The world’s largest particle accelerator is roaring along at an unprecedented pace, delivering torrents of data to its physicist handlers. But the hundreds of millions of collisions happening inside the machine every second are now growing into a thick fog that, paradoxically, threatens to obscure a fabled quarry: the Higgs boson. The problem is known…
There are certain laws of nature everyone accepts. The surest way to bring about rain on an overcast day is to leave your umbrella at home. Is your line at the grocery store moving too slowly? Switch lines. That will definitely speed it up (minus you). And if you’ve hit a series of green traffic…
The age of “omes” is here. It began with the genome, continued with the proteome, branched out with the memome and reached full flowering with the notion of the omome. This probably sounds like raw material for nonsense poetry, but it’s a real biological and linguistic trend that makes sense, once you get the idea…
An unfortunate controversy has been unfolding over the relationship (or lack thereof) between physics and philosophy. Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss has published a book titled A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. In it, Krauss explains how modern physics has been inching toward an explanation to what is, perhaps, the hardest…
Here’s a scientific clue as to why our society’s still dealing with conflicts based on skin color – something a bunch of sociologists can tell you is a completely made up thing. Racist might be a bit strong for a being that can’t even talk. But at just 9 months old, babies showed biases in…
The European Space Agency’s next big mission may be particularly juicy for scientists hunting for signs of extraterrestrial life. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, spacecraft has been formally approved and is now slated to blast off for the gas giant planet in 2022, ESA officials announced. The space probe will tour three of…
Casino bosses, take note: Physicists have described a way to guarantee complete randomness in a flow of information, such as the numbers generated by a roulette wheel. The work could allow a person to transform a stream of not-quite-random information into a totally random one. The scientists describe the finding online in Nature Physics. True…
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill. But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still…
The atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% the density of Earth’s. It’s one of the reasons liquid water covers much of our planet but cannot exist on the Red Planet. As more research points toward the possibility of water on early Mars, scientists have increased their studies on the density of its atmosphere billions…
Efforts to promote sustainable development must tap into technologies developed locally, driven by community needs and priorities. The products of modern science and technology (S&T), from chemical pesticides to carbon-emitting combustion engines, are frequently blamed — with some justification — for the unsustainable use of the planet’s resources. At the same time S&T offers a…