Large Hardon Collider

[Pirian]

Your youtube embeds never work for me, Sath

[Cyn]

Yeah I see BORKED on pretty much everything he posts too.

[Eliseos]

Wasn't broken when I was at work, but it is broken now that I am at home. Only difference between this build of firefox and the one at my work is noscript.

[Caiyuo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs
Amazing.

This was the youtube ID I found in the post, though Sath's showed the HTML embed code between youtube tags instead of the ID, but I kind of have to feel like this isn't the right video for some reason, lol.

[Eliseos]

No, that is definitely it lol.

[BerenTebogo]

Yeah, that's the one. Lol.

[Max™]

I'm on a cart, hyahh!

Believe it or not, I often used to stay in the library from open to close just reading happily, in the days before wikipedia, .

[Max™]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=11269119

PARIS (Reuters) - Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the "God particle" believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.
Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project near Geneva said in just three months of experiments they had already detected all the particles at the heart of our current understanding of physics, the Standard Model.
Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) which runs the LHC, told the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris experiments were progressing faster than expected and entering a stage in which "new physics" would emerge.
This could include long-awaited proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson and the detection of dark matter, believed to make up about a quarter of the universe alongside an observable 5 percent and 70 percent consisting of invisible dark energy.

"This is a dark universe and I hope the LHC ... will shed the first light into this dark universe," Heuer told the international conference. "This will take time."
The LHC, a 27-km (17-mile) looped tunnel which creates mini-Big Bangs by smashing together particles, is currently colliding particles at around half its maximum energy level -- 7 million million electron volts, or 7 TeV.
It plans to increase this to 14 TeV from 2013, coming closer to the conditions in which the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago.
"Whether the LHC will have discoveries by 2012, I don't know. I hope it might happen, but if it doesn't happen then it might be three or four years later," Heuer said.
U.S. PROJECT
Scientists at the older, lower-energy Tevatron particle accelerator near Chicago told the conference they had narrowed the range of possible mass for the Higgs Boson by around a quarter, with 95 percent reliability.

News, nothing big though, just that they have successfully found all of the known particles, reproducing the findings of all other particle accelerators to date, in their first 4 months online.


Some info about the data processing as well:

http://www.chem.info/News/Feeds/2010...-lhcs-alice-d/

For approximately one month a year, the nuclei of lead atoms traveling near the speed of light will collide in the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) ALICE experiment, generating a fireball about 100,000 times hotter than the core of our Sun. At these temperatures protons and neutrons dissolve into a "particle soup" of quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma-a state of matter that first occurred in nature at the birth of our Universe almost 14 billion years ago, a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. By watching this "soup" cool, physicists hope to better understand the nature of matter, which makes up everything from galaxies to humans.
For the month that these lead ions collide, the ALICE experiment will collect over 10 terabytes of data per day, equivalent to the amount of information that could be stored on 20,000 DVDs. About 10 percent of this data will travel from the LHC in Switzerland to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Northern California via the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). These facilities will provide the primary computing and storage resources for the ALICE collaboration in North and South America.

[Kryssan]

B&W to build mPower test facility

Crossposted:

The company said that the mPower Integrated System Test (IST) facility will be built at the Center for Advanced Engineering and Research (CAER), currently being constructed at the New London Business and Technology Center.
The IST facility, which is expected to be operational in 2011, will include a scaled prototype of the mPower reactor that will undergo extensive testing. B&W said that while all the technical features of the mPower integral reactor are included in the IST the source of heat for testing is electric rather than nuclear.

B&W said that the three-year initiative will collect data to verify the reactor design and safety performance, supporting its licensing activities with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Once testing concludes, the company anticipates using the facility for on-going training of utility workers who would be operating mPower reactors.

The CAER was selected for the IST facility after an extensive evaluation of various sites, B&W said in a statement. It added, "One of the key factors in the decision was a $2.4 million grant provided by the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission (TICRC)."

Chris Mowry, president of B&W Nuclear Energy, commented: "B&W is pleased to have the support of the Virginia Tobacco Commission in locating our IST facility in Bedford County. This facility will play an important role as we move forward with testing and licensing of B&W mPower reactors, while also reaffirming the region as a hub for nuclear technology."

The CAER, with a focus on nuclear energy and distance education, aims to promote economic development in the region. Commenting on B&W's decision to construct the test facility there, Bob Bailey, executive director of CAER, said: "This is exactly the type of opportunity we had in mind when we created CAER. Our research facility is designed to support innovation in our region's industries and strengthen the role of science and technology in our economy." He added, "B&W's decision to locate their IST facility here fits this objective like a glove."

Earlier this month, B&W and Bechtel entered into a formal alliance to design, license and deploy B&W's mPower design, a 125 MWe modular reactor. Under the alliance - to be known as Generation mPower - B&W will focus on designing and testing the nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) and nuclear island, including the design certification application development and submission, and NSSS production. Bechtel will complement these responsibilities with integrated engineering and project management leadership.

Information from B&W's site is available here. The fact that Bechtel is in on this makes me smile a little bit... I'll let you guess what kind of smile it is. I will say that I am happy to see at least the idea moving forwards... but...

