Discover Magazine

Roku and Hex from OHSU News on Vimeo. Researchers have announced the birth ...

In the 2011 edition of our annual Top 100 Stories of the Year issue, ...

Philcoxia couldn’t look more unassuming. It’s a small herb that lives in ...

Einstein, relativity, and much of 20th-century physics have come under assault from an esoteric but far-reaching experiment. A collaboration of 174 physicists fired bursts of neutrinos from the headquarters of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy. They tracked 16,111 of the ghostlike particles and measured how long they took to complete the trip. After three years of experiments and intense analysis, the team reported in September that the neutrinos were arriving one 17-millionth of a second early.

The minuscule discrepancy revealed by the experiment, dubbed OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), has staggering implications. It seems to indicate that the neutrinos were traveling faster than light, violating what has long been regarded as an ironclad cosmic law. If neutrinos really can do that, then Einstein’s theory of relativity, the backbone of modern physics, could break down. Time could flow in reverse. Neutrino-based messages could reach recipients before they were sent. An effect could precede its cause, which would explode our entire way of thinking about the universe...

The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.


Black holes have a reputation for destruction but it was only in 2011 that scientists caught one in the act, watching it 
devour an errant star. In March NASA’s Swift satellite detected a gamma-ray burst, an eruption of high-energy radiation that usually indicates a stellar explosion. But whereas most bursts last only seconds, this one kept on going. Josh Bloom, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, traced the burst to the center of a galaxy that hosts a black hole millions of times as massive as the sun, and concluded that the hole had just eaten a star-size meal (illustrated below). “It’s a pretty fantastic way for a star to die,” he says...

An octopus-shaped molecule is giving Schrödinger’s cat competition as the mascot of the bizarre world of quantum physics, where matter can simultaneously exist in different states. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment posited that a cat behaving according to quantum principles could be dead and alive at the same time. We are spared such paradoxes because the rules of quantum physics seem confined to subatomic objects— in the human-scale world, a cat is either alive or dead...

In an atom smasher on long island, gold nuclei smash headlong into each other at nearly the speed of light, unleashing a fountain of matter and antimatter, which possess identical mass but reverse properties. Within that maelstrom, physicists have now found 18 particles of anti-helium-4: the antimatter twin of helium, and the heaviest piece of antimatter ever made...

Party hats out, everyone! Stephen Hawking turned 70 years old yesterday, ...

Some of the great mysteries of science hide in plain sight—and, in this case, roll on two wheels. As hands-free cyclists know, a bicycle in motion can recover from wobbles with no steering input, or even with no rider at all. But physicists have never agreed on how this self-balancing act works. Some argue the rotating wheels act like a gyroscope to help the bicycle correct itself; others believe the “trail” (the angle between a bike’s steering axis and its point of contact with the ground) forces the bike into a stabilizing turn. Now American and Dutch engineers have built a bicycle that defies both theories...

Particle physicists entered 2011 with high hopes. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile tunnel straddling the border of France and Switzerland, was smashing protons together at unprecedented energies. By June the LHC had exceeded its full-year target of 70 million million collisions. But by the end of the year, many physicists were starting to sweat. The LHC delivered a flood of data, but none of it seemed to yield the discoveries everyone was hoping for. There were no signs of dark matter, no hints of extra dimensions, and not a whisper from the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that is an essential component of the leading model of quantum physics...

As a star forms, it attracts a swirling disk of gas and dust. Most of that material collapses into the star. Some remains in orbit, where it clumps to form planets. And some shoots like a jet from the disk’s center at velocities up to 30 times the speed of sound, triggering supersonic shock waves. Last year, Patrick Hartigan of Rice University selected images from 14 years of Hubble Space Telescope observations to produce a flip-book animation of the rippling wakes and collisions in those shock waves...

The Tevatron, a particle accelerator based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, shut down on September 30. The machine was 28. The cause of death was the bigger, more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland...

Slow boarding annoyed Jason Steffen. but rather than complain about it, like most of us would, the Fermilab astrophysicist took to his computer and began writing algorithms to model potential solutions. In 2008 he announced a method that he claimed would cut boarding times in half, but it wasn’t until last year that he finally had the opportunity to test his technique in a realistic setting...

Please see Luke Jostins’ posts at Genetic Inference and Genomes ...

Faster-than-light neutrinos may eventually sully Einstein’s legacy (see story #1), but in the meantime another experiment has confirmed two predictions of his general theory of relativity. The $700 million Gravity Probe B satellite, launched in 2004, contained four nearly perfectly spherical gyroscopes isolated from all outside influences—magnetic fields, friction, gravity—leaving them exposed only to relativistic effects. Einstein’s theory predicted that the orientation of the gyroscopes should slowly drift due to two phenomena: the geodetic effect, or Earth’s warping of space-time due to its mass, and frame-dragging, the tug on space-time that occurs as Earth rotates on its axis...

While private space companies were making their move (see below), NASA began testing the J-2X rocket engine, one of the powerhouses behind the agency’s Space Launch System that could drive the next stage of manned space exploration...

It took nature 13 billion years to create our galaxy, the Milky Way. Last August a group of scientists reported that they had replicated the feat in just nine months. To be fair, they created only a digital simulation, nicknamed Eris, but it is the first one to accurately reproduce the details of a galaxy like our own...

The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands are large, conspicuous and ...