And by hot I mean zillions of electron-volts:

Looking for the Higgs boson? Try your Android phone. The most powerful particle accelerator in the world now has its very own app, free for download for anyone interested in cutting-edge physics. The app, created by scientists at Oxford University and approved by the European Organization for Nuclear Research aka CERN, offers Android users a peek into the research going on at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including a live feed into what particles are being smashed at any given moment. The imagery is shown with computer-generated 3D models that users can move to see any angle, and the app offers a tutorial for physics newbies to decipher the things they’re seeing. According the Android Market, users have already downloaded the app more 10,000 times.

It’s not often we get to see a truly grassroots movement form and grow before our eyes, but that’s exactly what may be happening with the Occupy Wall Street protest that began in the Big Apple. The map above shows the extent of planned protests all over America:

The movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” has spread far beyond its starting point in lower Manhattan. CBS News correspondent Bigad Shaban reports that it now has offshoots in 25 cities nationwide, and political leaders from both sides are weighing in. From D.C. to Alabama to Portland, demonstrators protest everything from corporate greed to joblessness to economic inequality.

[Read more…]

Presidential long shot Herman Cain doesn’t just have supernatural deities in his corner, he’s also “just like” another Biblical celebrity:

Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, told the Christian Broadcasting Network that God has been behind him since he decided to run for the White House.”I felt like Moses when God said I want you to go into Egypt and lead my people out. Moses resisted. I resisted,” Cain said in the interview.

Yes, a multimillionaire being asked for details on the economy or foreign policy by adoring voters and friendly media is exactly like being tortured and abandoned in a desert with no food or water. Anyone can see the eerie similarity. ::eyeroll::

One of the coolest objects for backyard astronomy is the Crab Nebula, shown above. High energy detectors have found its more than pretty: the nebula is firing off lots high energy gamma-rays:

Using the Very Energetic Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a group of international astrophysicists spotted gamma rays with energies exceeding 100 billion electron-volts emitted from the fast spinning Crab Pulsar supernova that was discovered in 1968. “If you asked theorists a year ago whether we would see gamma-ray pulses this energetic, almost all of them would have said, ‘No.’ There’s just no theory that can account for what we’ve found,” said corresponding author Martin Schroedter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

That’s a lot of energy, but a freshly minted, rapidly rotating neutron star like the pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula has a lot of energy to work with. Just a baseball sized meteor falling to the surface in that enormous gravity well would hit with the energy of a small nova. I’m sure scientists will come up with some fascinating explanations for the gamma rays soon.

There is a strange liquid substance falling from the sky in Texas. Analysis reveals dihydrogen oxide saturated with free diatomic Oxygen and Nitrogen, trace amounts of CO2, Argon, and a smattering of various hydrocarbons are present. I’m not sure what to make of it.

We apologize for the intermittent slow loading speeds on the FtB site today. Our tech staff is working on tweaking the servers and we expect things to be back to normal any moment. In the meantime feel free to blame PZ Myers, or possibly Bill Gates, your choice.

Speaking of the coming singularity, this article reminded me of something, but at first I wasn’t sure what:

in a series of experiments at Duke University Medical Center, researchers fitted two monkeys with electrodes in their brains and trained them to move a virtual arm across a computer screen to grab virtual objects and “feel” their different textures — all using only their brains. It’s the first demonstration of what the researchers call a brain-machine-brain interface (BMBI).

Then I placed it: the opening scene in Surrogates, where researchers had hooked up a living primate to a robotic arm. At age 50 I could already make great use of a nice athletic, near indestructible artificial body. How about you?

The idea that the atoms in our body were cooked in the cores of massive stars that ultimately blew their starry guts out has already fascinated me. Now, astronomers have added a related celestial twist: the water making up earth’s ancient oceans, some of which resides inside our present day bodies, probably came from a special group of comets which normally wander lazily around the edge of the solar system:

Earth-like water has been discovered in the small oddball comet Hartley 2, which the Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft flew by in November 2010. This comet originated in the disk-shaped Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, suggesting this is ultimately where much of Earth’s water came from.

What does earth-like water mean? [Read more…]