The Wormhole A portal to the quirkier side of science
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet The Onion
EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world. More...
Hubble Kaleidoscope Finds Evidence Of Space Looking All Crazy The Onion
Astronomers analyzing the first images captured by the new Hubble Space Kaleidoscope announced that they've acquired the first concrete evidence that the universe is in a constant state of total weirdness. "With their unprecedented resolution, the latest images from the new kaleidoscope reveal that space, once thought to be isotropic, is actually continuously expanding, unfolding, and rearranging in a series of freaky patterns," said astronomer Douglas Stetler, head of the Space Kaleidoscope Science Institute in Baltimore. "It's an exciting time for the field of astrokaleidoscopics, or anyone interested in the vast, wacked-out nature of space." More...
Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered LiveScience.com Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur. And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions. More...
Asteroid Impacts on Earth: A Protection Plan Newswise.com One hundred years ago, a huge explosion took place in the atmosphere over Tunguska. Today, there is a low probability -- but not zero -- that an asteroid loitering out there in space has Earth's name on it. A melding of technology and space governance could negate such events from happening in the future. More...
Let the Proton Smashing Begin. (The Rap Is Already Written.)
By Dennis Overbye—excerpted from The New York Times
After 14 years and $8 billion, lawsuits and the occasional exploding magnet, the world’s largest physics experiment seems to be getting close enough to becoming a reality for its participants to plan the opening parties.
The Large Hadron Collider, under construction at CERN, outside Geneva, is designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them together in search of new particles and perhaps new forces of nature.
For those who like their physics in rhyme, there is now a rap video. The author and rapper is Kate McAlpine, aka alpinekat, a science writer who works at CERN and who also has a rap about neurons on YouTube.
She says she wrote the lyrics during her 40-minute bus commute from Geneva out to the lab. In an e-mail message, she emphasized that this was not an official CERN project, and that in fact that she had to get CERN’s press office to vouch for her so she could go down into the tunnel where some filming took place.
“My friends took a bit of convincing before they’d dance on camera,” she added. “However, unlike the first rap video about the neurochip, there was no tequila involved.”
