• How to Survive the End of the Universe | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-28 15:25:00
    <pNext year will be a doozy for doomsayers. depending on the prophecy, the world is predestined to expire by means of a solar storm, asteroid strike, rogue-planet collision, plague, falling stars, earthquake, debt crisis, or some combination thereof. Of course, nobody seems to be preparing for any of these impending 2012 apocalypses, with the exception of a porn studio reportedly building a clothing-optional underground bunker. And why should we? Scientifically speaking, the prophecies are strictly ballyhoo. Physicists can do a lot better. When it comes to end-times scenarios, cosmological data-crunchers have at their disposal far more meaningful prognostication tools that can tell us how it’s really going to end—not just Earth, but the whole universe. Best of all, they can tell us how to survive it. Science, oddly, is a lot better at predicting things like the death of stars than next week’s weather. The same laws of physics that enable scientists to study the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago also allow them to gaze into the future with great precision. And few people have peered farther than University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Greg Laughlin, science’s leading soothsayer. As a graduate student in 1992, he was plugging away at a simple computer simulation of star formation when he broke for lunch and accidentally left the simulation running. When he returned an hour later, the simulation had advanced 100 million billion years, much further into the future than most scientists ever think (or dare) to explore. The program itself didn’t reveal anything terribly startling—the simulated star had long since gone cold and died—but Laughlin was intrigued by the concept of using physical simulations to traverse enormous gulfs of time. “It opened my eyes to the fact that things are going to evolve and are still going to be there in timescales that dwarf the current age of the universe,” he says. Four years later, still fascinated, Laughlin teamed up with Fred Adams, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, to investigate the future of the universe more rigorously. Working in their spare time, the two researchers coauthored a 57-page paper in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics that detailed a succession of future apocalypses: the death of the sun, the end of the stars, and multiple scenarios for the fate of the universe as a whole...

  • Today’s physics news: Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy UK winters – Quest for quirky quantum particles may have struck gold – and more

    Updated: 2012-02-28 10:29:54
    Today’s physics news: Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy UK winters – Quest for quirky quantum particles may have struck gold -  and more Melting Arctic link to cold, snowy UK winters The progressive shrinking of Arctic sea ice is bringing colder, snowier winters to the UK and other areas of Europe, North America and [...]

  • Various and Sundry

    Updated: 2012-02-28 04:07:50
    Lots of people seem to be unhappy with my characterization of Lawrence Krauss’s question “why is there something rather than nothing?” as meaningless. I’m well aware that one can give this question a non-trivial meaning, I just don’t think Krauss … Continue reading →

  • Today’s physics news: Single molecule’s electric charges seen in first image, rain drains energy from the atmosphere and more

    Updated: 2012-02-27 10:28:05
    Today’s physics news: Single molecule’s electric charges seen in first image, rain drains energy from the atmosphere and more Single molecule’s electric charges seen in first image Researchers have shown off the first images of the “charge distribution” in a single molecule, showing an intricate dance of electrons at tiny scales. BBC Optical memory could [...]

  • Of Mice and Men and Medicines | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-24 14:55:00
    You won’t find more mentally ill mice per square mile anywhere than in Bar Harbor, Maine. Mice who seem anxious or depressed, autistic or schizophrenic—they congregate here. Mice who model learning disabilities or anorexia; mice who hop around as though your hyperactive nephew had contracted into a tiny fur ball; they are here too. Name an affliction of the human mind, and you can probably find its avatar on this sprucy, secluded island. The imbalanced mice are kept under the strictest security, in locked wards at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical facility internationally renowned for its specially bred deranged rodents. Every day trucks carry away boxes and boxes of them for distribution to psychiatric researchers across the nation. There are no visiting hours, because strangers fluster the mice and might carry in contagious diseases. The animals are attended only by highly qualified caregivers, people like neuroscientist Elissa Chesler. Sitting in her airy Jackson Lab office, accessible to germy and perturbing strangers, Chesler clicks open a series of photographs from a type of mouse personality test on her computer screen. The first picture shows a mouse sleeping on a nestlet, a stiff, square bed of compressed cotton. Mice typically gnaw vigorously at the cotton, shredding it to make soft igloos for sleeping and staying warm. The second image shows a mouse that has propped his nestlet against a wall, forming a makeshift lean-to. “When I see this guy, I’m thinking anxiety,” says Chesler, whose research delves into the genetics of stress. “This design isn’t trapping a lot of heat, but he’s secure under there.” She smiles as she clicks open the last photo. “And here we have the ‘I can’t deal with it’ mouse,” she says. The image shows a mouse asleep, with his rigid nestlet balanced on his back. Personality, Chesler maintains, can be read from these nestlet styles more clearly than from a test of forced swimming or bar pressing...

