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Messaggi del 26/04/2011
Post n°868 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
La Bibbia smentisce Maya e 2012: l'Apocalisse è il 21 maggio 2011
Secondo la setta guidata dal predicatore evangelista americano Harold Camping, il giorno del giudizio universale cadrà il prossimo 21 maggio di quest'anno. Studi matematici effettuati sulla Bibbia hanno permesso di calcolare la data. Seguita da quella della fine del mondo, il 21 ottobre sempre di quest'anno HAROLD CAMPING - Nato nel 1921, Harold Camping è presidente della Family Stations, un network a carattere religioso sito in California che raduna circa 150 stazioni radio e televisive sparse per gli Stati Uniti. Secondo Camping, nella Bibbia sarebbe nascosto un autentico calendario che permette di calcolare la fine del mondo, o meglio, il giorno del giudizio universale. Inoltre, la Bibbia rivelerebbe la teoria della predestinazione, cioè che Dio avrebbe deciso ancor prima dell'inizio del mondo chi si sarebbe salvato e chi no. La sua setta non è considerata una chiesa dallo stesso Camping. Laureato in ingegneria civile, Camping è stato membro della Chiesa Cristiana Riformata sino al 1988, nella quale serviva come pastore. Il concetto base di Camping è che solo la Bibbia è in grado di comunicare la parola di Dio, unica fonte autorevole di verità. Il suo lavoro è quello di decifrare ogni singolo passaggio biblico, ma senza dare alla Bibbia interpretazioni automaticamente letterali.
IL GIORNO DEL GIUDIZIO - Camping sta studiando la Bibbia da circa 70 anni. Grazie a questo poderoso impegno, ha individuato il giorno del giudizio: accadrà il 21 maggio di quest'anno. A quel paese la teoria Maya che la fine del mondo arriverà nel 2012, e tanto più a quel paese i film hollywoodiani come appunto "2012". Il problema è che non è la prima volta che il predicatore radio televisivo azzarda la data della fine del mondo. Aveva già fatto questa previsione anni fa quando aveva annunciato come giorno del giudizio il 6 settembre 1994. Ma la fine del mondo non arrivò. Camping ammise di aver fatto alcuni errori matematici nei suoi calcoli e si rimise al lavoro. Nonostante ciò, i seguaci del predicatore sono nuovamente a pendere dalle sue parole. In America si stampano t short con la scritta "21 maggio 2011", si decorano le automobile con le scritte "Il ritorno di Cristo: 21 maggio 2011", si inaugurano siti web e insomma ci si prepara al grande giorno. Ci sono anche evidenti segnali, secondo i seguaci di Camping, dell'avvicianasi della fine dei tempi, ad esempio la misteriosa moria di corvi e pesci che ha colpito l'Arkansas nelle ultime ore del 2010. Oltre 5mila corvi piovuti dal cielo morti stecchiti e circa 100mila pesci morti anch'essi.
L'APOCALISSE - In realtà, Camping ha annunciato due date per cui bisognerebbe tenersi pronti. Quella del 21 maggio 2011 è l'inizio del giudizio universale, mentre la fine del mondo è prevista per il 21 ottobre sempre di quest'anno. Da bravo ingegnere, Camping è appassionato di numeri. Per calcolare il giorno del giudizio universale, Camping si è basato sul ciclo delle festività ebraiche come sono descritte nell'antico testamento, il calendario lunare mensile (in cui un mese dura 29,53059 giorni) e il calendario gregoriano (un anno dura 365,2422 giorni). Ha inserito questi dati nella nostra epoca moderna, ne ha combinato i risultati con altre informazioni contenute nella Bibbia e ha ottenuto la data "esatta". Ma che succederà il 21 maggio 2011? Ogni abitante della Terra sarà passato al giudizio divino. Il 21 ottobre 2011 invece l'intero pianeta Terra verrà distrutto: dal fuoco.
