“In what can only be considered a bizarre court case, a former nuclear safety officer and others are suing the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop the use of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) until its safety is reassessed. The plaintiffs cite three possible ‘doomsday‘ scenarios which might occur if the LHC becomes operational: the creation of microscopic black holes which would grow and swallow matter, the creation of strangelets which, if they touch other matter, would convert that matter into strangelets or the creation of magnetic monopoles which could start a chain reaction and convert atoms to other forms of matter. CERN will hold a public open house meeting on April 6 with word having been spread to some researchers to be prepared to answer questions on microscopic black holes and strangelets if asked.”

• Slashdot | Large Hadron Collider Sparks ‘Doomsday’ Lawsuit

I have always found the nature of musical tones interesting; this interest just increased! - We have a lot to learn from studying the maths and nature of waves in general, and applying the science to music might just be one of the greatest ways to do this. Go go string-theory!!

An anonymous slashdot reader notes a Time.com profile of Princeton University music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko, who has applied some string-theory math to the study of music and found that all possible chordal music can be represented in a higher-dimensional space. His research was published last year in Science — it was the first paper on music theory they ever ran. The paper and background material, including movies, can be viewed at Tymoczko’s site.

• Time.com - The Geometry of Music
• Dmitri Tymoczko

Slashdot: Encyclopedia of Life opened up to the public today with its first 30,000 pages in place — and, according to the AP, promptly crumbled even before being Slashdotted. (The site seems fine now.) We discussed this project last year when it was announced. The Telegraph has an overview of the launch, and reports that only 25 “exemplar” pages on the site are fully fleshed out to the extent scientists hope eventually to attain for all species; the other few tens of thousands are expanded placeholders. The project hopes to begin taking input from citizen-scientists late this year.

• Slashdot.org: Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages

Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA, are reported in the 29 January 2008 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.”Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material—it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Lorenz. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”

Photo rendering: Copyright Kees Veenenbos

• ESA - Space Science - Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

Physicist may have finally cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has befuddled physicists for the past 40 years, according to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, which concludes that that an outside observer can never lose objects down a black hole.Case Western Reserve University physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss came to this conclusion after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes.

“It’s complicated and very complex,” noted the researchers, regarding both the general problem and their particular approach to try to solve it.

The question that the physicists set out to solve is: “what happens once something collapses into a black hole?”

• Black hole information loss paradox cracked | Press Esc
• The Black Hole Information Loss Problem