In less than two days - 1 day, 18 hours, and 50 minutes as of this writing - the Large Hadron Collider will be activated. Any of you worried? There's nothing to fear but fear itself. And the Large Hadron Collider. But why are we afraid of it, really? What can it actually do besides making a black hole to swallow up the world? Follow the wormhole into the full article.

Worried that the world will be ending soon? Then you might want to know that NCsoft, the publisher and developer of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, is offering players a shot at immortality. Well, as close to immortality as you can get if the entire earth gets razed by another Tunguska event, a nuclear war, or even aliens. To find out more, check out the full article.

We usually name things after their defining characteristics, such as color. There are exceptions, though. One such exception may be the so-called black hole, which Stephen Hawking theorized as not really being black at all. In fact, professors Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Germain Rousseaux used water to test Hawking's theory. Find out the specifics in the full article after the jump.

Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking recently authored a children's book about the cosmos. During an interview session with several reporters in Cambridge University, Hawking said he has plans to make real science as exciting as science fiction to increase awareness especially among the youth.

The said book is titled "George's Secret Key to the Universe" and will be released in French language this Thursday and in English a week from now. This book is actually part of a trilogy and will mostly revolve around the workings of the solar system, asteroids, and black holes among others.

The book was co-written with Hawking's daughter Lucy and Christophe Galfard - the first Frenchman to write a doctorate thesis on Hawking's observation. According to Hawking, the only fictional thing that readers can found in this book is a supercomputer named Cosmos that opens a door allowing travel into space aboard an asteroid.

The second entry in the trilogy is expected to come out some time next year.

Now, personally, I'm not much of an FPS fan. This title's got my interests quite piqued though: Portal from Valve Corporation, set to be released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

While we've heard all about it since time immemorial, a lot of you (myself included) might still be a bit confused about how the game actually goes. For one, I was never really able to grasp the whole concept of how an "FPS-puzzler involving portals and warping space" would play like.

So, if you've got the same sentiments, feast your eyes on this E3 developer walkthrough. Portal, set in the Half-Life universe, will have you running through rooms (literally) with the help of a gun which can create portals. Kinda trippy too if you see the gameplay footage as seen below. You'll probably be using more of your brains and spatial-relations than FPS skills. Here's a game which will probably make Stephen Hawking proud.

Portal is to be released on October 9 as part of the Half-Life 2 bundle called "The Orange Box," which includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

According to The New York Times, the first person in the world to have his full DNA profiled in text inside a small disk is none other that James D. Watson. Watson aided researchers in the cracking of DNA code five years ago, and scientists believe that this signals a start of a new trend for advancing health care.

 

In fact, scientists claim that once genomes are made public and more is known about them, they can establish links between other genomes and determine the best course of action to take. A person's genes define what diseases he may be prone to, or how long of a life he can expect.

"Nobody quite knows how to manage expectations in such a rapidly changing and deeply personal field," said George M. Church, director of the Personal Genome Project. Data reflected in your own genetic profile isn't always a fixed constant; it changes everyday.

Church explains, "The picture is getting more and more complete, but along the way there’s going to be a lot of, ‘You told us this last week and now you’re telling us this!’"

But at a steep price of US$ 1 million per sequence, mapping out six billion letters of genetic code isn't as attractive as it sounds. There are people who also would rather keep deeply-rooted personal information to themselves than to freely make them known. Scientists believe that the idea would have to overcome the social hurdles first, before becoming a scientific effort.

Dr. Church's own research project has vowed to allow 10 volunteers to have 1% of their DNA profiled, at a much more affordable US$ 1,000. Other companies, such as 23andme, have also begun to offer DNA mapping and readouts. They also make use of tools to keep track of genetic information.

Meanwhile, companies such as Illumina, Applied Biosystems and 454 Life Sciences have claimed that the average price point for the complete human genome has already dropped to US$ 100,000. The same companies are currently participating in a contest to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days for a US$ 10 million grand prize.

Volunteers for the contest include Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, television interviewer Larry King and financier Michael Milken.

 

We first reported about Richard Garriott and Stephen Hawking's "vomit comet" trip during the earlier parts of April. We also reported about what happened during this trip, but now, we have some photos to share with you, be sure to click on the thumbnails to have a better view of the pics.

