It’s been a rough few weeks of null results for physicists. First, a promising underground experiment failed to find evidence of dark matter. Then news broke that the Large Hadron Collider hadn’t discovered an exciting new particle after all.
John Carpenter has films that are considered classics: Halloween, The Thing, They Live, Big Trouble in Little China. But the films he made after his heyday don’t get nearly enough love. One big example: Ghosts of Mars, which takes The Thing and mushes it into Assault on Precinct 13, except with way more graphic…
In Japan they love to make perfect ice for perfect drinks. For that they use these metal machines to turn huge ice cubes into ice spheres using nothing but brute force. Surprisingly, the ice doesn't break thanks to the MAGICS of physics.
The University of Wisconsin's IceCube neutrino detection system has been quietly operating amid Antarctica's barren tundra for more than four years now. In that time, the fledgling detector has captured more than 100 cosmic neutrinos, many of which originated far outside our Milky Way galaxy. And if project leaders…
Catching a glimpse of even regular neutrinos—low-energy particles generated in the atmosphere—is difficult enough, but spotting a "cosmic neutrino" left over from the Big Bang has been downright impossible. That is until this cubic kilometer buried under Antartica's frozen wastes started looking.
Cosmic rays generate the most energetic particles in the universe, utterly dwarfing anything we can generate in particle accelerators. Astrophysicists thought these cosmic rays were created in powerful gamma-ray bursts. Turns out they were completely, utterly wrong. So now what?
Plans are afoot to build a gigantic, state-of-the-art neutrino detector beneath the Mediterranean Sea. This particle-hunting behemoth would be taller than the Burj Khalifa and the second biggest structure ever built, second only to the Great Wall of China.
I will bet you several internet points that you didn't know Ice Cube was an architecture student before he started rapping! Correct—the dude is a true renaissance man. Watch him geek out over The Eames House.
2010 was a great year for Science. NASA's space plane (and the Dolly lineage) were resurrected while a secret laboratory Neturino observatory was built under the South Pole. Check out our best science stories of the year!
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, built over a decade at a cost of $271 million, is buried under the South Pole... and longer than the world's tallest skyscrapers combined.
Sometimes you don't need to fill your 5-gallon Mega Xtreme Chill Polar Icecap Gulp with 238 ice cubs to get through the day. Sometimes you just want one or two.
