The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has begun its study of physics at distances 10,000 times smaller than an atomic nucleus. This accelerator and its experiments are enormous in many respects---in the physical size of the facilites, in the sizes of the experimental teams, but also in the stakes for our understanding of elementary particles, mass, and the universe.
Robots and other embodied systems can be seen as mediators between the real and the virtual, influencing our expectations of the possibilities and limitations of virtual worlds. In some cases, technologies designed specifically for virtual interactivity have spilled over into our exchanges with other places not normally considered "virtual": distant (but real) places, nano-scale phenomena, and even our own cultural history.
The Sun's dynamic magnetic field is the origin of all of the variability in the heliosphere and in geospace that we refer to as space weather. This variability occurs on a hierarchy of time scales ranging from the full 11-year solar cycle that determines the Sun's global dipole field down to less than the few hours on which a large solar flare or coronal mass ejection occurs. 
Forty years ago, Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are "hot," with characteristic temperatures and entropies that depend on properties of their event horizons. The Hawking temperature and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy are quantum and gravitational -- they depend on both Planck's constant and Newton's gravitational constant -- and, in fact, they provide one of the very few pieces of information about quantum gravity that we really beli
Objects with masses (<0.08 solar masses) too small to sustain hydrogen fusion were theorized to exist five decades ago, and discovered 30 years later, due to their extreme faintness. Even less massive (<13 Jupiter or <0.01 solar masses) are the planetary mass objects (PMOs, so-called because they are not orbiting a star.