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nice story from Andrés: my only concern: "At Gran Sasso, the ingots will be melted into a 3-centimetre-thick lead lining that will surround the cubic CUORE detector. Before the ingots are melted down, the inscriptions on each one will be removed and sent back to Cagliari for preservation. "They are trademarks, bearing the names of various firms that extracted and traded lead," explains Donatella Salvi, an archaeologist at the Cagliari museum.

New vision sensor from a swiss company seems to go beyond Elementary Motion Detectors (those inspired by insect vision)

Nice stuff!

no Higgs boson before 2013... and a replacement of 10,000 superconducting magnet connections ! Reminds me of the the gravitational detectors... no detection before an upgrade in 2013...! There are the big announcements to make the cash flow... and reality !

Higgs is almost 81, so he should better invest in his health if he wants the Nobel prize... But who cares, it's another 5 years window where high-energy theorists can produce nonsense with no experimental evidence. They should be happy!

A sonification experiment taking data from ATLAS and translating it into music. The outcome was played at Montreux jazz fest, listen to the results in soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/sonification-quantizer. The way it works is "A tiny subset of collision data from the ATLAS Detector (in CERN, Switzerland) is being generated and streamed in real-time into a sonification engine built atop Python, Pure Data, Ableton, and IceCast." Code's in github https://github.com/cherston/Quantizer_public

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view

...obvious use for space...

Indeed, you only need ONE antenna to communicate with your satellite irrespective of its position, since one can freely send the signals right through the Earth. Small disadvantage: you should tell the launcher section to design a new launcher that is capable to bring a 200tons detector to space...

"It works by emitting a burst of light from a femtosecond laser that reflects off visible surfaces - such as an opaque wall - onto objects that are hidden from the camera's direct view. The light then bounces off the object before ultimately making its way back to a detector. This process is repeated a number of times with the laser targeted at different areas of the reflecting surface." nice video

:-)

Well, it's not yet confirmed... That error would be worse than the magnetic moment of the muon about 10 years ago. There, it was "at least" a conflict of conventions used in the computer codes!

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show. CERN's statement says OPERA scientists are studying the "potential extent of these two effects" but doesn't indicate which source of error (if either) is likely to outweigh the other. However, Lucia Votano, director of the Gran Sasso laboratory, says the "main suspicion" focuses on the optical-fiber connection. She adds that OPERA researchers deserve credit for "having tenaciously followed this particular evidence via checks completed in the last few days." The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.

Related to our Airport security discussion

IceCube detects a neutrino in about every 6 minutes but most are from within the solar system. A small number of very high energy neutrinos have been found though which have energies that cannot be produced by the sun or on Earth.

essentially they made an experiment that does not prove or disprove anything -big deal-... what is the scientific value of "strongly disfavour"??? I also like the sentence "most models do not have exact predictions for the energy scale associated with this violation of Lorentz invariance" ... but if this is true WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE EXPERIMENT!!!! God, physics is in trouble ....

hum, null result experiments are not useless !!! there is always the hope of finding "something wrong", which would lead to a great discovery. For the state of theoretical physics (the "no exact predictions" quote), i totally agree that physics is in trouble... That's what happen when physicists don't care anymore about experiments...! All you can do now is drawing "nice"graph with upper bounds on some parameters of an all tunable weird theory !

Can we use this for space?

anything happening on this since 3 years?

yes it seems like. most of it seems however directed toward understanding this effect, and not toward applications. But i'm still convinced that we could find many very interesting applications !!! a few references from ADS: 1 2011PhRvA..83f3807B 1.000 06/2011 A E X R C U Brida, G.; Chekhova, M. V.; Fornaro, G. A.; Genovese, M.; Lopaeva, E. D.; Berchera, I. Ruo Systematic analysis of signal-to-noise ratio in bipartite ghost imaging with classical and quantum light 2 2011PhRvA..83e3808L 1.000 05/2011 A E R U Liu, Ying-Chuan; Kuang, Le-Man Theoretical scheme of thermal-light many-ghost imaging by Nth-order intensity correlation 3 2011PhRvA..83e1803D 1.000 05/2011 A E R C U Dixon, P. Ben; Howland, Gregory A.; Chan, Kam Wai Clifford; O'Sullivan-Hale, Colin; Rodenburg, Brandon; Hardy, Nicholas D.; Shapiro, Jeffrey H.; Simon, D. S.; Sergienko, A. V.; Boyd, R. W.; Howell, John C. Quantum ghost imaging through turbulence 4 2011SPIE.7961E.160O 1.000 03/2011 A E T Ohuchi, H.; Kondo, Y. Complete erasing of ghost images caused by deeply trapped electrons on computed radiography plates 5 2011ApPhL..98k1115M 1.000 03/2011 A E R U Meyers, Ronald E.; Deacon, Keith S.; Shih, Yanhua Turbulence-free ghost imaging 6 2011ApPhL..98k1102G 1.000 03/2011 A E R C U Gan, Shu; Zhang, Su-Heng; Zhao, Ting; Xiong, Jun; Zhang, Xiangdong; Wang, Kaige Cloaking of a phase object in ghost imaging 7 2011RScI...82b3110Y 1.000 02/2011 A E R U Yang, Hao; Zhao, Baosheng; Qiu

something for Luzi ...

Two apps - the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory (DECO) and Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones (CRAYFIS) - transform smartphones into miniature cosmic-ray detectors. They use the CMOS chips inside phones' onboard cameras to detect the secondary particles produced when cosmic rays - energetic, charged subatomic particles arriving from beyond the solar system - collide with air molecules in the Earth's atmosphere