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Enlarge ImageBruiser. Young and massive star W33A is following the same accretion process as our sun. Credit: Lynette Cook/Gemini Observatory; Subaru Telescope/NAOJ (inset) It's a puzzle that has bedeviled astronomers and theorists for years: Do massive stars form in the same way as our sun or by some other process? Now a team of astronomers has gone a long way toward providing the answer by catching a massive star in the act of condensing. Their verdict is that this massive star, at least, seems to follow the same mechanism as smaller stars. Based on decades of observations, astronomers know...

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer. This experimental demonstration confirms intriguing quantum-physics predictions that light's transit time through complex multilayered materials need not depend on thickness, as it does for simple materials such as glass, but rather on the order in which the layers are stacked. This is the first published study* of this dependence with single photons....

U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they've created a computer algorithm that allows a substantially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core. "The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles and thousands of energy groups -- all...

"Stop telling God what to do!" When Niels Bohr said these words to Albert Einstein - if indeed he ever did - it was probably in exasperation with Einstein's frequent repetition of the phrase "He does not play dice with the universe". The latter is perhaps the most famous of Einstein's many references to religion, although "The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not" comes a close second. There are many others too (see box below). Scientific materialists, who regard all forms of religious belief as superstition, are often puzzled and even embarrassed by Einstein's frequent remarks about...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy. Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That's because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced...

LONDON – It always falls down. That's how the apple helped Isaac Newton. An 18th-century account of how Newton developed the theory of gravity was posted to the Web Monday, making the fragile paper manuscript widely available to the public for the first time. Newton's encounter with the apple ranks among science's most celebrated anecdotes, and it can now be read in the faded cursive script in which it was recorded by William Stukeley, Newton's contemporary. [...]

Time Can be Turned Back 03/01/2004 15:37 Time has been one of the most complicated and less studied scientific issues since ancient times Eight years ago, American and British scientists who conducted investigations in Antarctica made a sensational discovery. US physicist Mariann McLein told the researchers noticed some spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole on January 27 which they believed to be just ordinary sandstorm. However, the gray fog did not change the form and did not move in the course of time. The researchers decided to investigate the phenomenon and launched a weather balloon with equipment...

Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a “catastrophic puncturing” of our Plant’s thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an “unimpeded thermal inversion” of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere. To the West’s firing of this ‘quantum’ high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled “Attack On Gods ‘Heaven’ Lights Up Norwegian Sky”. To how catastrophic for...

Usually, you'd expect two compounds with the same composition, atom-to-atom connectivity and symmetry to be chemically identical too. But scientists investigating metal-organic frameworks have discovered a surprising exception to this rule by identifying two isomers with the same symmetry and bonding but different gas storage properties. A team led by Shengqian Ma at the Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois, US, investigated a rod-like tetracarboxylate molecule (ebdc) which can bind to a metal atom from any one of four binding points, one at each corner of a rectangle. When it was heated with a copper salt at 75 °C, a crystal phase formed...

If you're going to ask Zecharia Sitchin, be ready for a "Planet of the Apes" scenario: spaceships and hieroglyphics, genetic mutations and mutinous space aliens in gold mines. It sounds like science fiction, but Mr. Sitchin is sure this is how it all went down hundreds of thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. Humans were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials, he said, pointing to ancient texts to prove it... He is an apparently sane, sharp, University of London-educated 89-year-old who has spent his life arguing that people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and...

SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That's the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called "dark flow" is a sign that other universes nestle next door. Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters' motion in the "afterglow" of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of...

A recent search for bright exploding stars -- commonly called supernovas -- found something quite unusual: antimatter.

While relatively few people were looking, an unusual eclipse darkened New Year's Day. On January 1 a giant space object blotted out our view of Epsilon Aurigae, a yellow supergiant star about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Based on studies of Epsilon Aurigae's previous eclipses, astronomers expect the star won't fully regain its bright shine until early 2011. Normally the star is so bright it can be seen with the naked eye even by city dwellers. For all but the most rural star-gazers, though, the mystery object that eclipses the star causes it to vanish for about 18 months every 27.1...

U.S. scientists say they have achieved a breakthrough in quantum cascade laser output power, delivering 120 watts from a single device at room temperature. The Northwestern University researchers, led by Professor Manijeh Razeghi, said their accomplishment is particularly attractive for infrared countermeasures -- a way of misguiding incoming missiles to protect commercial and military aircraft. Unlike conventional interband semiconductor lasers, the scientists said their quantum cascade laser is an intersubband device requiring only electrons to operate. Razeghi's team demonstrated the ridge width of a broad-area quantum cascade laser can be increased up to 400 microns, without suffering from filiamentation --...

Table-top experiments unlock quantum realm predicted by Dirac equation. Trapped ions masquerading as high-speed particles have been used to confirm a bizarre 80-year-old prediction of quantum mechanics. Quantum particles racing at close to the speed of light were first predicted to jitter violently as they moved — a phenomenon known as the Zitterbewegung — in 1930, by the father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger. The prediction was based on the Dirac equation, developed by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, which merges quantum mechanics with special relativity to describe how particles such as electrons behave. "The motion is particularly unexpected...

Caption: This composite color image is of the new infrared Hubble Ultradeep Field taken at 1.0 micron (blue), 1.25 micron (green), and 1.6 micron (red) with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3/IR) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Highlighted are the record-breaking high redshift galaxies, where the redshift "z"indicates the amount of stretching the light underwent on its voyage through the expanding universe. Higher redshift means larger distance and hence looking further back in time. The newly found objects are at z~7 (700 million years after the Big Bang: light blue circles) and z~8 (600 million years: dark blue circles) Credit:...

SCIENCE is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx...

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at...

Paul Titze, who somehow finds time to write the excellent Captain InterStellar blog when not preoccupied with his maritime duties in Sydney, passed along a 2009 paper on warp drives yesterday that I want to be sure to consider before the year is over. Warp drives as in Miguel Alcubierre’s notion of a method of reaching speeds that are faster than light. The Star Trek echo in the choice of names was playful and intentional on Alcubierre’s part, and the physicist kicked off a cottage industry in exotic spacetimes and their geometries when he used it in a 1994 paper...

"Everyone loves a good road movie, whether it's Hope and Crosby or Fonda and Hopper. But the scope of those films pales in comparison to the ground covered by the Hayden Planetarium's new video, The Known Universe. The video starts in Tibet and zooms out through time and space until it shows well, the entire known universe. The video, created for the new Rubin Art Museum exhibit Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, uses over a decade of data collected by researchers at the planetarium. Called the Digital Universe Atlas, the data encompasses the...