Archive for July 25th, 2011
Cern scientists say they expect to find the “God particle” by 2013 – swissinfo
Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) expect to discover – or disprove – the existence of a key particle in Big Bang theory by 2012.
Cern director Rolf Heuer says the latest findings from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, have been enough to convince the centre that progress is being made in their hunt for the most sought-after of particles – the Higgs boson.
“I would say we can settle the question, the Shakespearean question – ‘to be or not to be’ – end of next year,” he told reporters at a major conference in Grenoble, France on Monday attended by around 700 leading particle physicists.
Sometimes referred to as the “God particle”, the Higgs boson is the linchpin of the Standard Model of particle physics theory on the Big Bang. It is believed to give mass to other objects and creatures in the universe.
“They have tested the Standard Model very well,” Heuer said of Cern scientists. “They are now ready to bring us into uncharted territory. We are still missing the most wanted particle, the Higgs boson.”
These are “exciting times” for particle physicists, he noted, because of recent findings by two separate teams of scientists at Cern.
via Cern scientists say they expect to find the “God particle” by 2013 – swissinfo.
Deep Below Park Avenue, a 200-Ton Drill at Rest – NYTimes.com
Rome has the catacombs; Paris has its sewers. Now New York will have its own subterranean wonder: a 200-ton mechanical serpent’s head.
An underground stretch that is being excavated for a train station under Grand Central Terminal. To save time and money, the Spanish contractor overseeing the project will leave the drill behind in Midtown, instead of extracting, dismantling and selling it for scrap.
It is a gargantuan drill that has been hollowing out tunnels for a train station under Grand Central Terminal. As tall as four men and with the weight of two whales, the so-called cutter head — the spinning, sharp-edged business end of a tunnel boring machine — is usually extracted, dismantled and sold for scrap when the work is done.
But the Spanish contractor overseeing the project is taking a different approach. It believes it can save time and money by simply leaving it behind, dormant and decayed, within the rocky depths of Midtown Manhattan. The drill’s final resting place: 14 stories beneath the well-tended sidewalks of Park Avenue.
There is little precedent for such a Brobdingnagian burial. No one at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to officially entomb the machine sometime this week, can recall such an interment. “It’s like a Jules Verne story,” Michael Horodniceanu, the authority’s chief of construction, said.
via Deep Below Park Avenue, a 200-Ton Drill at Rest – NYTimes.com.
Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light : Discovery News
It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn’t travel faster than light.
Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.
“We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory,” said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org
The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it’s known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.
The tricky part is that the ship wouldn’t actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.
That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein’s relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn’t actually moving.
The fabric of space has moved faster than light before, says Cleaver, right after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.
via Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light : Discovery News.
Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists : Discovery News
Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”
“Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light,” the university said on its website.
“Professor Du’s study demonstrates that a single photon, the fundamental quanta of light, also obeys the traffic law of the universe just like classical EM (electromagnetic) waves.”
The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal — or faster-than-light — propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said.
It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.
Du, however, believed Einstein was right and determined to end the debate by measuring the ultimate speed of a single photon, which had not been done before.
via Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists : Discovery News.
First Nokia, Now RIM: The Mighty Are Falling | Epicenter | Wired.com
Research in Motion, whose Blackberry handsets dominated the mobile phone scene only a few short years ago, announced Monday it was cutting 2,000 jobs — about 11 percent of its global workforce — as it falls further behind the curve now defined by the iPhone and Android-powered smartphones.
In cutting workers for the first time in a decade RIM joins Nokia as a once-mighty player who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt quickly enough to a pace of innovation and quixotic consumer expectations that has only accelerated since the introduction of the original iPhone in June 2007. In what seems like the blink of an eye RIM is now playing a game of catch-up with upstarts Apple and Google — big, powerful competitors who came out of nowhere to to become chip leaders in the high-stakes smartphone game.
Nokia got hit with the same headwind. The biggest phone maker in the world — 28.2 percent of the market at the end of last year — announced in February that it was ditching its Symbian smartphone operating system and replacing it with software from Microsoft.
RIM is now the No. 3 smartphone platform, behind Android and iOS, according to Comscore. In terms of handset market share it is fifth, dropping in the quarter ended April 30 behind Apple, a company which makes exactly one phone.
via First Nokia, Now RIM: The Mighty Are Falling | Epicenter | Wired.com.
Facebook’s Secret iPad App Exposed [Pictures] | TechCrunch
So, we just exposed the awesome secret that Facebook’s iPad app is actually already out there, hidden inside of the iPhone app. Now it’s time to show it to you.
I’ve been playing with the app for much of the night, and it seems solid. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this is what Facebook will launch when the iPad app does officially hit, but this looks and feels about right.
After months of downplaying the importance of having an iPad app, and instead playing up HTML5, Facebook has clearly spent some time working on this. At the same time, it is an HTML5-rich experience, with things like the News Feed being populated this way. But other things, like image uploads simply cannot be done without native code at this time.
At the end of the day, would I use this app over the full website, which functions pretty well on the iPad already? Absolutely. I cannot wait for this app to actually launch.
via Facebook’s Secret iPad App Exposed [Pictures] | TechCrunch.
San Diego Comic-Con 2011 Day Four – Los Angeles – Slideshows
San Diego Comic-Con 2011 came to a close on Sunday, July 24 with an appearance from Nathan Fillion, the much-anticipated Dr. Who panel and more. All photos by Dianne Garcia.
via San Diego Comic-Con 2011 Day Four – Los Angeles – Slideshows.
I think I may be in love.
How do racists feel about aliens? : reddit.com
I was just playing Mass Effect 2 for the first time, and now I can pick an alien to join my squad. I was just wondering, would racists put an alien in their team? I mean, if you hate people from another country you must really despise people from other planets, right?
Read some of the hilarious Reddit replies…
‘Star Trek’ app transforms your iPad into a PADD
In a nutshell: Wanna pretend you’re Capt. Picard in his ready room, researching xenolinguistics as they pertain to Tamarian mythology? There’s an app for that. This one turns your Apple tablet into a Starfleet Personal Access Display Device (PADD), the science fiction predecessor to the iPad. And it’s a digital encyclopedia of all things “Star Trek,” with info on characters, cast, episodes, aliens, ships, places and even food. Sorry, no recipes for Klingon gagh.
Cool factor: Not only does the app mimic the sounds and look of Starfleet’s LCARS interface, its computerized voice is also supplied by the late actress Majel Barrett. Easter egg: Keep tapping on a nonfunctional tab and listen for her reply.
Note: The $4.99 iPad-only app – developed by San Francisco’s ArcTouch and CBS Interactive – can be downloaded by going to sfg.ly/pM3f2k. Make it so.
Ed Parnell's Cunning Plan 