Officials at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on Tuesday that the world’s biggest physics experiments will be on hold until April. This comes as result of recent large, unexpected helium leak into a sector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Earlier this month CERN had its first successful test run of the LHC by sending a beam of protons clockwise through a 17 mile ring making up the system. The next steps were to send the proton beam counter-clockwise through the LHC, and then eventually …

In what is probably the biggest physics experiment in history, today marks the first successful test of the Large Hadron Collidor in Geneva by sending a beam of protons through the the entire underground ring that makes up the world’s largest particle collider. The beam sent through travels through the 17 mile underground ring and nearly the speed of light and can make 11,000 laps through the tube every second.

Officials with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) dubbed the test a success today and the next step will be …

A sensor-based idea first drawn up and tested in the Harvard University Robotics Lab and originally funded by DARPA research grants has now found its way to market. It is called the Pressure Profile Systems FingerTPS and you’ll find it pricing around $5,000 for a single-hand system.

The Pressure Profile Systems FingerTPS, as you can see from the photo, places flexible sensors on select parts of the hand to “transmit accurate, repeatable tactile force data to a PC via wireless Bluetooth connection.” The maker says this data, integrated with video, “provides a complete representation of user interaction with tools, sports equipment, new
product designs, or medical applications.”

According to the Space Adventures tourism company out of Virginia, Sergy Brin, cofounder of Google, has put a $5 million deposit down for a vacation in space aboard a Russian spacecraft. The total trip will cost $35 million dollars and the launch date is scheduled for sometime in 2011.

Brin joins a small number of elite individuals who have both the desire to travel into space and more importantly the deep pockets to make it happen. Richard Garriott’s trip with Space Adventures is still coming up this fall. Brin’s $5 million deposit also makes him the founding member of a new Space Adventure club called the Orbital Mission Explorers Circle. The membership appears to work something like a vacation timeshare, but for space. Brin and any other new members that join get preferential options to the mission seats or can sell the seat to another space traveler if there schedule just doesn’t allow for traveling to space that day.

After over three years of direct planning and ten months of traveling through space, NASA’s Phoenix Mars spacecraft today sent back signals that it has made a safe landing on the surface of Mars. The Phoenix spacecraft appears to have hit the intended target in the icy area of Mars’ arctic circle.

Signals sent from Phoenix were delayed by 15 minutes as they were routed through the Odyssey satellite currently orbiting Mars and back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth which caused the celebrations of steps of the landings to take place shortly after they actually happened on Mars.

The University of Melbourne announced on Friday a new technology they are calling “GiFi”, which promises some serious game-changing wireless transfer speeds for all types of consumer gadgets. The tiny silicon chip invented by professor Stan Skafidas is able to move data through the air as fast as 5 gigabits per second at a distance of just over 30 feet.

This short-range wireless technology would potentially be a competitor or more than likely a replacement for WiFi, and things like Bluetooth might want to look out as well. The transfer speeds combined with the constantly increased storage capacities of small handheld devices could really take media down some new avenues as well. The Age newspaper uses an example of transferring a high-definition movie from a kiosk at a store to your mobile phone in seconds. Then that same movie can be transferred just as quickly from the phone to your home computer or entertainment system to watch.

Some scientists from the U.S. and Canada have teamed up to create a new knee brace that generates electricity from your steps. The brace takes advantage of the stop energy that occurs after swinging the knee forward which would otherwise dissipate as heat, much like braking on an electric or hybrid car.

According to the initial studies on the 3.5 pound prototype, a person walking at 2.2 mph was able to create around 5 watts of electricity while wearing a brace on each leg. The researchers state that this device can generate enough electricity to power as many as 10 cell phones, or possibly a small laptop. Some practical future applications include using the knee-mounted generator for campers or soldiers who are not near electricity to power up GPS devices or satellite phones.

