From Apple’s support pages, a warning about potential static electricity buildup in earbuds, in which Apple has been reduced to explaining basic physics to its customers. [via Crave UK]
The real Large Hadron Collider has been a bit of a disappointment to date, so an impatient Russian artist decided to make his own. Out of wood. https://gizmodo.com/lhc-restart-postponed-further-wont-attempt-to-swallow-5150411 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…
Super genius and physicist Stephen Hawking is supposed to make a full recovery from his chest infection, but is being kept for observation in the mean time. [MSNBC] https://gizmodo.com/stephen-hawking-rushed-to-hospital-is-very-ill-5219842
Yeah, this is a neat image and all, but it’s a blatant example of a designer not even doing a little bit of research into how physical objects work before opening up Photoshop. Would it be cool to have a sofa shaped like a cloud that magically floated a couple of feet off the ground.…
James Kakalios was a consultant on Watchmen (film), and here, he walks us through the physics of Dr. Manhattan. Summarized, he’s “not strictly correct from a physics point of view, but very cool nonetheless.”
Too good to be true: because his character in Angels and Demons saves the Vatican from being destroyed by antimatter stolen from CERN, Tom Hanks will be flipping the switch to restart the LHC. No word on whether a faux-religious novel’s 500+ pages of pap will have to be deciphered first for the activation codes.…
Scientists are racing to to discover the Higgs boson particle first. That’s right – CERN isn’t the only one looking, and its Large Hadron Collider might be upstaged by a U.S. accelerator yet. https://gizmodo.com/lhc-restart-postponed-further-wont-attempt-to-swallow-5150411 Finding Higgs is the major goal of CERN’s $7 billion LHC. But after an electrical mistake damaged integral circuits, its restart…
Those anxiously awaiting the restart of the most complex machine ever built on earth will have to wait a little longer, as CERN today announced they were pushing back Large Hadron’s restart to September. It was previously hoped that the LHC’s tunnels would be down to near absolute zero in time for a summer reactivation,…
I don’t understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t even really understand it. But somehow, information was successfully teleported over a full meter, which means we’re that much closer to making Star Trek a dorktastic reality. A team at the University of Maryland was able to successfully teleport a quantum state (like spin or polarization) from one…
PopSci’s Adam “Easy Joke” Weiner has worked out the physics of a super crazy Japanese water jetpack. Science is cool and all, but I just like watching this guy get tossed across a lake. Essentially, this poor bastard left the launching pad at over 200 miles an hour due to the pressure of the water…
Your Mac OS X desktop may become exactly as messy as your real-world one if Apple finally develops this newly-released patent, which describes a 3D desktop that obeys the laws of physics. I have a hard time believing that this one will become reality, since 3D-based user interfaces introduce more complexity than benefits for the…
CERN’s photos of the LHC’s multi-million-dollar ouchies aren’t as dramatic as the Earth being swallowed by the Singularity, but they show the results of a single solder joint’s failure on the world’s most complex machine. For someone who doesn’t know his quench detector from his quadropole Q24, it’s not easy to see what’s going on…
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most complicated machine that was felled by a single faulty solder joint last month, won’t be back until summer 2009 now, at the earliest—a few months later than CERN last speculated. And at what cost? $21 million in repairs. A drop in the bucket when the full $10 billion…
Scientists have connected up the world’s first computer network protected by “quantum cryptography,” a supposedly unbreakable system that functions off a scheme based on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. For us non-science folk, that means that you can’t grab information transmitted through the network without disturbing it somehow, making it easy to detect when somebody’s trying…
Carbon nanotubes have been popping on Giz for a while, touted as one of the next wonder-materials—but a new development in their manufacture means they may not remain “future technology” for long. In fact the work of a team at CSIRO and the University of Texas at Dallas means that commercial-scale production of sheets of…
Barely a week after it was powered up for the first time, the Large Hadron Collider was shut down temporarily when an electrical fault struck a cooling system for the high-powered magnets responsible for steering beams of particles through the tunnel. It should really come as no surprise that problems would pop up from time…
Despite repeated assurances by experts that the Large Hadron Collider would not bring about the end of the world, it appears that one 16-year-old girl in central India decided to commit suicide by drinking pesticide rather than face that remote possibility. Her father noted that several Indian programs aired doomsday predictions in the days leading…
This is the first groovy image produced by the Large Hadron Collider, showing some of the first protons accelerated today at 1028h Central European Time (0428h Eastern Time), the exact time when CERN scientists successfully fired up the LHC for the first time. As we told you earlier this morning, this wasn’t the heads-on collision…
Yes. Looks like we are still alive. The first ignition of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, is now underway and nothing has happened yet. But there’s a simple reason for that, one that I realized two days ago and I didn’t have time to actually write about until today: we got it all…
We know the LHC won’t end the world, but in an amusing note before its big switch-on tomorrow Stephen Hawking (he of the physics brain the size of a planet) has admitted he’s got a $100 bet that the machine won’t succeed in one of its big goals: finding the very mysterious Higgs boson.In a…
