According to the Geological Survey of Finland, which created the map out of years of survey research:

This map is the first global compilation of the wealth of magnetic anomaly information derived from more than 50 years of aeromagnetic surveys over land areas, research vessel magnetometer traverses at sea, and observations from earth-orbiting satellites, supplemented by anomaly values derived from oceanic crustal ages. The objective is to provide an interpretive dimension to surface observations of the Earth’s composition and geologic structure. Metamorphism, petrology, and redox state all have important effects on the magnetism of crustal materials.

The magnetic anomalies represented on this map originate primarily in igneous and metamorphic rocks, in the Earth's crust and possibly, uppermost mantle. Magnetic anomalies represent an estimate of the short-wavelenght (< 2600 km) fields associated with these parts of the Earth, after estimates of fields from other sources have been subtracted from the measured field magnitude. In most places the magnetic anomaly field is less than 1 per cent of the total magnetic field.

Magnetic Anomaly Map of the World [via Commission for Geological Maps of the World]

The prizes were awarded in a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater in ten areas:

• Nutrition: Massimiliano Zampini and Clark Spence for demonstrating that, when the sound of eating a potato chip is modified, the eater believes the chip is fresher and crisper than it really is.
• Peace: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
• Archeology: Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino for demonstrating how the actions of an armadillo may scramble the contents of an archeological dig site.
• Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc for discovering that fleas on a dog jump higher than fleas on a cat.
• Medicine: Dan Ariely for demonstrating the high-cost placebos are more effective than low-cost placebos.
• Cognitive Science: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro, and Agota Toth for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
• Economics: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan for discovering that a lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects the tips she earns.
• Physics: Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith for mathematically proving that a heap of hair or string will inevitably tangle itself into knots.
• Chemistry: Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson for demonstrating that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and Chuang-Ye Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang for discovering that Coca-Cola is not an effective spermicide.
• Literature: David Sims for his study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners [Improbable Research]

In the 16th century, Copernicus hypothesized that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, but rather the sun is. Later, cosmologists expanded this idea into the Copernican Principle: Earth is not in a special place in the universe, therefore our observations of local space can be used to infer data about the rest of the universe. When astronomers observed that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate, they needed to add something to their equations to make it all make sense. That something is dark energy, which would have to exist in massive quantities (as yet, pretty much undetectable) to explain this expansion.

Here's the thing - the universe is really, really, really huge. Just the part we can see is almost incomprehensibly big, and there's a whole lot of universe we can't see. No one knows how big the whole universe is, but it's entirely possible that our part of the universe is just a tiny fraction of the whole. Physicists from Oxford University are considering the idea that the universe we can observe is actually anomalous, a giant void with a low density of matter. The rest of the universe may look substantially different. Doing some number crunching revealed that their model of the universe works without dark energy, but isn't quite as accurate as the current dark energy model. However, they need more observations of certain types of supernovae to refine their numbers - in a few months, their equations may look better with more data.

What's particularly cool is that this maverick theory that tosses a very accepted tenet of astronomy right out the window is being published in Physical Review Letters, one of the most respected physics journals. It sure beats excommunication. Image by: NASA.

Overturning Copernicus, eliminating dark energy. [Nobel Intent]

Tsunami invisibility cloak, dark energy v. the void, sorting nanotubes with light, and more. [EurekAlert!]

Things do not look good. Not only was the fire brigade called in to deal with the situation, but vacuum was lost as well as liquid helium. Here's what the BBC had to say:

The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9C above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit. As a result of the [leak], the temperature of about one hundred of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C. A spokesman for Cern confirmed that it would now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week. Further delays could follow once the damage has been fully assessed over the weekend.

Hopefully this will only be a minor setback, but we'll have to see what the LHC researchers say on Monday.

Hadron Collider Forced to Halt [via BBC News]

The Mist
In a remote Maine town, a thick fog envelops an area near a military base where a mysterious "Project Arrowhead" appears to have ripped down a wall between two dimensions. Unfortunately, it turns out that the universe in the cosmic string next door has really crappy atmosphere and is full of giant monsters with long teeth. And humans, known across the multiverse as a tasty snack, have lured a ton of those monsters over to chomp us up.

