Topic: Pamela Gay
CERN did Alchemy, turning Lead to Gold

CERN did Alchemy, turning Lead to Gold

by | May 16, 2025 |

Reaction for lead to transmute into gold. Credit: CERN Showing that alchemy is possible if you have a big enough particle accelerator, researchers using the Large Hadron Collider have managed, not entirely on purpose, to transform Lead into Gold. According to a press release from CERN, “Near-miss collisions between high-energy lead nuclei at the LHC generate intense electromagnetic fields that can knock out protons and transform lead into fleeting quantities of gold nuclei.”And when they say fleeting quantities… their paper states they “estimated a total of some 2.9x10-11 g of various gold...

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New Weird Star-Star-Planet Combination

New Weird Star-Star-Planet Combination

by | May 5, 2025 |

The Universe sometimes likes to mock us. Such is the case with exoplanets. Once upon a time, researchers would sagely say, “Solar Systems like Tatooine, with twin stars, likely don’t exist.” The thing is, this was based on models that relied on limits created with...

Rubin Observatory Brings Much Needed Joy

Rubin Observatory Brings Much Needed Joy

by | Apr 25, 2025 |

Ok, so we held off running this last little section while I waited to see if Vera Rubin observatory would put out a First Light press release. Rubin Observatory did not put out a first light press release. They put out a Facebook post saying “on-sky engineering tests...

Leading Science Via Meritocracy and Consensus

Leading Science Via Meritocracy and Consensus

by | Apr 23, 2025 |

An American flag hung upside down from a cliff by National Parks employees, signifying distress. Credit: Tracy Barbutes / San Francisco Chronical One of the imperfectly realized goals of science is to reward people fairly for their excellence and defining our future...

It’s Time to Give Up on Supersymmetry

It’s Time to Give Up on Supersymmetry

by | Apr 9, 2025 |

Since I was old enough to read about particle physics, I’ve been reading about how one possible set of solutions to explain why we have the particles we have in our universe would require the existence of a massive zoo of particles that that bring the population of...

Galaxies Seen Through Gas

Galaxies Seen Through Gas

by | Apr 7, 2025 |

One of the more surreal aspects of JWST images is that infrared light can pass through a lot of dust and gas, allowing us to see galaxies that were previously hidden. New images of Herbig-Haro 49/50 resemble a weirdly abstract Christmas tree; a ring galaxy ornaments...

Dark Energy Search Gets Dynamic

Dark Energy Search Gets Dynamic

by | Apr 6, 2025 |

At the beginning of our last episode, I mentioned that we’d just learned that new work by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, had provided hints that our universe has a changing density of dark energy, but I needed time to look over the research. Well,...

Ancient Crater Found Hiding in Australia

Ancient Crater Found Hiding in Australia

by | Mar 26, 2025 |

I want to bring you a story that looks to rewrite a bit of our world's history. Researchers studying the geology of an Australian feature called the North Pole Dome, despite being located in Western Australia, found evidence that the feature is associated with a 3.5...