Auroras appear according to the whims of nature, not humans, which might just be part of their eerie appeal. But c’mon, it’s the 21st century now. Why are we just waiting around? So here’s a crazy idea unearthed by Mark Zastrow writing in Eos: Let’s a build a particle accelerator to trigger auroras whenever we want.
If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new type…
I have visited CERN and they have sections of the accelerator you can look at. It's a mess—to you and me—wires and tubes. This has not been built for consumers. There's no pink model; there will not be a thinner and lighter 2.0; and Nike is not sponsoring a limited edition line. In other words—no safety measures in…
Today I found out what happens when you stick your head into a particle accelerator.
Behold the International Linear Collider — a proposed 31-kilometer electron collider that could shed light on new areas of physics — including dark matter.
In early 2007, NASA's Cassini spacecraft observed something extraordinary around Saturn. An unusually strong blast of solar wind sent subatomic particles crashing into the ringed planet's magnetic field, giving rise to perhaps the most tremendous shock wave ever observed emanating from the planet. But newly announced…
A while back, Sixty Symbols asked a bunch of physicists what they thought would happen if you were to place your hand in the particle beam at the LHC and... none of them knew. Now they've done some digging, and found out.
Leave it to a bunch of geniuses to waste a good opportunity. Remember how Samuel Morse famously asked, "What hath God wrought?" with the first telegram? Well this week, a group of scientists at the University of Rochester sent the first-ever message using a beam of neutrinos, and spelled out: "neutrinos."
The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart.
The Tevatron shut down yesterday. Before its duties were taken up by the the Large Hadron Collider, it accelerated highly charged particles through 4 miles of electromagnetic coil and vacuum tubes to discover the secrets of the universe. How do you turn a beast like that off?
Yesterday, CERN physicists shocked the world with news of a scientific finding that could revolutionize the field of physics. The researchers claim to have observed what many had believed to be impossible: subatomic particles called neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light.
How cool is this? Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Easy Bay represent!) have created an atom-smasher that could fit on your kitchen table. Why should the Large Hadron Collider guys have all the fun?
In the twilight days of the Cold War, the Soviets began building UNK, a proton accelerator in the town of Provtino that would have been the biggest in the world. It was never completed...but its ghostly remains are still there.
The work of Vincent Van Gogh may be among the greatest artistic achievements in human history, but barely a century after his death his work is already starting to fade. The bright yellows of his paintings are turning to a murky brown. But this isn't any ordinary decay - and scientists used a particle accelerator to…
The world's most intense X-ray laser may soon be the fastest strobe-light camera ever. Two of the laser's first experiments show the device will be able to take snapshots of single molecules in motion - without destroying them first.
Immediately after the Big Bang, the earliest elementary particles fought for supremacy, with matter emerging victorious over antimatter. Exactly how that happened, though, had remained mysterious until now, as new data suggest a particular particle was key to matter's success.
If you've ever had an MRI scan or accelerated a sub-atomic particle to near light speed, then you've experienced the wonders of superconductors. Here's how they work, what they do, and how they can be used in science fiction.
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 budget…
The CERN scientists said the LHC's big malfunction this weekend was the result of a "faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out," but we snarky Internet folk know better. It was performance anxiety! With more than a…
In case you were still worried about the LHC bringing on the biblical apocalypse, you can calm down, because it turns out the Collider is going to be out of commission for a lot longer than previously thought. The "electrical transformer" problem wasn't the cause of the shutdown at all, and the real problem means the…
