Wait, what? New Higgs boson results? Did you think it was over? Oh hell no. "A post today":http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/14/higgs-results-at-kyoto/ from physicist Matt Strassler discussing the newest Higgs findings puts it well, "Knowledge…
Even if cosmic multiverse theories turn out to be bunk -- probably not -- it's worth considering that we live in at least a few multiverses already. You might say that the narrow band of visible light that allows the set of things we can see with our…
The thing used to protect most of your digital secrets -- credit card numbers, email accounts, bank account information, whatever -- is a peculiar sort of lock and key, a variety of encryption called public key cryptography. In this secrecy scheme, t…
Experimental results released last month from Italy's deep underground XENON100 detector revealed, sadly, "no dark matter":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/18/space-is-only-noise-in-the-underground-dark-matter-detector, at least in its most commonl…
For many years, we've been able to communicate via electronic messages really, really securely. Thank asymmetric key cryptography for this, a scheme for encoding messages that is nigh unbreakable. The widely-used and depended-upon secrecy scheme rest…
How hard did that headline blow your mind? Imagine: music really is crappier now; you're not just turning more snobby. It's louder, not just because you're playing it louder because technology is making it much easier and cheaper to give yourself tin…
Smashing two things together in order to uncover their hidden properties is something hardly limited to the pleasure-inducing, dirty acts you’re now thinking about. Particle physicists all over the world have been constantly working on and improving…
Data and statistical analysis is a hard thing to explain to a public not accustomed to it and more used to pop culture imaginings of scientists just finding shit in sudden _eureka!_ moments. Based on a cross-section of interactions over the years, "s…
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the par…
For all of the pop culture, mainstream buzzing devoted to the Higgs boson, it seems almost bizarre that at least some amount of comparable attention isn't devoted to dark matter and dark energy. Is that the price tag that comes with high energy colli…
Detecting and cross-checking (and cross-checking again) the existence of the Higgs boson is a big undertaking and an important one, so its attention from the press is understandable - laudable, even. But the problem with covering the Higgs boson sear…
Physicist Rob Roser is head of the Scientific Computing Division and formerly a spokesman for the CDF experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator, in Batavia, Illinois, an hour outside of Chicago. The Tevatron was switched off last September, leavi…
Of course _you_ know what the Higgs boson is -- it's the theorized particle that composes the energy field that endows every other particle with mass. It's the particle that makes the universe possible, let's nature construct things, like humans, or
Tomorrow, when the world hears a giant announcement about the Higgs boson from scientists at Europe’s CERN laboratory, they might not notice its American accomplice. On Monday, the Fermi National Laboratory, or Fermilab, which is situated in the midd…
Hey, did you hear the big news? The Higgs boson has been discovered!!!! Oh wait. No it hasn't. Well, at least not yet. So please, for the love of theorized God particles, please refrain for the time being from shitting bricks and/or popping the bu…
Minutes before we learned Chief Justice Roberts had sided with the majority in ruling the Affordable Care Act constitutional, between 70% and 80% of savvy reality arbitrageurs on InTrade were predicting with their dollars that the Court would strike
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, just launched a new consumer complaint site today. The dispinterest wall, is a forum for credit card holders, with what I'd say is a pretty stylish and readable design for a bureaucratic agency. But
Facebook (FB) started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange around 11 AM this morning. The opening price, just decided last night, was $38 per share. (As you might have noticed in the year-long build-up to today, the powers that be seem to
What is a second? You could do the whole "one one thousand" thing and not be terribly far off, and that might be OK for calculating things like how fast you're driving on the highway or how much you should get paid for a certain amount of time worked…
Last year, a programmer from Japan and a 23- year old student from Northwestern "continued humanity's obsession":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/10/26/occu-%CF%80-the-strange-history-of-counting-to-pi-3-14159265301 with _pi_ when they successfully c…
Dark matter is thought to be the ghosts that helped build the structured universe, ghosts that the universe _needed_ to make galaxies happen. I say "ghosts" because dark matter doesn't interact with the universe in ways beyond gravity; the electromag…
In 1997 I moved from Detroit to Colorado's Front Range. The Front Range isn't rural by any means -- constituting Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and a great many lesser places -- basically making up a big vertical smear of mile-high
As a species, we’ve done alright. Technologically speaking, we’ve achieved so much in the last couple of centuries. We’ve flown to the moon, invented the Internet, I mean, we’ve even created invisibility cloaks and cloned shit. But there is one part…
