Word: cosmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite these exciting prospects, however, physicists studying the cosmos at CERN and other accelerators still face a fundamental dilemma: to explain the awesome scale of their work while calming the public's inevitable trepidation. There remains a credibility gap surrounding high-profile physics, after all: the most tangible results of atomic research in the past 50 years have been bombs capable of ending all life on earth. CERN officials refer to the laboratory as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics because they feel "nuclear" in the literal translation carries negative implications, and tour guides at the LHC are quick...
...wrong - no one has yet witnessed black-hole evaporation - scientists at CERN say the LHC's collisions are already known to be harmless: an equivalent amount of energy is produced hundreds of thousands of times a day by cosmic rays colliding with the earth and other objects in the cosmos - always without incident...
Think it's hard counting the census here on Earth? Try it when you're keeping track of the population of the sky. There are more than 70 sextillion - or 70 thousand million million million - stars in the cosmos, and that doesn't include uncountable moons and asteroids and comets and more. With all that, you wouldn't think you could generate much buzz by announcing that astronomers had spotted a few dozen more bodies whirling about out there. But a buzz is just what was created yesterday at a meeting in Nantes, France, when Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor...
...beep that could be a passing satellite. Everything seems to exist in its own silo until a rising whoosh comes along and the instruments merge into a huge harmonious collision. The track is called Life in Technicolor, and what differentiates it from previous Coldplay attempts to lasso the cosmos (Speed of Sound, Clocks) is the details--or rather, the fact that there are details. Whereas before, the band would pound listeners into submission with giant chords and a lyric about space, here they let the songs' various parts resolve themselves, and there are no lyrics at all, just a single...
There's no such thing as breaking news when it comes to us from space. It's not enough for an event to occur; word of it must then travel to Earth across the vast ocean of the cosmos. The dispatch may move at the speed of light, but the journey can still take hours, years, epochs--turning current events into history long before we ever learn of them. Signals from the Cassini spacecraft, currently studying Saturn's moons, take 84 min. to reach us; the supernova whose cataclysmic birth astronomers observed earlier this year was already fading millions...