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The European telescope sent far from Earth to study the oldest light in the Universe has returned its first images. The Planck observatory, launched in May, is surveying radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The light holds details about the age, contents and evolution of the cosmos. The new images show off Planck's capabilities now that it has been set up, although major science results are not expected for a couple of years. "The images show first of all that we are working and that we are able to map the sky,"...

VIENNA (AFP) – They can make fabric resistant to stains, improve the taste of food and help drug research, but nanoparticles could also pose a danger to human health, experts warned Wednesday. Susanne Stark, of the Consumer Information Association, told a seminar in the Austrian city of Salzburg that companies should be forced to indicate on labels whether a product contains the tiny particles. "There are more questions than answers on the effects of nanoparticles" on human health, the chemist said. Cosmetic and food products should indicate whether their products contain nanoparticles by 2012, she said. Nanoparticles, measuring no more...

In many ways, black holes are science’s answer to science fiction. As strange as anything from a novelist’s imagination, black holes warp the fabric of spacetime and imprison light and matter in a gravitational death grip. Their bizarre properties make black holes ideal candidates for fictional villainy. But now black holes are up for a different role: heroes helping physicists assess the real-world existence of another science fiction favorite — hidden extra dimensions of space. Astrophysical giants several times the mass of the sun and midget black holes smaller than a subatomic particle could provide glimpses of an extra-dimensional existence....

Science Daily — In a shock finding, astronomers using CSIRO’s Parkes telescope have detected a huge burst of radio energy from the distant universe that could open up a new field in astrophysics. The research team, led by Assistant Professor Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University, reported its discovery in the journal Science Express. The radio burst appears to have originated at least one-and-a-half billion light-years [500 Mpc] away but was startlingly strong. “Normally the kind of cosmic activity we’re looking for at this distance would be very faint but this was so bright that it saturated the equipment,” said...

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years. Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving...

Apple today made the source code of Grand Central Dispatch available under an Apache open source license. One of the new technologies for concurrency added to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Grand Central is Apple’s attempt to help developers deal with the rise of multi-core. The open sourcing of Grand Central comes as something of a surprise, because it is a core technology in Snow Leopard, and could be seen to give Apple a competitive edge in the new world of multi-core. So why did they do it? Only Apple knows for sure, but there are compelling arguments for...

Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields. Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments. The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something. "It actually kicked around and started...

Time doesn’t exist. The universe isn’t really expanding. And if you want a theory of quantum gravity, look to the man who inspired Einstein, says Julian Barbour. For someone who believes time doesn’t exist, Julian Barbour sure has a head for dates. He remembers exactly when he started to have doubts about time: It was October 18, 1963, and he was reading the newspaper. He spotted an article about the physicist Paul Dirac and his quest for a theory of quantum gravity—a theory linking Einstein’s ideas about gravity to the clashing doctrine of quantum mechanics. Today, Barbour is on that...

Magnetic nanopoles observed for the first time Magnetic monopole Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden, St. Andrews, La Plata and Oxford, for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material. Results of their research are being published in the journal Science. Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles proposed by physicists that carry a single magnetic pole, either a magnetic North pole or South pole. In the material world this is quite exceptional because magnetic particles are usually observed as dipoles, north and south combined. However...

Report hints at the existence of a new and massive elementary particle In a weak moment, researchers have found an unexpected asymmetry in particle production that could hint at exotic physics. The tentative evidence, announced August 21, could be the fingerprint of a massive elementary particle that would help unify three of the four known forces in nature. The physicists collected data for nearly a decade at the Belle particle accelerator experiment in Tsukuba, Japan. In the experiment, known as a B factory, beams of electrons and positrons collide to produce millions of pairs of B mesons and anti-B mesons....

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers. The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques - but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

I'm going to leave this as link-only.

Sensitive search fails to find ripples in space, but boosts hopes for future hunts.Supernovas, such as the one which created the Crab Nebula, should send out bursts of gravity waves.NASA The hunt for gravitational waves may not have found the elusive ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein, but the latest results from the most sensitive survey to date are providing clear insight into the origins and fabric of the Universe.General relativity predicts that gravitational waves are generated by accelerating masses. Violent yet rare events, such as a supernova explosion or the collision of two black holes, should make the...

More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time. In Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard. Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which every other kilogram on the planet...

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

The Invariant Set Postulate differentiates between reality and unreality, suggesting the existence of a state space, within which a smaller subset of state space (reality) is embedded. (PhysOrg.com) -- Since the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists have been trying to understand the many strange implications of the theory: superpositions, wave-particle duality, and the observer’s role in measurements, to name a few. Now, a new proposed law of physics that describes the geometry of physical reality on the cosmological scale might help answer some of these questions. Plus, the new law could give some clues about the role of...

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy. According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology. "We're saying that maybe the...

The world's smallest laser, contained in a silica sphere just 44 nanometres across, has been unveiled. At about 10 times smaller than the wavelength of light, however, this is no ordinary laser, it is the first ever 'spaser'. Whereas a laser amplifies light, using a mirrored cavity to intensify it, a spaser amplifies surface plasmons — tiny oscillations in the density of free electrons on the surface of metals, which, in turn, produce light waves. The spaser could be used as a light source for scanning near-field optical microscopes, which can resolve details beyond the reach of standard light microscopy,...

Well, this is NOT a perpetual motion machine, but something interesting.. from the article: ... A Zero point magnetic power generator is basically a Free Energy Generator. It uses magnets, and magnetic force to induce perpetual motion. It runs by itself, indefinitely without stopping, thus creating completely free electrical energy... A Perpetual motion device refers to a machine that runs perpetually i.e. indefinitely, and produces a larger amount of energy than it consumes. Thus, it produces free energy indefinitely, runs by itself, without having to need a third-party device or resource to power it... SkyNews vid: http://www.youtube.com/v/w8TJlQlPi4s

Google “E=mc2 is wrong” and you get 1,060 hits. Google “E=mc2 is correct” and you get a mere 138 hits. There you have it. It took us a more than a century, but finally this crazy inconsistent theory of relativity got outvoted. Common sense cries victory! Fortunately, science does not work that way. Science is no democracy, and we do not render a theory invalid by popular vote. Einstein's theory of relativity has stood the test of time and its correctness is beyond any doubt. But... there is an issue with what is arguably the most famous equation in the...