Heavy man...

Its been an interesting week for records, this story from CERN describes how the most dense material ever seen has been created in the worlds largest particle accelerator. Smash lead ions together at suitably high energies and you get a super-hot quark-gluon plasma that's so dense a sugar cube sized sample of it would weigh more than 40 billion tons; just goes to show how much empty space we contain, in fact we're mostly empty space, particularly fundamentalist Christians who predict raptures who seem especially empty in the reasoning centres of the brain and yet exceptionally dense at the same time?

Not wanting  to be outdone by the boson bashers, the astronomers took this snap shot of an exploding star, not too special except when you realise that it's 13.14 billion light years away, i.e. it actually exploded 13.14 billion years ago and it's taken the light that long to reach the tiny sensor in NASA's Swift telescope.

At the opposite end of the size/mass spectrum another team of physics buffs working at Imperial (London)  have used some fiendishly precise lasers to make the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of an electron, and ta da... they're spherical! This is interesting because the standard model, our current best framework for how everything works, suggests that they should be more egg shaped, if this is correct then these results could mean that theory is scrambled!