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CHICAGO (AFP) – Physicists have come closer to finding the elusive "God Particle," which they hope could one day explain why particles have mass, the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced Friday. Researchers at the Fermilab have managed to shrink the territory where the elusive Higgs Boson particle is expected to be found -- a discovery placing the American research institute ahead of its European rival in the race to discover one of the biggest prizes in physics. Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with...

Same techniques could be used to detect theoretical particles like the Higgs boson Physicists have identified the production of the elusive single top quark, two research teams report. Previously top quarks have been observed only when produced in pairs, as when they were initially discovered 14 years ago at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Now, researchers using Fermilab’s two detectors announced March 9 that they have detected single top quarks. The techniques used to find the singleton quarks could help to identify other rare particles, such as the Higgs boson, the scientists say. “What a discovery,” comments...

Longer search promised after physicists exclude heavy masses for the 'God particle'. The Higgs boson particle may be lighter — and the race to find it tougher — than particle physicists had hoped, according to the latest results from the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.Fermilab is still hunting the Higgs boson.Fermilab On 13 March, scientists there announced that they had ruled out a crucial part of the hunting ground for the 'God particle', thought to confer mass on all other matter.The results suggest that the Higgs boson is not a relatively high-mass particle,...

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2009) — In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action at a distance' of quantum mechanics directly, Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth, poses a conundrum...

No one suspected that Ax + By = Cz (note unique exponents) might also be impossible with co-prime bases until a remarkable discovery in 1993 by a Dallas, Texas number theory enthusiast by the name of Andrew Beal. Beal was working on FLT when he began to look at similar equations with independent exponents. He constructed several algorithms to generate solution sets but the very nature of the algorithms he was able to construct required a common factor in the bases. He began to suspect that co-prime bases might be impossible and set out to test his hypothesis by computer....

« We’ve already speculated here that if the Kepler mission finds few Earth-like planets in the course of its investigations, the belief that life is rare will grow. But let’s be optimists and speculate on the reverse: What if Kepler pulls in dozens, even hundreds, of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their respective stars? In that case, the effort to push on to study the atmospheres of such planets would receive a major boost, aiding the drive to launch a terrestrial planet hunter with serious spectroscopic capabilities some time in the next decade.Budget problems? Let’s fold Darwin...

This is (IMHO) an outstanding work of hard science fiction. From the Wikipedia page:Tau Zero follows the crew of the starship Leonora Christine, a colonization vessel crewed by 25 men and 25 women. The ship is not capable of FTL travel and so is constrained by relativity. Its engines operate two modes, acceleration and deceleration. The deceleration module becomes damaged during the trip. Because the engines must be running at all times (to provide particle/radiation shielding), and because of the hard radiation produced by the engines, the crew can neither repair the decelerator nor turn off the accelerator. Instead, the...

subtitled, "Lecture 11 of 23 from the course Physics III: Vibrations and Waves"

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about...

For anyone not initially aware, The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is a particle accelerator located along the French/Swiss Border, being the Largest Man-made machine ever (also the most expensive), it's biggest item for debate has been it's potential risk (even with a low liklihood for such events, catastrophic risk is still there). The risk to Put it mildly ranges anywhere from Miniature Black Hole creation(which broken down comes down to the verity of Hawking Radiation, and estimated accretion rates, both based purely from theory), The creation of matter destroying strange matter with a positive charge, or a myriad of other...

Is mathematics the language of the universe?MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math's ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality? The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf Bender of Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Ludwig Maximilians University Observatory. The results are puiblished in this week's issue of Astrophysical...

Temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, among other data, are helping researchers better understand the accelerating expansion of the universe. Image credit: NASA. (PhysOrg.com) -- An alternative proposal to dark energy in which the Earth sits near the center of a large void is undergoing scrutiny, and the results show that void models fit poorly with observed data. Nevertheless, scientists say that more research will be needed to determine if void models, dark energy, or something else can accurately explain how the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Almost a decade ago, theorists proposed a void model as...

Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer? Um, well, you may have a point. Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted. Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps...

Ytterbium ion is the first element to be teleported over a distance. Ytterbium ions have been 'teleported' over a distance of a metre.MM_photo / Alamy Researchers have teleported a single ion of the element ytterbium over a metre in distance, shattering previous records. Photons have gone further but teleportation of matter has only occurred between ions in the same trap over a few micrometers.Although still highly inefficient, their technique provides an important proof-of-principle for long-distance quantum teleportation and brings the era of quantum communication closer to reality. The work appears in the journal Science1.The spandexed crew of Star Trek has...

Scientists across America are celebrating the passing of the Bush administration as the end of a dark age, a bleak stretch in which research budgets shrank and everything — stem cells, sex education, climate change, and the very origins of the Grand Canyon — became a point of conflict. President Barack Obama has ignited a new optimism among the white coats. In his inaugural speech, he promised to "restore science to its rightful place," hinting at nothing short of a renaissance in the fields of health, energy, the environment and America's schools. As a testament to that, the United States...

Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "Star Trek" feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter - about a yard. This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort. Teleportation is one of nature's most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a...

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not...

As a new book speculates that 'Britain's Einstein' was autistic, an autism expert warns that a prenatal test for the condition would prevent brilliant scientists like Paul Dirac from ever being born A new book on the greatest British physicist since Newton speculates that both his profound mathematical abilites and his extreme social awkwardness stemmed from undiagnosed autism. The claims – from a biography of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man – tie in with an article on the BBC website from leading autism researcher Prof Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen says we need a public debate about the prenatal...

A progression of squeezed triphoton states spirals outward. The quantum uncertainty in the triphotons can be represented as a blob on a sphere that becomes progressively "squeezed.". (Image by Victoria Feistner) A team of University of Toronto physicists have demonstrated a new technique to squeeze light to the fundamental quantum limit, a finding that has potential applications for high-precision measurement, next-generation atomic clocks, novel quantum computing and our most fundamental understanding of the universe.