[Tristam]

Here's some fun

http://thirdreviewer.com/

If anyone ever has, or will publish a paper. Generally after you get past editorial review peer review process becomes an enormous chore. There's usually one reviewer who seems to worship the ground you walk on, and reccommends your study for immediate publication without delay. Another reviewer who obviously gave the task to a grad student who didn't really care. And a third reviewer who mandates an excessively onerous set of experiments without which they would suggest rejection. So you spend another few months of your life appeasing this one reviewer and wish he or she didn't exist.

This sort of thing has been tried before, but this site allows completely anonymous commenting across multiple journals sorted by topic (with more to come I hope). So the potential for good or evil is greater.

It's a neat experiment, might be worth lurking about if it catches on.

[Eliseos]

Well at least our multi million billion schmillion dollar experiment has proved the known particles in the standard model. In other news, there are owls howling outside in unison and it is creeping me out.

[Max™]

It only took 4 months to reproduce the last 100 years of particle physics results, which is good.

[Pirian]

Anyone know what the name of the new particle accelerator being built? I know it is already named, but it is not due to be finished for quite a while. I am pretty sure it is being build in the US, but it is impossible to find information on it since the LHC was just finished and is dominating the particle collider news

[Max™]

http://www.linearcollider.org/

International Linear Collider, the ILC, an electron-positron collider meant to compliment the research ability of the LHC.

http://www.linearcollider.org/about/...LC-in-1-minute

[Caiti]

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=11269119

PARIS (Reuters) - Scientists working with particle accelerators in Europe and the United States said on Monday they may be closing in on the elusive Higgs Boson, the "God particle" believed crucial to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang.

Bad science reporting or two interpretations of the same information?

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3073

Just got back from vacation this morning. Luckily I managed to be away for the blogosphere-fueled Higgs rumors, returned just in time to catch the released results which appeared in a Fermilab press release minutes ago ( http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/pr...-20100726.html ). The ICHEP talk in Paris announcing these results will start in about half an hour, slides should appear here ( http://indico.cern.ch/materialDispla...s&confId=73513 ).

The bottom line is that CDF and D0 can now exclude (at 95% confidence level) the existence of a Standard Model Higgs particle over a fairly wide mass range in the higher mass part of the expected region: from 158 to 175 GeV. If the SM Higgs exists, it appears highly likely that it is in the region between 114 GeV (the LEP limit) and 158 GeV. The most relevant graph is here. It shows an excess of about 1 sigma over the entire region 125 GeV to 150 GeV, which unfortunately is nothing more than the barest possible hint of something actually being there.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/im...uly2010_mr.jpg

Seems to contradict what the ABC article says, but then again, we all know how science reporting works. "Well, you know, we figured out where it can't be - which is almost everywhere - but there's still places we can check" ->> "SCIENTIST FINDS WHERE GOD PARTICLE IS HIDING!"

Edit: Basic credentials for source, since we all know that anyone can write a blog: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/

[Max™]

A little of both, probably, it's easier to misreport obscure physics findings, but it's also hard for some scientists to admit to the public how little they actually know, often turning what they know to be false into a claim of near certainty regarding what they don't.

[Caiti]

A little of both, probably, it's easier to misreport obscure physics findings, but it's also hard for some scientists to admit to the public how little they actually know, often Kaku-ing everything up.

Yeah, figured that could be the issue here.

[Eliseos]

Dark Matter May Be Lurking at Heart of the Sun

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2010) — A scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London believes dark matter is lurking at the centre of the sun and cooling down its core temperature.

The latest study, led by Dr Stephen West from the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway, looks at the possible effects of dark matter on the properties of the sun, if these elusive particles become trapped at its centre.

"Dark matter makes up more than 80 per cent of the total mass of the universe. We know that dark matter exists but to date it has never been produced in a laboratory or directly observed in any experiment, as a result we have very little information about what it actually is. It is important that we examine all possible ways of probing the nature of dark matter and the sun could provide us with an unexpected laboratory in which to do this," says Dr West.

Dark matter is expected to form a halo around our galaxy and since the sun is in motion around the galaxy it experiences a dark matter "wind" as it moves through this halo. Some of the dark matter particles may collide with the elements in the sun and become gravitationally captured by the sun. This could lead to a build up of dark matter particles at the centre of the sun.

The research team's simulations show that the effect of this build up is to reduce the temperature of the solar core. The dark matter particles can absorb heat at the core and transfer it out towards the surface, decreasing the temperature of the core. This change in temperature affects the number of neutrinos produced as by-products in nuclear reactions within the Sun and it is hoped that by examining these neutrinos we can gain information about the Sun's core temperature and whether dark matter plays an important role in solar physics. This in turn could provide information about the mass of individual dark matter particles and how they interact with the elements in the sun.

Dr West adds, "The next step in the work is to look more closely at the change in the predicted number of neutrinos produced in the sun as a result of dark matter collecting at the core and to examine the sensitivity of existing neutrino experiments to this change. In addition, an investigation of the possibility of probing this type of dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider is planned. The LHC could provide complimentary information about the properties of dark matter which along with the information from the sun may lead to a clearer picture of one of the more puzzling issues in physics."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0721132407.htm

[Neosutra]

It's more "It's not that our equations are wrong, it's that 95% of the Universe can't be seen or detected"!!!

[Eliseos]

Also sad that I'm about 3 degrees too far south to be able to see the aurorae from the CMEs about to hit tonight.