While we may never know all the details of our universe’s explosive birth, scientists have been able to piece together quite a bit by studying the ancient light that saturates the cosmos. This cosmic microwave background radiation bears imprints from the …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Space.com
It went beyond the Big Bang.
Margaret Thatcher transformed the British economy over little more than a decade in office. She introduced free-market policies that helped the country throw off its postwar malaise and shook up the cozy world of banks and brokers with a flurry of deregulation — which came to be known as the “Big Bang” — that made London one of the world’s pre-eminent financial centers.
But while Thatcher ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth, her legacy on economic issues remains divisive. Some argue her policies also sowed the seeds for the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, the economy is on the verge of another recession and she is still reviled by unions who say she ignored the needs of workers and the poor.
“To supporters, she changed Britain from a nation in long term industrial decline to an energetic, dynamic economy. To opponents, she entrenched inequalities between the regions and classes, and placed the free market above all other concerns,” Richard Carr, a political historian at Anglia Ruskin University said in statement. “Our politics, and many of our politicians, have been forged in her legacy.”
When Thatcher arrived at 10 Downing Street in May 1979, Britain’s first female prime minister set about smashing the existing economic order. Along with her conservative soulmate, President Ronald Reagan, she rejected the way economic policy had been conducted since the end of World War II in favor of a focus on free market ideology that is accepted by most of the world today.
The woman who said she learned to be careful with money by watching her green-grocer father sought to reduce the government‘s footprint in the economy, diminished labor unions’ powers and overhauled London‘s financial center.
In 1986, just a year before the movie “Wall Street” coined the phrase “greed is good,” Thatcher pushed through a flurry of reforms, the so-called Big Bang, which broke up the “boys’ club” culture that dominated the City of London. The changes allowed international banks like Goldman Sachs to step in and attracted a river of foreign business.
It changed the financial services sector and the country.
“The Big Bang paved the way for the spectacular growth of the financial services industry in the U.K.,” said Iain Begg, a professor from the London School of Economcis. “It went from a relatively cozy banking center doing …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
New data from the Planck satellite suggests very good news for proponents of the standard Big Bang cosmological model of the universe. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
AP
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at AOL
By Kevin Spak 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Great Finds
New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is a bit older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos — how it began, what it’s made of and where it’s going — seem to be on the right track.
The findings bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.
George Esfthathiou, an astrophysicist who announced the Planck satellite mapping on Thursday, says the findings also offer new specificity of the universe’s composition. He says it is made up of slightly more ordinary matter and less of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
(Phys.org) —Acquired by ESA’s Planck space telescope, the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang – was released today revealing the existence of features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
The world’s biggest radio telescope is being launched in a plateau high above Chile‘s Atacama desert.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, will search for clues about the dawn of the cosmos — from the coldest gases and dust where galaxies are formed to the energy produced by the Big Bang.
Most of the 66 radio antennas will be inaugurated Wednesday in an official ceremony.
ALMA also reaches farther than any other radio telescope and has captured images different from anything seen before by visible-light and infrared telescopes.
The $1.5 billion project is jointly funded by the United States, Canada, Japan and Europe. It is an engineering triumph that launches Chile to the forefront of ground-based space exploration.
By The Huffington Post News Editors
By: Mike Wall
Published: 03/07/2013 04:40 PM EST on SPACE.com
The oldest known star appears to be older than the universe itself, but a new study is helping to clear up this seeming paradox.
Previous research had estimated that the Milky Way galaxy’s so-called “Methuselah star” is up to 16 billion years old. That’s a problem, since most researchers agree that the Big Bang that created the universe occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
Now a team of astronomers has derived a new, less nonsensical age for the Methuselah star, incorporating information about its distance, brightness, composition and structure.
“Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star’s age compatible with the age of the universe,” study lead author Howard Bond, of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. [Gallery: The Methuselah Star Revealed]
The uncertainty Bond refers to is plus or minus 800 million years, which means the star could actually be 13.7 billion years old — younger than the universe as it’s currently understood, though just barely.
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More on Hubble Space Telescope
Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Videos, Crossover, Toyota, Celebrities, Humor
For viewers who plan on watching the Super Bowl only for the commercials, here’s one for you to enjoy ahead of time. As we saw in the teaser video that Toyota released last week, will be making the transition from Big Bang to The Big Game as a wish-granting genie in a commercial for the 2013 Toyota RAV4.
Though not as entertaining as the actual teaser for this commercial, it still garnered a couple chuckles from the Autoblog crew. We won’t spoil it for you, but a word of advice: if Cuoco ever shows up in your driveway granting you wishes, we’d suggest you be very clear what you want… and enunciate.
If you want to see the commercial before this Sunday’s game, we have the video (and an accompanying press release) posted after the jump.
Continue reading Toyota, Kaley Cuoco grant wishes in Super Bowl XLVII ad
Toyota, Kaley Cuoco grant wishes in Super Bowl XLVII ad originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Autoblog
The world should know with certainty by the middle of this year whether a subatomic particle discovered last summer is a Higgs boson long sought by physicists, the head of the world’s largest atom smasher said Saturday.
Rolf Heuer, who is the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said he is confident that “towards the middle of the year, we will be there.” By then, he said reams of data from the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, should have been assessed.
The timing could also help Scottish physicist Peter Higgs win a Noble Prize, Heuer said in an interview with The Associated Press in the Swiss resort of Davos.
CERN‘s atom smasher helped scientists declare last July their discovery of a new subatomic particle that Heuer calls “very, very like” a Higgs boson, that promises a new realm of understanding the universe.
The machine, which has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, is being put to rest early this year. The data from it, however, takes longer to analyze.
“Suppose the Higgs Boson is a special snowflake, so you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields,” Heuer said by way of analogy. “That is very difficult, you need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time.”
He said the standard model of particle physics describes only 5 percent of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
To explain how subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, were themselves formed, Higgs and others in the 1960s envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
The idea was that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. But a big question remains: Is this new particle a variation of the Higgs boson, or the same as the Higgs boson that was predicted?
The phrase “God particle,” coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started.
“Now, if there is a deviation in one of the properties of this Higgs boson, that means we open a new window, for example, hopefully into the part of the dark universe, the 95 percent of the unknown universe,” Heuer said.
“If you find the deviation,” he added, “that means if it is not the — but a — Higgs boson, then we might find a fantastic window into the dark universe so we would make another giant leap from the visible to the dark.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
European probes this year will return a treasure trove of data from explorations into the Big Bang, water on Mars and climate change, European Space Agency (ESA) chief Jean-Jacques Dordain said on Thursday.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
A journalist took a trip to the southernmost part of the world, where scientists study astronomy, biology, climatology and more.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Space.com
(Phys.org)—Where do we come from? What is the universe made of? Will the universe exist only for a finite time or will it last forever? These are just some of the questions that University of California, San Diego physicists are working to answer in the high desert of northern Chile. Armed with a massive 3.5 meter (11.5 foot) diameter telescope designed to measure space-time fluctuations produced immediately after the Big Bang, the research team will soon be one step closer to understanding the origin of the universe. The Simons Foundation has recently awarded the team a $4.3 million grant to build and install two more telescopes. Together, the three telescopes will be known as the Simons Array.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
(Phys.org)—(Phys.org)—Scientists have replaced the telescope with the microscope: Using the similarities between the structure of a crystal and the state of the cosmos in the early universe, they have explored a yet unconfirmed phenomenon, the formation of cosmic strings. These so-called “topological defects” are believed to have formed as the universe expanded shortly after the Big Bang.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
