Because after all, the world will go on:

The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite. Physicists around the world now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

"Well done everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

[. . .]

The start of the collider - described as the biggest physics experiment in history - comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collision of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.

I cannot wait to see what it is that we will learn from all of this. And I'm glad that our search for knowledge has not and will not imperil our very existence and thus render searches for knowledge moot.

Awesome:

Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos.

Researchers at the government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology said they created stem cells of the type found in human embryos using the removed wisdom teeth of a 10-year-old girl.

"This is significant in two ways," team leader Hajime Ogushi told AFP. "One is that we can avoid the ethical issues of stem cells because wisdom teeth are destined to be thrown away anyway.

"Also, we used teeth that had been extracted three years ago and had been preserved in a freezer. That means that it's easy for us to stock this source of stem cells."

The announcement follows the groundbreaking discovery by US and Japanese scientists last year that they could produce stem cells from skin, a finding that was hailed by the Vatican and US President George W. Bush.

[. . .]

 As with last year's skin cell discovery, the Japanese researchers said it would take time to put the use of wisdom teeth into practical use.

Ogushi estimated it would take at least five years to put the method into clinical use such as trial treatments of congenital bone disease.

"Because extractions of wisdom teeth are commonly operated in dental clinics, we can expect a lot of donors of stem cells," he said.

I still have my wisdom teeth. This constitutes an incentive to get them taken out and keep them as potential lifesavers. Between this and massive amounts of coffee consumption each day, immortality will be mine.

A fascinating article of the drive to describe--and claim credit for the discovery of--the process of evolution. A brief taste:

In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island's elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. 'Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,' he later recalled.

Thoughts of money or women might have filled lesser heads. Alfred Russel Wallace was made of different stuff, however. He began thinking about disease and famine; about how they kept human populations in check; and about recent discoveries indicating that the earth's age was vast. How might these waves of death, repeated over aeons, influence the make-up of different species, he wondered?

Then the fever subsided - and inspiration struck. Fittest variations will survive longest and will eventually evolve into new species, he realised. Thus the theory of natural selection appeared, fever-like, in the mind of one of our greatest naturalists. Wallace wrote up his ideas and sent them to Charles Darwin, already a naturalist of some reputation. His paper arrived on 18 June, 1858 - 150 years ago last week - at Darwin's estate in Downe, in Kent.

Darwin, in his own words, was 'smashed'. For two decades he had been working on the same idea and now someone else might get the credit for what was later to be described, by palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, as 'the greatest ideological revolution in the history of science' or in the words of Richard Dawkins, 'the most important idea to occur to a human mind.' In anguish Darwin wrote to his friends, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell. What followed has become the stuff of scientific legend.

In order to preserve Darwin's claim on natural selection Hooker and Lyell arranged for a joint reading of both men's works at the Linnean Society in Burlington House, Piccadilly. On 1 July in a room that is now part of the Royal Academy, society members were summoned to hear the news of a theory that has gone on to cause more offence and trouble to our species than any other in our history. Exactly 150 years ago next week, a notion, more radical even than Marx's, was set loose on the world - though it certainly did not seem that way at the time.

The story is engrossing. Read it all.

Never let it be said that life has lost its capacity to surprise:

"Ten years ago I could never have imagined I'd be doing this," says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. "I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to - especially the ones coming out of business school - this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into."

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs - very, very small ones - so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls "renewable petroleum". After that, he grins, "it's a brave new world".

Apparently, this "Oil 2.0" will be both renewable and carbon negative. The challenge is being able to mass produce all of this stuff and that may take a few years.

So the universe has a problem. Said problem is described as follows:

The universe does not look right. That may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. How do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as "natural"--and the universe we see does not qualify.

Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. Some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. This picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand.

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe--hot, dense, homogeneous--is completely different from today's--cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

What follows is an excellent discussion on the issue of entropy. If we suppose that the universe began in a state of high entropy--which would equate to nearly empty space--the question becomes how we got to our current low entropy state. The following may serve as an explanation:

In the presence of dark energy, empty space is not completely empty. Fluctuations of quantum fields give rise to a very low temperature--enormously lower than the temperature of today's universe but nonetheless not quite absolute zero. All quantum fields experience occasional thermal fluctuations in such a universe. That means it is not perfectly quiescent; if we wait long enough, individual particles and even substantial collections of particles will fluctuate into existence, only to once again disperse into the vacuum. (These are real particles, as opposed to the short-lived "virtual" particles that empty space contains even in the absence of dark energy.)

Among the things that can fluctuate into existence are small patches of ultradense dark energy. If conditions are just right, that patch can undergo inflation and pinch off to form a separate universe all its own--a baby universe. Our universe may be the offspring of some other universe.

Superficially, this scenario bears some resemblance to the standard account of inflation. There, too, we posit that a patch of ultradense dark energy arises by chance, igniting inflation. The difference is the nature of the starting conditions. In the standard account, the patch arose in a wildly fluctuating universe, in which the vast bulk of fluctuations produced nothing resembling inflation. It would seem to be much more likely for the universe to fluctuate straight into a hot big bang, bypassing the inflationary stage altogether. Indeed, as far as entropy is concerned, it would be even more likely for the universe to fluctuate straight into the configuration we see today, bypassing the past 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.