Anathem
I've already mentioned that Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem contains references to an LHC-esque device that was doing experiments with recreating the Big Bang. Little is known of this device because switching it on led to something the characters in the novel refer to only as The Terrible Events. Records are spotty, especially 3700 years after the fact, which is when the novel takes place. However, we do know that the Terrible Events probably began with LHC-style experiments, and ended with the science centers on planet Arbre being sacked by outraged citizens. The planet spirals into a dark period of war and chaos before completely reorganizing itself and outlawing massive physics experiments.

Earth
In David Brin's 1990 novel Earth, humans create a microscopic black hole that accidentally drops into the core of the planet. If you'll recall, one of the things that the LHC might do is create tiny black holes that exist for a few nanoseconds. Brin imagines a scenario embarrassingly similar to the one in cheesy flick The Core, where the Earth's core stops spinning and gravity gets fucked.

Quiet Earth
In this classic New Zealand apocalypse flick, a man awakens to find himself on an alternate Earth where only a few humans still exist. He suspects the government project he was working on might have had something to do with the change, and his suspicions grow as reality becomes less and less stable. In some ways, the physics mayhem is really a backdrop to the human mayhem that our main characters find themselves in. Even though the tissue of reality is ripping, there are still enough humans left to have a love triangle.

His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman's trilogy that begins with The Golden Compass is about how a few people have learned to use a special knife to cut windows between dimensions. Unfortunately, the windows are causing a shortage of a basic substance in the universe called (depending on your dimension) Dust or dark matter. The overarching quest of the series is to discover what Dust is and why it's running out, which eventually leads the characters to a physics lab in contemporary Oxford.

Donnie Darko
Sure, Donnie Darko is a weird movie that might just be about schizophrenia induced by the Scariest Bunny Suit Ever. But if you take it at face value, Donnie Darko is about the apocalypse that might be unleashed when Donnie manages to travel through time and prevent a death that was supposed to happen. The question is, whose death was supposed to happen? And can you travel through time when you are dead? Whoa, man. Luckily Jake Gyllenhaal is so smoking hot in this movie that you won't pay attention to the plot when he's on screen. And he's on screen a lot.

Doctor Who
Remember in the first season of the new Doctor Who when we had A Very Special Episode called "Father's Day" with Rose going back in time to save her dad's life and accidentally unleashing a bunch of timespace-rending bat things? Obviously the Doctor travels though time, so he and his companions are constantly screwing up the timeline. But apparently that only results in a possible destruction of Earth when Rose goes back to rescue her father from the fatal car accident he suffered when she was a baby. The two contradictory timelines cause monsters to appear and the world to begin ending in a very Buffy-esque way. How will Rose and the Doctor stuff those bats back into the time crack?

SciFi Channel's Flash Gordon
I know all of you loved SciFi's Flash Gordon series — especially in the good old days when I recapped it every week — but you have to admit it's a perfect example of physics experiments that destroy the world. Flash's dad and the dorktastic Dr. Zarkov have invented these devices that allow them to open a doorway between Earth and Mongo. But it turns out their dimension-tripping is destroying the fabric of reality, not to mention getting Ming all excited about stealing Earth's water. One of the big plot arcs from the only season of this tragically-canceled show was trying to stop everybody from opening up dimension doorways because Something Bad would happen.

A Sound of Thunder
Any number of lameass time travel movies show this most basic of physics experiments — moving around in time — destroying the world. But Sound of Thunder is a standout for two reasons. One, it's based on a famous Ray Bradbury short story, which gives it literary cred. And two, it shows that time travel can completely destroy the human world rather than just causing the Nazis to win or Rome to never fall. When our time travelers return to the present after stealing a butterfly from the primeval era, they discover that dinosaurs have won the evolutionary war and are wiping out the last of humanity.

Lexx
Possibly the most awesome Canadian scifi series ever made, Lexx is about a crew of troublemakers on board the Lexx, a planet-eating sentient spaceship. One of the major subplots in Season 4 involved determining the mass of the Higgs-Boson, which all the characters casually refer to as something that "everybody knows" will cause entire planets to be destroyed. Starting tomorrow, the LHC will be conducting tests to determine the mass of the Higgs-Boson. This might be why robot head 790 pointed out that Earth is of the class of planets that usually destroys itself by war, or by unintentionally smooshing itself into a pea-sized object by attempting to measure the mass of the Higgs-Boson.

