Okay. So we know that the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, has run into a few snags recently, including a major coolant leak, an arrest, and numerous delays.

Now we can add bird droppings to the list. Or, more specifically, a dropped piece of bread.

Popular Science reports that a bird dropped a baguette on a section of LHC machinery outdoors, which eventually caused part of the accelerator to overheat--enough that if the LHC were actually running at the time, the heat would have triggered automatic failsafes and shut down the system.

The bread won't cause another delay in the planned reactivation next month, according to the report.

The $1 million race to build a lunar lander is heating up, as--unexpectedly--Masten Space Systems' Xoie rocket prototype has taken the lead. MSNBC reports that the Masten team's remote-controlled rocket had a successful test flight, just one day after a damaging fire on the launch pad and two days after communications glitches derailed two earlier launch attempts.

Level 2 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge requires that a remote-controlled aircraft makes a complete round trip between one launch pad and a boulder-strewn pad about 164 feet away, according to the report. Each leg of the flight needs to last at least three minutes, and the rocket has to rise up 50 meters from the ground--all within a 135 minute time period.

Armadillo Aerospace--backed by id software's John Carmack--first qualified to win last month. Since more than one team has now qualified for the prize, judges will decide who to award it to based on the accuracy of the flight. (Via Slashdot)

This is starting to become a regular event: Astronomers have detected what appears to be the most distant object anyone has seen from Earth, according to NPR.

The discovery, which appears in the current issue of Nature, involves a gamma ray burst, which is essentially a type of exploding star (visible as the tiny red dot in the center of the photo). "These things are brighter than anything else we know of in the universe," said Nial Tanvir, a University of Leicester astronomer who was on one of the two teams involved in the discovery. "In principle we can see them very far away but they're incredibly rare."

So here's the tech portion: the astronomers used NASA's SWIFT satellite to find the gamma ray burst. In this case, it turns out to be from a star that collapsed when the universe was "only" 600 million years old; that's 13.1 billion years ago. The light took that long to reach us, and finally arrived on April 23rd of this year--and is the most distant object ever detected, according to the report.

"It was absolutely thrilling -- a spine-tingling moment, actually," Tanvir said in the article. (Thanks to Warren W for sending this in.) (Image credit: A.J.Levan and N.R.Tanvir/Nature)

Researchers figured out how to simulate a miniature black hole in a lab--though fortunately for us, it's not going to eat the Earth, as Space.com reports.

"The device we created is not a real black hole, but only a device to mimic the black-hole effect," said researcher Tie Jun Cui, a professor at Southeast University in China, in the article. "Actually, the device can trap and absorb the electromagnetic waves which hit the device. Hence we call it as the Electromagnetic Black Hole." Essentially, the pseudo black hole sucks in light, but not mass.

The team "built the black hole" (I love my job) out of circuit board, by linking 60 concentric circular layers etched with copper patterns, the report said. In turn, the patterns interact with electromagnetic waves. That means the device, as a result, absorbs any incoming light that's in the microwave range of the spectrum--but not any mass. (Image credit: Cheng/Cui/Arxiv)

The weather isn't cooperating at the moment, but NASA is poised to launch its highly-anticipated Ares I-X rocket this morning. As Space.com reports, the rocket is designed both to replace the aging space shuttle and--perhaps one day--transport humans to Mars.

To commemorate the event, NASA built the booster stage from parts previously flown on 30 shuttle missions, including the one that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, according to the report.

Currently, winds are a little heavy at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But NASA has until noon today to launch the rocket before rescheduling. The rocket won't actually enter space; instead, it will follow a 28-mile-high, five minute flight profile while over 700 sensors record its performance, according to the report. (Image credit: NASA)

Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Washington are receiving $1.6 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) to enable the automated discovery of astrophysical phenomena.

The idea is to capitalize on a new generation of telescopes--to be built and deployed over the next decade--by automating the sifting of massive amounts of cosmological data. The tools will be able to spot new objects for further study, as well as identify patterns in observational data that could help scientists understand how the universe evolved.

