The book's called Voyage To The Heart Of Matter – The Atlas Experiment At CERN and it's written by Emma Sanders and crafted by Anton Radevsky. It'll be out at the end of November and run for about $33. I just want one because it'll satisfy both the physics dork and the bookworm inside me all at once. [Atlas via Shiny Shiny via OhGizmo!]

Separate from the LHC itself, CERN's labs are sprawling and fairly old, so it's understandable if they're a little industrio-creepy. Which they are!

But considering the facilities are intended for similar purposes (in theory), and the CERN already employs a real-life Gordon Freeman, the likeness here is just uncanny, as if CERN ripped the models and textures from Valve's FPS and somehow actualized them. (Or, you know, the other way around, which actually makes sense.) Check out the full gallery at: [CERNLove via Reddit]

It took them a while to get there, but once they crossed paths, Boyle and Smith quickly got to working on our beloved CCD image sensors, changing our digital photographs forever. And one day, as the rest of the world had their eyes on the moon in 1969, they finalized their device, which would let us capture images of it.

Williard Boyle had a brief teaching career after his stint in the Royal British Navy and earning his BSc, MSc, and PhD from McGill University. He then moved on to join Bell Labs, working up to being director of the Space Science and Exploratory Studies department where he provided "support for the Apollo space program and help[ed] to select lunar landing sites." After some time away from that, he "returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits." All the while it was remarked that he truly was a modest and "self-effacing" man, almost a stereotype of the quiet genius.

While we don't know whether he was cocky or modest, George E. Smith followed a vaguely similar path: he served in the US Navy, then earned a BSc from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Chicago, where he did in fact write a dissertation a mere three pages long. He, too, then joined Bell Labs and began to research lasers and semiconductor devices.

Yes, with their beginnings in space exploration and lasers, it seems almost obvious that these two were bound to come up with something incredible, but I doubt that they even dreamed about inventing something that we would use or see results of on a daily basis.

Dearest Williard, beloved George: Today we thank you for your inventions and congratulate you on your Nobel prize. After all, without you, our porn wouldn't be the high-quality digital video we so enjoy. [Digital Photography Review and Wikipedia and Wikipedia]

The Nobel Prize for physics is the award in question, and it was actually split between two winners this year.

The first, Charles K. Kao, is the man most responsible for making fiber optic communication the force it is today. Whenever you fire up FiOS next, give thanks to Kao.

The second winner is actually two people: Willard Boyle and George Smith. These two chaps invented the CCD. No, not the Catholic classes your parents forced you to go to when you were a child, the CCD device that's used in countless thousands of digital cameras and other similar gadgets.

Of course if you combine the two breakthroughs you get digital porn, for which, as far as I know, there is no Nobel category. Regardless, lots to be thankful for today. [DPRReview via CrunchGear]

Except, obviously, in the case of the LHC this is real hyperdrive technology and testing we're talking about, whereas, sadly, Han's bucket of bolts will remain firmly in the realm of sci-fi.

But no matter. If physicist Franklin Felber gets his way then an ancient, unknown German research paper from the 1920s could get dusted off and have its thesis tested in the LHC. Called the "Foundations of Physics," the paper proposed that under certain circumstances a stationary mass can, on occasion, repel a "relativistic particle." Ferber's theory proposes that the opposite must also be true, and that this can be tested at the LHC.

In the experiment, Felber would monitor a test mass inside the ring as particles shoot past it. The work would not interfere with other already scheduled projects, and if it works we'd be one small step closer to unlocking that coveted near light speed achievement. That is, if the LHC ever starts up again. Where's R2? [Technology Review via Engadget]

The reasons floated for the collider's foibles are many as of late, from faulty hoses to un-magnetic magnets to the aforementioned libidinous couple who've been assaulting coworkers' ear drums with wanton abandon.

Nevertheless, pressure from scientists have forced CERN to start the LHC up in November, where it will then smash atoms at half power until next year—when it will have to be shut down again.

Meanwhile, this may all be moot, at least for now, as many scientists (publicly and privately) have turned their eager eyes to other colliders around the world, like Fermilab's Tevatron, for use with similar experiments. [MSNBC]

On a related note, it's exciting to find out there's another company besides Komatsu that makes trucks this big. Hey, Liebherr, do you have review units?

UPDATE: More on the excavator.—Thanks, GitEmSteveDave!

[Break]

Seeing that current nuclear fusion projects are expected to cost around 14 billion dollars (ITER project) and take 20 years to complete, General Fusion's reactor would indeed come at a bargain price. But how can they make this so cheap, and what makes them so confident they'll succeed?

Well currently, the aforementioned ITER project is attempting to use astronomically expensive, superconducting tokamak magnets to keep superheated plasma in its place for a fusion reaction, while the National Ignition Facility is trying to use lasers to compress plasma into a reaction.

General Fusions wants to create a reaction using a mechanical process where 220 pneumatic pistons push acoustic waves through a sphere filled with liquid lithium and lead into a plasma ring in the center. With 220 of these waves coming in at 100 meters per second, scientists hope that it will compress the plasma into a fusion reaction. And since the majority of the tech consists of long-established machinery, costs will be low.