This is totally what conspiracy theorists are picturing when they say the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will destroy the fabric of the universe. Sadly, this exhibit has been torn down but its weird science flair lives on.

House-sized art exhibit in Texas [via Gadling] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

One of her sculptures is showing in a group show at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens through the end of October. According to the SculptureSite Gallery, which helped curate the exhibit:

Employing electromagnets and magnetically-charged microfine particles suspended in oil set in motion through a computer controller, Kodama, who is associate professor at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications, explores an entirely new territory where the seductive glossy black liquid seems to turn into rows of solid spikes impeccably organized around a spiraling cone, only to dissolve abruptly into obvious liquidity once again

SculptureSite [gallery page]

Physicists working on the LHC say that even if the device does produce tiny black holes, they will exist for such a short time that they couldn't possibly do any damage. Instead, they're interested in experiments that could reveal for the first time what dark matter is, and what the universe looked like after the big bang.

Though the LHC won't be in full operation until September 10, when the first real experiments there will get underway, this weekend marks the first time the facility will be used. Researchers will shoot a few particle beams through the magnetized, reinforced tunnels that make up the giant particle accelerator. According to Popular Mechanics:

As part of a scheduled injection test, the LHC will be closed off this Friday, and researchers at CERN will fire protons through one of the eight sectors that make up the sprawling concrete-lined collider tunnel. The purpose of this test? “It’s, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” says Judy Jackson, head of the Office of Communications at Fermilab. “It’s a very complex machine. This is a step towards getting ready.”

Let's see what happens? You mean, like whether it produces tiny black holes that last longer than a nanosecond? Awesome.

Start Date for the Large Hadron Collider [Popular Mechanics]

Here's the endcap of the ATLAS detector, which contains several layered cylinders around the spot where the where the LHC's proton beams will smash into each other.

Here you can see the gigantic electromagnetic calorimeter, which is 6x7 square meters. According to the Boston Globe:

[It] consists of 3300 blocks containing scintillator, fibre optics and lead. It will measure the energy of particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC when it is started. Photons, electrons and positrons will pass through the layers of material in these modules and deposit their energy in the detector through a shower of particles.

In other words: This device measures the output of the smashed protons.

No, it's not some steampunk fantasy gear. This is a huge magnet that will become part of the endcap of the ATLAS detector we showed you above.

Want to see more hardcore physics experiment insanity? Check out the amazing set of photos at the Boston Globe. The LHC goes online and starts smashing tiny particles later this year.

Large Hadron Collider Nearly Ready [via Boston Globe] (Thanks, Gonzalo Sanchez!)

By sending out pulses of infrared light, the Oak Ridge laser system can pick up clues about the composition of the materials surrounding it. When the light pulses hit objects, they refract off of those objects, and some of the light is directed back at the laser system itself. Quartz crystals in the laser system transform these light pulses into a full picture of the chemical composition of the objects you want to check out. If the object's activation profile contains chemical signatures of known explosives, you've identified your bomb.

Using this technique, the researchers' laser gun might eventually be used to detect the chemical signatures that exist in spoiled food. One day, you might have a small laser in your cell phone, which you can whip out at the grocery store to get the best possible produce. As laser technology improves, so will this system; researchers are hoping that sensitivity will go through the roof as cost and size shrink accordingly. Three cheers for not exploding, and for always finding the greenest banana of the lot!

Ray Gun Detects Bombs at Distance [Discovery Channel]

Image of ray gun by ImageZoo

Physicist Bernard Gerstman, author of the paper, writes:

Damage by pulsed lasers to the retina or other tissues containing strongly absorbing particles may occur through biophysical mechanisms other than simple heating. Shockwaves and bubbles have been observed experimentally, and depending on pulse duration, may be the cause of retinal damage at threshold fluence levels. We performed detailed calculations on the shockwave and bubble generation expected from pulsed lasers. For a variety of different laser pulse durations and fluences, we tabulated the expected strength of the shockwave and size of the bubble that will be generated. We also explain how these results will change for absorbing particles with different physical properties such as absorption coefficient, bulk modulus, or thermal expansion coefficient. This enables the assessment of biological danger, and possible medical benefits, for lasers of a wide range of pulse durations and energies, incident on tissues with absorbing particles with a variety of thermomechanical characteristics.

