Home
Share |

Content about physics and astronomy

August 1, 2012
Big science needs Mickey Mouse models

The largest scientific projects in the world, including the Large Hadron Collider or the Square Kilometre Array, still require simple models to help researchers understand the results.

August 1, 2012
Five billion years of lunar evolution in two minutes

From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn't always look like this. Learn about how the moon evolved from its early state to how it looks today in this animation. Image courtesy NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

August 1, 2012
Hear a Higgs through its data

The Higgs boson-like particle has been turned into music. Not only is this a way to bridge the gap between science and the public, but it could enable researchers to hear their work in a new light.

July 11, 2012
Getting value from a trillion electron haystack

For the first time, researchers from Berkeley have managed to query 32 terabytes of a trillion particle dataset in three seconds, with new techniques.

July 11, 2012
Higgs–like particle spotted at CERN – have you seen it?

Candidate Higgs boson decay to four electrons recorded by ATLAS in 2012. Image courtesy ATLAS.

July 11, 2012
The higgs, the history, and the grid

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have identified a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson. Confidence levels are as high as 5.0 sigma. This means the probability of the background alone fluctuating up by this amount or more is about one in three million. The director general of CERN, Rolf Heuer, said this global success was only made possible because of the experiments, infrastructure, and grid computing.

July 4, 2012
Hunting for giants

The top quark may interact with the Higgs field and open up new physics such as supersymmetry. Distributed computing enables researchers to home in on this elusive particle.

June 27, 2012
Funding boost for US grid computing

The Open Science Grid, in the US, have received a large financial commitment to sustain its computing grid resources into the future.

June 27, 2012
Making data more searchable, shareable, & citable

Europe's leading neutron source, and international experiments, and projects, are setting up policies and tools to make raw data more open, streamlining cross-disciplinary research.

June 27, 2012
Shedding light on supernovae

PRACE researchers use 3D computer modeling to better understand the mechanisms behind the most powerful and rarest supernovae explosions.

June 27, 2012
The grand vision of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

Last month, we brought you news about the Square Kilometre Array. Now, we have wind of another ambitious telescope. On 1st July, the Royal Society celebrates the discovery of cosmic rays centenary. One project on show will give new glimpses into the highest-energy universe, processing up to 25 petabytes per year; as much data as CERN manages today, which may require a new worldwide computing grid.

June 20, 2012
More particle physics apps pop into your pocket

Two new Android smartphone applications have been released that bring particle physics education into the palms of students' hands.

May 30, 2012
Physics software used to fight cancer

Medical researchers are using a physics software application called Fluka to predict how ions interact in a patient’s body when undergoing cancer treatment.

May 16, 2012
The search for 'new physics' - a view from the frontline

A PhD student based at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (NIKHEF), in the Netherlands, wrote an opinion feature of her experience in using the grid to help search for new physics in LHCb detector data and to answer why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe today.

May 2, 2012
Early Universe behaved like a fluid

Video courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Brookhaven, New York, USA.

The US Department of Energy has started putting together a series of videos called "Breakthrough," profiling research at various national laboratories. That's how we came across this week's visual.

April 25, 2012
Gamma rays, gravity waves, and galactic GPS

The Einstein@Home volunteer computing project has enabled the public to discover 27 new stars. When someone finds a new pulsar, not only do they enter the history books, they also get a personal email or even a signed-for-letter from project leader Bruce Allen.

April 11, 2012
Gearing up for Belle II

The Belle experiment at the KEKB electron-positron collider, based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, made significant contributions to the field of particle physics before it shut down 30 June 2010. Among them was the observation of charge-parity violation in B mesons. Today, physicists are preparing for the next step: SuperKEKB and Belle II. And part of those preparations include creating the computing infrastructure the experiment will need to handle massive amounts of data.

March 28, 2012
Does computation threaten the scientific method?

Bug-free code is an impossibility. So, how can researchers know when the bugs in their code are minor, with no real impact, or show-stoppers that completely change the entire result?

March 14, 2012
Tevatron closes in on the Higgs Boson

Physics enthusiasts may have already heard the latest news on the Higgs Boson, which was announced 7 March 2012.

From Symmetry Breaking:

February 22, 2012
Catch the wave

Modeling and simulation using high performance computing help scientists advance work with supernovas.

February 22, 2012
When worlds collide

If the sun is anything, it is reassuring. It rises, sets, and rises again, allowing us to grow crops, get tan, and power homes, just to name a few of humanity’s most important life-sustaining functions. No wonder it was considered a deity by countless ancient civilizations.

Like many other things, however, our sun is prettier at a distance. Turns out the sun is a violent place where magnetic fields and fusion energy spew plumes of radiation into outer space and at Earth. Physicists call this phenomenon space weather, and seek to understand it by running increasingly complex simulations on increasingly powerful computing systems.

February 8, 2012
Tying the Sun together

Solar flares affect us on Earth in a variety of ways, ranging from disrupted telecommunications to the beauty of the aurora borealis. But what do they mean for the sun?

January 18, 2012
The Royal Society opens up permanently

The Royal Society has made 60,000 of its historical scientific papers free and permanently available online. 

January 11, 2012
Modeling the perfect fluid

Researchers rely on computing power to study the universe's most fundamental particles.

December 21, 2011
The Tevatron's enduring computing legacy

Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software.

Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come.