Word: earthly
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...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 to point out that the accelerator has no weapons applications...
Critics of the LHC say the high-energy experiment might create a mini black hole that could expand to dangerous, Earth-eating proportions. On Aug. 26, Otto Rossler, a German chemist at the Eberhard Karis University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights that argued, with no understatement, that such a scenario would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law. Last March, two American environmentalists filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Honolulu seeking to force the U.S. government to withdraw...
...Hawking's theories prove to be 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...
...opening act of Spore shows a comet crashing into Earth bearing organic material from outer space. This represents an actual hypothesis of how life on Earth began, called panspermia, which Wright considers to be fairly plausible. (He describes himself as "definitely an atheist. Well, agnostic atheist maybe.") But that's not why he put it in Spore. He put it in because it's more fun than other hypotheses. "We did a lot of prototypes around more of a biogenesis model," Wright says. "Autocatalytic sets, emergent chemistries. The programmer and I really enjoyed playing with those. Nobody else did. They...
...released the game's creature-design module as a free download. He thought he might see a million designs by the end of the year. Instead, he got a million in the first week. "Eighteen days after we released it, we'd exceeded the number of known species on Earth," he says. "I thought that was a nice metric." Wright also discovered that he'd inadvertently created a new art form: Spore-nography. People were using Spore to create creatures that looked like, well, genitals. "We anticipated that," Wright says. "But I was really surprised at how good the Sporn...