The moon is known for its ability to impact on our tides, but it has been causing another effect over the last few years - disrupting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

The gravitational effect of the moon may be generally weak on our surface, but with the collider stretching out in a ring with a 16mile (27km) circumference, the effects are enough to be felt.

The scientific research facility on the Swiss-French border is picking apart neutrons and electrons while hunting for the elusive Higgs Boson particle, and technician Pauline Gagnon, working on the collider, blogged her surprise when she realised the cause for less 'particle collisions' were happening on her shift.

Quantum computers don't exist yet, but physicists already have a software program ready for them to use.

A group of scientists has designed an algorithm that they say could run on any future quantum computer to simulate all the possible interactions between two colliding particles.

The program could be used to model how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, when conditions cooled enough for the formation of subatomic particles called quarks, which then collided with each other to form protons and neutrons. Eventually, the first atoms were born.

The complexity of a particle's quantum properties makes these post-Big Bang interactions far too complicated for existing computers to simulate.

Scientists are hoping for the eventual creation of computers based on the principles of quantum physics. Such computers would use quantum processor switches that could exist in both "on" and "off" states simultaneously, enabling them to consider all possible solutions to a problem at once.

Quantum computers should be able to perform incredibly complex calculations at a small fraction of the time required by current technology.

Remains of an enormous turtle, which was the size of a Smart Car, have been unearthed in a Colombian coal mine.

The shell alone of the 60-million-year-old turtle, Carbonemys cofrinii, aka "coal turtle," is large enough to be a small swimming pool. Its skull is roughly the size of a regulation NFL football.

The coal mine where it was found is part of northern Colombia's Cerrejon formation.

Discovery Date: June 1, 2012

Magnitude: 19.0mag

Discoverer: Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research project

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-L12.

Discovery Date: June 1, 2012

Magnitude: 19.4 mag

Discoverer: Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research project

The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2012-L13.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, NASA and Congress have reached a deal on how to proceed with the commercial crew program that provides government subsidies to pay for the development of private spacecraft.

NASA will pay for two commercial spacecraft and partially for a third

Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., the chairman of the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding, has described the accord in a news release. NASA will select the number of competitors from the current four -- SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada -- to two. A third competitor will be picked for partial funding as a fallback in case both of the main competing companies run into difficulties developing a space craft on time and on budget.

Congressional concerns addressed

Previously, according to Wolf's statement, Congress had been concerned NASA was funding too many companies with too little funds, therefore unacceptably exposing the American taxpayer. Originally, Congress had proposed NASA down select to two competitors, one main company to be fully funded and one fallback company to be partially funded in case of a failure of the main competing company.

Modern life may be going to your head.

It's not clear why - medicine? cars? supermarkets? - but the skulls of white Americans, and perhaps of other races and nationalities, have become slightly taller and roomier, according to new forensic research.

New measurements of hundreds of skulls of white Americans born between 1825 and the 1985 suggest that their typical noggin height has grown by about a third of an inch (eight millimeters).

It may not sound like much, but the growth translates to roughly a tennis ball's worth of new brain room.

"I can't guess the implications of this jump in cranial size, but other research shows a bigger cranium doesn't necessarily mean more intellect," said University of Tennessee biological anthropologist Richard Jantz, who presented the findings with colleagues at an American Association for Physical Anthropology meeting in April.

Reality TV goes to Mars! Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp is leading a group visionaries and businesspeople who want to send four humans to Mars by 2023, and they say they can achieve their goal at an estimated cost of $6 billion USD. How can they do it? By building it into a global media spectacle. And oh, by the way, this will be a one-way trip.

"Who would be able to look away from an adventure such as this one?" asks Lansdorp in his bio on the Mars One website. "Who wouldn't be compelled to watch, talk about, get involved in the biggest undertaking mankind has ever made? The entire world will be able to follow this giant leap from the start; from the very first astronaut selections to the established, independent village years later. The media focus that comes with the public's attention opens pathways to sponsors and investors."

As far as the one-way mission (a concept that Universe Today has written about extensively) the Mars One website notes, "this is no way excludes the possibility of a return flight at some point in the future."

Sometimes, finding nothing is just as good as finding something.

Physicists have made the most sensitive measurements yet in the hunt for a rare event that could undermine the dominant theory of particle physics, and turned up zilch.

The scientists, who are searching for a rumored particle decay process called "neutrinoless double-beta decay," ran a finely tuned detector for almost seven months, and found no significant data to suggest the process occurs. That non-detection hints that exotic particles called neutrinos may be more mundane than some have thought.

"The result could only have been more exciting if we'd been hit by a stroke of luck and detected neutrinoless double-beta decay," Stanford University physicist Giorgio Gratta, spokesperson for the experiment, called the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200 (EXO-200), said in a statement.

The scientists recorded only one signal (or event) that might have represented neutrinoless double-beta decay occuring. "That means the background activity is very low and the detector is very sensitive. It's great news to say that we see nothing!" Gratta added.

Unstable atomic nuclei (the jumble of protons and neutrons that make up the core of atoms) will often lose a neutron in a process known as beta decay. The neutron turns into a proton by releasing an electron and a tiny particle called a neutrino.

Sometimes, two neutrons are lost in a process called double-beta decay, which usually releases two electrons and two antineutrinos (the antimatter partner particles of neutrinos). But scientists have also theorized that neutrinoless double-beta decay could occur, which would produce two electrons and no antineutrinos.

What if you could read much of your child's medical future while it was still in the womb? Taking a major step toward that goal, one fraught with therapeutic potential and ethical questions, scientists have now accurately predicted almost the whole genome of an unborn child by sequencing DNA from the mother's blood and DNA from the father's saliva.

At the moment, prenatal diagnosis for a small number of genetic conditions is usually done from fetal cells that doctors capture from fluid in the womb (amniocentesis) or a snippet of placental tissue (chorionic villus sampling). But these methods, which require the insertion of a needle or tube into the womb or placenta, can cause miscarriages in about 1% of all cases.

In 1997, chemical pathologist Dennis Lo, now at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, discovered that roughly 10% of the cell-free DNA floating in a pregnant woman's blood stream stems from her fetus. In 2010 in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine, Lo's group showed that enough such fragments of fetal DNA are there to reconstruct the fetus's whole genome, and that it should be possible to use this DNA to test the unborn child for genetic diseases without exposing it to the risk of an invasive procedure. "The biggest advantage is that you are saving all those babies that would be lost," says Lo.

But it is tricky to distinguish fetal DNA in the blood from the mother's DNA. One strategy makes use of subtle genetic variations that exist between a mother's pairs of chromosomes. In most cases, for a particular genetic sequence on a specific chromosome, the variants from each pair should be represented equally in the woman's blood. But in an expectant woman, whose child has received only one variant as part of its genetic inheritance, her blood will contain a little more of that variant because of the free-floating fetal DNA. If the mother's patterns of genetic variants, or haplotypes, are known, statistics allow researchers to conclude what variants she passed on to her offspring. In 2010, Lo showed that with both parents' haplotypes known, it would be possible to predict the child's genome from the DNA in an expectant mom's blood.