It is natural for those not deeply involved in the half-century quest for the Higgs Boson – one of the most important missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is nature – to ask why they should care about this seemingly esoteric discovery. There are three reasons. First, it caps one of the most remarkable…
Physicists at CERN delivered big news when they announced the almost certain discovery of the Higgs boson — the so-called “God particle” thought to be the key to the formation of matter, and life. They were able to detect what they believe to be the Higgs boson by firing particles around a giant, $10 billion…
Scientists at Europe’s CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering…
Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That’s what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider…
Eighth-century jump in carbon-14 levels in trees could be explained by “red crucifix” supernova.
Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have carried out an experiment that has recreated a form of matter that pervaded the entire universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the cosmic explosion that marked the origin of the universe. The experiment produced fundamental insights into laws pertaining to all visible matter….
The first-ever mission dedicated to looking for dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities believed to explain the composition of the universe as we know it, will be launched in 2020, the European Space Agency said. The 800-million-euro ($1-billion) Euclid project will use a satellite employing a 1.2-metre (four-foot) diameter telescope and special cameras…
Neutrons may be traveling from our universe into parallel worlds and back again, according to a new theory that explains a rather odd phenomenon. Experiments at ultra-low temperatures carried out by Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin in France have revealed a phenomenon known as neutron loss, whereby neutrons appear to vanish for short periods….
Noted paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey says scientific discoveries may soon make the debate over evolution a part of history. The Kenyan-born scientist serves as a professor at Stony Brook University on New York’s Long Island and recently spent a month in New York raising funds for his Turkana Basin Institute. Leakey says the institute welcomes scientists,…
Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory, which suggests that the universe began as a seemingly impossible “singularity,” an infinitely small point containing an infinitely high concentration of matter, expanding in size to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-fast expansion of space proposed…