Phase 1: Physicist makes joke.
Phase 2: NYT.
Phase 3: ...
Phase 4: Profit!

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC."

A hard rain's gonna fall on exoplanet COROT-7b

Scientists were able to conclude that COROT-7b has a similar density and silicate rock makeup to that of Earth. However, the planet and its host star are separated by only 1.6 million miles, which is 23 times less than the distance between our Sun and Mercury. With an orbit much like our Moon's around Earth, one side of COROT-7b always faces towards its Sun, and this side is thought to have a temperature of 4220°F.

As rocks vaporize at that heat it is believed that COROT-7b's precipitation is pebbly. When a "front moves in" pebbles condense out of the air and run into lakes of molten lava on the surface below. Scientists used a computer system that ran different variants yet yielded consistent results - rock showers.

Much like the Earth's atmosphere causes water cloud to form resulting in water droplets, COROT-7b's atmosphere is believed to form rock clouds that then rain little pebbles and other forms of rock.

Previously: It's raining superballs and part 2. (Not to be confused with.)

Mice Levitated in Lab

Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.

The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.

"It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.

I wonder if this would actually feel like freefall? I guess it would, since all of your tissues would be being lifted simultaneously, including in the fluid and hairs inside your semicircular canals.

Found: first amino acid on a comet

An amino acid has been found on a comet for the first time, a new analysis of samples from NASA's Stardust mission reveals. The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space.

Previously, researchers have found amino acids in space rocks that fell to Earth as meteorites, and tentative evidence for the compounds has been detected in interstellar space. Now, an amino acid called glycine has been definitively traced to an icy comet for the first time. [...]

The researchers spent two years trying to find out - a painstaking task since there was so little of the comet dust to study. In fact, there was not enough material to trace the source of any compound except for glycine, the simplest amino acid.

"It's a great piece of laboratory work," says Lunine. "It's probably something that couldn't have been done remotely with a robotic instrument - it points to the value of returning samples."

Microwave weapon will rain pain from the sky

The Pentagon's enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.

The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, has now called for it to be upgraded. The US air force, whose radar technology the ADS is based on, is increasing its annual funding of the system from $2 million to $10 million.

Previously.

...12:34:56 07-08-09.

Previously.

The Extinction Oscillator

Using the revised timescales and Fourier analysis, Rohde and Muller looked for a periodic signal in the history of biodiversity. They were looking for evidence of a 26-million-year extinction cycle that had been hinted at in the 1980s; the strong peak in their power spectrum indicating a 62-million-year cycle was a surprise. We found evidence of the same cycle in three more data sets.

Nothing known in the motion of the Earth itself can make a 62-million-year cycle. Further, the laws of celestial mechanics rule out any object orbiting the Sun with such a long period; it would be so distant that the gravity of other stars would pull it away. But other astronomical cycles are still in play.

It takes about 200 million years for the Sun to complete one orbit around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Moreover, the galaxy is a thin disk, and there is also a motion along a vertical direction. As our solar system slowly orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. When we move up in the disk, we are pulled back down by gravity, coasting past the midpoint, then rising back up again, akin to a weight bobbing up and down on a spring.

Was this the missing mechanism? In fact, Rohde and Muller had considered this and dismissed it, for the same reason almost anyone would: One would think that any effect would occur when we passed through the disk of the galaxy, or perhaps when we got very far away from it. But that would happen twice per cycle, every 30 million years or so, which doesn't explain the 62-million-year signal.

It turns out that the biodiversity minima of the 62-million-year cycle happens when the Sun is "bobbed up" on only one side of the galaxy, when the solar system is on the disk's upper, "north" side. The galaxy's north side lies toward the constellation Virgo, as well as the largest concentration of mass in our neighborhood, the Local Supercluster some 60 million light-years away. This supercluster is so massive that its gravity pulls our galaxy toward it at a velocity of about 200 kilometers per second.

As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane. Shocks in hot gas at such high speeds generate cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called "cosmic rays." These should be showering the north side of the galaxy's disk. We are protected by the galactic magnetic field, much as the Earth's magnetic field protects our planet. When we rise to the north side, we are less protected -- and the ensuing flux of cosmic rays contains particles of such energy that they can reach the Earth's surface.

dreadwhimsy writes:

Looking back, was the short enslavement of humanity by our alien overlords, Mieux-Mieux and Praxis, really such a "reign of terror," the way the cable news media's trying portray it?

Let's not re-write history. It wasn't all that bad.

"Now I'm not saying I believe in stealing moon rocks or that shit. Don't get me wrong." "Yeah, we respect moon rocks and all." "But if I was gonna be a moon rock thief... I'd be Mickey and Mallory."

Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards -- it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon. [...]

In the bathroom, when Thad and Tiffany put on their wetsuits, they also stopped to check their breathing apparatus. The moon rocks were in a chamber devoid of oxygen in order to keep the rocks from rotting by oxidation. They would have 15 minutes of air supplied from their tanks once they entered the nitrogen-filled chamber, past the airlock. [...]

Thad and Tiffany had only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn't have enough air to get back outside. As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. [...]

The samples they took were from every Apollo mission, ever. Sometime between the heist and its resolution, Tiffany and Thad arranged the moon rocks on a bed -- and had sex amongst them.

A Battle to Preserve Wardenclyffe, Tesla's Bold Failure

A science group on Long Island wants to turn the 16-acre site into a Tesla museum and education center, and hopes to get the land donated to that end. But the owner, the Agfa Corporation, says it must sell the property to raise money in hard economic times. The company's real estate broker says the land, listed at $1.6 million, can "be delivered fully cleared and level," a statement that has thrown the preservationists into action.

Also: Sherpa Who Led Neil Armstrong To Moon Dead At 71

NASA recruited Dorje from a lunar-savvy band of coastal Sherpas outside Cape Canaveral. The small tribe is locally known for its proficiency in high-altitude work and its ability to survive in the harsh regions around the moon. Recognized for his innate skill at navigating the upper stratosphere, Dorje was chosen by John Glenn to be lead guide on the 1962 Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. Dorje worked with NASA cartographers for months to map out his people's ancient navigational route to the moon, which, until that time, was known only through oral tradition.