A video on youtube documents a remarkable feat -the Australian motorbyker Robbie Maddison jumping the Korynth channel in Greece. A 85-meter jump! I am interested to explain in simple terms the…

I was on a plane to Valencia yesterday at the time when Paolo spoke in the Main Auditorium at CERN, and got approved our very first physics result with CMS collider data. Okay -with a small group we…

Russian and US physicists have created a superheavy element made of atoms containing 117 protons that is roughly 40% heavier than lead.  The achievement fills in the final gap on the list of…

A lot has been going on recently in blogs I sporadically visit (I am not a big reader myself). I thus thought I'd put together a list of valuable links here. First of all, Michael Schmitt deserves…

I just read a very nice article by Nature's Zeeya Merali, and I thought I would link it from this blog. It discusses in detail several aspects of the sociology of the very large communities of…

The CDF Collaboration blessed yesterday afternoon the results of a search for massive Gravitons decaying into pairs of Z bosons. And it is a startling new result! Usually after a blessing (which is…

The formulation of a fun physics problem with practical -and pleasant- applications occurred to me yesterday. I am currently spending a week in Madrid with my family, and we have chosen a very nice…

  Birefringence and the polarized light 1. Definition Birefringence is a kind of optical phenomenon that when the light go through an anisotropic crystals, there are two emergent refracted…

We are on. This afternoon just after 1PM the LHC beams have started to produce proton-proton collisions in the heart of the experiments, at the never-before achieved energy of 7 TeV. It was a long…

So how dangerous is the Large Hadron Collider? How likely is it that when operated at maximum energy the LHC will create a black hole and wipe out earth? Eric Johnson, assistant professor of law at…