I've been told that when you hit a certain age, a biological alarm clock goes off and you go gaga, absolutely bonkers, for babies. Me? Not so much. But I'm suddenly very, very interested in seahorses.

As you may remember from your class trip to the aquarium, male seahorses and their brothers the pipefish and seadragons do something the males of no other animal species can do: They get pregnant. Here's how it works: They court (or are courted by) their aquatic ladies, who deliver a clutch of eggs for the males to fertilize. The dads carry the eggs, providing them with nutrients, until they are ready to emerge as fully-formed mini sea creatures. Meanwhile, the moms are off advancing their careers and sipping pumpkin-spice chai with their girlfriends.

Today is a huge day for physics. As of this afternoon, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest and most powerful physics experiment, is finally up and running. It's been 16 years and over 10 billion dollars in the making.

Although the LHC was slated to go online in 2008, an explosion in its 17-mile tunnel brought the machine to a grinding halt. Even now, it's only operating at half power (full-power won't come until 2013), but it's already setting records. Eventually, the LHC will smash protons together at forces that simulate the first trillionth of a second after the big bang, which will offer physicists a new window into the formation of the universe.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to visit the LHC when it still under construction. It was a mind-boggling experience. More than 300 feet under a Geneva suburb is what looks like an endless tunnel stretching for miles, broken in a few spots by cathedral-sized caverns packed with sensitive detectors to measure the collisions of sub-atomic particles. All in all, it felt like visiting the Death Star.

To give you a "behind the scenes" look. I've posted a few photos from my trip below.

    
(above, left) the security entrance to the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This is at the bottom of a 300-foot elevator shaft--and although its name suggests it's there to keep people out, it's really to help keep track of who's already inside. Because if there's a liquid helium leak in the tunnels, you'll look like the guy on the sign (right) in no time.. As my guide reminded me, ALWAYS carry your emergency breathing equipment.

    
The underground tunnels of the LHC stretch for 17 miles--a distance which physicists and technicians often travel by bike (left). The white tube sections to the right side of both images house the LHC's beam pipes, where protons are suspended in a magnetic field and pushed to 99% the speed of light before being smashed together in huge detector chambers.

     

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector under construction. This complex device will sense collisions between subatomic particles called Muons. The metal staircase to the left of the image (top left) gives a sense of scale. Likewise, take a closer look at the shot to the right, and you'll see two technicians surveying the underground chamber that the CMS detector sits in.

For an in-depth look at the LHC and its role in the physics community, check out the web features we produced for NOVA scienceNOW back in 2007. You can listen to expert audio, view video clips of the segment, and get more info on this amazing machine.

When I first met Brendan Foley last fall, I was immediately struck by the scope of his ideas. He's the resident archeologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (there's only one), and he studies ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. But Foley's style of archeology is very different from traditional forms. Instead of spending years excavating a single site, he wants to take a big picture approach, using tiny robotic vehicles to quickly find and catalog as many ancient wrecks as possible--gathering useful data about the size, shape, and contents of each vessel without ever touching them.

In the ancient world, Foley says, sailing ships were the vector for the exchange of goods, food, and even ideas between ancient cultures. "Sailing was safe, but not perfectly safe," he says. "A small percentage of all sailing voyages end in wrecking events. What we're left with, then, on the bottom of the Mediterranean, is a random sampling of everything that ever moved across the Mediterranean throughout antiquity. Really, the entirety of the human experience lies there on the sea floor."

Foley thinks that by collecting basic information on a vast number of wreck sites, he can start filling in gaps in our understanding of the very early days of western civilization. His ultimate goal is an ambitious one--to document and compare every known wreck in the Mediterranean. Right now, he's doing it one site at a time. But as the technology of autonomous underwater vehicles improves, he thinks it might be possible one day to conduct the survey remotely using a fleet of small robot submarines.

Of course, that's years away from being a possibility. But who knows? if technology catches up to his vision, Foley's work could provide new insights on the origins of western civilization.

You can hear Foley describing his work in his own words in this podcast I released a couple days ago:

Where do new show ideas come from? Do they appear to us in dreams? Does the idea-stork drop them from the sky in adorable little idea-bundles? Or could they come from YOU?

Here's the thing: Our research team has been in overdrive thinking up story ideas for a new NOVA scienceNOW hour called "What's The Next Big Thing?" But the idea stork has been in a holding pattern, and our dreams haven't been so helpful, unless the next big thing is my husband and Shakira co-hosting the Grammy awards. So, we want to know what you think. What is the next big thing? Will it be a leap in medicine? Computers? Energy? Transportation? Something we haven't even thought of yet?

Put on your future goggles and let us know what you see. Next thing you know, you might be seeing your idea on NOVA scienceNOW!

