2014 Nobel Prize – Physics … I’ve seen the light

It’s Nobel Prize time again and today we find out who wins the Prize for Physics. This one usually excites because it is often somebody well-known, or for something well deserved, and this year is indeed a great choice – they really do get this one right year after year. Awarded annually since 1901 (except in 1940, … Read more

2013 Nobel Prize – Physics

  For myself, today is perhaps a highlight day for this year’s Nobel Prize – it is time for the Physics prize, and that perhaps betrays a slight bias on my part, because the other categories are just as appropriate (apart from “peace”, but I’ll save that rant until later in the week). So why … Read more

2012 Nobel Prize: Physics

Yea, its physics day for Nobel Prizes. Humm, do I portray a slight bias there, one that advocates that the only real science is Physics and that the rest is simply stamp collecting? Hat tip to Ernest Rutherford for that observation, and also a tad ironic because he won the Nobel prize in 1908 for Chemistry, … Read more

The Diamond Planet

Now this is cool … University of Manchester astronomers think they’ve found a once-massive star that’s been transformed into a small planet made of diamond.

The researchers first detected a pulsar using the Parkes radio telescope of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

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Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine

Ron Cowen reports in ScienceNews that there are Possible evidence for WIMPs reported, supporting claims of Italy-based experiment

An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.

WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe.  In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.

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