Do you think it was like this in 1929?

Great article from the Guardian about the hideous excess of art fairs:

"We don't yet know how Frieze 2008 and its parties and dinners and rococo excess will one day be viewed, but at the art coalface - pressed hard up against a nicely chilled glass of champagne - it felt like the beginning of the end."

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/19/friezeartfair-art

Ghostly Glow Reveals Galaxy Clusters in Collision

A team of scientists have detected long wavelength radio emissions from a colliding, massive galaxy cluster. 

The discovery implies that existing radio telescopes have missed a large population of these colliding objects. 

The discovery implies that existing radio telescopes have missed a large population of these colliding objects.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081015144157.htm

Virgin Birth by Shark Confirmed

Scientists have confirmed the second-ever case of a “virgin birth” in a shark, indicating once again that female sharks can reproduce without mating and raising the possibility that many female sharks have this incredible capacity.
Shark scientist, Dr. Demian Chapman, and his collaborators, have proven through DNA testing that the offspring of a female blacktip shark named “Tidbit” contained no genetic material from a father.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081010173054.htm

Dark Designs

Dark Designs will explore the notion of art, technology and conspiracies in a series of events taking place in venues across Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland.

Organised by Maison d’Ailleurs, the museum of Science Fiction, Utopia and Extraordinary Journeys, and the University of Art and Design in Geneva (HEAD), Dark Designs includes a symposium featuring acclaimed science fiction writer, Norman Spinrad, director of transmediale, Stephen Kovats, philosophers Pierre Lagrange and Daniel Pinkas, scientists Herbert Keppner and Jérôme Charmet, and many others. Dark Designs also includes an exhibition of digital art by students, located in Yverdon-les-Bains’ historic 13th century Savoyard castle, and an evening of extraordinary performances by artists Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand and Gaspard Buma, hosted by the picturesque theatre, L’Echandole, situated in the caves of the castle.

Source: http://www.dark-designs.net

The party is over for Iceland

Iceland is on brink of collapse as inflation and interest rates soar, while the krona is in freefall. Almost overnight, its population became the wealthiest on Earth. Tracy McVeigh of the Guardian finds that the credit crunch is making the cash disappear

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/05/iceland.creditcrunch

Phonon effects on magnetosensors

This article gives a good overview of the role of phonons in magnetosensor research.

"The notion is that if you have higher temperature applications, most materials' response to magnetic fields [the magnetoresistive response] falls off very rapidly because of excitations of the lattice--phonon vibrations," explained University of Chicago professor Thomas Rosenbaum. "But it turns out the mechanism we are adapting to [indium antimonide] is not limited by the phonons."

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210601942

Hadron Collider forced to halt

Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work.

The failure, known as a quench, caused some of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva. The LHC beam will remain turned off over the weekend while engineers investigate the severity of the fault.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7626256.stm

Courts weigh up claims that LHC will destroy the world

Critics who say the world's largest atom-smasher could destroy the world have brought their claims to courtrooms in Europe and the United States - and although the claims are getting further consideration, neither court will hold up next week's official startup of the Large Hadron Collider.

The main event took place today in Honolulu, where a federal judge is mulling over the federal government's request to throw out a civil lawsuit filed by retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho. Meanwhile, legal action is pending as well at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Last week, the court agreed to review doomsday claims from a group of professors and students, primarily from Germany and Austria. However, the court rejected a call for the immediate halt of operations at the LHC.

Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/09/02/1326534.aspx

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

Stunning gallery of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France. It is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. 

Source: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

Are we living in a giant cosmic void?

The paper "Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle with Distant Supernovae" by Timothy Clifton, Pedro G. Ferreira, Kate Land, argues that if we are living in a giant void - that is, if our cosmic neighbourhood is significantly less dense than other parts of the universe, then that could account for the fact that the universe's expansion appears to be accelerating.
As the New Scienist notes, "In fact, if the void were big enough - roughly the size of our observable universe - it might account for the supernovae observations that imply acceleration, and do away with the need for dark energy."

Source: http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0807.1443