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GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest atom smasher will likely be fired up again in October after scientists have carried out tests and put in place further safety measures to prevent a repeat of the faults that sidelined the $10 billion machine shortly after startup last year, the operator said Saturday. The Large Hadron Collider was meant to restart in late September, but that will probably be pushed back two to three weeks, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research said. "We're pretty confident about the dates," James Gillies told The Associated Press, adding that scientists believe they...

A dispatch from my colleague Dennis Overbye: As fans of the late, great “Seinfeld,” know, there is a lot to say about nothing. At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all? “Nothing is unstable,” Frank...

Nanoscience milestone opens up new possibilities in molecular electronics ZURICH, June 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists in collaboration with the University of Regensburg, Germany, and Utrecht University, Netherlands, for the first time demonstrated the ability to measure the charge state of individual atoms using noncontact atomic force microscopy. View video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plMkPtwEMRM (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO ) Measuring with the precision of a single electron charge and nanometer lateral resolution, researchers succeeded in distinguishing neutral atoms from positively or negatively charged ones. This represents a milestone in nanoscale science and opens up new possibilities in the exploration of nanoscale structures and...

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

BERLIN (Reuters) – A new, superheavy chemical element numbered 112 will soon be officially included in the periodic table, German researchers said. A team in the southwest German city of Darmstadt first produced 112 in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120-meter-long particle accelerator to hit a lead target. "The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences released Beyond Bias And Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which found “pervasive unexamined gender bias” against women in academic science. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration cabinet secretary, chaired the committee that wrote the report. When she spoke at a congressional hearing in October 2007, she warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in university science. This “crisis,”...

BERLIN (Reuters) – A new, superheavy chemical element numbered 112 will soon be officially included in the periodic table, German researchers said. A team in the southwest German city of Darmstadt first produced 112 in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120-meter-long particle accelerator to hit a lead target. "The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research said in a statement late on Wednesday.

Enlarge ImageSpooky connection. Physicists forged a quantum link called entanglement between the mechanical oscillations of one pair of ions and another distant pair. Credit: John Jost and Jason Amini/NIST Quantum mechanics and its bizarre rules explain the structure of atoms, the formation of chemical bonds, and the switching of transistors in microchips. Oddly, though, in spite of the theory's name, physicists have never made an actual machine whose motion captures the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. Now a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, has taken a step in that direction by forging...

PASADENA, CALIF. — The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87. The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development. "We did not expect it at all," said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of...

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics "Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the...

PHYSICS ARTICLES DISCUSSION FORUM Fusion and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) Gravitonics article found HERE. Located near Geneva, close to the border between Switzerland and France, the Large Hadron Collider is the largest particle accelerator in the world at a cost of about 9 billion dollars. It is strange how we love to put all of our eggs in one basket. At the same time 9 billion was spent on the LHC, Dr Bussard could not find a few million for his fusion reactor. Don't get me wrong, the Physicists working at CERN are some of the best in the...

The oldest of the subatomic particles called neutrinos might each encompass a space larger than thousands of galaxies, new simulations suggest... According to quantum mechanics, the "size" of a particle such as a neutrino is defined by a fuzzy range of possible locations. We can only detect these particles when they interact with something such as an atom, which collapses that range into a single point in space and time. For neutrinos created recently, the ranges they can exist in are very, very small. But over the roughly 13.7-billion-year lifetime of the cosmos, "relic" neutrinos have been stretched out by...

SYDNEY: The universe's first stars blew small galaxies apart when they exploded, effectively quashing all nearby star formation, say Japanese astrophysicists. The theory, based on analytical calculations of the energy and disruptive effects of early supernovae, adds another piece to the puzzle of what the first stars were like and how they influenced galaxy formation. The first stars formed around 200 million years after the Big Bang in clumps of dark matter called dark matter haloes – the basic building blocks of galaxies. Running out of gas These stars were massive, probably 10 to 100 times bigger than the Sun....

String theory: you love it or loathe it. To some it represents our best hope for a route to a "theory of everything"; others portray it as anything from a mathematically obtuse minefield to a quasi-religion that has precious little to do with science. There might be a middle way. String theory's mathematical tools were designed to unlock the most profound secrets of the cosmos, but they could have a far less esoteric purpose: to tease out the properties of some of the most complex yet useful types of material here on Earth. Both string theorists and condensed matter...

Our understanding of life and technology at extreme temperatures could become clearer thanks to a microfluidic device that studies ice formation. The new instrument studies ice formation in supercooled water George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, and colleagues have developed a microfluidic device that produces supercooled water drops (droplets that remain liquid below 0 °C) and measures the temperature at which ice nucleates in them. The device is two orders of magnitude faster that current state-of-the-art ice nucleation instruments and very accurate, claims the team.Ice nucleation controls water's freezing process. Studying how water behaves is important for our comprehension...

An Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked a math puzzle that has gone unsolved for over 300 years. Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported.

Using new data from ESA’s XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy. The galaxy – known as 1H0707-495 – was observed during four 48-hr-long orbits of XMM-Newton around Earth, starting in January 2008. The black hole at its centre was thought to be partially obscured from view by intervening clouds of gas and dust, but these current observations have revealed the innermost depths of the galaxy. “We can now start to map out the region immediately around the black hole,” says Andrew Fabian,...

It was at Caltech that Gell-Mann helped to lay the foundations for our understanding of the components that make up matter. He drafted a blueprint of subatomic physics that he called the Eightfold Way. At the time, physicists understood that atoms are constructed from protons and neutrons, but they had also found many other mysterious particles. The Eightfold Way made sense of this baffling menagerie, finding within it places for particles never even imagined. The work was so important that it netted Gell-Mann a Nobel Prize in 1969. In 1984 Gell-Mann pursued his dream of working in other fields by...

Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley's argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe "out there" into which we have each individually arrived....

The rare earth metal is the 53rd naturally occurring element to possess the property An old element just learned a new trick under pressure. When cooled and squeezed very hard, the soft metallic element europium turns into a superconductor, allowing electrons to flow unfettered by resistance, a study appearing May 13 in Physical Review Letters shows. The results make europium the 53rd of the 92 naturally occurring elements to possess superconductivity, which, if harnessed, could make for more efficient energy transfer. Europium, a rare earth metal with a silver color, is strongly magnetic at everyday temperatures and pressure. Study coauthor...