His findings may later be used by others with less humane motives — such as anyone interested in the anti-personnel possibilities of high-energy laser pulses which cause 'explosive bubble formation' in human flesh.

Laser-Induced Shockwaves and Vaporization in Biological Systems [PDF] via Danger Room

According to a release from NASA:

"We found a clock that ticks slower and slower, and when it slows down too much, boom! The bomb explodes," says lead author Diego Altamirano of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

The bursts occur on a neutron star, which is the collapsed remnant of a massive star that exploded in a supernova. The neutron star belongs to a binary system that can be described as a ticking time bomb. Hydrogen and helium gas from a companion star spirals onto the neutron star, slowly accumulating on its surface until it heats up to a critical temperature. Suddenly, the hydrogen and helium begin to fuse uncontrollably into heavier elements, igniting a thermonuclear flame that quickly spreads around the entire star. The resulting explosion appears as a bright flash of X-rays.

These bursts, which can occur several times per day from the same neutron star, release more energy in just 10 to 100 seconds than our Sun radiates in an entire week. Put another way, the energy is equivalent to 100 fifteen-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding simultaneously over each postage-stamp-size patch of the neutron star's surface.

NASA satellite pins down time of explosions [Eurekalert]

That's a sex sphere alright.

Rucker will be offering his novel Spacetime Donuts as a print-on-demand book too. Both should be out this summer. We'll let you know as soon as the URLs exist.

The Sex Sphere, etc. [Rudy's Blog]

Shebar claims that the "dark matter particle" predicted by Liu Xing could turn out to be "the real dark matter present in the universe." If so, Shebar boasts, "he could become the first fictional character to win a Nobel Prize."

While those claims may be a little far-fetched, the film itself sounds like one of those rare moments where fiction about scientists turns out to be as strange and haunting as science fiction. Though not as surreal as Darren Aronofsky's Pi, the flick deals with some of the same clashes between science-for-truth and science-for-prestige. Check the Dark Matter site for details about when it will be coming to your city.

Dark Matter [official site]

Says Popular Mechanics' Erin Scottberg:

Dr. Michio Kaku [wrote a] new book, "Physics of the Impossible," makes Lost's flip-flop between past and present look, well, not impossible.

Unlike deadly black holes, traversable wormholes could make a condition such as Desmond's feasible if the portals that skip time and space without an event horizon were ever discovered, Kaku says. When treating him remotely over Lost's super satellite phone, Faraday asks Desmond if he had been exposed to any extreme doses of radiation or electromagnetic energy that could make him "a little confused." And that's where the show's producers did their homework for the key plot twist when the helicopter sends Desmond's conscience to become unstuck in time.

"To open the wormhole, you need large amounts of energy," Kaku says. "In principle, if you could harness the energy of a star, you might be able to bend time into a pretzel, but we are talking about astronomical amounts of energy."

Are Lost's New Time-Travel Physics Junk Science? [Popular Mechanics]

Holy crap. Seriously, I am in awe. This is the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet. I want one for the outside of my apartment building. Photos by Martial Terzzini/AP.

Here is the Spherical Torus from above in the Princeton Plasma lab:

And here's a schematic to give you a better idea of what it looks like.

Apparently plasma toroids are all the rage in physics circles right now, so it's time to get rid of all your old-fashioned plasma spheres and ovoids. Also, dear readers, if any physics geeks out there would care to explain the principles of magnetic fusion to us in layperson's terms we'd love to know.

National Spherical Torus Experiment

Knowing the crystalline structure of this chunk of microporous aluminium carboxylate — a crazy-ass hybrid compound of organic and inorganic molecules — is great for future research into things like using special powders to absorb toxic spills, or building flexible glass. But, points out scientist Thierry Loiseau, it will also help tidy up lab cupboards:

Researchers can now bring forward samples left in their cupboards because the sizes had previously prevented their study. Now they will be able to elucidate the structures of these samples, with potentially great scientific advances on the horizon.

Oh, oui, oui! Lavez les laboratoires, mes choux choux scientifiques!Image by T. Loiseau, CNRS 2007.

Unveiling the structure of microcrystals [via Eurekalert]