You may have heard of superfluids and superconductors, so why not supersolids?  In 2004 Moses Chan and Eunseong Kim thought they had discovered that super-cooled helium ice could essentially…

See, this is what I really like of a blog: when readers contribute significantly! I have discussed analogies here in the recent past, producing the writeup of a recent talk at a conference on the…

Quantum physics uses a parameter space that is curved. It is possible to cure this situation by converting the quantum state functions to distributions that have a flat parameter space. Let ψ(q) be a…

Yesterday I spent a very interesting day at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference held in TORINO which brought together researchers, high-school teachers, journalists and other professionals working…

Science based creationism has arrived and is fashionable: Established academics and NASA scientists claim that evolution is merely a deception, the fossil record planted; darlings of “new-atheists”…

This is just to report that I feel greatly honoured to be cited on top of the acknowledgements section of the new paper by Dimitri Nanopoulos and colleagues. I hope I will be able to review the…

Two papers describing results of searches for high-mass resonances decaying into jet pairs have appeared on the arxiv this week. They are authored by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, and they both…

Well, kind of. David Wineland and Serge Haroche have not endangered any living beings. That is to say: probably not in their physics experiments.  Yet, although they stayed at a safe distance…

Five years ago I was fascinated by an analogy used by my friend Michelangelo Mangano to explain the problem of naturalness, a crucial issue in fundamental physics, and maybe the biggest single…

 Things everyone should know about real black holes in  comparison to fictional black holes.  Most importantly they don't suck things into them.    Black holes do not …