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Comment Re:Journalism (Score 1) 691

Just to give some scale to the show's ignorance, a Level 6 Nuclear Accident is something like the Kyshtym disaster, where 80 tons of highly radioactive material were released into the atmosphere. Level 5 Accidents include Three Mile Island and Goiânia, where 250 people were heavily contaminated and 5 died from the direct consequences of Cesium-137 exposure (without counting cancer victims, miscarriages and children born with severe problems). Most Level 4 Accidents actually caused at least some deaths, so the classification of Fukushima at Level 4, despite official, may be a bit premature.

Japan

Third Blast At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant 691

iamrmani was one of several people reporting updates on the Fukushima Nuclear plant that has been struggling following last Friday's disaster. A third explosion (Japanese) has been reported, along with other earlier information. MSNBC has a story about similiar reactors in the US. We also ran into a story which predicts that there won't be significant radiation. But already Japan is facing rolling blackouts, electricity rationing, evacuating the area around the plant, and thousands dead already.
Power

Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion? 815

Haffner quotes physorg which says "Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W....when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31."
Crime

Man Tunnels Into GameStop, Steals Games 210

An anonymous reader writes "Life imitates Minecraft: Computer game piracy is big business, but there are still those who prefer to get their games the old-fashioned way: by digging a tunnel into their local games shop and making off with as much stock as they can carry. At least, that's the slightly bizarre approach taken by a man from Greeneville, Tennessee, who was arrested late last week after being caught tunneling into his local GameStop store from an empty adjoining building." Note that the link is thin, and the sources are behind logins and subscription links, so please post better URLs if you can find them.
Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."

Comment Re:What if it doesn't exist? (Score 3, Interesting) 101

Actually, I work with neutrinos. The latest MiniBooNE/MINOS results are really, really weird; I'd hold any conclusions for now, because they have very little statistics for the antineutrino runs (and some lack of knowledge of the primary proton beans). Some say the next MINOS analysis is already on its way and will be very surprising, but we'll see.

The main problem is that those experiments suggest that CPT symmetry is broken (or, in non-technical terms, that a reaction with antimatter isn't the same as the same reaction with matter with the opposite charge, time reversed and seen in the mirror). CPT symmetry can be shown to be equivalent to Poincaré invariance, which means that these results challenge not only the standard model, but special relativity itself. Such an extraordinary claim needs really extraordinary evidence, so let's wait for more statistics for now.

Comment Re:What if it doesn't exist? (Score 3, Interesting) 101

Actually, we'd love to see the Higgs, and something else. Other Higgs-like particles, supersymmetric particles, Kaluza-Klein modes, anything else. This would confirm that the standard model is a good approximation for the energy ranges where we're using it, and that there is something beyond that. Not finding the Higgs would be interesting too, because we'd have to rethink almost everything we know.

The worst-case scenario is finding the Higgs and nothing else. Then we'd be out of jobs.

Google

Chrome OS Doesn't Trust Apps Or Users 410

holy_calamity writes "Google's Chrome OS chiefs explain in Technology Review how most of the web-only OS's features flow from changing one core assumption of previous operating system designs. 'Operating systems today are centered on the idea that applications can be trusted to modify the system, and that users can be trusted to install applications that are trustworthy,' says Google VP Sundar Pichai. Chrome doesn't trust applications, or users — and neither can modify the system. Once users are banned from installing applications, or modifying the system security, usability, and more are improved, the Googlers claim."

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