Impatient for Halloween? Why get your chills from midnight movies or lame costumes when the world already teems with the denizens of Mother Nature’s darkest dreams? From the tame to the tongue-devouring, these creepy creatures are guaranteed to fly, swim and burrow into you nightmares. Dare to take my twisted tour of…
When physicists at CERN cranked up the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on Sept. 10, 2008, they had high (if contradictory) hopes. Like a child at Christmas, they wanted to get exactly what was on their wish list – the Higgs boson, some proof of supersymmetry – but also yearned for some wonderful surprise; because, if everything they predicted was right on the money, then particle physicists might well weep, for they would have no new worlds to conquer.
Years later, the LHC still hasn’t destroyed the planet or crushed physicists’ hopes. In fact, it’s made some amazing and somewhat perplexing discoveries. In this article, I take a (relatively) nontechnical look back at five the five most major findings so far.
Does it feel like lately your car has exchanged horsepower for hamster power? If so, you might have a power problem, but good luck nailing it down; the same intricate fuel systems that mostly conquered vapor lock also introduced a slew of failure points, and pinpointing which one is responsible can try the patience of a shade-tree saint.
Thankfully, there are some clear signs to look for, so get the banana out of your tailpipe and read…
Who doesn’t love a story about the little guy who makes it big, or the underdog that overcomes? Take these five mighty mites. What they lack in geographical size they make up for in strong economies and supersized space aspirations. As the new space race heats up, and as the airless reaches cease to be the sole province of superpowers, who knows how far their ambitions will carry them?
Science sharpens our minds to discern proper evidence from flimflam, to tell good experimental design from bad and to separate statistics from exaggerations. More than that, it reveals the beauty and intricacy woven into the very fabric of reality.
In this article, I suggest some easy and fun ways for your family to explore science together.