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"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler", Albert Einstein
Browsing All Posts published on »July, 2012«
ATLAS: 5.9 Sigma For A 126 GeV Higgs !
By Tommaso Dorigo ATLAS has just released a note which summarizes the searches for the standard model Higgs boson in 7-TeV and 8-TeV data. Since July 4th the main improvement is the addition of the WW channel, which had not been shown back then. With it, the combined local significance of the 126 GeV Higgs […]
Flaring black holes may solve cosmic ray puzzle
July 30, 2012
WHERE do ultra high-energy cosmic rays come from? These charged particles zoom to Earth from outer space, but why is a mystery. Now a possible source – gamma-ray bursts, which seemed to have been ruled out – have received a new lease of life. Gamma-ray bursts are usually created by exploding stars, which produce neutrinos. […]
Probing gravity
July 30, 2012
Einstein’s theory of relativity is remarkable not only because it is so successful in explaining seemingly bizarre observations (like the bending of starlight) or because it has assembled a coherent picture of nature. One would expect these results from any good theory. Relativity is also amazing because its has shown that the universe behaves in […]
New NASA photos reveal American flags…
July 30, 2012
…planted during moon landings proudly yet wave FOUR DECADES after last Apollo mission Four decades after the last astronauts landed on the moon and planted an American flag in lunar soil, scientists wondered: ‘Does that star spangled banner yet wave?’ Finally new images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have given proof in the […]
Magic Angle
July 27, 2012
by Glenn Roberts Jr. The magic angle is all about mathematics, not hocus pocus, but it can work wonders in gathering useful data in scientific experiments and in medical imaging, too. John Bozek, an instrument scientist at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source, said the angle, which measures about 54.7 degrees, is important for a range […]
Answering your Higgs questions
July 27, 2012
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a Higgs-like boson on July 4 – but what does that mean? What’s a Higgs boson? And how can a particle be like a Higgs? Read on to learn more about the new particle and how it fits into our world. The following questions were asked […]
The Brightest Stars Don’t Live Alone
July 26, 2012
A new study using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has shown that most very bright high-mass stars, which drive the evolution of galaxies, do not live alone. Almost three quarters of these stars are found to have a close companion star, far more than previously thought. Surprisingly most of these pairs are also experiencing disruptive […]
Basketball science has more answers
July 23, 2012
In a multibillion-dollar sport like basketball, one might expect trainers had figured out every nuance of aerodynamics, mechanics and all things Newtonian to increase the rate at which the ball goes through the hoop. Think again. Take free throws. For 50 years professional players in the United States have sunk these shots from the “charity […]
Best of “Earth As Art” – Top Five
July 23, 2012
Landsat has been collecting data of the Earth’s surface since 1972. Some of the images are visually striking, and they have been selected for the “Earth As Art” collection. These are the best. A series of Landsat satellites have surveyed the Earth’s surface since 1972. In that time, Landsat data have become a vital reference […]
Can quantum theory be improved?
July 23, 2012
Being correct 50% of the time when calling heads or tails on a coin toss won’t impress anyone. So when quantum theory predicts that an entangled particle will reach one of two detectors with just a 50% probability, many physicists have naturally sought better predictions. The predictive power of quantum theory is, in this case, […]
New clues to the early Solar System from ancient meteorites
July 22, 2012
In order to understand Earth’s earliest history–its formation from Solar System material into the present-day layering of metal core and mantle, and crust–scientists look to meteorites. New research from a team including Carnegie’s Doug Rumble and Liping Qin focuses on one particularly old type of meteorite called diogenites. These samples were examined using an array […]
Whether or not to run in the rain
July 22, 2012
Franco Bocci Abstract: The problem of choosing an optimal strategy for moving in the rain has attracted considerable attention among physicists and other scientists. Taking a novel approach, this paper shows, by studying simple shaped bodies, that the answer depends on the shape and orientation of the moving body and on wind direction and intensity. […]
New chemical bonds possible in extreme magnetic fields
July 21, 2012
In the extreme magnetic fields of white dwarves and neutron stars, a third type of chemical bonding can occur. That is the finding of theoretical chemists in Norway, who have used computer simulations to show that as-yet-unseen molecules could form in magnetic fields much higher than those created here on Earth. High-school chemistry students are […]
Van Gogh Sun
July 20, 2012
A crucial, and often underappreciated, facet of science lies in deciding how to turn the raw numbers of data into useful, understandable information — often through graphs and images. Such visualization techniques are needed for everything from making a map of planetary orbits based on nightly measurements of where they are in the sky to […]
Physicists review progress in understanding the ‘primordial soup
July 20, 2012
A review article appearing in the July 20, 2012, issue of the journal Science describes groundbreaking discoveries that have emerged from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, synergies with the heavy-ion program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, and the compelling questions that will drive this research forward […]
One of the First Computer-Generated Films, from 1963
July 19, 2012
This film was a specific project to define how a particular type of satellite would move through space. Edward E. Zajac made, and narrated, the film, which is considered to be possibly the very first computer graphics film ever. Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, […]
Computer that could outlive the universe a step closer
July 19, 2012
The heat-death of the universe need not bring an end to the computing age. A strange device known as a time crystal can theoretically continue to work as a computer even after the universe cools. A new blueprint for such a time crystal brings its construction a step closer. Ordinary crystals are three-dimensional objects whose […]
