Large Hadron Collider not colliding until Spring |
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 …

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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 