Anytime waterproofing is added to a gadget it just seems to make it that much more cool, but unfortunately not many electronic devices are able to live through being accidentally dropped into your Mai Tai or withstand a simple vodka resistance test because the the difficulty and expense of making small seals for all those cracks and crevices.

Well, thanks to some scientists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down, Wilts. who originally developed the technology, gadgets may soon be getting something called an Ion-Mask coating to provide waterproofing to all sorts of devices. The Ion-Mask was a military technology originally designed to protect soldiers clothing from chemical attacks but soon could be used to protect mobile phones and media players from moisture, rain and the occasional drop in the drink.

Some California residents might be receiving electricity from a more novel, environmentally friendly and source in the coming years. PG&E has announced that it is going to team up with Finavera Renewables to build a “wave farm” off the coast of California in order to generate electricity.

The wave farm consists of “wave energy converters”, or basically large buoys like Finavera’s Aquabuoy pictured here. As the buoy moves up and down on top of the waves that pass by it drives a piston which is anchored on the ocean floor. The piston creates pressure which drives a turbine and in turn creates electricity. A single full-scale Aquabuoy can generate 250 killowatts which can power approximately 80 homes. The initial plan is to create a farm of these buoys that will generate 2 megawatts of electricity by 2012, and if things go well they will ramp up the farm to produce 100 megawatts.

This next story should give you pause to think about what may be ahead in the near future for the emerging biotechnology sector. A science team at South Korea’s Gyeongsang National University announced that they have successfully cloned kittens that have a modified gene that alters their skin color. When placed underneath an ultraviolet light a unmodified cat will look green. These new genetically modified cats have a fluorescent protein inserted into their DNA which makes their skin appear red under the same kind of UV light.

Three cloned Turkish Angola kitties were born in early 2007 but one died shortly after. The two surviving cats now weigh 3.5 kilograms and appear to be perfectly healthy representatives of the feline race. Aside from being able to make funky colored critters the new procedure is hoped to be used for bringing back the populations of animals on the endangered species list as well as identifying and eliminating genetic diseases in people and pets.

The Discovery Rainbow In My Room makes a great gift if you want to steer your kid toward Science and away from say, Halo. Though I doubt most boys would appreciate this. It fits in more in a room filled with My Little Pony’s.

LED lights recreate the colors of a real rainbow and the motion-activated sensor turns the unit off with a wave of your hand.

Samsung has actually developed a water powered cellphone. A micro fuel cell and hydrogen generator make it possible. They will be capable of powering all kinds of small electronics, in this case cellphones, for 10 hours on nothing but old fashioned H2O.

When the phone powers on, metal and water in the phone react and produce hydrogen gas. They envision beginning with hydrogen cartridges that would have to be changed roughly every four days, if you use the phone for four hours a day. After that, their plan is to improve on the design until all you need to do is squirt some water in your phone and you are ready.

The 2007 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded joinlty to French physicist Albert Fert (pictured left) and German physicist Peter Grünberg for their work in magnetoelectronics, also known as spintronics. The two each made independent discoveries of magnetoresistance back in the 80’s, which uses the spin of electrons to store and transport information instead of using an electrical charge. This discover allows more data to be stored in a smaller physical space and in under a couple decades led to radically smaller hard drives for common items such as laptop computers, smartphones and iPods.

After 18 years spent playing the game and millions of matches won and lost, a computer has now solved the riddle of whether there can be a perfect game of checkers. Computer scientists working at the University of Alberta in Canada used a program called Chinook to factor out the 500 billion positions possible in any one game of checkers. The result was that it is possible to reach a draw against your opponent but it’s exceedingly rare to happen. Chinook was able to plot out every possible move and reach the …

Stephen Hawking is a name that by now we all know well. The Cambridge professor, best selling author and the world’s reigning expert on black holes is now set to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral. Since he has spent most of his life working around the nature of gravity, it seems only fit that he should experience it himself, first hand.

Said the executive of Zero G, “the idea of giving the world’s expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity” was irresistible. He will …