physics

JellyCar is an inventive and whimsical free game in which you drive a bouncy car through a series of 2-D puzzles on 15 short levels. What makes JellyCar unusual (besides its goofy soundtrack) is the game's "soft-body physics," which make your car and everything in the game world extremely squishy and reactive. The fairly simple controls make great use of the touchscreen--you can drive left and right, temporarily "inflate" the size of your car, tilt your device left and right to rotate the car, and pinch and zoom to change your view of a level. … Read more

I'm not in the habit of watching PBS or science programs. I am not smart enough and I'm always afraid PBS will ask me for money.

However, last night, as part of its Nova series, PBS showed an extraordinary documentary entitled Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. It featured, Mark Everett, better known as E, the lead singer of the indie/alternative/just plain very, very good band EELS.

As a child, his father didn't talk to him very much. He didn't hug him at all. In fact, pretty much the first time Mark had any physical contact … Read more

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes … Read more

Build an $8 billion machine that forms a 17-mile circle 300 feet underground and that may reveal secrets from the origins of the universe, and you're bound to provoke curiosity.

The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, the goal of which is to reproduce the conditions from just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. It'll do so by slamming together subatomic particles at about the speed of light, with scientists poised for a glimpse at the results.

In Sunday night's season premiere of the CBS news program 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft talked to … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider is an emotive subject.

For some, it is the most serious thing to have ever happened in the world, beyond even their first kiss or their first algebra lesson. For others, it is a source of suspicion, like a pollster stopping you in the street or a well-dressed man asking you for spare change.

Some (with either excitement or trepidation) have even pointed out that one of the brains behind this vast eternal machine is Dr. Brian Cox, once the keyboard player for the band D:Ream. D:Ream's greatest hit, a song adopted by … Read more

You can put Kate McAlpine in a giant particle accelerator 300 feet underground. You can even put her in a rap video. Just don't put her in a box.

That's a tenet the 23-year-old Michigan native--who recently climbed the YouTube charts with a rap video on the Large Hadron Collider--embraced long ago in choosing a career as a science writer. She tips the hat to her dad, who was annoyed by the results of her career aptitude test in high school that sought to place her in a particular field.

"They're trying to put you … Read more

Professor Peter Higgs will have to wait at least a few additional seasons to find out whether his long-held theory on how matter has mass is right.

That's because officials announced Tuesday that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could confirm the existence of a theoretical particle name after Higgs, will remain shut down until at least early spring.

The LHC, the world's largest particle collider, is located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN), it promises to push forward theories … Read more

The ever-shrinking record album--its latest iteration being the compact disc--just got a lot more compact, or shall we say, micro.

Backed by four major music labels, SanDisk on Monday announced a new physical music format dubbed "SlotMusic" that's essentially an entire album on a MicroSD compact memory card. Wal-Mart and Best Buy are among the retailers that have already signed on to start selling the cards for the upcoming holiday season.

With CD sales continuing to flounder, this latest effort to boost physical media sales is aimed at users of the millions of cell phones and MP3 … Read more

The world's largest particle collider has been shut down for at least two months due to a large helium leak stemming from an incident Friday, officials said.

The Large Hadron Collider is a gigantic particle accelerator located in a nearly 17-mile-long circular tunnel along the French-Swiss border about 330 feet underground. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

The collider was officially launched on September 10 when the first particle beam was successfully sent around the full circuit. On the heels of an earlier malfunction due to a faulty transformer, CERN said … Read more