Surprising Science — March 30, 2010

Happy “First Physics Day”

March has its share of strange and obscure holidays. The first of the month is National Pig Day, the fifth is Multiple Personality Day (a chance for anyone to get in touch with themselves), and the fourteenth is National Pi Day (the decimal expansion of pi starts 3.14). And now there is a new March holiday…

First Physics Day! It’s being celebrated today because the particles

in the Large Hadron Collider are finally being smashed together at

super-high energies that mirror conditions after the Big Bang. The

physics community is aflutter over the potential of bagging the elusive

Higgs boson, and the rest of us are grateful that, improbable as it

seemed, the collider did not create a fatal black hole.

(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, user Julian Herzog.)

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

—

with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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