Garriott joined Hawking, his entourage of assistants, and 25 other passengers on the converted Boeing 727 as it ascended 25,000 feet from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was Garriott's fourth trip to the edge of space but he clearly can't hide his excitement in his blog post (which you can check out in our read link below). As for Prof. Hawking, this trip is indeed another feather in his cap.

"Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" from the band Spiritualized should have been the perfect theme song for one of the world's leading theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Tabula Rasa's Richard Garriott as the two and a handful of others soared through a zero-gravity flight last Thursday.

The momentous event for Hawking (he's been in his wheel chair for four decades now because of ALS) took place inside the cabin of a modified 727 over the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The flight took a total of eight parabolas - the same flight technique astronauts experienced during weightless space environment preparations.

Speaking of which, Richard Garriott mentioned that they only planned for six parabolas but Hawking was grinning widely and seen as really having a great time. Garriott, who is the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, added, "six parabolas really was the intended cutoff point. But he was having so much fun, we went for two more, and then we thought we'd better quit while we're ahead."

Aside from the obvious reason that Hawking wanted to get out of his wheel chair, he explained that he joined the flight because he believes that the future of man lies outside of this endangered world. He commented,

I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically-engineered virus or other dangers, I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

Hawking was accompanied by several people during the flight including four physicians, two nurses, two coaches, and two dozen other friends. The famed physicist announced plans for another zero-gravity flight from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to celebrate his 65th birthday in January.

A month back, we ran an article that argues how unlikely it is for humans to ever travel back in time unless they want to find a black hole and plunge headlong into certain doom in a foolhardy effort to go through a wormhole that hopefully leads to some desolate corner of the universe in a time almost indeterminable.

Sounds real tough, doesn't it? Not really, says physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington. For starters, he says it's theoretically possible to conduct an experiment that may spawn a different approach using an old Einstein paradox. By splitting light particles called photons, he could test what forces bind the sub atomic pieces such that they remain "entangled" even when light years apart.

To put it into context, Cramer says the ideas of the most famous physicist of this generation, Stephen Hawking, regarding time are wrong. Hawking has long fathered the idea that time travels in a straight and linear path through the time-space continuum. The theory essentially suggests that time moves only forward and going against it to travel to the past is impossible. The theory also says that travel to the future is a possibility as long as a body travels in the speed of light or faster.

Cramer agrees about the part concerning future travel, but he says time can ping back both ways in the laws of quantum mechanics, a study that deals with the actions and motions of the smallest particles known to man. He says that by using the Einstein paradox as a model, we can see that split particles influence each other no matter how far apart. This, Cramer says, is only possible if a signal or energy pattern binding the particles transcends time by traveling forward and backwards.

Experiments could have been underway, but neither NASA's Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) nor the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) would cough up the US$ 20,000 that Cramer is asking for. The NIAC is on its way to closing down and the DARPA says the Cramer study is just too strange. Incidentally, DARPA is involved in developing liquid robots and cyborg beetles.

"We're about to hit the wall if we don't get funding," he said. "It would be a shame because even if this doesn't work, I'm sure we'd learn something from trying," says a dejected Cramer.  To find out more about the UW study, follow the read URL.

One of the brains behind Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriott, and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking are teaming up! Unfortunately, they're not gonna put their heads together to concoct a kickass MMORPG, these two guys are going to be travel buddies. Where would they go, you may ask. Well, they're off on the "vomit comet" - a zero-gravity flight that goes up roughly 24, 000 feet and induces weightlessness and queasiness.

The duo would be travelling on April 16.

Said Hawking when asked about this unusual trip, he wanted to show "that people need not be limited by physical handicaps, as long as they are not disabled in spirit". Lord British is of course not a newbie in this field - he is a space enthusiast and has gone on three zero-gravity flights before. In fact, Richard Garriott is an investor in Zero Gravity Corporation, a company who sells the flights on a modified and amped Boeing 727.

According to Mike Crouch, a NCSoft spokesman, Mr. Garriott is "very excited about it...He's read all of his books, watched as many programs on Professor Hawking as possible".

Well, hopefully after this trip, he'll give us more updates on Tabula Rasa.