350 Years of Science

The Royal Society has a timeline celebrating 350 years of publications. A 1770 paper reported on the study of 8-year-old prodigy Wolfgang Mozart years earlier. Uta Frith writes, "Barrington was convinced and wrote that the young boy's musical gifts were 'amazing and incredible almost as it may appear'". Read the letter here.

(image credit: Mozart at age 14, by Saverio dalla Rosa, 1770, C wikimedia commons)

Recordings of the Decade

NPR lists their 50 most important recordings of the decade.

"Wake Up" (with David Bowie) from Arcade Fire's 2004 Funeral.

Water Flea Visible

Olympus announces the Bioscapes best microscope image winners. First place was Dr. Jan Michaels's portrait of the water flea using confocal laser scanning microscopy.

(image credit: Dr. Jan Michaels, Christian Albrecht University of Kiel, via olympusbioscapes.com)

First Collisions in CERN LHC

The Large Hadron Collider is particle smashing

They have not made observations . . . yet. But they will soon.

Super Collider POWER ON

The Large Hadron Collider is back on and powering up. If all goes according to plan, bringing the beam up to the power it needs to be at will set a world record for beam energy, surpassing by.2 trillion the record set by the Tevatron in Illinois at 1 trillion electron volts.

As Steve Cern, director of accelerators has said, "We've learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That's how progress is made."

No comment yet from Doc.

B-Rex

On 60 Minutes.


Watch CBS News Videos Online

7.3 Billion-Year Race

Two types of gamma-ray photons emitted after a star crash long before the Earth was formed have reached the Fermi Space Telescope. After traveling 7.3 billion light years, the photons met at the detector within nine tenths of a second, affirming (with caveats) the constancy of light and rejecting some alternative theories of gravity. Physicist Peter Michelson is quoted in Science Daily, "To one part in 100 million billion, these two photons traveled at the same speed. Einstein still rules."

(image credit: illustration of two photons of different energies, NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet, via www.sciencedaily.com)

Beard-seconds

The University of Utah has a cool model scaling from a coffee bean to a carbon atom (h/t Andrew Sullivan). They also have an interactive cell model and some other great stuff. To give an idea of the size of a nanometer, it's roughly the amount a man's beard grows as he lifts a razor to shave it.

In fact, there is an actual unit of measurement called a "beard-second". It's the physics tiny measurement partner of the light year. Wikipedia defines it as "the length an average physicist's beard grows in a second", equivalent to either 5 or 10 nanometers. I assume the namer intended some humor and, as far as physics jokes go, it's a damn good one. You can convert measurements to beard-seconds using the Google search bar. The influenza virus (see image) is roughly 25 beard-seconds.

(image credit: 3dscience.com)