nerds break really expensive machine

The Large Hadron Collider has suffered a setback. The very-important-piece-of-equipment that holds three magnets in place broke. A representative of CERN- the organization building the LHC - said that they could not say whether or not this would cause a delay because they did not yet fully understand the situation.
That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the organization that plans to build lots of black holes underneath the French-Switzerland border. Very, very safe black holes, I should add... or at least, safe according to Stephen Hawking.
American scientists are now saying that America is losing the edge in particle physics, by ceding it to Europe and the LHC.
Let them have it, I say. Particle physics was a fast moving, important field fifty years ago. These days it's the preserve of tenured professors who are big on gravitas and short on imagination. The sharp young minds of today are working on the problems of today. That is to say, they're getting into genetics, robotics, computation, cognitive science, AI, medicine. Not particle physics.
These days, particle physicists and particle accelerators are mainly producers of spin of the P.R. kind, not the nuclear kind.
But if CERN can't build a black hole factory for the shoestring budget of eight billion dollars, maybe they should hand it over to the americans. That way, if it blows up the world, we can blame it all on George Bush.
And he won't care. One more screw-up will be neither here nor there.

heart before head: the time travel problem

In mathematics, if you can prove that a statement leads to an inconsistency (or erroneous conclusion), then the statement must be wrong. Bertrand Russell, a giant of mathematics and philosophy, gave a colorful example of this.

During a popular lecture Russell explained that any statement can be proved, given a single inconsistency. (A standard remark in logic)

A heckler shouted:
Then I give to you that 2 times 2 equals 5.
Now prove to me you are the pope!

Russell: Well, subtracting three from both sides, we have two equals one.
Now my dear Sir, you agree that the pope and I are two:
therefore the pope and I are one!"

So, since Russell is not the pope, then two times two doesn't equal five, and two doesn't equal one.
Easy. So why do people not apply this when it comes to time travel?
Time travel leads to clear paradoxes and inconsistencies. If you know the effect before you perform the action, you can change the action: a clear contradiction.
Choose your poision.
1) Marty McFly traveled back in Hollywood time (in Back to The Future), and accidentally stopped his parents from marrying and having a child. He spent the rest of the movie trying to undo the error.
2) if I go back to the time of Isaac Newton, meet him, and give him the theory of gravity, where did the theory of gravity come from?
3) if I go back in time one hour and stop myself from traveling back in time (by, say, locking myself in a room), what happens to me?
and so on. Essentially, we've arrived at a point where 2=1. Therefore, the premise - time travel - must be false.

This has not stopped John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, from trying to get funding to run an experiment to see if time travel exists. The idea is to extend what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" to happen in fibre-optic cables. If so, then the information could arrive before if it is sent. There have been calls for NASA to fund this experiment .
But as Darnell Clayton of colonyworlds.com said, If NASA ever funded a project like this, I would vote for its removal as a governmental agency.
Why do we persist in dreaming of time travel, when first, there is no evidence for it, and second, it is logically impossible?
The reason is memory. The world of the past seems so real to us, it seems like a place we could visit, if only we had the vehicle. There are people, and events, and places, that we experienced and saw, that seem to us like they are in a distant land.
The way we remember leads us to believe in the past as a place, like another country, rather than a time. Travelling in time for a mere hour, as in my example above, or forwards a few days (as in the Philip K Dick story, A little something for us tempunauts), seems strange and bizarre. In fact, traveling a small distance in time seems more bizarre than travelling to a far away time. That's because nearby times, near future and near past, are more correctly represented in our heads as times, not places.
No matter how much evidence there is against the possibility of time travel, people will still believe it is possible.
It's easy to imagine, and it sounds like fun.
And the Pope and I are one.

caves, water on mars

The Mars Express Probe is circling Mars, gathering data, and sending the data through space back to Earth. Its radar equipment is known as the MARSIS radar (that stands for "Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding". Data has recently been analyzed from the probe on the Martian polar caps, which appear to be water. This is interesting, because water is believed to be essential for life.
From spaceref.com:

the study of the Marsis radar signal has revealed that the South Polar region of Mars, which has the shape of a giant dome of around 1000 km diameter, is mainly composed of ice.
...it has been possible to estimate the total volume of ice in this region at 1.6 million cubic kilometers. If this volume of ice was distributed in a uniform manner over the whole surface of the planet, Mars would be covered by 11 m of water.