Post n°867 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
Building the Great Pyramid of Giza: Jean-Pierre Houdin’s Internal Ramp Theory We know lots about the Great Pyramid of Giza – it’s age (about 4,569 years), who it was built for (the Fourth Dynasty Egyptian King Khufu), who designed it (Khufu’s brother, the architect Hemienu) and even who rolled up their sleeves and did the work (tens of thousands of skilled labourers from across the kingdom, as opposed to slaves as was once believed). But ask a room full of experts how it was built, and you can expect a whole lot of head-scratching and beard-stroking, followed by heated argument and possibly some light fisticuffs. The main bone of contention is: how the heck did the ancient Egyptians manage to elevate around two million stone blocks, weighing an average of 2.5 tons, as high as 146.6 metres off the ground? Some kind of technology highly advanced for the time was clearly employed, with most scholars at least agreeing that a ramp of sorts must have been involved. Yet how come no evidence of such a contraption has ever been located? It would have had to be so huge as to leave almost as indelible a mark on the Giza landscape as the pyramid itself. French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin reckons he has the answer, and he’s dedicated the last decade to trying to prove it. While there are still holes in his hypothesis, it holds water better than perhaps any other – the ramp’s inside the pyramid, stupid. Ramping It Up Cranes in the 46th century BC were relatively rudimentary devices, and helicopters were a cool four millenia away from being even a sparkle in Leonardo da Vinci’s eye. So the best means Hemienu – or rather his huge gang of skivvies – had of stacking a load of enormous chunks of limestone one on top of the other was shoving and dragging each of them slowly, inch by inch, up a ramp. The precise shape and form of this ramp is a fierce bone of contention. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll divide the opposing theories into two broad camps: the straights and the spirals. The straights argue that the ramp was without-bend and basically stretched directly from the ground up to the side of the pyramid. The weakness of this idea is a matter of gradient: an incline of 8° is as steep as the Egyptians could realistically angle their ramp and still hope to move the stone blocks. Therefore to reach the pyramid’s highest point it would had to have been about a mile long. There simply isn’t enough room on the Giza plateau for such a thing, and besides, the mass of the structure would have been almost equivalent to the pyramid itself, and therefore, we can speculate that it would have taken nearly as long to construct – i.e. 20 years. Nobody needed that, not least Khufu, who could hardly delay his own death any longer than nature permitted. So the ramp must have been of spiral shape, winding its way up around the outside of the pyramid as it grew then, right? The spiral theory does sound more feasible on paper, but there are flaws in this one too. Mainly that a spiral ramp would have permanently shrouded the corners of the pyramid, which were absolutely vital to the complex, ongoing process of calculations required to ensure that the structure came to a precise point at the top. A quick reminder of the difficulties the builders of Pharaoh Sneferu’s pyramid encountered is sufficient reason to conclude that Hemienu knew fine well the trouble a spot of bad maths could cause. It took them three attempts to get Khufu’s dad's funerary monument right; the second effort is affectionately known as the Bent Pyramid for its imperfect shape. Solving Ancient Egypt’s “Greatest Mystery” Enter Houdin, or – in the first instance at least – his father Henri Houdin, who was a retired civil engineer. He had the flash of inspiration that might just be the key to resolving this five millennia old teaser. What if the Great Pyramid’s builders did predominantly use a spiral ramp, but instead of wrapping it around the outside of the monument, instead constructed it inside? Houdin the younger – a successful architect, with a specialty in 3D graphics – was asked by his father to join him in his efforts to prove his theory. He became so hooked, that he eventually quit his day job and dedicated himself full-time to the cause. Houdin and his wife lived in a tiny studio apartment for four years while he toiled passionately at his self-financed project, which remains ongoing. A measure of his commitment can be detected in the title of his 2007 book, co-written with a fellow believer, Egyptologist Bob Brier: The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery. Has the French architect really “solved” ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery? His conclusion – based on extensive projections using advanced 3D-modelling computer programmes – is that an external ramp was used to erect the first 43 metres of the structure, then an inner ramp built into the fabric of the pyramid itself was used to lift stones (taken from the dismantled external ramp) towards its 147-metre apex. A 3D representation of his theory, by industrial software giant Dassault Systemes, can be viewed here. Many of Houdin's ideas still rest on mere hypothesis, but a few concrete finds have thus-far backed up his claims. The Proof? A small open notch on the outer façade of the pyramid, about 90 metres above the ground, is the main building block of Houdin’s pyramid