Astronomers measure the precise distance to over a quarter of a million galaxies to gain new insights into the influence of dark energy on the Universe.

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Survey gets a grip on dark energy

For the Huichol Indians, the desert mountains here are sacred, a cosmic portal with major mojo, where shamans collect the peyote that fuels the waking dreams that hold the universe together. For a Canadian mining company, these same hills look like a billion dollars worth of buried silver. Read full article > >

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Huichol ‘cosmic portal’ peyote cermonies threatened by silver mine

The Planck space telescope, which has been mapping the Universe’s oldest light, starts to warm past its instrument operating temperature.

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Coolest space mission nears end

Astronomers have found the largest known galaxy cluster in the ancient Universe, calling it “El Gordo” – Spanish for “the Fat One”.

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Galaxy cluster is named ‘fat one’

The most famous man in the literary world, if you are under three feet tall, has a trim beard and a lean physique and is currently sending the kindergartners of Raymond Elementary School into fits of apoplectic hysteria because he has just uttered the funniest phrase in the history of the universe, which is “bird poop.” Read full article > >

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Mo Willems is the go-to author for children — and their parents

Two teams of scientists say they have recorded only hints of the subatomic particle Higgs boson, whose existence is a key to explaining why there is mass in the universe.

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‘Tantalizing Hints’ But No Direct Proof in Search for Higgs Boson

If rumors were dollars, the arcane world of particle physics would have enough cash to solve the Euro crisis. For weeks, statements circulating on physics blogs have hinted at the discovery of an elusive particle essential to our understanding of how the universe works. Called the Higgs boson, this particle — if spotted — would all but complete the fundamental theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model. Confirmation of the Higgs would solve the mystery of why matter has the property that physicists call mass — the resistance to being shoved around. Read full article > >

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Scientists close in on linchpin of physics, the ‘God particle’

The Higgs particle is also known as the Higgs boson, or “ the God particle ,” a term that Leon Lederman used some years ago and which delighted journalists but surely offended photons and electrons throughout the universe. The Higgs is named after Peter Higgs, a theorist who four decades ago predicted its existence as part of the Standard Model of particle physics. No one’s ever found one. Discovering the Higgs is a central purpose of two very elaborate experiments being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. On Tuesday, the CERN scientists will announce their latest batch of results, and, as Scientific American has reported , rumors abound that they’ve homing in on the Higgs. More here from Nature . Read full article > >

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Joel Achenbach:
Higgs particle: Getting closer

The odds have shrunk that Einstein was wrong about a fundamental law of the Universe.

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CERN Excludes 1 Error in Faster-Than-Light Finding

Today is the eleventh day. Of the eleventh month. Of the eleventh year. 11/11/11. You could read this piece at 11:11 — a.m. or p.m. — and your mind could be sandblasted with the amazingness of it all, with the unique, symmetrical way that the universe seems to have fallen in line. It’s probably time to find lots of meaning in randomness, to call up the experts and ask what it all signi— Read full article > >

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11/11/11 is a divine date for many interested in numbers

STOCKHOLM — Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating. Their discovery created a new portrait of the eventual fate of the universe: a place of super-low temperatures and black skies unbroken by the light of galaxies moving away from each other at incredible speed. Read full article > >

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3 U.S.-born scientists win physics Nobel for revealing universe’s expansion is getting faster

Three U.S.-born scientists won the prize for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

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Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess for Work on Expanding Universe

Three researchers are honoured with a Nobel prize in physics for their discovery that our Universe’s expansion is accelerating.

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Nobel for expanding Universe find

An underground experiment designed to detect the elusive “dark matter” that makes up most of the Universe’s mass is the latest to report hints of it.

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Dark matter hunters see 67 hints

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have succeeded in trapping atoms of anti-hydrogen for more than 15 minutes – a breakthrough in the quest to learn about the origins of the universe.

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VIDEO: Science ups the ‘anti’ on matter