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05 Jun 2011 21:51

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Tech: Antimatter stops by CERN long enough for a good converstation

  • 17 minutes trapped in one place; antimatter was just hangin’ source
  • » This is what we call progress: Back in November, it was kind of a big thing when scientists managed to trap antimatter at all — even for .17 seconds! Now we’ve gotten past viral video length and we’re almost at the length of an episode of “The Office.” The lifespan of the antimatter is a big deal because usually when antimatter is made, it disappears instantly. But the process that CERN (known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research) uses basically holds the antimatter in place using really strong magnets. The longer lifetimes offer scientists the opportunity to study it in greater detail, which is kind of neat, and to possibly figure out longer-term uses for this pretty cool technology. This research totally matters, guys.

30 Mar 2010 10:33

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Tech: Pretend you’re a scientist: Study these particle physics terms

  • hadron A particle that has mass,
    bound together from smaller parts called quarks. Protons and electrons are types of hadron
    (which we didn’t misspell).
  • collider A device that takes two beams headed in opposite directions and makes them run into each other, in an attempt to make two sets of particles combine.
  • higgs boson The thing which is suspected to give matter its mass if Peter Higgs‘ theory pans out. The Large Hadron Collider is trying to figure out whether it’s real or not.
  • dark matter This weird, cool stuff that
    scientists think makes up a quarter of the universe, and kinda shapes the trajectory of the universe a little. Like we said, weird and cool. source

30 Nov 2009 09:14

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Tech: That super-duper particle collider’s making particle beams faster than ever

  • 1.18 trillion electric volts of big-banging action source