theory. It has been previously noted by pyramid experts, but never considered of great significance. To the French architect, it's vital to proving how the ancient Egyptian builders managed to turn the great stone blocks, as they gradually shoved them up the internal ramp. In 2008, Brier and a National Geographic camera crew – together with an expert mountaineer – climbed up to the notch, squeezed inside and entered a narrow L-shaped room, which was exactly where Houdin had predicted it would be. It was in hollow corner sections such as this, he claims, that the pyramid builders spun the blocks 90° – for the ascent of the next side – using a crane. “A green light from Cairo and the Great Pyramid mystery is over,” -- Jean Pierre Houdin Further support for Houdin's theory had landed in his lap by chance in 2000, after a member of a French team who had surveyed the Great Pyramid in 1986 caught a presentation by the architect at a scientific conference. He shared two exciting bits of information with Houdin – firstly, that during their surveying of the pyramid, his team had been shocked to spot a desert fox in a hole next to the 90 metre-high notch. Short of scaling the steep face of the pyramid, how else could it have got there, other than by navigating some kind of internal passageway that led from the bottom of the monument up? Even more vitally, the French surveyor presented to Houdin a microgravimetry scan of the pyramid – a measurement of the density of different sections of the pyramid that they had applied in order to try and detect hidden chambers. They hadn’t found any, but the scan did show up a baffling pattern – a hollow that appears to spiral its way up the inside of the pyramid. They had originally written-off it as inconsequential, but to Houdin this was critical proof of his hypothesis.
Future Studies “A green light from Cairo and the Great Pyramid mystery is over,” Houdin commented boldly to National Geographic in 2008. It’s his belief that a system of simple, well-understood, non-invasive studies of the famous Egyptian monument is all that is required for him to prove his theory, and put to bed the centuries old question of how the ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza. He’s prepared an application to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) to carry out a survey, together with Rainer Stadlemann, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and one of the greatest authorities on pyramids. All Houdin is waiting for is the nod of approval. But it may be a long time in coming. There are voices that express doubt about Houdin’s theories – speaking to The Engineer in 2007, University College London Egyptology professor David Jeffreys called his internal spiral hypothesis “far-fetched and horribly complicated”, while Oxford University Egyptology professor John Baines stated more broadly that he was “suspicious of any theory that seeks to explain only how the Great Pyramid was built.” Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, revealed in an interview with Heritage Key that he was also sceptical. “The theory is completely wrong,” he commented. “We did investigate the theory and we, I wrote about it everywhere. The theory is the theory of other theorists. This Houdin wants to make his theory famous and that’s why he took Bob Brier to be with him as a co-author but really Bob Brier doesn’t know anything about pyramids. He’s a good guy, he knows about mummies, but pyramids are not his field.” Houdin believes that a technique as simple as placing an infrared camera in front of the pyramid and recording subtle differences in its interior materials and temperatures could be all that’s required to finally prove, beyond all doubt, that an internal ramp exists. Yet – in an exclusive interview with Heritage Key – he explains why his theory is still not accepted by the mainstream. If an internal ramp is detected, and then – better still – later accessed and walked through, it’s hard to see how anyone could deny that perhaps ancient history’s greatest conundrum has been as good as solved. When might that happen? “Buy me a crystal ball!” Houdin jokes. Pictures by Dassault Systemes. All rights reserved. Egyptian workers are here shown dragging blocks up the first section of the pyramid, which was built using a long external ramp. Houdin too may face a long uphill struggle in finally proving his theory. A look at Houdin's internal ramp from above - note the notches on the corners, which the Frenchman speculates were used for turning the stones as they were shoved upwards. 3D graphic representation of Houdin's theory, showing how the internal ramp spiralled around the inside of the pyramid. An image from Dassault Systemes
Post n°866 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
Da:"ScienceDaily.com"