A sea of water eleven metres deep over the whole planet! (if it were evenly spread). That's a lot of water.
Another recent discovery is the existence of underground caves on the surface of Mars.
Or to speak more precisely, there are several large dark spots near the equator that appear to be caves. One of them is estimated to be as much as 130 metres deep. These would make a suitable place
If they are in fact caves, then these would be a place to search for signs of life on Mars. If microbial life on other planets does exist, then it would be more likely to survive -and its fossils to be preserved - somewhere away from the surface bombardment of meteors from outer space.
This is by no means certain, but the answer is interesting either way. As science fiction author Arthur C Clark once said:

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."

Global warming on mars

In 2005, NASA reported that its Mars Global Surveyor had detected three consecutive years of melting and shrinkage of the southern polar ice caps. This was interpreted by many as evidence of global warming on mars.
In response, National Geographic ran an article about Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia. Abdussamatov is a global warming skeptic:

"Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance."

As balance, they also interviewed other scientists who said that his views were well outside the mainstream consensus of climate scientists.
Realclimate.org ran an article disputing the conclusions, suggesting that a three-year local change was not enough data to infer global warming. The logic of skeptics went like this: if Mars is warming (and there is some - rather less compelling -evidence that Triton and Pluto are as well), then perhaps the solar system is warming due to solar fluctuations.
The story made the rounds of newspapers and blogs but was largely forgotten. It re-emerged this week with the publication in Nature of a paper on the Martian climate. The authors, Lori Fenton of the Carl Sagan Center as well as Paul Geissler (NASA) and Robert Haberle (US Geological Survey), report on simulation models that they developed of the Martian surface. Their conclusion is that the current warming on Mars is due to changes in wind patterns causing dust storms. These wind patterns, in turn, were caused by changes in the brightness of the surface of Mars, caused by deposits of bright dust. In short, it's a cyclical phemonenon that's unique to Mars.
Fenton told Space.com:

"A dust storm is kind of like a big party that picks up dust and tosses it everywhere," said study leader Lori Fenton of the NASA Ames Research Center in California. "It takes forever to clean up after a party."
Once the dust storm subsides, particles fall out of the atmosphere and are redistributed over a large portion of the planet. "You can almost think of a big dust storm as a resetting mechanism."

If the researchers are right, then Martian "global warming" is due to dust storms, not solar output. So that would seem to take the wind out of the sails of warming skeptics. After all the skeptical argument went something like this:
1) Earth and Mars are both warming.
2) Ockam's razor would suggest a common cause
3) this common cause is most likely due to the sun
4) therefore global warming, being due to the sun is
(a) out of our control, and
(b) nothing to worry about (since fluctuations tend to reverse).
But if the warming on Mars has nothing to do with the sun, then there are really no lessons in it for us Earthlings. Essentially, this weakens the solar fluctuation argument, and weakens the Martian global warming as a data point in the debate.
This study, it was hoped, would put to rest a key climate-skeptic talking point. However, judging by the response around the internet, it has not achieved this, at least in the public domain. The rhetorical power of another planet experiencing climate change has led to a chorus of skepticism about the reality of man-made global warming on earth.
The release of the study coincides with an editorial about overblown rhetoric from climate scientists in the Sydney Morning Herald:

The first thing that strikes you on reading the latest consensus report from the world's climate scientists about the effect of global warming is that it is like the plot of an Armageddon movie.

and later...

The next thing that strikes you about the report is the high degree of uncertainty to which the authors readily confess. Climate change, the scientists write, "is taken to be due to both natural variability and human activities. The relative proportions are unknown unless otherwise stated".

It is true that some activists for action on climate change sometimes overstate the case. Calm, reasoned argument may not grab headlines in the short term, but it is better in the long term. Hyperbole gets a lot of attention, but it can come back to bite you.
While Martian climate change causes storms here on Earth, it may be good news for our species down the road. In fact, it may eventually make the Martian environment a habitable place for humans to live. A NASA report in 2001 noted that Mars was too cold to support humans or many other Earth species. A suggestion was made that introducing greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere may induce sufficient warming for Earth-like life to be supported.
Of course, if Martian warming is merely part of the Martian long-term weather cycle, then we may just have to do it ourselves.