Publicist Note: The fifth season of "NOVA scienceNOW" hosted by renowned astrophysicist, author, and Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil deGrasse Tyson premieres in 2011. NOVA scienceNOW covers four timely science and technology stories per one-hour episode. The new season, each episode tackles one BIG question such as Where did I come from? How does the brain work? and What's the next big thing?

Here's a special guest post by Pamela King, a Northeastern University journalism student interning with NOVA's web team this semester. To read more of Pamela's work, visit her portfolio blog!

What can dogs do for us? Apart from companionship and the tasks of the occasional watchdog or service dog, canines seem to be the sole evolutionary beneficiaries of their relationship with their best friend, man. Stephen Budiansky even goes so far as to describe dogs as social parasites in his book, The Truth About Dogs, an excerpt of which appears on the companion web site for NOVA's Dogs and More Dogs.

But a recent study published in Molecular Psychiatry indicates canines might serve a purpose beyond being our cute, cuddly friends - dogs could provide insight into human mental health.

This week, NOVA was invited to attend Dr. Sally Ride's Roundtable Discussion about Gender Equality in Math and Science Education (it's part of a series of nationwide round tables sponsored by one of our funders, the ExxonMobil Corporation).

On March 9, a distinguished panel gathered at the Omni Parker House in Boston to address the issue of motivating young people, especially girls, to pursue careers in science and math. As the marketing manager for NOVA, I'm very interested in the topic. NOVA's programs, website, and outreach activities are created to inspire kids to pursue science careers, and my job is to spread the word.  

The panel included the first American woman to fly in space and Astronaut Hall-of-Famer Dr. Sally Ride (today she runs a science education company), lead scientist on NASA's Grail MoonKam mission Maria Zuber, former Miss Massachusetts and founder of the WhizKids Foundation Erika Ebbel, and former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift.

The MAKING STUFF crew has been busy the past couple of months and things are only getting busier. We've steadily been shooting different scenes for our first hour-long episode "Stronger" and have begun shooting some of the second episode, "Smaller."

"Stronger" has brought host David Pogue and our crew at Powderhouse Productions to some exciting locations.  We shot on the USS Stennis, a Navy aircraft carrier, to get up close and personal with "arresting cables," the steel cables that make landing a plane on the ship's short runway possible.

(Photos Courtesy of Powderhouse Productions - Left: David Pogue on deck. Right: An arresting cable stops a landing plane to a halt.)

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge MA, we visited "Strobe Alley" which is dedicated to David Pogue's great uncle Harold Edgerton, a pioneer in the art of high-speed photography. There, we got a slow motion look at how materials break when impacted by a 22-caliber bullet. We tested different steels as well as aluminum, wood, ceramic, and I personally had the pleasure of hurling a water filled polymer (a water balloon) at David Pogue's head (in the name of science, of course.)

(Photos Courtesy of Powderhouse Productions - Left: Slow motion bullet impact. Right: David Pogue gets hit with a water balloon)
Next, we took a trip down to Richmond VA to visit the DuPont company. There, David learned about Kevlar...

For most American children, the name Pluto conjures up either one or both of these images: Pluto the Disney character and/or Pluto the (former) planet.  As a cartoon-obsessed kid with glow-in the dark solar system stickers, I had a deep affinity for both dog and planet.  It wasn't until my work on The Pluto Files that I learned about several lesser-known Plutos. 

Pluto the Myth: With the exception of Earth, planet names are derived from Roman and Greek mythology.  The ancient Romans knew Pluto as god of the underworld. Virgil, the classical Roman poet, wrote about Pluto and his golden palace in The Aeneid.

Atomic number 94: In 1940, scientists at UC Berkeley synthesized element 94 by bombarding uranium-238 with deuterons.  Named after the planet, this new addition to the periodic table of elements joined the nuclear arms race. The second atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was made of Plutonium-239.

Fat Man, codename for the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki.

 Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense.

The Ultimate Flying Object: In 1957, American toy company WHAM-O introduced a flying plastic disc that would later become a staple on college campuses. Capitalizing on America's fascination with UFOs and growing interest in space, WHAM-O named their invention the Pluto Platter.  A few years later it was renamed the Frisbee

Why is NOVA wiring David Gergen--presidential advisor, Harvard professor, CNN analyst--with electrodes? That's easy: For science!

Roll up those sleeves for science! David Gergen preps for his electrodes.

Yesterday morning at the Harvard Decision Science Lab, Gergen was among those who volunteered to be a subject in a study of how we make decisions about money. NOVA producer Malcolm Clark was there filming it all for NOVA's Mind Over Money (premiering Tuesday, April 27), which looks at how our brains may be wired to make just the kind of poor economic decisions that got us into our current money mess.