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More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter...

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US scientists have confirmed the discovery of element number 114, first made over a decade ago by a team in Russia. By smashing a high energy beam of calcium-48 ions into a plutonium-242 target, the US team managed to detect two nuclei of element 114, which is predicted by some to be bordering the so-called 'island of stability' for superheavy atoms.Yuri Oganessian and his team at Dubna, Russia, were the first to claim to have created nuclei of element 114 - but any such claim has to be thoroughly verified and the experiments repeated independently before the element can be considered for admission...

Japanese researchers have made ultra-thin metal wires by growing them inside carbon nanotubes. It is hoped that the research - which can make wires only a single atom in diameter - could provide interesting clues to the best components for future nanoelectronic devices. Atom-thin metal wires show many novel electronic properties - but the wires are so fragile and prone to oxidation that they have been difficult to study. Ryo Kitaura and colleagues at Nagoya University solved this problem by growing the wires encased within protective nanotubes. This means that their properties can be measured and mapped. 'The process [of growing the...

Enlarge ImageObviously. The area of this triangle is 13, a congruent number. Credit: L. Blizard/Science Quick! What do the numbers 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, and 23 have in common? If you said they're all "congruent" numbers--numbers related to the areas of certain triangles--then you may be one of those folks who scored an 800 on your math SAT. Even if that answer didn't leap to mind, you may be intrigued to know that mathematicians have now cataloged the congruent numbers--which are easy to define but not so easy to spot--up to a trillion. A...

Enlarge ImagePeer pressure. Magnetic domains in steel (vertical bans) arise when neighboring electrons point their magnetic poles in the same direction. Credit: Zureks, Chris Vardon/Wikimedia It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim. Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to...

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.

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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...