  • How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-23 14:55:00
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  • How to See the Invisible: 3 Approaches to Finding Dark Matter | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-22 15:30:00
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  • String Theory Skeptics and Multiverse Mania

    Updated: 2012-02-21 22:08:12
    My endless rants here about the hot field of multiverse studies are mainly motivated by concern about the effect this is having on particle theory. Multiverse scenarios all too often function as an excuse for not admitting that string theory/extra-dimensional … Continue reading →

  • How I Dismantled the World’s Deadliest Weapon | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-20 00:05:00
    In October Sandia National Laboratories engineer Phil Hoover dismantled the U.S. arsenal’s last B53, a 9-megaton bomb 600 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima. Hoover talked to DISCOVER about taking apart America’s most powerful weapon. The B53 was big and heavy, about the size of a minivan and 10,000 pounds. We needed 130 engineers and scientists from across the nuclear weapons enterprise to take it apart. Even though the B53 was designed to be rather easily disassembled, it still took us about two weeks per bomb. All of the nuclear explosive disassembly was done in one well-lit, clean, and orderly room large enough to hold a Volkswagen van. We wore cover­alls, safety glasses, gloves, safety shoes, and dosimeters to track radiation exposure. Typically three or four people at a time actually did the work. There wasn’t much small talk—the operation required focus...

  • 4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply 
Safer, Cleaner & 
Virtually Inexhaustible | DISCOVER Magazine


    Updated: 2012-02-16 16:50:00
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  • There's a Shot for That | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-15 17:55:00
    Two centuries ago Edward Jenner administered the first scientifically developed vaccine, injecting fluid from a dairymaid’s skin lesion into an 8-year-old boy. The English physician knew that dairymaids who contracted cowpox, a comparatively mild skin disease, became immune to the much deadlier smallpox, which at the time killed 400,000 Europeans a year. Jenner hoped the fluid from the cowpox lesion would somehow inoculate the boy against the smallpox scourge. 
His hunch proved correct. Today vaccines (vaccinia is Latin for “cowpox”) of all forms save 3 million lives per year worldwide, and at a bargain price. A measles shot, for instance, costs less than a dollar per dose. By training the human immune system to recognize and ward off dangerous pathogens, vaccines can protect against disease for decades, or even for a lifetime. Preventive vaccines work by introducing harmless microbial chemical markers, known as antigens, which resemble the markers on living microbes. The antigens train the immune system to recognize and destroy those microbes should they ever appear in the body. By injecting cowpox antigens into his patients’ bloodstream, for instance, Jenner primed their immune systems to attack the similar smallpox virus. Today medical scientists are taking 
Jenner’s ideas in new directions. They are exploiting a growing understanding of the immune system to develop therapeutic vaccines: ones aimed not at preventing infection but at rooting out established disease or even changing how the body functions...

  • The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-15 15:20:00
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  • SUSY Still in Hiding

    Updated: 2012-02-14 16:52:09
    Recent rumors supposedly coming from theorists at Harvard indicating that today would be the day that an announcement would be made of first evidence for a superpartner of a top quark have just been shot down. The talk at CERN … Continue reading →

  • How To Think About Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance

    Updated: 2012-02-07 23:15:52
    I continue to believe that “quantum field theory” is a concept that we physicists don’t do nearly enough to explain to a wider audience. And I’m not going to do it here! But I will link to other people thinking about how to think about quantum field theory. Over on the Google+, I linked to [...]

  • Latest from the LHC

    Updated: 2012-02-07 15:15:35
    CMS and ATLAS have just released final versions of their Higgs analyses for the 2011 data (the new CMS gamma-gamma analysis was previously discussed here). The preliminary versions of these were what was released last December, and the final versions … Continue reading →

  • The Spider Assassin That Acts Like Prey and Cloaks Itself With Wind | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-06 19:00:00
    A good predator must be as cunning as it is strong, especially when its prey can turn the tables and kill it. The assassin bug has learned this well, becoming a master of deception in its hunt for spiders. Last year biologist Anne Wignall from Australia’s Macquarie University discovered that the bug lures food by strumming webs with its legs, mimicking the vibrations of a trapped fly. Now she has found that the insects exploit the weather by stalking spiders in the wind...

  • How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities? | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2012-02-03 14:30:00
    No matter what you do with it, it'll still look like Hogwarts. Rip open that new LEGO set and your mind races at the possibilities! A simple repertoire of piece types, and yet you can build a ninja boat, a three-wheeled race car, a pineapple pizza, a spotted lion… The possibilities are limited only by your creativity and imagination. “Combine and create!”—that was the implicit war cry for LEGOs. So how, I wonder, did LEGO so severely lose its way? LEGO now fills the niche that model airplanes once did when I was a kid, an activity whose motto would be better described as “Follow the instructions!” The sets kids receive as gifts today are replete with made-to-order piece types special to each set, useful in one particular spot, and often useless elsewhere. And the sets are designed for constructing some particular thing (a Geonosian Starfighter, a Triceratops Trapper, etc.), and you—the parent—can look forward to spending hours helping them through the thorough yet thoroughly exhausting pages. LEGO appears to be doing very well for itself, and there’s no shame in helping to revolutionize model-building (and there’s an elegance to snapping together one’s models rather than gluing them together). But one has to wonder whether, at some deep philosophical level, the new LEGOs really are LEGOs at all, as they’re no longer the paragon of creative construction they once were and with which they’re still associated. In fact, as I was bemoaning my kids’ LEGOs with the Guardian's Roger Highfield and later with IRED's Samuel Arbesman), it struck me that I have such data on LEGOs...

  • The Langlands Program and Quantum Field Theory

    Updated: 2012-02-02 01:59:53
    Edward Frenkel is here this semester in the math department at Columbia, and he’s giving a series of lectures on a topic dear to my heart. Video of his lectures on The Langlands Program and Quantum Field Theory is starting … Continue reading →

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