Science Glance
The symbolic Doomsday Clock calculated by a group of scientists was moved a minute closer to midnight on Tuesday, with the group citing inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and climate change.
The clock was moved to five minutes to midnight, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said, the first adjustment since the beginning of 2010, when it was moved back one minute to six minutes from midnight -- or "doomsday".
Doomsday clock a minute closer to midnight
"Time Cloak" Created; Can Make Events Disappear
Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.
The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.
Book examines America's turn from science, warns of danger for democracy
Americans have trouble dealing with science, and one place that's especially obvious is in presidential campaigns, says Shawn Lawrence Otto, who tried, with limited success, to get the candidates to debate scientific questions in the 2008 presidential election.
Otto is the author of a new book, "Fool me twice: Fighting the assault on science in America," which opens with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government."
Large Hadron Collider team detect 'new particle'
Large Hadron Collider scientists including a group from the UK believe they have detected their first new subatomic particle. Known as Chi (the Greek X symbol) b (3P), it is a "boson" like the fabled Higgs particle believed to underpin mass.
Chib(3P) provides a new way of combining two other elementary particles, the "beauty" quark and its antiquark, so that they bind together. Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which form the cores of atoms.
Scientists find monster black holes, biggest yet
Scientists have found the biggest black holes known to exist -- each one 10 billion times the size of our sun. A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away. That's relatively close on the galactic scale.
"They are monstrous," Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma told reporters. "We did not expect to find such massive black holes because they are more massive than indicated by their galaxy properties. They're kind of extraordinary."
New test finds reutrinos still faster than light
A new experiment appears to provide further evidence that Einstein may have been wrong when he said nothing could go faster than the speed of light, a theory that underpins modern thinking on how the universe works.
The new evidence, challenging a dogma of science that has held since Albert Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in 1905, appeared to confirm a startling finding that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster.
Pristine Big Bang Gas Found
Scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which -- unlike everything else in the universe -- has never mingled with elements forged later in stars. The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed.
The clouds, which are located about 12 billion light-years from Earth within the constellations Ursa Major and Leo, were found serendipitously during an ongoing study to characterize gas in distant galaxies.
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