If successful, General Fusion believes they can ultimately create a fusion reactor rated at 100 megawatts, that could potentially power a grid for 500 million dollars. The most recent contribution of 9 million dollars for General Fusion brings the total funding to 14 million, but they'll need 37 million more over five years to build a working prototype. Um, can we pass a collection plate around? [MIT Tech Review and Xconomy]

The 125,000-square-foot facility was one of the crown jewels of the world of particle physics back then, but at this point its sadly outdated and has outlived its usefulness. But back in the '50s, it earned a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, who discovered the antiproton within a year of the Bevatron's completion.

Just think: how long will it take for us to decide that the Large Hadron Collider is an outdated piece of junk? And what will we be replacing it with? [Wired Science]

You see, while warp drives are all sorts of fun within the confines of Star Trek, when they're applied to the real world—which must live under the iron fist of physics—things get expensive, exponentially difficult to power, or just plain deadly.

Warp drives, for example, are now theorized to be black hole-creating monstrosities that, if activated in the distant future, would incinerate their passengers and suck Earth into a black hole.

This according to Stefano Finazzi, of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies, who said in a scientific paper published this past week that warp drives, powered by dark energy bubbles, are completely possible—it's just that they're unsustainable and would kill us all if one should collapse.

According to their calculations [...] it would take a huge amount of energy to create the bubble, and then increasing amounts of energy to contain the highly repulsive dark energy. Eventually the energy would run out. The bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble.

Anyone watching the ship nearby wouldn't be much better off. "We know that the warp drive will be destabilized," said Finazzi. "But we do not know if it will in the end explode or collapse to a black hole."

Of course, speaking of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and crew already had this all figured out by the time The Next Generation came around. As any Trekkie knows, for safety reasons Federation ships are discouraged or even forbidden from making warp jumps in-system. Time to get back to the lab, Finazzi. [Discovery Channel - Thanks, Chase]

Nikolay Polissky is an artist who trades primarily in giant, incomprehensibly weird wooden sculptures. Apparently (as in, obviously) his intention in building this "Large Hadron Collider" wasn't to create something with much aesthetic similarity to the LHC, but something that captures its essence. One shared motif: Tubes!Otherwise, see if you can pick out this "essence":

Me neither. [English Russia, Technogreatideas]

Would it be cool to have a sofa shaped like a cloud that magically floated a couple of feet off the ground. Sure, why not. But that sliver of magnet on the floor would have to be seriously powerful to support it, and there's nothing anchoring it in place. If this existed, that cloud would shoot off in some direction and end up on the floor every time someone sat on it.

Also, really? A floating cloud couch? You don't live in an anime. Just get a sofa at Ikea like a normal person. [Kootouch via NotCot.org]

No word on whether a faux-religious novel's 500+ pages of pap will have to be deciphered first for the activation codes. Or if Hanks will be in the "long hair mode" Dan Brown requires, but either way, I want to kiss the PR person at CERN who had this idea. If anyone can find a way to keep us all from being Hoovered into a rip in the fabric of space-time, it's the Hanks.

The wait until September just got even more agonizing. [Telegraph]

Finding Higgs is the major goal of CERN's $7 billion LHC. But after an electrical mistake damaged integral circuits, its restart has been pushed to September.

That'll give the United State's Fermilab a fighting chance of detecting the particle with its Tevatron accelerator before the LHC can. Fermilab said it estimates that Tevatron has already picked out eight collision events which could be hints at Higgs, and that its odds of seeing the "God Particle" first are now 50-50 at worst, and 96% at best.

Professor Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, scoffed at the idea that CERN had somehow lost the lead.

"The setback with the LHC has given them an extra time window. And they certainly will make the most of it," he told the BBC.

"If they do find the Higgs, good luck to them. But I think it's unlikely they will find it before the LHC comes online. They may well be in a position to get a hint of the Higgs but I don't think they'll be in a position to discover it..."

"In one year, we will be competitive. After that, we will swamp them," he added. Booyah.

It was previously hoped that the LHC's tunnels would be down to near absolute zero in time for a summer reactivation, but September is now the goal to accommodate further safety features and inspections. Experiment data will be in eager physicists' hands by early 2010 by the new schedule. [Reuters]

A team at the University of Maryland was able to successfully teleport a quantum state (like spin or polarization) from one atom to another over the distance of one meter. How they did it is incredibly complicated: the explanation sounds like half advanced physics and half existential philosophy (i.e. "each photon is in an unknowable superposition of states"). But the end result is that the information doesn't travel the distance between the two atoms. It merely appears at the second and disappears from the first.

The tech is still very young, so there isn't much speculation on, say, when I can stop taking that awful 14-hour bus from Philly to Montreal in favor of teleporting. But it is suggested that this kind of instant transfer of information could be useful in mass exchanges of data, like the Internet. [Live Science]