The Large Hadron Collider does it's thing

Yesterday saw the greatest moment in science since Einstein came up with general relativity... did you notice? I guess not, so here's the lowdown:

The worlds largest particle collider the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has it's first full power collision yesterday, and it was successful. They've been accelerating some light beams around the gigantic machine for the last few months, reaching 99.99% the speed of light... hard to grasp that sort of figure, isn't it? An article over at the Sydney Morning Herald equates the energy of this light beam with a train traveling at 144km/h .... Let me say that again... a beam of light that will hit you as hard as a train.

With the experiments run off this collision, Scientists are exploring what the universe was like at the moment of the big bang, hopefully providing us with a better understanding of how our reality works and finding the elusive God Particle that is supposed to give mass to everything.

So... no black holes, no giant crater in Europe.... it all turned out well, despite the court cases and miscellaneous doom mongering.

On another topic, I challenge all of you to click through to the link in the news section called Fixing Reality with Online Games. This is a truly exceptional program... and one I hope we can all get behind. Do it! It's good karma.

In the News:

First Anti-Cancer Nano-particle Trial on Humans a Success - tiny machines designed to hunt down and kill cancer cells... how cool is THAT?

Fixing Reality with Online Games - What can I say? This could very well save us all from ourselves... READ IT!!!!!!!!

Hubble Builds 3D Dark Matter Map - Our first detailed schematic of the universe?

A Samsung Robot In Every Home By 2020? - How South Korea is getting it right... a lesson for all of us in SA perhaps?

Zero carbon, zero waste city being built in Abu Dhabi - an ambitious project that I'm fully in support of. Great thinking.

Australia reveals prototype 'bionic' eye - History is going to look back at this century as the century of the cyborg... very cool.

Study shows chocolate reduces blood pressure and risk of heart disease - I can already hear you saying, "see, I TOLD you it was good for you".

...And there we have it, another week, another post. Hope you enjoyed it.

-Odd

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality" - Albert Einstein