Large Galaxies Stopped Growing Seven Billion Years Ago ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2011) — Galaxies are thought to develop by the gravitational attraction between and merger of smaller 'sub-galaxies', a process that standard cosmological ideas suggest should be ongoing. But new data from a team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University directly challenges this idea, suggesting that the growth of some of the most massive objects stopped 7 billion years ago when the Universe was half its present age. On April 18 team member Claire Burke presented their work at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2011) in Llandudno, Wales. How galaxies form and then evolve is still a major unanswered question in astronomy. The sub-galaxy units thought to have merged to make galaxies, are themselves associated with fluctuations in the density of material in the cosmos left over from the Big Bang and seen today as temperature 'ripples' in the cosmic background radiation. To study galaxy evolution, the team, which also included Professor Chris Collins and Dr John Stott (now at the University of Durham) looked at the most massive galaxies in the Universe, known as Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) and so called because of their location at the centre of galaxy clusters, structures that typically contain hundreds of galaxies. In the nearby Universe BCGs are elliptical in shape and are the largest, most uniform and most massive class of galaxies observed, with each galaxy having a mass equivalent to up to 100 trillion (100 million million) Suns. Like smaller elliptical galaxies, BCGs are composed of old red stars and are thought to have formed through mergers of the dense population of sub-galaxies that were found in the centre of galaxy clusters. By studying how BCGs grow in size gives an insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies in general. Measuring the sizes of BCGs has always been difficult as their outer regions are very faint. Burke and her team have overcome this by using long exposure images from the Hubble Space Telescope data archive that pick up the dimmer parts of these galaxies. The BCGs they studied are so distant that the light we detect from them left 7 billion years ago, so they appear as they were when the Universe was less than half its present age. When they examined the Hubble images, the team found that these distant BCGs are almost the same size as their nearby counterparts and that these galaxies can have grown by at most 30% in the last 9 billion years. This is in line with other work by the same research group, but is quite unlike the observed development of 'regular' elliptical galaxies. More significantly, conventional simulations of the evolution of the Universe predict that BCGs should have at least tripled in size over that time. Ms Burke comments: "The lack of growth of the most massive galaxies is a major challenge to current models of the formation and evolution of large scale structure in the Universe. Our work suggests that cosmologists appear to lack some of the crucial ingredients they need to understand how galaxies evolved from the distant past to the present day."
![](http://images.sciencedaily.com/2011/04/110418084005.jpg)
A Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG) appears as the orange arc in this Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy cluster Abell 2218. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and Johan Richard (Caltech, USA). Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin & James Long (ESA/Hubble))
Post n°865 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
Da:"ScienceDaily.com"
Science News
Anti-Helium Discovered in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider ExperimentScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — Eighteen examples of the heaviest antiparticle ever found, the nucleus of antihelium-4, have been made in the STAR experiment at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. "The STAR experiment is uniquely capable of finding antihelium-4," says the STAR experiment's spokesperson, Nu Xu, of the Nuclear Science Division (NSD) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "STAR already holds the record for massive antiparticles, last year having identified the anti-hypertriton, which contains three constituent antiparticles. With four antinucleons, antihelium-4 is produced at a rate a thousand times lower yet. To identify the 18 examples required sifting through the debris of a billion gold-gold collisions." Collisions of energetic gold nuclei inside STAR briefly recreate conditions in the hot, dense early universe only millionths of a second after the big bang. Since equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the big bang they should have completely annihilated one another, but for reasons still not understood, only ordinary matter seems to have survived. Today this excess matter forms all of the visible universe we know. Roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter are also produced in heavy-ion (gold nuclei) collisions at RHIC. The resulting fireballs expand and cool quickly, so the antimatter can avoid annihilation long enough to be detected in the Time Projection Chamber at the heart of STAR. Ordinary nuclei of helium atoms consist of two protons and two neutrons. Called alpha particles when emitted in radioactive decays, they were found in this form by Ernest Rutherford well over a century ago. The nucleus of antihelium-4 (the anti-alpha) contains two antiprotons bound with two antineutrons. The most common antiparticles are generally the least massive, because it takes less energy to create them. Carl Anderson was the first to find an antiparticle, the antielectron (positron), in cosmic ray debris 1932. The antiproton (the nucleus of antihydrogen) and the antineutron were created at Berkeley Lab's Bevatron in the 1950s. Antideuteron nuclei ("anti-heavy-hydrogen," made of an antiproton and an antineutron) were created in accelerators at Brookhaven and CERN in the 1960s. Each extra nucleon (called a baryon) increases the particle's