Get ready to duck (again). The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has now reached an operating temperature of 1.9K--colder than outer space itself, according to Ars Technica.

That means the LHC will soon be ready to begin crashing particles together, after a catastrophic failure and series of repairs over the past year took the accelerator out of commission.

The current prognosis is that the LHC will begin operations sometime in the next five weeks. It will accelerate particles at speeds very close to the speed of light. In effect, they'd run around the 16.7-mile length of the accelerator over 11,000 times per second, the report said. That necessitates the accelerator contain a vacuum that's an order of magnitude less dense than the moon's atmosphere. In other words, this is tough stuff, so let's give those guys a break about that whole catastrophic failure thing. (Image credit: CERN)

Hold onto your phasers: a new rocket, designed jointly by NASA, Ad Astra, and Canadian firm Nautel, could potentially slash trip times to Mars to as little as 39 days. And yep, it uses ion propulsion--just like Star Trek taught us.

Ion propulsion, via the new plasma-based VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engine, is now close to the point where it could be tested on a flight to the moon, according to Canada.com. The rocket works by turning electrical power into thrust in order to harness solar energy.

The 39 day time compares to six months using current rocket technology. Actually, a round-trip ticket to Mars would take far longer than even six months. Since Mars and Earth only pass close to each other every two years, engineers assume a crew would go one way, wait a year, and then fly back the next time the planets passed each other by, according to the report.

The ion drive would enable astronauts to shoot there and back during a single close approach. (Image credit: Ad Astra) (Via Slashdot)

There's nothing quite like having a meal with geniuses. And Popular Mechanics gave me that opportunity today, at a lunch held in honor of its Breakthrough Awards 2009 winners.

In a panel during the lunch, PM's Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs (far right) introduced three of the honorees, each of who gave us a précis of his or her winning project. 

William Borucki (far left) is the science principal investigator of NASA's Kepler mission, whose aim is to find habitable planets.  As he explained it, there are a series of steps humanity needs to take in order to expand into the galaxy; first, we have to determine whether other "earths" are frequent or rare. If they are common, we need to determine more closely their habitability. Then, Borucki said, "our children decide what happens."

Pull up a seat and grab some popcorn--NASA is going to crash two spacecraft into the moon tomorrow!

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will drop its Centaur upper-stage rocket onto the moon's surface at 7:31 AM ET, according to CNN. The idea is to disturb the lunar dust enough to reveal the presence of water somewhere in the soil.

Four minutes later (7:35 AM ET), the LCROSS itself will fly through the debris plume, collect some data, and send it back to Earth--and then plunge into the Cabeaus crater by the moon's south pole, according to the report.

While all this chaos is going on, the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will watch, take pictures, and crack nerdy jokes about the collisions to each other. (OK, I made up the last bit.) The best part: NASA claims the debris plumes will be visible through any 10-inch or larger backyard telescope. Or watch it tomorrow on NASA TV.

Scientists have discovered a huge ring around Saturn--and no, not the ones we already all know about. (This isn't The Onion.)

NASA scientists have found a ring much further out from the planet, one that's made up of debris from Saturn's distant moon Phoebe, according to Space.com. It turns out astronomers have long suspected the presence of this ring because of the color of another one of the planet's moons, Iapetus. Iapetus has one dark side and one light side; some scientists figured that it could be debris dust from Phoebe, since the composition was very similar, according to the report.

It turns out 40 years of believing the moon's surface was dry wasn't the case. New observations from three separate spacecraft, on three different missions, have confirmed "unambiguous evidence" of water across the moon's surface, even in sunlit regions, according to Space.com.

