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...The properties and mass of the LHC's Higgs boson suggest that physicists will soon find superpartners for particles, and that we have begun to connect string theory to the real world... Physicists thought that a Higgs boson, when discovered, would take this supersymmetric form, so how have we discovered one so apparently identical to the impossible standard-model version? Working out how to interpret this could be a large step towards the underlying broader theory that will extend the standard model. One explanation could come from an unexpected source: string theory or its extension, M-theory. Contrary to what you may have...

More than 100 apples mysteriously rained down upon a small British town on Monday night. The still-unexplained apple shower left 20 yards of city streets and car windshields covered in the cascading fruit just after the daily rush hour.

Uploaded by MITNewsOffice on Dec 12, 2011 MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects. Video: Melanie Gonick.

Last Friday, I realized the sort of place I work in: an academic Computer Science institute that bears more than a passing resemblence to the ficticious TV town of 'Eureka'. We don't have flying cars, or intelligent, rebellious, precocious attack bots, but we do have some cool stuff. Take the 128-QuBit Quantum Computer housed the ground floor of parking lot where a sandwich shop used to be, for example. This is the next generation of computers, using the superposition effects of quantum mechanics to process vastly many more states than our current 'classical' computers can accomplish. This is the sort...

The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle which scientists believe gives mass to everything in the universe, and is a key component of the Standard Model of physics. While finding it in its expected form would confirm common theories on how atoms are put together, identifying a number of Higgs bosons with different masses or disproving the particle entirely would overturn many assumptions of modern physics.

Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale. Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." It's a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small... Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there's no input of outside...

Utah chemists: Water doesn't have to freeze until minus 55 FahrenheitSALT LAKE CITY -- We drink water, bathe in it and we are made mostly of water, yet the common substance poses major mysteries. Now, University of Utah chemists may have solved one enigma by showing how cold water can get before it absolutely must freeze: 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That's 87 degrees Fahrenheit colder than what most people consider the freezing point of water, namely, 32 F. Supercooled liquid water must become ice at minus 55 F not just because of the extreme cold, but because the molecular...

News from the American Physical SocietyHydrodynamics of writing with inkFor millennia, writing has been the preferred way to convey information and knowledge from one generation to another. We first developed the ability to write on clay tablets with a point, and then settled on a reed pen, as preserved from 3000 BC in Egypt when it was used with papyrus. Cont... Faster-than-light neutrinos may leave trails at the LHCIs Einstein's venerated theory of special relativity challenged by neutrinos? Cont... Why it's hard to see Schroedinger's catWhy do we not see quantum physical effects in our daily lives? This question was...

Conventional wisdom would say that blocking a hole would prevent light from going through it, but Princeton University engineers have discovered the opposite to be true. A research team has found that placing a metal cap over a small hole in a metal film does not stop the light at all, but rather enhances its transmission. In an example of the extraordinary twists of physics that can occur at very small scales, electrical engineer Stephen Chou and colleagues made an array of tiny holes in a thin metal film, then blocked each hole with an opaque metal cap. When they...

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound. OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) measures the properties of neutrinos that are sent through the Earth from the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and arrive in its detector located under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. On 22 September,...

The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts. The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, have been colliding protons at high speeds to create explosions of energy. From this energy many subatomic particles are produced. Now researchers...

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday. The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment. While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency...

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real. “I...

PRESS RELEASE: Scientists at Chalmers have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results have been published in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum. The experiment is based on one of the most counterintuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics: that vacuum is by no means empty nothingness. In fact, the vacuum is full of various particles that are continuously fluctuating in and out of existence....

The team behind the finding in September that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and found the same result.If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics. Critics of the first report had said that the long bunches of neutrinos used could introduce an error into the test. The new work, posted to the Arxiv repository, used much shorter bunches. It has been submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community. The...

Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist? This is a mystery because the so-called Standard Model of physics calls for ordinary matter and antimatter to decay in very similar ways. Theory also says that equal amounts of antimatter and regular-type matter (such as that making up the Sun, the Earth, all the life upon it including us etc) should have...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain as part major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe. Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed. Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists...

Caption: This computer-generated image shows the different layers of the Earth: The outer solid crust, the viscous upper and lower mantle, the liquid outer core, and the solid inner core. Credit: ESRF Usage Restrictions: None ESRF inaugurates unique new X-ray facilityGrenoble -- Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometres beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain. The major scientific project will follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and will answer questions about the universe. The laser will be capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it will be similar to the light the earth receives from the sun but focused on a speck smaller than a pin prick. Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum. A vacuum fizzles with...

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel. The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment. Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory...