The second day of the “Neutrino Conference XIII” in Venice was dedicated to, well, neutrino telescopes. I have written down in stenographical fashion some of the things I heard, and I offer them to those of you who are really interested in the topic, without much editing. Besides, making...

In what must be the most touching and useful tribute to departed author Arthur C. Clarke ever attempted, a group of scientists authors are trying to dare time travel into existence.  Sir Clarke famously stated that "when a [distinguished scientist] states that something is impossible, he i...

The paper by Thomas Gehrmann and collaborators I cited a few days ago has inspired me to have a closer look at the problem of understanding the features of extensive air showers - the phenomenon of a localized stream of high-energy cosmic rays originated by the incidence on the upper atmosphere of a...

In the craziest cosmological kids toy since the extremely short-lived "Kids First (and Last) Matter-antimatter Combining Oven", scientists from New York's Columbia University used pairs of black holes to create Star Smashing Spirographs.  An array of simulations have categorized the p...

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 ...

The New York Times > Business > Image > One Way of Measuring a Bank’s Health - Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist - If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle ...

And here's another curve ball from the cosmos. A team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland said Thursday that it has discovered cosmic radio noise that booms six times louder than expected. The noise was discovered by an......

2009 has its fair share of poetry centenaries - 100th anniversaries of births and deaths - of notable poets. These include (feel free to add more): Births in 1909 of - A.M. Klein; Stephen Spender; and Robert Garioch. Deaths in 1909 0f - Davidson; Swinburne; and Meredith. Of these, A.C. Swinburne's s...

To start 2009 with a tidy desk, I wish to put some order in the posts about particle physics I wrote in 2008. By collecting a few links here, I save from oblivion the most meaningful of them -or at least I make them just a bit more accessible. In due time, I will update the “physics made easy&...

Saw a story yesterday from BBC (or maybe Telegraph) about a 'hole' in planet Earth's magnetosphere. Then today I found a compilation of recent stories (since the year 2000) about further interesting magnetic events in our close solar neighborhood - Meanwhile, Some Chaos in the Neighbo...