NYT: "Large Hadron Collider Finally Smashing Properly"

Best headline of the week (so far) and best nerd news all around! From the Grey Lady:

Following two false starts due to electrical failures, protons whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece around a 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack outside of Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building sized detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the world.

The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the collider. The relief spread to bleary gatherings of particle physicists all around the world, who have collectively staked the future of their profession on the idea that the new collider will eventually reveal new secrets of the universe, like the identity of the dark matter that shapes the visible cosmos and the strange particle known as the “Higgs,” which is thought to imbue other particles with mass. Until now, these have been tantalizingly out of reach.

Congrats to the scientists at CERN. Send them a thank you that we may now all enter our own personal pocketverses.

Full New York Times article

Newly discovered species of humans in Siberia

Archeologists publishing in the journal Nature, have discovered the 40,000 year-old pinky bone of what appears to be a new species of human--in Siberia. (Actually, it's southern Siberia, but it's still SIBERIA). A DNA analysis revels that the, uh, owner--was neither directly related to humans or neanderthals of the era, but more likely a distinct offshoot of humans. From USAToday:

Analysis of the pinky bone discovered in a dirt layer about 40,000 years old yielded enough DNA for the gene study. It shows the creature's ancestry diverged from humans and Neanderthals roughly 1 million years ago. Dubbed "x-woman" by the researchers, despite its undetermined gender, the pinky owner may have belonged to an archaic human species such as Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, known only from fossils, or an unknown pre-human species. From the size of the pinky tip, the team estimates its owner was a 5- or 6-year-old child.

Check out the full article or the article at Nature.com. Sharp readers will note that the image found at USAToday is a bit misleading as the pinky belonged to a child and the image is of an already known hominid.

Previously: Hobbits Discovered!

Evidence of stone age sailors discovered

 

Image: Nicholas Thompson and Chad DiGregorio via New York Times

Stone tools dating back to circa 100,000 years (or more) ago have been discovered on the island of Crete, indicating prehistoric sailors visited the island long before the Greeks became Ancient History, according to two new findings. From the New York Times:

Previous artifact discoveries had shown people reaching Cyprus, a few other Greek islands and possibly Sardinia no earlier than 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia, beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence, notably the skeletons and artifacts on the Indonesian island of Flores, of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

More than 2,000 artifacts were recovered from the site, so this appears to be a mega find re-writing the history books. And in what qualifies as best sci-fi inspiring quote from the article:

“We were flummoxed,” Dr. Runnels said in an interview. “These things were just not supposed to be there.”

Indeed! But still amazingly cool that these things not only existed, but in huge numbers. Now wouldn't it be cool if they discovered Atlantis and Lemuria! ;)

Read the full story...

Reptoids of the Los Angeles Undergound!

So here's a plug-n-play RPG adventure if there ever was one. Man claims there's an entire underground city of lizard people living under LA and maps it. Cool, huh? The map above is an artifact from the 1930s and a product geophysicist mining engineer, G. Warren Shufelt. There's your adventure module right there--map and all! Reptoids.com, a reptilian alien tracking site (I'm not joking) has reprinted the original 1934 LA Times article that gives an overview of this strange legend:

So firmly does Shufelt and a little staff of assistants believe that a maze of catacombs and priceless golden tablets are to be found beneath downtown Los Angeles that the engineer and his aids have already driven a shaft 250 feet into the ground, the mouth of the shaft being on the old Banning property on North Hill street, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, Spring street and North Broadway.
And so convinced is the engineer of the infallibility of a radio x-ray perfected by him for detecting the presence of minerals and tunnels below the surface of the ground, an apparatus with which he says he has traced a pattern of catacombs and vaults forming the lost city, that he plans to continue sending his shaft downward until he has reached a depth of 1000 feet before discontinuing operations.

It gets better, apparently the lizard people dug the catacombs with chemicals after a great fire that scorched the Earth....5,000 years ago.

Large rooms in the domes of the hills above the city of labyrinths housed 1000 families "in the manner of tall buildings" and imperishable food supplies of the herb variety were stored in the catacombs to provide sustenance for the Lizard folk for great length of time as the next fire swept over the earth.

Cool! Get the round up of links from Boing Boing.