March 2010

Large Hadron Collider Makes History

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Scientists of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said that on Tuesday, March 30, 2010,  their $10 billion research tool,  the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC),  a 17-mile tunnel on the border of Switzerland and France, near Geneva, Switzerland, crashed two proton beams into each other at high energy, at  three times more force than ever before. Why is this important?  Because scientists are telling us that this is a breakthrough, marking a "new territory" in physics, " and "experiments at the LHC may help answer fundamental questions such as why Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- which describes the world on a large scale -- doesn't jibe with quantum mechanics, which deals with matter far too small to see.The collider may help scientists discover new properties of nature. The as-yet theoretical Higgs boson, also called "the God particle" .

Big Blue Marble

NASA's Goddard Space Center

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has been accumulating incredible high resolution images of Earth and then using post-processing software to "stitch" together many small images into detailed high resolution images of the entire planet. Goddard scientists and data specialists have stitched together months of observations in 2001 of the entire planet into a rotating mosaic of every square kilometer. They've even established a Flickr account to display these images, images and research paid for with all of our tax dollars and already being used to track resources, locate lost cities, and research atmospheric changes. You can find the NASA Blue Marble Flickr account here. I've linked to sample image in this post; click it for a larger version, and don't forget to enjoy the animation below.