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12,745 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science
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- February 10, 2012 (18:53)
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- September 13, 2007 (14:53)
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WEDNESDAY 8. FEBRUARY, 2012
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21:59
Letter: The pleasures of tobacco
For every person who smoked and died young I can give you other names, especially in my own profession, who didn't: Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and a lot more (Letter, 1 February). Are there no doctors who would admit they haven't a clue why this is so? I for one am not sure medicine is a science – human beings are messy and all a little bit different, and I rejoice in that. I will be even more impertinent. I will continue to ask some questions of doctors. Looking around the Leonardo exhibition it occurs to me that they had better eyesight than we do. Flemish painting has also suggested this to me. Could very bright lights cause this? What will gazing at a computer screen all day do to us?
If Mr Chapman is concerned about children, this week's news that 3 million children in the US are on Ritalin, a drug prescribed for attention deficit disorder horrified me. I intend to stick with my far more natural, delicious, pleasure-giving tobacco.
David Hockney
Bridlington, East Yorkshireguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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20:10
The Red Bull Stratos team have announced that they are moving into the final preparation phase for Baumgartner's attempt to break the 52-year-old record for the longest freefall jump from the edge of space
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19:10
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18:40
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18:30
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17:30
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14:00
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13:22
The White House science fair launches with a bang on Tuesday as Barack Obama shoots marshmallows at the wall in the state dining room
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12:36
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12:00
The European Southern Observatory has released the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula ever created
The Carina Nebula, 7,500 light years from Earth, buzzes with activity. Countless stars are being born among the glowing clouds of dust and gas. Over several million years, this nebula – named after the keel of the mythical ship Argo – has created some of the most massive stars known to astronomers.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
At the lower left is the highly unstable star Eta Carinae, which astronomers believe will one day explode into a supernova – when it will briefly shine more brightly than the rest of our galaxy. The brighter star near the centre of the image is Trumpler 14. Dotted across the picture are many small dark patches: these are huge clouds of dust that shroud new stars that are only just beginning to shine.
The newly released image was constructed from a mosaic of hundreds of individual pictures from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is the most comprehensive image of the Carina Nebula ever produced using infrared wavelengths of light.
The VLT sits at an altitude of 2,500m, on top of Mount Paranal in the northern Atacama desert in Chile. The dry, dusty desert is almost devoid of life and a perfect place to watch the skies: at night, the bone dry air means the VLT can track and measure stars, black holes and planets with exquisite precision using its four individual observatories. At the heart of each observatory is an 8m-wide mirror made from a single piece of polished glass, the exact shape of which changes 100 times per second to counteract, in real time, the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere on the starlight it is trying to detect.
The VLT infrared survey of the Carina Nebula, led by Thomas Preibisch of University Observatory Munich, has revealed many previously unseen features that will occupy scientists for years to come. The yellow stars on the left of the image, for example, cannot be seen in visible light, as is the case with hundreds of thousands of fainter stars scattered across the nebula. The full results are described in a research paper published on Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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09:00
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08:00
Freezing seas, flooding lakes and a dramatic photo of London from space were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month
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TUESDAY 7. FEBRUARY, 2012
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21:30
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20:04
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19:30
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18:30
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18:27
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17:58
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17:56
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17:30
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16:51
The Higgs search results you heard in December have now been submitted to journals. What happened in the meantime?
Well, a lot of cross-checking, a lot of work, but not a great deal of change in the results.
The CERN council seminar on December the 13th last year caused a lot of interest, in that a range of possible masses for the Higgs boson were excluded, and there were intriguing hints that it might even be there in the remaining mass range.
The fact that there were talks and a press conference led to some criticism because the results had not been submitted for publication. In fact this was unfair, since detailed technical descriptions of the analyses were made public at the time. These were labelled "preliminary". This is a way indicating that some loose ends need to be tied up before submitting the final results for peer review. But information is there for interested scientists to see, and no one expects major changes.
Today's paper submission shows that these loose ends have now been tied up, and cross-checks have been done. Frankly none of them are interesting enough to describe in detail here. Which is a relief, really. The ATLAS result has not significantly changed; you can read about, and find links to the papers, here. The CMS collaboration have also submitted their papers.
I will have annoyed the SEO by not putting "Higgs" (or "god particle" argh argh) in the headline, but actually I deliberately did not, because I don't think this is big news. I don't want another round Higgs frenzy (yet). But I thought it was worth recording and explaining a bit more about how the process works, for anyone who is interested.
The next thing? The papers will be peer reviewed (by non-ATLAS members, this time) and, we hope, published in journals.
But much more importantly, in a few weeks the LHC will turn on again, and then we start collecting more data, and squeezing those probabilities.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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16:00
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15:55
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13:05
By PD Smith
Einstein once said that the "eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility". Deutsch, a physicist, has written an immensely impressive study into what Einstein described as this "miracle" of how we understand the universe. For Deutsch it all comes down to one thing: "the quest for good explanations". Scientific theories are the result not of sense data (empiricism) but are, he says, "guesses – bold conjectures". Deutsch argues compellingly that it is the ceaseless criticism and improvement of our explanations of reality that explains the progress that has been achieved since the Enlightenment, not just in science but in society too. For him, this revolution in thinking marked "the beginning of infinity", the point at which we embraced an optimistic and dynamic view of ourselves and what we can achieve. His optimism and faith in rationality appear to be limitless, but this book is truly mind-expanding in a way that few others are: it goes to the heart of how we grasp the true wonder of the universe.
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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09:00
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