physical

It's widely believed that Steve Jobs will announce the "iPhone 4G" at his keynote speech for Apple's World Wide Developers Conference on June 7. This is exciting for a number of reasons, but for me, it couldn't come soon enough.

My trusty iPhone 3G is still working as well as can be expected, but I'm noticing more and more that it struggles to keep up with some of the  resource-heavy games I download. Beyond performance, there's a crack from the base of my iPhone that goes up its back that has definitely … Read more

Angry Birds Lite is a free, 12-level preview of Angry Birds, an addictive physics-based puzzler with a lot of personality.

You're helping a bunch of birds, as they wreak vengeance upon a crew of smug little egg-stealing pigs. Basically a one-player, turn-based artillery game, Angry Birds has a dead-simple interface: you just pull back on a slingshot to launch birds one at a time, with your finger position determining the speed and trajectory of each bird. The only other interaction comes when new birds (essentially, different ammo types) are introduced: a tiny, MIRV-like bluebird and a speedy yellow bunker-buster, … Read more

iStunt Reloaded is an improved and expanded version of iStunt, a physics-based, 2D arcade snowboarding game.

iStunt Reloaded's graphics have gotten slightly more sophisticated, but its gameplay remains the same: you tilt your device left and right to rotate the angle of your snowboard (when you're in midair, this is how you perform flips), you jump with a quick swipe up, and you crouch (to pick up speed) by swiping down. Each of the game's 30 levels challenges you with a stunt-filled course (with checkpoints to save progress), from straightforward jumps and flips to much more convoluted … Read more

ZombieSmash represents the current apotheosis of enemy-flicking castle-defense games. Your rural home is your castle, and the foes to be flicked are a ravening variety of the undead.

ZombieSmash mixes up the castle-defense format slightly, with a central house that you alternately have to defend from the left, right, and both sides, using both thumbs as your on-screen perspective shifts for each incoming wave. Your primary task is served well by the game's great visuals and sound effects: you can touch and flick (or drag and slam) zombies to kill them, watching them fly with rag-doll physics and erupt … Read more

Ragdoll Blaster 2 Lite is a free 18-level preview of Ragdoll Blaster 2, the much more polished follow-up to physics-based puzzler Ragdoll Blaster.

The interface of Ragdoll Blaster 2 is a lot like its predecessor, but with a brand-new skin. You're still using your touch screen to aim and fire rag dolls from a cannon, but the earlier game's graph-paper-sketch aesthetic has been swapped out for a more realistic, steampunk-like backdrop, with a cute musical score, cartoony sound effects, and higher production values throughout.

The object of the game is the same: each level has a red-and-white, bulls-eye … Read more

The first particle has been detected in a Large Hadron Collider experiment that hopes to shed light on the nature of interactions between matter and antimatter.

LHCb--an experiment set up to explore what happened in the moments immediately after the Big Bang--on Wednesday found a particle called a beauty or bottom quark. CERN scientists have a wish list of particles they want to measure in the experiment, and the beauty quark is the first on the list that they have found.

The detection is a step on the road to the possible discovery of new particles or interactions between particles, … Read more

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, did something gutsy but smart Tuesday: they revved the Large Hadron Collider up to a new energy level in full public view.

Happily for the dozens of scientists and engineers in attendance, the LHC successfully reached its goal of a 7 TeV energy level--two beams of protons each at 3.5 trillion electron-volt energies whizzed in opposite directions and eventually collided at several points in the gigantic underground ring-shaped particle accelerator.

Scientific projects by and large are hardly cloaked in secrecy. But the LHC's run Tuesday was … Read more

After overcoming some hurdles, researchers operated the Large Hadron Collider at its highest energy level yet on Tuesday, gathering data after smashing protons into each other.

The huge underground particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, is designed to probe the nature of dark matter, antimatter, and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, as well as any number of physics issues about how those things relate to the history of the universe.

"We have observed the first collisions [and] lots of beautiful tracks. It's really fantastic," said a representative of one … Read more

The Large Hadron Collider has reached its highest power so far, taking CERN closer to its goal of using the particle accelerator to conduct experiments that will discover new physics.

Proton beams at 3.5 tera-electron-volts (TeV) were first circulated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) early Friday, CERN's director of communications, James Gillies, told ZDNet UK. Reaching that level of intensity in circulating beams is an important landmark, as it will enable physicists to start working toward the target energy of 7 TeV, he added.

"It's great--there's really nothing in our way now to starting … Read more