A Qward-er Hour of Science.

“The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made.“

Building on the LHC’s success last November, scientists in Geneva, Switzerland manage to trap anti-matter for a full sixteen minutes, 10,000 times longer than ever before. “This time around, they used the same method but also cooled the antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen, which lowered the energy of the antimatter,but increased the chance that more could be collected.“

Glimpses of Qward.

“‘What we’d like to do is see if there’s some difference that we don’t understand yet between matter and antimatter,” Professor Hangst said. ‘That difference may be more fundamental; that may have to do with very high-energy things that happened at the beginning of the universe. That’s why holding on to them is so important – we need time to study them.‘”

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern have found a way to hold atoms of antimatter for a fraction of a second. “[T]he ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics….'[W]e need a lot more atoms and a lot longer times before it’s really useful – but one has to crawl before you sprint.’”

Now We’ve Done It.

Don’t say we weren’t warned: In the wake of the historic particle smashing by the LHC earlier this week, strange and potentially life-threatening anomalies have been reported all around the world, and they’re increasing in both magnitude and frequency. “Dr. Isadora Chin, a spokeswoman for the SCP Foundation, said that several of the anomalies had been granted ‘Euclid’ and even ‘Keter’ status, the designation for life-threatening manifestations of unusual size or behavior…Several have already been relocated to an observation facility in Black Mesa, New Mexico, she said.“

(Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance.) Y’know, to be honest, I blame the time travelers from the future who should’ve come back and prevented these catastrophic rips in the fabric of space-time. Bang up job, you effing slackers.

Next Stop, Alderaan.

“‘We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going,’ said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer as the record was announced. ‘It is fantastic.’” Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world…Also in science news, the now armed and fully operational Large Hadron Collider is breaking particle beam records as it warms up for the Big Show, when its handlers will work to recreate the conditions at one billionth of a second after the Big Bang. “Said Heuer: ‘We are continuing to take it step by step, and there is a lot to do before we start [first] physics in 2010. I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.’” (By way of Dangerous Meta.)

Dawn of the Particle Age.

“It’s really a generation that we’ve been looking forward to this moment, and the moments that will come after it in particular. September 10 is a demarcation between finishing the construction and starting to turn it on, but the excitement will only continue to grow.” A Quantum Leap Forward, or the End of Days? (Answer: The former.) Over on the border of France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider — the giant, multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator decades in the making — gets ready for its first big test on Wednesday (as does its accompanying “Grid”.) “The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot ‘soup’ of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a detector specialized to analyze that question.“