baryon number, and in the STAR collisions every increase in baryon number decreases the rate of yield roughly a thousand times. The nuclei of the antihelium isotope with only one neutron (antihelium-3) has been made in accelerators since 1970; the STAR experiment produces many of these antiparticles, having baryon number 3. The antihelium nucleus with baryon number 4, just announced by STAR based on 16 examples identified in 2010 and two examples from an earlier run, contains the most nucleons of any antiparticle ever detected. "It's likely that antihelium will be the heaviest antiparticle seen in an accelerator for some time to come," says STAR Collaboration member Xiangming Sun of Berkeley Lab's NSD. "After antihelium the next stable antimatter nucleus would be antilithium, and the production rate for antilithium in an accelerator is expected to be well over two million times less than for antihelium." NSD's Maxim Naglis adds, "Finding even one example of antilithium would be a stroke of luck, and would probably require a breakthrough in accelerator technology." If antihelium made by accelerators is rare, and heavier antiparticles rarer still, what of searching for these particles in space? The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment, scheduled to be launched on one of the last space-shuttle missions to the International Space Station, is an instrument designed to do just that. A principal part of its mission is to hunt for distant galaxies made entirely of antimatter. "Collisions among cosmic rays near Earth can produce antimatter particles, but the odds of these collisions producing an intact antihelium nucleus are so vanishingly small that finding even one would strongly suggest that it had drifted to Earth from a distant region of the universe dominated by antimatter," explains Hans Georg Ritter of Berkeley Lab's NSD. "Antimatter doesn't look any different from ordinary matter, but AMS finding just one antihelium nucleus would suggest that some of the galaxies we see are antimatter galaxies." Meanwhile the STAR experiment at RHIC, which has shown that antihelium does indeed exist, is likely to hold the world record for finding the heaviest particle of antimatter for the foreseeable future. This work was supported by the DOE Office of
Science![](http://images.sciencedaily.com/2011/04/110424152441.jpg)
Roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter are created in the collision of energetic gold nuclei inside STAR, but because the fireball expands and cools quickly, antimatter can survive longer than that created in the big bang. In this collision an ordinary helium-4 nucleus (background) is matched by a nucleus of antihelium-4 (foreground). (Credit: STAR Collaboration and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Post n°864 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
(ANSA) - ROMA, 22 APR - L'Italia e' in prima fila nelle ricerche sui 'tre poli' del pianeta per conoscere i meccanismi che regolano il clima. E' partita oggi la spedizione per installare, a 8.000 metri su Colle Sud dell'Everest, la stazione meteorologica piu' alta del mondo. Nell'Artico, invece, si sta studiando il comportamento del carbonio nero per capire il fenomeno dell'assottigliamento dei ghiacci polari. Si sta lavorando anche nella base artica Dirigibile Italia e quella italo-francese Concordia.
Post n°863 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
Da:"Reuters.com" Giffords cleared to attend shuttle launch: husband Space shuttle Endeavour sits atop launch pad 39A after arriving from the Vehicle Assembly Building to prepare for Mission STS-134 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Florida March 11, 2011. Credit: Reuters/Joe Skipper
HOUSTON | Sun Apr 24, 2011 10:18pm EDT HOUSTON (Reuters) - Astronaut Mark Kelly says doctors have cleared his wife, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, now recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, as healthy enough to attend his space shuttle launch on Friday. Word that Giffords had been given a medical approval to make the trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the blastoff, which President Barack Obama also plans to attend, came in CBS Evening News interview slated to be broadcast on Monday. The network released excerpts from Katie Couric's interview with Kelly on Sunday. "Yes, I've met with her doctors, her neurosurgeon and her doctors. And ... they've given us permission to take her down to the launch," Kelly said. Asked Giffords' reaction to hearing that she's been given the green light to attend the launch, Kelly said, "I think she said, 'awesome,' and she pumped her fist." James Campbell, a spokesman for the Houston hospital where she is undergoing rehabilitation, told Reuters in an e-mail on Sunday the hospital plans to issue a statement about her plans to travel on Monday. The event would mark the first extended outing the Arizona Democrat has made from a hospital environment since she was gunned down as she met with a group of constituents outside a Tucson, Arizona supermarket on January 8. Six people were killed and 13 others were wounded, Giffords among them, when a gunman opened fire on the congresswoman and bystanders. Jared Loughner, 22, a college dropout with a history of erratic behavior, is charged with the shooting. Kelly, the commander of NASA's next-to-last scheduled shuttle mission, took a leave of absence after Giffords was wounded but returned to work in February after