Oh, how great is this? Swiss pilot Yves Rossy crossed the English Channel via jetpack!

Yves is not quite Nathan Petrelli — he was wearing about 120 lbs of equipment, but hey! It’s a lot less cumbersome than most ways of flying!

Not quite Nathan Petrelli — but getting close!

A jet-pack and a wing (and a crash helmet) seem to work a whole lot better than just a jet-pack.

–ooh, bummer. He didn’t start from the ground, but bailed out of a plane at 8000 ft.  On the other hand, it’s very very cool that his body is the fusillage, so his head motion controls the direction.

“Jet Man” Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket.

Nat’l Geographic has a video.

The Large Hadron Collider smashed particles for the first time on Wednesday morning. It came off without a hitch,* and my congratulations to the tens of thousands of people involved in the project! (Any sort of particle physics is notorious for involving a whole lot of people — I’ve seen papers with scores of authors — and a piece of equipment the size and cost (and providing the potential results) of the LHC is bound to have even more participants than usual.)

The reason most of the general public has heard of the LHC isn’t because it’s big and expensive and exciting science. Most people have heard of it because of the hoopla largely created by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

The problem, near as I can tell, is two-fold. First, most of the media wants to tell the truth, but even more than that, they want to tell a compelling story. (Most reporters just report. They don’t have the time or the editorial mandate to judge — as long as the story is compelling enough.) And highly emotional people, who aren’t obvious nutjobs, waving their arms and talking about scientists destroying the world by creating a black hole beneath Switzerland is a compelling story. Wacky, but compelling.

Second, if you call the Higgs boson “the God particle” then fundamentalist religious autocrats are going to pounce to claim some sort of exclusive right to it. You just can’t safely use religious metaphors about science, these days, which is a shame.

And by the way, here’s what CERN has to say about the safety of the LHC:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

Want to know more about the LHC?

While considering the Matt Parkman’s mental powers (not to mention The Haitian’s) in “The Science of Heroes” I talked a little bit about the Harvard Brainbow project. In that case, Harvard researchers inserted multicolored fluorescent proteins into a developing mouse brain, which allowed them to literally see the difference between different neurons — which are usually all uniformly gray and white and all very very tangled. Changing colors helps sort the mess, but only on a small scale.

Now a researcher at Mass General Hospital, just across the river from Harvard, is doing something not quite so literal, but perhaps more helpful: according to a report in MIT Technology Review, neuroscientist Van Wedeen is using a sort of MRI called diffusion spectrum imaging to see what — broadly speaking — connects where. The article has a very cool video attached.