WIMPS
esiegel | April 10, 2013"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Three classic observations -- the Hubble expansion of the Universe, the leftover cosmic microwave background radiation, and the observed abundance of the light elements -- lead us inevitably to modeling our Universe as having begun in a hot, dense state from which it expanded and cooled. There is no other explanation that agrees…
jhalper | May 29, 2012Not many Israelis make it all the way to the South Pole. (In fact, very few people go there, at all. Not only is it really, really cold, it is extremely difficult and expensive to transport people, gear and necessities to this remote and inhospitable corner of the earth.) So when we learned that Dr. Hagar Landsman, who recently joined the Weizmann Institute’s Physics Faculty, has a part-time gig at the IceCube neutrino detector array, we simply had to write about her. Landsman’s specialty is particle detectors, and IceCube has 5,000 of them buried under several kilometers of ice. In her brief…