Observations with the 1.6-meter telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) in California, the most powerful ground-based instrument dedicated to studying the Sun, have resulted in the highest-…

They key issues in the discussion of the BICEP2 result center around the way BICEP2 accounted for dust in the foreground.  They based their analysis on a presentation graphic which was shown at…

"After the 1974 London Conference, with its strong confirmation of the quark model, a general change of view developed with regard to the structure of hadrons. [...] the quark structure of hadrons…

One of the nice details lost in the big picture of the Higgs boson discovery of 2012 is that a significant part of the signal put in evidence by ATLAS and CMS is produced by a very special kind of…

I reported here a few days ago about a very nice challenge issued by the ATLAS experiment: find Higgs boson decays to tau lepton pairs in a sample containing signal as well as background events,…

I am spending the week in the pleasant resort of La Biodola, in the Elba island. Elba is a beautiful island just off the coast of Tuscany. Here Napoleon was exiled after his abdication in 1814 (he…

The laws of physics are absolute - in theory.  And with an exception. So absolute doesn't always mean what we think it means. How heat and temperature related to energy, the laws of…

Some Sun-like stars are 'earth-eaters.' During their development they ingest large amounts of the rocky material from which 'terrestrial' planets like Earth, Mars and Venus are made. Trey Mack, a…

I came to know through a social network (I have many colleagues as friends there, and they usually post more useful stuff than cute kittens) that ATLAS has launched a very intriguing competition. One…

Physicists say they have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorized 80 years ago. There is just one problem. In order to test the newest…