WHEN the Large Hadron Collider was switched on last September - and ignominiously switched off a few days later - it was the subject of the kind of media frenzy usually reserved for rock stars and celebrity models. These, we were told, were the first moments of the most complex machine ever built. What we […]

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Porites and other corals provide habitat for thousands of species.

Coral growth in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has slowed to its most sluggish rate in the past 400 years.

The decline endangers the species the reef supports, say researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
They studied massive porites corals, which are several hundred years old, and […]

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In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team with expertise in archaeology, past climates, and ecology reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.

Maps of geographic projections of conditions identified as suitable by eco-cultural niche models for Neanderthals (A — pre-H4, […]

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Quantum physics is both mysterious and difficult to grasp. Barry Sanders, director of the U of C’s Institute for Quantum Information Science, is hoping to change that.

Sanders, who is also the iCORE Chair of Quantum Information Science, has produced a four-minute animated movie with a team of animators and scientists. The film is intended for […]

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The Big Bang is widely considered to have obliterated any trace of what came before. Now, astrophysicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) think that their new theoretical interpretation of an imprint from the earliest stages of the universe may also shed light on what came before.

"It’s no longer completely crazy to ask what […]

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Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that may make up the mysterious "dark matter" believed to dominate the universe’s mass. But the existing detectors have a problem: They also pick up particles of ordinary matter — hurtling neutrons that masquerade as the elusive dark-matter particles the instruments are designed to find.

MIT […]

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It’s 40 degrees F below zero (with the wind chill) at the South Pole today. Yet a research team from the University of Delaware is taking it all in stride.

The physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Delaware’s Bartol Research Institute are part of an international team working to build the world’s largest neutrino […]

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The world’s most precise clock - on which all time-keeping and navigation systems are based - might be made as small as a wristwatch with a new design proposed by an international team of physicists.

Cesium atomic clocks are presently used to define the basic unit of time - the second - to co-ordinate and synchronise […]

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Should there be nuclear-powered planes to save the environment? Engineers reconsider a Cold War-era proposal scrapped decades ago

NUCLEAR-POWERED CONVAIR NB-36H "PEACEMAKER": Depicted here is a view of the Convair NB-36H Peacemaker experimental aircraft and a Boeing B-50 Superfortress chase plane during research and development taking place at the Convair plant at Forth Worth, Texas. The […]

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In September this image was recorded when some of the first protons to be accelerated inside the Large Hadron Collider smashed into an absorbing device called a collimator at near light speed, producing a shower of particle debris. After a fault just nine days later, the accelerator faces a $29 million repair bill and will […]

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