In less than two days - 1 day, 18 hours, and 50 minutes as of this writing - the Large Hadron Collider will be activated. Any of you worried? There's nothing to fear but fear itself. And the Large Hadron Collider. But why are we afraid of it, really? What can it actually do besides making a black hole to swallow up the world? Follow the wormhole into the full article.

Worried that the world will be ending soon? Then you might want to know that NCsoft, the publisher and developer of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, is offering players a shot at immortality. Well, as close to immortality as you can get if the entire earth gets razed by another Tunguska event, a nuclear war, or even aliens. To find out more, check out the full article.

We usually name things after their defining characteristics, such as color. There are exceptions, though. One such exception may be the so-called black hole, which Stephen Hawking theorized as not really being black at all. In fact, professors Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Germain Rousseaux used water to test Hawking's theory. Find out the specifics in the full article after the jump.

Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking recently authored a children's book about the cosmos. During an interview session with several reporters in Cambridge University, Hawking said he has plans to make real science as exciting as science fiction to increase awareness especially among the youth.

The said book is titled "George's Secret Key to the Universe" and will be released in French language this Thursday and in English a week from now. This book is actually part of a trilogy and will mostly revolve around the workings of the solar system, asteroids, and black holes among others.

The book was co-written with Hawking's daughter Lucy and Christophe Galfard - the first Frenchman to write a doctorate thesis on Hawking's observation. According to Hawking, the only fictional thing that readers can found in this book is a supercomputer named Cosmos that opens a door allowing travel into space aboard an asteroid.

The second entry in the trilogy is expected to come out some time next year.

According to The New York Times, the first person in the world to have his full DNA profiled in text inside a small disk is none other that James D. Watson. Watson aided researchers in the cracking of DNA code five years ago, and scientists believe that this signals a start of a new trend for advancing health care.

 

In fact, scientists claim that once genomes are made public and more is known about them, they can establish links between other genomes and determine the best course of action to take. A person's genes define what diseases he may be prone to, or how long of a life he can expect.

"Nobody quite knows how to manage expectations in such a rapidly changing and deeply personal field," said George M. Church, director of the Personal Genome Project. Data reflected in your own genetic profile isn't always a fixed constant; it changes everyday.

Church explains, "The picture is getting more and more complete, but along the way there’s going to be a lot of, ‘You told us this last week and now you’re telling us this!’"

But at a steep price of US$ 1 million per sequence, mapping out six billion letters of genetic code isn't as attractive as it sounds. There are people who also would rather keep deeply-rooted personal information to themselves than to freely make them known. Scientists believe that the idea would have to overcome the social hurdles first, before becoming a scientific effort.

Dr. Church's own research project has vowed to allow 10 volunteers to have 1% of their DNA profiled, at a much more affordable US$ 1,000. Other companies, such as 23andme, have also begun to offer DNA mapping and readouts. They also make use of tools to keep track of genetic information.

Meanwhile, companies such as Illumina, Applied Biosystems and 454 Life Sciences have claimed that the average price point for the complete human genome has already dropped to US$ 100,000. The same companies are currently participating in a contest to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days for a US$ 10 million grand prize.

Volunteers for the contest include Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, television interviewer Larry King and financier Michael Milken.

"Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" from the band Spiritualized should have been the perfect theme song for one of the world's leading theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Tabula Rasa's Richard Garriott as the two and a handful of others soared through a zero-gravity flight last Thursday.

The momentous event for Hawking (he's been in his wheel chair for four decades now because of ALS) took place inside the cabin of a modified 727 over the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The flight took a total of eight parabolas - the same flight technique astronauts experienced during weightless space environment preparations.

Speaking of which, Richard Garriott mentioned that they only planned for six parabolas but Hawking was grinning widely and seen as really having a great time. Garriott, who is the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, added, "six parabolas really was the intended cutoff point. But he was having so much fun, we went for two more, and then we thought we'd better quit while we're ahead."

Aside from the obvious reason that Hawking wanted to get out of his wheel chair, he explained that he joined the flight because he believes that the future of man lies outside of this endangered world. He commented,

I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically-engineered virus or other dangers, I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

Hawking was accompanied by several people during the flight including four physicians, two nurses, two coaches, and two dozen other friends. The famed physicist announced plans for another zero-gravity flight from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to celebrate his 65th birthday in January.

A month back, we ran an article that argues how unlikely it is for humans to ever travel back in time unless they want to find a black hole and plunge headlong into certain doom in a foolhardy effort to go through a wormhole that hopefully leads to some desolate corner of the universe in a time almost indeterminable.

Sounds real tough, doesn't it? Not really, says physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington. For starters, he says it's theoretically possible to conduct an experiment that may spawn a different approach using an old Einstein paradox. By splitting light particles called photons, he could test what forces bind the sub atomic pieces such that they remain "entangled" even when light years apart.

