Artist's conception of the binary supermassive black hole system. Credit P. Marenfeld, NOAO Paired black holes are theorized to be common, but have escaped detection — until now. Astronomers Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer, from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Ari...

Black holes once existed exclusively in the realm of theory, but astronomers have become increasingly adept at spotting the telltale signs of objects that are hard to spot due to the fact that they suck in any light that happens to cross an event horizon. Black holes have fallen into two separate ca...

Pop rocks. News on the bubble has been good for Michigan of late. You can take a neutral ESPN's word for it, or a rabidly pro-mid-major JCCW's: …the big boys and their ESPN propagandists got the results they needed from the land of mid-majors this weekend. Neither Siena nor Utah St. could handle t...

Apparently now that the LHC has Google doing its bidding, it's taking it easy and won't become operational anytime soon. Unless September is considered soon, in which case, shit, I won't live to see the finale of LOST. The Large Hadron Collider could be switched back on in September - a year after i...

While the creation of black holes in the high-energy proton-proton collisions that LHC will hopefully start providing this fall is not granted, and while the scientific establishment is basically unanimous in claiming that those microscopical entities would anyway decay in a time so short that even ...

KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One undeveloped me...

It's not until you acknowledge the world's greatest physicists do you realize how fundamentally useless our role here is. You and I will not uncover the secrets of the Universe. Luckily, someone's working on it. One branch of theoretical physics believes that the Universe is just a holographic versi...

I saw this movie at the Arclight Saturday night. It was smart, profound and real. My previous articles on Waltz are here and here. I’m glad I bought my ticket Friday because the screening was sold out. Afterwards, movie director Ari Folman spoke. Interviewer: "Several years ago, at age 40...

Swift's Hard X-ray Survey offers the first unbiased census of active galactic nuclei in decades. Dense clouds of dust and gas, illustrated here, can obscure less energetic radiation from an active galaxy's central black hole. High-energy X-rays, however, easily pass through. Credit: ESA/NASA/AVO/Pao...

This has been a year of portents. We’ve had so many “end of the world is nighs” that we’re probably into “the end of the end of the world is nigh” by now. It clearly isn’t the end of the world though, just the end of our picture of it as a booming sybaritic ...