SKIRMISHER

The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist.
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Physically destroying the Earth is hard.
What would it take to vaporize the planet? Let’s define vaporization as blowing it up so hard that it disperses and cannot recollect due to gravity. How much energy would that take?
Think of it this way: take a rock. Throw it up so hard it escapes from the Earth. That [...]

A 16-year-old girl in Madhya Pradesh in India killed herself after watching news about the possibility of the end of the world, following the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Geneva that began on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the world is still okay in its usual fucked up way. Yes, it didn’t end.
{Photo: “Gordon Freeman” may just make your [...]

This computer simulation — presumably based on very realistic parameters — shows what happens to the planet if a 500-km asteroid fucks it up big time. Great bed time video clip for them kids to inspire them to add “Dear God, please protect our dear planet from motherfuckingly huge stones from Satan” to their bedtime [...]

The dangerous pollutant ozone, it turns out, is destroyed by hair and body oils, an oddity revealed when researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology compared washed and unwashed hair. Environmental engineer Glenn Morrison and physician Lakshmi Pandrangi found that dirty hair—generally awash in skin oil—consumed seven times more ozone on average than did [...]

Long a symbol of humanity’s throw-away culture, existing landfill sites are now being viewed as mines of potential which as the world population grows could also help bolster the planet’s dwindling natural resources.
“By 2020 we might have nine billion people on the planet, we could have a very big middle class driving millions more cars, [...]

Over the past two or three decades, scientists have noticed with growing alarm that vast stretches of coastal waters are turning into dead zones — patches of seabed so depleted of oxygen that few creatures, if any, can survive there. In 2004, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) took stock of the phenomenon — which [...]

Scientists say amphibian death could be the start of the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs.
Lots of amphibians (a third to a half of all species) are dying, and their deaths are the breaking-edge of what many scientists are calling the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs checked out 65 million years ago, researchers say [...]