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A partial map of the distribution of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, going out to a distance of 7 billion light years. The amount of galaxy clustering that we observe today is a signature of how gravity acted over cosmic time, and allows as to test whether general relativity holds over these scales. [...]

An example of a random walk is the Galton board, which is used to demonstrate binomial distribution to students. On this board, balls are dropped from the top and they repeatedly bounce either left or right in a random way as they hit pins stuck in the board. (Credit: Photo by Antoine Taveneaux)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2010) — Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe.

Artist’s representation showing outflow from a supermassive black hole inside the middle of a galaxy. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)
The researchers, led by Durham University's Department of Physics, [...]

U.S. nuclear power plant owners are gaining regulatory approval to run aging reactors longer but, as the power plants age, the need for rigorous safety supervision steadily mounts.

POWERFUL PRECAUTIONS: As nuclear power plants age, the need for rigorous safety supervision steadily mounts, industry experts say.
ISTOCKPHOTO/MICHAELUTECH
On Nov. 4, 2008, two divers were cleaning sludge and silt [...]

Knowing enough about the way light is scattered through materials would allow physicists to see through opaque substances, such as the sugar cube on the right. In addition, physicists could use information characterizing an opaque material to put it to work as a high quality optical component, comparable to the glass lens show on the [...]

THE long-anticipated nuclear renaissance has arrived. In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama announced plans for the US to build a new generation of nuclear power plants, and his budget for 2011 proposes large funding increases for the industry.

Going the hybrid way (Image: David Hills/iStock)
Several European countries are also [...]

IT SEEMS obvious: if you're planning a new generation of nuclear power stations, you should invest in the most advanced and efficient designs available. Yet that's not what seems to be happening in the US.

Backing old technologies (Image: Bloomberg/Getty)
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The first new nuclear power plants on American soil for 30 years could soon [...]

Protons collide inside the beam pipe at the centre, while the BPIX detector fitted around that location records the data in three dimensions. (Credit: H.R. Bramaz/PSI)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — CERN has been able to take the first measurements of collisions between particles with the highest energy ever generated. These collisions were performed at CERN's [...]

GENEVA – Operators of the world's largest atom smasher restarted their massive machine Sunday in a run up to experiments probing secrets of the universe, a spokeswoman said.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, sent low energy beams of protons in both directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under [...]

Supercool. As individual water molecules fluctuate, breaking and forming bonds with their nearest neighbors, the result is slightly imperfect tetrahedral structures that are constantly in flux. Research suggests that these fluctuations give rise to some of water's most unusual and life-sustaining features. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 27, 2010) — The key to [...]