The Large Hadron Collider is a machine that essentially smashes subatomic particles together so scientists can study the outcome. The 15-year-old project has a total cost of $10 billion and has been plagued with problems that have prevented it from operating as intended.

As of March 30, 2010, scientists working on the project had something to rejoice about as the machine was able to make subatomic particles collide head-on at energies far greater than have ever been achieved before.

And rejoice they did, very excitedly and in a few different languages as anyone who was watching the live stream provided by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN.

Personally I understood about 15 percent of what was being said during this stream, but that’s probably a generous overstatement on my part. Still, there are others who would either be bored to tears with the thought of watching it or (if forced to watch) comprehend even less than I [...]

The names Roland Emmerich and Isaac Asimov are about as opposite as two elements of the same basic spectrum can be.

Emmerich is known for his massive end of the world disaster films like Independence Day and 2012, but has also faced much criticism for his lack of other crucial story elements, specifically with titles like Godzilla, 10,000 B.C., and The Day After Tomorrow. Asimov is a legendary author and a master of the realms of science fiction literature. He has written over 500 books and was also a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, just to note a couple of his awe-inspiring lifetime accomplishments. His most popular work as an author are his seven-book creation known as the Foundation series.

So what do these two have in common? Well, Roland Emmerich is currently the man who holds the arduous task of trying to adapt Asimov’s Foundation into blockbuster movies, of course! And with the knowledge that Emmerich is the man handling this, one of the most classic of series in science fiction literature, fans of Asimov may not want to read further. [...]

One of my favorite scenes in The Empire Strikes Back is when Han Solo rescues Luke Skywalker on Hoth. When Han finds Luke stranded outside the rebel base, Luke’s been injured in a Wampa attack and is near freezing and delirious. To keep his friend alive until he can build their shelter for the night, Han uses Luke’s lightsaber to cut open his tauntaun (which had dropped dead from the cold just as Han found Luke) and secures his friend inside the animal.

Now, thanks to protocol droid C3PO, we know that the odds of surviving the night in sub-zero temperature outside the Hoth rebel base are 725 to 1 (although, we don’t know if this is with spending the night in a shelter or just out there exposed to the elements). Considering the dire situation Luke was in, his odds of survival were even worse. That means that Han had to get that shelter build right away.

The folks over at Wolf Gnards wondered, as most of us have as well, how long could Luke have survived in that tauntaun, especially since the animal had already died of severe hypothermia itself? According to their calculations, Han had about 56 minutes to build that shelter before Luke died of hypothermia [...]

A new TV series is just about to debut on the Science channel called Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible. The show is hosted by quite possibly the smartest dude ever to live, Dr. Michio Kaku, and explores the science fiction creations that we know without a shadow of a doubt to be futuristic and fantastical impossibilities, and offers realistic ways to bring them into existence.

One of the episodes is set to cover a topic that will be near and dear to our very own geek hearts: lightsabers! The episode will take a look at the fictional super-weapon and then try and figure out a way to actually create one. Whether they accomplish such a thing is unknown and rather unlikely, but hell, we all just won’t be able to help but watch and see for ourselves.

Head on over to the other side to read the show’s synopsis and watch a short clip from the lightsaber episode, as well as a clip from their parallel universe episode. [...]

We’ve certainly seen the story before: high technology machines and robots evolve, rise up, and take over the world of men. Whether it’s Battlestar Galactica, the Terminator franchise, or a movie like I, Robot, people love being scared by the thought of man-made machines turning on us and killing us all. If this trend is kept up, the robot apocalypse could become a genre in itself like zombies, but that isn’t stopping DreamWorks, who are on the verge of acquiring the rights to an unpublished manuscript entitled Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson.

So what makes this project so attractive? What makes Robopocalypse different from the other movies that we’ve seen? Well, it’s realism. Wilson is an actual Ph.D. in robotics, and he has injected a massive level of realism into his tale of man vs. machine, which is what immediately grabbed DreamWorks’ attention. Over the past few years, there have been some terrifying videos of actual man-made robots that are so freaky-realistic, you almost expect them to evolve and slaughter mankind. [...]

We’ve all seen the movie Jurassic Park (I assume). The method to the madness of bringing living, breathing dinosaurs back to life in that movie, was to find prehistoric pieces of amber with bugs perfectly preserved inside and extract their blood — assuming that they’ve fed on dinosaurs and contain their DNA. Though it’s likely that scientists have attempted to try this, it’s not something that many expect to actually work. Now comes word that a scientist in Canada has a whole new plan to possibly bring dinosaurs back to life.

Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal’s McGill University, Hans Larsson, believes the fact that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds may just hold the key. He believes that while a chicken is its embryonic stages, he can literally go in and alter this, change that, and replicate what once was, hundreds of millions of years ago.

Larsson has been studying the evolution of birds for a decade now, and truly believes that in time, he could find a way to do the unthinkable: hatch a live prehistoric creature. [...]

While watching The Colbert Report, as I so often do, they let loose one of their great movie references as it relates to a real news story. This particular news story is from The Raw Story, who reported the announcement that a United States weapons laboratory has officially created a “super laser” which was capable of creating temperatures and pressure equal to that of a star or a large planet’s core. Naturally, this got people to thinking: do we have our very own Star Wars Death Star!?

While the exact damage this little baby would cause isn’t really known, it is expected to keep nuclear weapons in check, as well as offer a possible answer to safe fusion power. I wonder if this is how we would take out Texas-sized meteor that were threatening to hit Earth, instead of the standard oil drilling crew. Asteroids style.

Click over to the dark side to see the great video from The Colbert Report!

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke at a dedication ceremony for the weapons and energy breakthrough achievement, saying: [...]

The new Star Trek has arrived at the White House and all the way up to the International Space Station.

Paramount transferred Star Trek, which opened in theaters last weekend, earlier this week to NASA‘s Mission Control in Houston, which then uplinked the film to the space station where NASA astronaut Michael Barratt can then watch the movie on a laptop computer inside the Unity module, 220 miles above Earth.

“I remember watching the original ‘Star Trek’ series and, like many of my NASA coworkers, was inspired by the idea of people from all nations coming together to explore space,” said Barratt. “‘Star Trek’ blended adventure, discovery, intelligence and story telling that assumes a positive future for humanity. The International Space Station is a real step in that direction, with many nations sharing in an adventure the world can be proud of.”

President Obama watched the new Star Trek movie at the White House’s movie theater and he told Newsweek that he thought the film was good. In a Q&A with the magazine, the President acknowledged how the media has been saying that he is like the logical Vulcan Spock and he even gave the Vulcan salute [...]

A while back, Gizmodo had the brilliant idea to find the actual size specs of fictional space crafts and create a chart comparing their size to our own very real International Space Station. Now with the the release of Star Trek and the presentation of a new, much larger USS Enterprise, they’ve decided to do the same thing. Click the image to go bigger, but click the link above to go to the site and see the full-size jumbo version!

Size Comparisons Of The Space Crafts Of ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ & Real Life!

As it turns out, the old Battlestar Galactica‘s ship is the one being used for the chart. It was found out later that the new Galactica measures 1,438.64 meters — almost 1,000 meters longer than the new Enterprise, and very close to the 1,600 (about a mile) meter Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

I hope Gizmodo soon has a chart that includes the new Galactica and the Star Destroyer. It would be very interesting to see how they dwarf these other, very massive ships. It’s also cool to see just how big the International Space Station is. You could go even further and add man-made cities and worlds like the Death Star and the Citadel from Mass Effect [...]

Toy Story Mania! goes intergalactic as Buzz Lightyear’s space mission continues at the international space station — check out this video Buzz in zero gravity!

NASA to send Disney’s favorite space ranger into space with Space Shuttle Discovery on May 31, 2008 launch from Kennedy Space Center.

Here in this episode of the History Channel series The Universe, Mars is explored.

A look at the first two planets orbiting the Sun in this episode of The History Channel series The Universe.

During this episode of The History Channel series The Universe we learn about the biology of stars — how they are born, live, and die.

Hailed as the “showstopper” of our solar system, the planet Saturn is subject of this installment of the History Channel series The Universe.

The episode features a look at the distant past of the 3rd rock from the Sun, the planet we call Earth.

In this episode of The Universe, telescopes are pointed outside of our solar system to explore and contemplate the absolutely daunting massiveness of the universe.

See The Sun in 3-D thanks to images taken by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft.

Kirsten Dunst on Carl Sagan smoking habits.

From the pages of The Book of Geek: The Great Pyramid, Einstein, Pastafarian, iTunes, and much more.