There's not a *lot* of water; one ton of the top layer of the surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, the report said. But it's there--as both H2O molecules and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen chemically bonded)--and could be harnessed as a source of drinking water or fuel for a future permanent moon base. This is in addition to the polar ice found by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The back story: forty years ago, astronauts brought back lunar rock samples. Trace amounts of water were detected at the time. But scientists assumed it was due to contamination from Earth, since the containers had leaked, according to the article. But now observations from Chandrayaan-1, NASA's Deep Impact probe, and even NASA's Cassini spacecraft made over the last 10 years have proved the presence of water conclusively. NASA is planning a 2pm EST briefing today to discuss the findings. (Image credit: NASA)

It's possible that the Red Planet wasn't always red.

New research has found a compelling explanation for Mars' trademark rusty color, according to Space.com. Drawing data from NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers, scientists are theorizing that the red color is a relatively new development due to the erosion of rocks on the planet's surface, yielding a red mineral that stains the dust, the report said.

It turns out it's something we could replicate on Earth. Here's how it works, according to Jonathan Merrison of the Aarhus Mars Simulation Laboratory in Denmark: seal samples of quartz sand in flask flasks, and then tumble them over and over again. The process simulates gentle winds on the surface of Mars, and reduces about 10 percent of the grains to rust over a period of seven months. Then, add powdered magnetite--an iron oxide found on the red planet--and watch the sand become red as it continues to tumble in the flasks.

"We think we have a process that explains how the dust became red without liquid water, which doesn't seem to fit in with the data," Merrison said in the report. "Before this work, I think most people in the field kind of thought the Martian surface was billions of years old and had always been red. This work seems to imply that it could be quite recent - millions of years instead of billions of years." (Image credit: NASA)

After finding over 370 extrasolar planets over the past 15 years, scientists have confirmed the first Earth-like rocky planet outside the solar system, according to CNN.

To date, known exoplanets have been gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. That doesn't necessarily mean the recently discovered rocky planet, called COROT-7B, can support life. While its composition may be similar to that of our own planet, COROT-7B orbits very close to its star, the report said. The planet's daytime temperature at the surface could reach over 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, while its nighttime temperature may drop to 328 degrees below zero.

Astronomer Artie Hatzes said in the report that the star-facing side of the planet was likely molten, while the back could be icy. "We think it has no atmosphere to redistribute the heat," he said, adding that astronomers "would never have dreamed" of finding a rocky planet orbiting so close to a star--close enough that its entire "year" is shorter than one of our own 24-hour days. (Artist credit: ESO/L Calcada)

Around the corner from the PCMag.com office is a construction site for a hi-rise apartment complex. Last Tuesday, when I passed it on my lunch hour, I noticed one of the workers pointing his iPhone's camera up at the structure, so I tried to see what he was aiming at.

Above the building, I spotted a rainbow-like arc that I immediately recognized as a portion of a solar halo, and snapped a number of pictures of it (such as the one above) mostly with my Canon SD990 IS. (I even got a few good shots of it with my iPhone.)

In observing and photographing solar halo phenomena, the biggest obstacle, ironically, is the Sun itself. You must avoid looking at the Sun--even when partially obscured by thin clouds, looking directly at it can cause eye damage. As for photography, the Sun's glare can wash out much of the detail of the delicate arcs, and spots, as well as the structure of the accompanying cirrostratus (and sometimes cirrus) clouds. So be sure to hide the Sun behind a tree, a building, a street sign, or other object--even a hand will do in a pinch.

Note that in photographing a halo, you'll need to focus on the sky rather than the nearby object, or else the halo will be blurred. You can do this by pointing the camera at the open sky and engaging the autofocus if you're in automatic mode--usually, a green box will appear when the shutter is half-pressed. Then, while keeping the shutter half-pressed, you should return to your initial framing with the nearby object in view, and press the shutter fully to complete the shot) It's a good idea to move the camera around a bit to find the place with the least glare before you shoot. Although it's good to try both, I find that wider-field shots often work better than close-ups--for one thing, if you want to capture the entire solar halo, it may be necessary to go as wide as you can.