Hasta La Gadget!

Are you still scratching your head over what a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider actually does? Don’t feel bad, the LHC is the most complicated piece of scientific equipment mankind has ever built. And unless you’re a physicist, you’ll probably never understand its intricacies. But if you’re curious, take a few minutes to watch this animated Particle Accelerator 101 by Don Lincoln. You won’t be applying for a job at CERN afterwards, but you should at least get the gist of what’s going on at the LHC. [YouTube via Geekosystem] More »

Science fans around the world were saddened when CERN announced its Large Hadron Collider would be shutting down for almost two years worth of repairs and upgrades. But as this video explains: that’s ok. Because when the LHC is powered up again in 2015, it will finally be able to run at full capacity. More »

The Large Hadron Collider has been pretty busy lately, probably discovering the Higgs Boson, and definitely not destroying the world and whatnot. It’s probably earned a little time off, right? You bet it has, which is why it’s going down for a two-year nap. More »

Teams at the Large Hadron Collider must be developing a knack for producing tangible evidence of theoretical particles. After orchestrating 2 million collisions between lead nuclei and protons, like the sort you see above, the collider’s Compact Muon Solenoid group and researchers at MIT suspect that stray, linked pairs of gluon particles in the mix were signs of color-glass condensate, a currently theory-only form of matter that sees gluons travel in liquid-like, quantum-entangled waves. The clues aren’t definitive, but they were also caught unexpectedly as part of a more routine collision run; the team is curious enough that it’s looking for more evidence during weeks of similar tests in January. Any conclusive proof of the condensate would have an impact both on how we understand particle production in collisions as well as the ways gluons and quarks are arranged inside protons. If so, the CMS and MIT teams may well answer a raft of questions about subatomic physics while further justifying CERN’s giant underground rings.

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Source: MIT

Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

Remember when we told you last week that we live in a strange world? Well, we had no idea what we were talking about. Seriously, things are about to get a whole lot weirder. High school is certainly a head-scratcher, no matter how old you are, but the mathematics of social hierarchies can’t hold a candle to the mysteries of the buckyball. And, if the strange behavior of the familiar carbon molecule isn’t enough for you, we’ve got an entirely new molecule to contend with, while the once-elusive Higgs Boson is getting us closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe. It’s all pretty heady stuff, which is why we’re also gonna take a quick detour to the world of human waste. This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 8.4.12: buckyballs, bosons and bodily fluids

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Science

Alt-week 8.4.12: buckyballs, bosons and bodily fluids originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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