Topic: Technology
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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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...

iSpace Has a Rubric for Mission 2 Success

iSpace Has a Rubric for Mission 2 Success

by | Jan 24, 2025 |

Over the past year, we've seen a variety of different commercial missions that do things I wouldn't necessarily consider successful. We've seen lunar landers unintentionally practice gymnastics by standing on their heads and flipping over sideways. We've seen...

The Monkeys Can’t Write Hamlet

The Monkeys Can’t Write Hamlet

by | Dec 3, 2024 |

By New York Zoological Society — Image derived from: Chimpanzee seated at a typewriter; Public Domain. I have bad news for one of statistics favorite sayings. As the story goes, given enough time and enough monkey’s randomly pressing keys on a keyboard, the complete...

Telescopes galore: Euclid, Rubin, and Roman

Telescopes galore: Euclid, Rubin, and Roman

by | Nov 4, 2024 |

Back in 1998, researchers studying supernovae discovered that our universe is accelerating apart. Up until that point, it had been understood that our universe’s expansion was either going to slow to a stop, continue on as is-ish, or reverse it’s motion and collapse...

VIPER May Live to Rove Another Day

VIPER May Live to Rove Another Day

by | Sep 17, 2024 |

A computer generated concept image of the VIPER rover Despite what the contents of this and recent episodes might imply, my passion is for science not for spacecraft. The thing is, sometimes spacecraft are needed to do the science. And lately, I and many others have...

The Cost of Space Flight on the Planet

The Cost of Space Flight on the Planet

by | Sep 17, 2024 |

As a nerdy member of GenX, I can state with pride and shame that I watched Buck Rogers in the early 80s and was constantly fascinated by all the weird ways their writers found for fictional 24th century scientists to misunderstand the relics from the 20th century....