XENON100 sets record limits for dark matter
July 18, 2012
Scientists from the XENON collaboration announced a new result from their search for dark matter. The analysis of data taken with the XENON100 detector during 13 months of operation at the Gran Sasso Laboratory (Italy) provided no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading dark matter candidates. Two events being […]
Spitzer Finds Possible Exoplanet Smaller Than Earth
July 18, 2012
Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our solar system that is smaller than our home planet. Exoplanets circle stars beyond our sun. Only […]
APEX takes part in sharpest observation ever
July 18, 2012
Telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, and Arizona reach sharpness two million times finer than human vision An international team of astronomers has observed the heart of a distant quasar with unprecedented sharpness, two million times finer than human vision. The observations, made by connecting the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope [1] to two others on different […]
How Black Holes Shape the Galaxies, Stars and Planets around Them
July 17, 2012
The matter-eating beast at the center of the Milky Way may actually account for Earth’s existence and habitability Black holes, such as the four-million-solar-mass lurker at the center of our galaxy, are not simply consumers. They also radiate copious amounts of energy as they devour nearby matter. A black hole’s feeding habits can have a […]
How To Steer Sound Using Light
July 16, 2012
The ability to create phonons and then steer them using laser beams could lead to a new generation of applications, say physicists Zap an optical fibre with a couple of laser beams and the resulting interference pattern causes an interesting effect–it squeezes the material, an effect known as electrostriction. This creates a compression wave called […]
Finally – A Higgs Boson Story Anyone Can Understand
July 16, 2012
Einstein famously marveled over the idea that the universe was comprehensible. But on July 4, the universe started to sound weird and unnecessarily complicated. Physicists worldwide were celebrating an elusive thing called the Higgs Boson, which had apparently made a brief appearance. They kept repeating that it was important because it gives matter mass, but […]
Galaxy cluster motion seen for the first time
July 13, 2012
An international team of astronomers and physicists has, for the first time, detected the large-scale motion of galaxy clusters, using an effect that was proposed almost 40 years ago. This is the first direct measurement of the motion of objects at cosmological distances and such observations could lead to a better understanding of how the […]
Northern Lights From Balloon
July 13, 2012
In April 2012, I was part of a team of scientists, teachers and students who travelled to Alaska to observe the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. Our mission was a unique one – to launch weather balloons up to 100,000 feet loaded with experiments, tracking devices and HD cameras. This is the result of our […]
Measuring Nothing
July 13, 2012
Daniel K. L. Oi, Vaclav Potocek, John Jeffers Measurement is integral to quantum information processing and communication; it is how information encoded in the state of a system is transformed into classical signals for further use. In quantum optics, measurements are typically destructive, so that the state is not available afterwards for further steps – […]
Unveiling the Higgs mechanism to students
July 12, 2012
Giovanni Organtini In this paper we give the outline of a lecture given to undergraduate students aiming at understanding why physicists are so much interested in the Higgs boson. The lecture has been conceived for students not yet familiar with advanced physics and is suitable for several disciplines, other than physics. The Higgs mechanism is […]
Boson-spotter’s guide helps you decode the Higgs
July 12, 2012
The elusive Higgs boson, or something very close, has finally been spotted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The next challenge is to pin down whether the new particle is the boson physicists were expecting or some other beast. One of the first things physicists want to know about the new particle is itsspin, a […]
Higgs Boson Music: What Might Quarks Sound Like?
July 11, 2012
Using a data “sonification” process, researchers at the pan-European GÉANT network have created melodies from the results of the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider – the experiment that found the so-called ‘God Particle’ http://youtu.be/mmvE8nUXw1w
Tritium as an Anthropic Probe
July 11, 2012
Andrew Gould (Ohio State) I show that if tritium were just 20 keV lighter relative to helium-3, then the current deuterium burning phase of pre-main-sequence stellar evolution would be replaced by deuterium+tritium burning. This phase would take place at the same temperature but would last a minimum of 4 times longer and a maximum of […]
Exoplanets Subject to Meteorological Variations
July 10, 2012
An international team from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/UPMC) and the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG(1) — CNRS/Université Joseph Fourier — Grenoble 1) has detected meteorological variations in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (a planet outside our own Solar System). The astrophysicists made the discovery while observing the exoplanet HD 189733b […]
Scientific Searches’ Statistics Explained
July 9, 2012
Searching for the Higgs boson and other particles requires scientists to take into account statistics and probability in their analyses. Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln explains these concepts using simple dice. http://youtu.be/73JeQ2RZnwc
Higgs Boson May Be An Imposter, Say Particle Physicists
July 9, 2012
At least two other particles could be masquerading as the God particle, according to a new analysis of the data from CERN The news coming out of CERN in recent weeks has been hard to miss. At first, there was a dripfeed of gossip which turned into a firehose of ‘Higgsteria’. Finally, last Wednesday, CERN […]
Higgs Boson Discovery Timelapse
July 8, 2012
These animations show the Higgs Exclusion plots and Signal plots as they evolved over time until the discovery of the Higgs Boson. These were produced by viXra unofficial combinations of LEP, Tevatron and LHC data. http://youtu.be/wWOo6fygNz0
A Moment for Particle Physics: The End of a 40-Year Story?