In our new scenario, the preexisting universe was never randomly fluctuating; it was in a very specific state: empty space. What this theory claims--and what remains to be proved--is that the most likely way to create universes like ours from such a preexisting state is to go through a period of inflation, rather than fluctuating there directly. Our universe, in other words, is a fluctuation but not a random one.

You want details on this postulation?

Very well. I give you details:

This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.

Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time--both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.

The idea of a universe with a backward arrow of time might seem alarming. If we met someone from such a universe, would they remember the future? Happily, there is no danger of such a rendezvous. In the scenario we are describing, the only places where time seems to run backward are enormously far back in our past--long before our big bang. In between is a broad expanse of universe in which time does not seem to run at all; almost no matter exists, and entropy does not evolve. Any beings who lived in one of these time-reversed regions would not be born old and die young--or anything else out of the ordinary. To them, time would flow in a completely conventional fashion. It is only when comparing their universe to ours that anything seems out of the ordinary--our past is their future, and vice versa. But such a comparison is purely hypothetical, as we cannot get there and they cannot come here.

As of right now, the jury is out on our model. Cosmologists have contemplated the idea of baby universes for many years, but we do not understand the birthing process. If quantum fluctuations could create new universes, they could also create many other things--for example, an entire galaxy. For a scenario like ours to explain the universe we see, it has to predict that most galaxies arise in the aftermath of big bang-like events and not as lonely fluctuations in an otherwise empty universe. If not, our universe would seem highly unnatural.

But the take-home lesson is not any particular scenario for the structure of spacetime on ultralarge scales. It is the idea that a striking feature of our observable cosmos--the arrow of time, arising from very low entropy conditions in the early universe--can provide us with clues about the nature of the unobservable universe.

And with that, we can consider ourselves officially blown away.

The question is posed here. I vote for "discovered"; certainly, no one has invented particular mathematical laws and theorems just as no one has invented laws of physics, economics, or biology. These are phenomena that are independent of the human mind and require human cogitation to be revealed and explained to human beings. Fermat didn't invent his famous Last Theorem. He discovered it, couldn't write down the proof and left it for future generations to discover it. Mathematicians ought to be applauded for having done the necessary detective work to figure out the theorem. No one made stuff up to either pose the question the theorem answered or to spell out the answer itself.

If you have ever been intrigued by the so-called "Monty Hall Problem" (or are just way too fond of old game shows), the New York Times has a treat for you this morning.  A John Tierney column on probabilities and cognitive dissonance research includes an interactive version of the problem, a further discussion on Tierney's blog, and best of all, a reprint of a 1991 article in which Monty Hall himself explained to Tierney why, despite the probabilities involved, it might not have been the best strategy for a "Let's Make a Deal" contestant to switch from Door #1 to Door #3.

And people wonder why I read the Times online only. 

I really want this.

Robots have learned to lie. And no, I am not making that up.

Behold. The mind--whatever its state--reels. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Behold.

The Bible meets nanotechnology.

I've said it before and will say it again: It is wonderful to be alive and to see such dramatic technological advances. Just imagine what tomorrow might bring.

It's entirely possible, according to this story. If we do indeed run out, things would be . . . well . . . read on:

The group bases its idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, a so called theory of everything, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk".

In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether - and everything will stop.

"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."

To say that all of this is quite weird would be to seriously underst

Because it has made the teaching of physics popular throughout the world.

Behold:

A jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting another galaxy nearby -- an act of galactic violence that astronomers said yesterday they have never seen before.

Using images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other sources, scientists said the extremely intense jet from the larger galaxy can be seen shooting across 20,000 light-years of space and plowing into the outer gas and dust of the smaller one.

The smaller galaxy is being transformed by the radiation and the jet is being bent before shooting millions of light-years farther in a new direction.

"What we've identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire," said Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He said any planets orbiting the stars of the smaller galaxy would be dramatically affected, and any life forms would likely die as the jet's radiation transformed the planets' atmosphere.

Behold. (Via Slashdot.)

Think again:

Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday.

In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.

The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers said.

Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases that became mass killers following the growth of human civilizations, the researchers said.

For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.

The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population -- from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years -- with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt, added Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropologist.

"The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast -- faster than any of us thought," Harpending said in a telephone interview.

"Most of the acceleration is in the last 10,000 years, basically corresponding to population growth after agriculture is invented," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

The research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lots of this sounds prosaic--especially the business about the earwax. But it actually is quite fascinating.

I love the holidays. It brings out the wonderful quirks in all of us.

The technology described here will be really, really, really useful for me since I find myself in bookstores quite often.

I am sure there will be a lot of "I told you so" comments and perhaps not a little bit of schadenfreude concerning this news. Personally, I am just glad that we have a tremendous scientific advance that involves no moral qualms whatsoever.

And really, that's the most important issue.