To put it into context, Cramer says the ideas of the most famous physicist of this generation, Stephen Hawking, regarding time are wrong. Hawking has long fathered the idea that time travels in a straight and linear path through the time-space continuum. The theory essentially suggests that time moves only forward and going against it to travel to the past is impossible. The theory also says that travel to the future is a possibility as long as a body travels in the speed of light or faster.

Cramer agrees about the part concerning future travel, but he says time can ping back both ways in the laws of quantum mechanics, a study that deals with the actions and motions of the smallest particles known to man. He says that by using the Einstein paradox as a model, we can see that split particles influence each other no matter how far apart. This, Cramer says, is only possible if a signal or energy pattern binding the particles transcends time by traveling forward and backwards.

Experiments could have been underway, but neither NASA's Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) nor the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) would cough up the US$ 20,000 that Cramer is asking for. The NIAC is on its way to closing down and the DARPA says the Cramer study is just too strange. Incidentally, DARPA is involved in developing liquid robots and cyborg beetles.

"We're about to hit the wall if we don't get funding," he said. "It would be a shame because even if this doesn't work, I'm sure we'd learn something from trying," says a dejected Cramer.  To find out more about the UW study, follow the read URL.

Physicists in Switzerland are inching closer and closer to bringing the most feared space monster to Earth, but don't worry, they'll be making harmless, microscopic versions of the fiend just so we can understand the universe better.

Using the Light Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists Henriette Elvang of MIT and Pau Figueras of the University of Barcelona are pulling out all the stops to test theories regarding space and time. The version of the black hole that they will be making will look a lot different from the ones in space, though. Elwang explains that the Earth-made hole will look more like a tiny black Saturn, meaning it will have one central black orb and a black ring, both of which will spin at high speeds to maintain the existence of the body if only for a few milliseconds.

"If you just had a ring, it would collapse. It's essential that it rotates to keep balanced," says Elwang.

Both the ring and the core are defined by their event horizons- virtual boundaries where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. What can be seen would be very similar to a flattened microscopic chocolate doughnut.

So why don't they make bigger ones so everyone can see?

That's because they can't. These tiny black holes can only exist in a plane with four dimensions- length, width, height and time. We humans exist in three dimesions, so in a manner of saying, we don't live in the same reality where these things exist. However, scientists have discovered that in very small spaces, the third and fourth dimensions can actually be reconciled. If they smash protons in very small quantities with about a thousand times the gravity of the same subatomic particle, a tiny black hole will be born.

Of course, all of this is theoretical, but if all goes well, detectors in the LHC will light up to herald the vindication of theories by Stephen Hawking and those who followed him.

There's still a lot of doubt as to whether or not the black hole can stabilize before it dissipates, but the scientists in Geneva say that in a few years, it is very likely that they'll create a much smaller black hole to actually bridge the gap between the third and fourth dimensions.

Nerdcore hip hop and geeksta rap. Hip hop music about nerdy topics (like soon-to-go-to-space Stephen Hawking and relativity) and geeky topics (like Star Wars, computers, the Internet, and video games). While we enjoy the lyrics of MC Hawking (with songs like "The Big Bizang")...

I explode like a bomb. No one is spared. My power is mass times the speed of light squared. (from "E = MC Hawking")

You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break? You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake. But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true, if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new? (from "Entropy")

...the geeks of QJ have to bow before MC Frontalot who coined the word "nerdcore" and whose "Penny Arcade Theme" warms the heart:

nerd-ho! warm the mic up (yo) we 'bout to strike up
this band of nebbishes who cultivate nebulous fetishes
the FPS, RPG or MMPOG, any obsession to blather over by blog
or BBS. Step and possess, hone thy geekishness
your frame rate and frags to date both impress

Pure genius. "Nerdcore Rising: The Movie" is a documentary of nerdcore. It features MC Frontalot's first major US tour as well as interviews (including Weird Al Yankovic, who was instrumental in the creation of the nerdcore scene).

Finally, let's thank the geeks and nerds. We wouldn't have computers, consoles, and video games if it weren't for them.

Quadriplegic physicist and author of "A Brief History in Time" Stephen Hawking is determined to embark on a travel to space. He's tired of theorizing and wants to experience the real thing. He's been hinting about his dreams of space travel and now he's close to achieving his dream. But how can he do that? He's paralyzed and can only communicate through a blink-controlled computer.

Well, Prof. Hawkings has coordinated with Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic's going to be able to take passengers into suborbital flight by 2009.

The plan is to have Prof. Hawkings take a zero-gravity flight courtesy of Zero Gravity Corp. He would be able to experience 30-second weightlessness during the flight and that would serve as a preparation for space travel.

Zero Gravity has clarified the procedures for flying disabled people with the FAA. Prof. Hawking's flight may not even have been scheduled yet, but he's already taken the proverbial giant leap ahead for all of us by proving that even a wheelchair doesn't have to be a barrier to space.