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Scientists announced Thursday that they believe they have detected evidence of dark matter in data collected at an underground physics lab in Soudan... According to the Department of Energy's Fermilab, which is conducting the search for dark matter at the Soudan lab, "judging by the way galaxies rotate, scientists have known for 70 years that the matter we can see does not provide enough gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. There must exist some form of matter that does not emit or reflect light." In the announcement, the lab said the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has "detected...

MOUNT VERNON, Wash., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- A string of lawn gnome disappearances in Washington state was solved when winds blew down a fence around the yard where they were being kept, authorities said. Lisa Soneda of Mount Vernon said her daughter told her this month that the fence separating her back yard from that of her next-door neighbor had blown down to reveal an unusual sight,

In a remarkable home movie, an international team of researchers has filmed individual metal atoms as they move around and react within the confines of a carbon nanotube. As well as demonstrating the power of the imaging technique, the work has shown that the interior of carbon nanotubes may not be as inert as previously assumed.Andrey Chuvilin from the University of Ulm in Germany and colleagues trapped single atoms of the heavy metal dysprosium within hollow fullerene spheres made up of 82 carbon atoms, and enclosed a series of these dysprosium-seeded cages within single-walled carbon nanotubes, with the fullerenes stringing themselves along the...

Shortly after the first of the year (if not already), the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator ever built — will smash protons together at record energies. If the Earth remains intact, doomsayers will once again have been falsified. Every time they forecast the demise of the planet, those prophets of Earthly annihilation prove themselves no more foresightful than mortgage bankers or phony psychics.

The new research may help explain why large galaxies tend to have super-massive black holes at their cores. Astronomers have long wanted an answer to the chicken-and-egg question of what comes first, a super-massive black hole or the stars surrounding it. A new observation of a far away object five billion light years from Earth may now help to solve the riddle. The object is a quasar, a powerful source of energy believed to mark the location of an active giant black hole. Nothing that gets close enough to a black hole can escape its powerful gravity. However, material swirling...

> For this to work, the wire's surface must be extremely clean, allowing electrons to move freely and spread along the wire to create a uniform temperature. A material with a critical temperature of -193 °C could superconduct at room temperature, provided some sections were kept to -253 °C, they found. In principle, the colder these refrigeration points are, the fewer you need, Dubi says. >

An engineer peers at damaged magnets inside the Large Hadron Collider on December 11, 2008 -- almost a month after an electrical glitch stopped the first attempt at sending a beam of protons around the world's largest particle accelerator. After more than a year of repairs, physicists now have both beams of protons stable and circulating though the collider's main ring, LHC managers announced on November 23, 2009. Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity. Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr Hořava,...

Ultracold beryllium ions tackle 160 randomly chosen programs Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to run many different programs on a single piece of machinery. The new...

So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again. It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,”...

<snip>2.4 Diagnosis #4: The Attraction of Magnificent Academic Trusels. A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a trusel and probably will not be thought to be magnificent.) A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" (MAT) is a trusel that has been widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its...

Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip. It’s ironic, then, that the search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.

Its inventors are comparing it to the Star Trek phaser: a way of exploiting an on-off 'switch' in nematodes that paralyzes them when they're exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off. But when exposed to ordinary light, they become unparalyzed and wake up. It's the first time that photoswitching has been demonstrated in a living animal. The report describes the development and successful testing of a photoswitch composed of the light-sensitive material, dithienylethene. The scientists grew the transparent, pinhead-sized worms - C. elegans - and fed them dithienylethene. When...

As a practising priest, there was great scope for mediation when Reiss took on such a key role in such a renowned scientific institution, but sadly science and religion really do not good bedfellows make. Yet if the CERN experiment succeeds in its quest to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang, maybe a way can be found to understand the role of a creator in the building blocks of science. Some scientists believe in the concept of a creator at work behind the Big Bang and that among the possible revelations about ‘dark matter’, anti-matter and space-time dimensions...

Math theories may hold clues to origin, future of life in universe June 9th, 2009 How did we get here and where are we headed? These are some of life's biggest questions. To get the answers, one Kansas State University professor is doing the math. Louis Crane, K-State professor of mathematics, is studying new theories about why the universe is the way it is. He has a grant from the Foundational Questions Institute to study new approaches to the quantum theory of gravity, his primary research area as both a mathematician and a physicist. Crane hopes to uncover implications of...

What if the discrepancy arises from a flaw in our theory of gravity rather than from some provider of mass that we cannot see? In the 1980s physicist Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, proposed a modification to Newtonian dynamics that would explain many of the observational discrepancies without requiring significant mass to be hidden away in dark matter. But it fell short of describing all celestial objects, and to incorporate the full span of gravitational interactions, a modification to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is needed. A review article in the November 6...

Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on EarthWashington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation. The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident,...

Finding Critics for Science Allie Winegar Duzett, November 4, 2009 There are many fields with rigorous critics; many writers make a living critiquing music, dance, art, and literature. At Accuracy in Media and other media watchdog groups, employees critique the claims of major news organizations. But one crucial field regularly goes without any public criticism: the field of science, and scientific discovery. “Science lacks for critics,” David Berlinski claimed at a recent Heritage Foundation Bloggers’ Briefing. “It is really remarkable that in the sense in which literature or dance or music has always entered public consciousness with a very rich...

Next month, Prof. Ada Yonath will be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, becoming the fifth Israeli scientist to win this award. This has sharpened, once again, the grim statistics regarding the scarcity of Nobel laureates in the Muslim and Arab worlds. While Jews, who are only around 0.2 percent of the world population, have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences, Muslims, who are one quarter of the world population, have won only a handful, even by the most generous accounts. And while relative to its size, Israel's tiny academia has been the world's leading...