbances in their gaseous atmospheres showed that the central black holes in these galaxies must be spinning at near their maximum rates....

The quasar OJ287 contains two black holes (this slightly dated illustration lists the larger black hole's mass as 17 billion Suns, though researchers now estimate it is 18 billion Suns). The smaller black hole crashes through a disc of material around the larger one twice every orbit, creating bright outbursts (Illustration: VISPA) The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever...

CHICAGO (AFP) - Hundreds of rogue black holes may be roaming around the Milky Way waiting to engulf stars and planets that cross their path, US astronomers said Wednesday. The astronomers believe these "intermediate mass" black holes are invisible except in rare circumstances and have been spawned by mergers of black holes within globular clusters -- swarms of stars held together by their mutual gravity. These black holes are unlikely to pose a threat to Earth, but may engulf nebulae, stars and planets that stray into their paths, the researchers said. "These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do...

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...