Of the estimated 10,000 slides shown at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, a few stand out as likely to stick around for a while. One may be the first slide ever that lists all possible future projects in high-energy physics around the world, along with their states of readiness. 
One topic which generated a lot of discussion at the Gravity and Cosmology meeting was the void model of the Universe. The basic argument is simple: the dark energy is an ugly addition to our cosmological standard model, with 70% of the energy density of the Universe some mysterious substance with weird properties. From a [...]
Exploring our dark universe is usually the domain of extreme physics. Clues to dark matter and energy are searched for by huge neutrino telescopes and particle detectors, deep underground, and by experiments launched into space. But an experiment doesn't have to be exotic to explore the unexplained. At the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which ends today in Paris, scientists from the GammeV-CHASE experiment unveiled the first results from their experiment, which used 30 hours' worth of data from a 10-meter-long experiment to place the world's best limits on particles of dark energy.
CERN's press release issued today states that the LHC's first measurements are allowing them to “rediscover” the Standard Model of particle physics. But the presentations at ICHEP tell a slightly different story.
Everyone's catching Higgs fever, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The elusive particle - and the race between the experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron and those at the Large Hadron Collider to discover it - have made headlines for years, but the frenzy reached new heights in the run-up to the International Conference on High Energy Physics. 
It might be a long way to the top, but the LHC experiments are already half way there: at the ICHEP conference in Paris CMS and ATLAS presented their first candidates for top quark, the heaviest particle in the Standard Model. 
Around 10:30pm last night I started to see reports coming in on Twitter of a large and bright noctilucent cloud (NLC) display appearing across much of the country. Poking my head out the window I was, to my dismay, greeted with thick uniform cloud lit by light pollution. Hoping for the best, I checked on [...]
The Milky Way over Dartmoor (click to see a bigger version). Credit: Will Gater I thought I’d just briefly share this image with you all and give you a quick heads-up for some sights to look out for in the night sky at the moment. I took this image last weekend from one of my [...]
I am presently in Japan, participating in the Gravity and Cosmology workshop at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics on the Kyoto University campus. The big news here is that the Large Cryogenic Gravitational-wave Telescope (LCGT) was just approved for funding! I believe that this is the press release, as witnessed by the exclamation mark [...]