July 8, 2012
The announcement early yesterday morning of experimental evidence for what’s presumably the Higgs particle brings a certain closure to a story I’ve watched (and sometimes been a part of) for nearly 40 years. In some ways I felt like a teenager again. Hearing about a new particle being discovered. And asking the same questions I […]
The man who built the LHC
July 7, 2012
By Alice Lighton The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva is the arguably most famous experiment on Earth. It’s also, by many measures, the largest; a particle collider 27km in circumference and 100m underground, it took 16 years to build and cost £6bn. The LHC was built to answer some of the burning questions facing particle physicists. […]
Measuring the eccentricity of the Earth orbit with a nail
July 6, 2012
… and a piece of plywood Thierry Lahaye I describe how to obtain a rather good experimental determination of the eccentricity of the Earth orbit, as well as the obliquity of the Earth rotation axis, by measuring, over the course of a year, the elevation of the Sun as a function of time during a […]
Ian Hinchliffe Answers Your Higgs Boson Questions
July 6, 2012
Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist who heads Berkeley Lab’s sizable contingent with the ATLAS experiment at CERN, answers many of your questions about the Higgs boson. Ian invited viewers to send in questions about the Higgs via email, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube in an “Ask a Scientist” video posted July 3: http://youtu.be/xhuA3wCg06s CERN’s July 4 announcement […]
Is the resonance at 125 GeV the Higgs boson?
July 6, 2012
Pier Paolo Giardino, Kristjan Kannike, Martti Raidal, Alessandro Strumia The recently discovered resonance at 125 GeV has properties remarkably close to those of the Standard Model Higgs boson. We perform model-independent fits of all presently available data. The non-standard best-fits found in our previous analyses remain favored with respect to the SM fit, mainly but […]
Le boson de Higgs a deux «papas» belges
July 6, 2012
Le physicien Peter Higgs reconnaît lui-même devoir partager la paternité de « sa » particule avec plusieurs collègues, aux premiers rangs desquels deux Belges, Richard Brout et François Englert. François Englert et Richard Brout sont victimes d’une grande injustice. Bien que les deux physiciens belges aient coécrit le premier papier publié sur le boson scalaire en août […]
Unofficial Higgs Combinations
July 5, 2012
Press here: http://vixra.org/Combo/ Read also: Are unofficial Higgs Combinations “Valid” ?
Dark matter filament found, scientists say
July 5, 2012
By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times The mysterious stuff called dark matter is thought to act as the spider silk for the cosmic web of the universe. But although it makes up most of the matter in the universe, scientists have been able to find only clumps of it in the web’s galaxy-filled “nodes,” not […]
Live: Latest update in the search for the Higgs boson
July 3, 2012
press here: CERN webcast (update) CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought […]
Physicists Identify New Quantum State
July 3, 2012
Strength in Numbers: Physicists Identify New Quantum State Allowing Three — But Not Two — Atoms to Stick Together A Kansas State University-led quantum mechanics study has discovered a new bound state in atoms that may help scientists better understand matter and its composition. The yet-unnamed bound state, which the physicists simply refer to as […]
A brief history of a boson: Timeline of Higgs
July 3, 2012
by Jacob Aron It’s turned into science’s worst-kept secret. Tomorrow, physicists at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland are expected to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson, the culmination of a 50-year quest to find the elusive particle that gives others their mass. Here’s how they got there. 1964 Peter Higgs is the first to […]
Hitler Learns the Tevatron Has Been Shut Down
July 2, 2012
http://youtu.be/Hqxg5WIFAdQ U.S. particle physicists aren’t the only ones pissed off about the shutdown of the Fermilab Tevatron. When Hitler finds out his Higgs search won’t happen, it triggers a wave of anger and regret as he contemplates his other career options.
Origins of Mass
July 2, 2012
Frank Wilczek Newtonian mechanics posited mass as a primary quality of matter, incapable of further elucidation. We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property. Most of the mass of standard matter, by far, arises dynamically, from back-reaction of the color gluon fields of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The equations for massless particles support extra symmetries […]
God particle is ‘found’
July 2, 2012
Scientists at Cern expected to announce on Wednesday Higgs boson particle has been discovered Scientists ‘will say they are 99.99% certain’ the particle has been found Leading physicists have been invited to event – sparking speculation that Higgs Boson particle has been found ‘God Particle’ gives particles that make up atoms their mass Scientists at […]
July 31, 2012
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