she was transferred to the Houston rehabilitation center. The Endeavour mission led by Kelly will be delivering equipment to the International Space Station. NASA plans to fly one last mission with sister ship Atlantis in June before ending the 30-year-old shuttle program. Kelly told Couric that the injury to the left side of his wife's brain has made it difficult for her to regain her ability to walk to and to speak but left the right hemisphere, which controls personality and cognitive functions, intact. "Her personality's a hundred percent there," he told Couric. The Arizona Republic reported on Sunday that Giffords still struggles to piece together lengthy sentences but can articulate brief phrases such as "love you" and "I miss Tucson." The newspaper said she is working to improve the use of her right arm and leg through therapy that involves pushing a grocery cart, bowling and indoor golf. She can walk a bit on her own and is working on improving her gait, Dr. Gerard Francisco, the chief medical officer at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (TIRR), Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, told the newspaper. The Arizona Republic based its reporting on interviews with Giffords' doctors, husband, congressional staff, and a nurse. "Her left side is perfect," Pia Carusone, her chief of staff, is quoted as saying. "She can do whatever you can do." Kelly said his wife learned that people had died and others were wounded when he was reading her a New York Times story about the shooting one day in March and, noticing he had skipped a paragraph, she grabbed the newspaper from his hand. Giffords cried and said, "So many people, so many people," according to the Arizona Republic. But Kelly said he still has not told his wife that the dead included a Gabe Zimmerman from her staff, a federal judge who was a friend, and a 9-year-old girl. (Writing and reporting by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Peter Bohan)
Post n°861 pubblicato il 26 Aprile 2011 da diegobaratono
Da:"Reuters.com"
CERN marks advance in universe mysteries search Credit: Reuters/Valentin Flauraud
By Robert Evans GENEVA | Fri Apr 22, 2011 10:15am EDT GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN physics research center reported on Friday that they had smashed particles together at a record intensity in a key advance in their program to unveil mysteries of the universe. The development came in the early hours after they fed beams into the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with some 6 per cent more particles per unit than the previous record, set by the U.S. Fermilab's Tevatron collider last year. Each collision in the LHC's 27-kilometre (16.8 mile) circular underground tunnel -- at a tiny fraction under the speed of light -- creates a simulation of the Big Bang which brought the universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago. The higher the "beam intensity" or number of particles in each beam, the more collisions take place and the more material the scientists have to analyze. Many millions of these mini-Big Bangs are already being produced daily. "Beam intensity is the key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step," said Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. "Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential." "There is a tangible feeling that we are on the threshold of new discovery," said his deputy, Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director. COMPUTER DISCS As the CERN physicists and engineers ramped up the intensity over the past week, said CERN spokesman James Gillies, they gathered more information -- stored in thousands of computer discs -- than in nine months of LHC running in 2010. The $10 billion machine, the world's biggest single scientific experiment, started up at the end of March 2010. After this year, following the Tevatron's permanent closedown in the autumn, it will be the world's lone super-collider. Among the LHC's aims is to establish whether an elementary particle, dubbed the Higgs after the British scientist who first suggested it as the agent that gave mass to particles after the Big Bang, actually exists. By observing the collisions on computers at CERN and in linked laboratories around the world, scientists also hope to find solid proof of the existence of the dark matter believed to make up nearly a quarter of the known universe, and perhaps the dark energy thought to constitute around 70 per cent. Cosmologists say the CERN experiments may also shed light on emerging new theories suggesting the known universe is only part of a system of many, invisible to each other and with no means of inter-communication, that has been dubbed the "multiverse." They also look to the LHC, to remain in operation for a decade after a year-long technical shutdown in 2013, to produce some back-up to indications tracked by other researchers that the known universe was preceded by another before the Big Bang. After the 2013 shutdown, CERN scientists aim to increase the total energy of each particle collision from a current maximum of 7 Tera electron-volts, or TeV, to 14 TeV. This will also increase the likelihood of new discoveries in what CERN calls "New Physics," taking knowledge beyond the so-called Standard Model based on the theories of Swiss scientist Albert Einstein early in the 20th century. (Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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