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Submission + - Tevatron data doesn't match predictions (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Asmodae
Asmodae writes: Top and Anti-Top quark events in the Tevatron have some unpredicted behavior that might need a new explanation. From the article: "A number of theoretical papers suggest interesting new physics mechanisms," the authors note, "including axigluons, diquarks, new weak bosons, and extra-dimensions that can all produce forward-backward top-antitop asymmetries."
Network

Submission + - Stock trades to exploit speed of light (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Financial institutions may soon change what they trade or where they do their trading because of the speed of light.

"High-frequency trading" carried out by computers often depends on differing prices of a financial instrument in two geographically-separated markets.

Exactly how far the signals have to go can make a difference in such trades.

Alexander Wissner-Gross told the American Physical Society meeting that financial institutions are looking at ways to exploit the light-speed trick.

Dr Wissner-Gross, of Harvard University, said that the latencies — essentially, the time delay for a signal to wing its way from one global financial centre to another — advantaged some locations for some trades and different locations for others.

There is a vast market for ever-faster fibre-optic cables to try to physically "get there faster" but Dr Wissner-Gross said that the purely technological approach to gaining an advantage was reaching a limit.

Trades now travel at nearly 90% of the ultimate speed limit set by physics, the speed of light in the cables.

Submission + - House Fails to Extend Patriot Act Spy Powers (wired.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The House failed to extend three key expiring provisions of the Patriot Act on Tuesday, elements granting the government broad and nearly unchecked surveillance power on its own public.

  The “roving wiretap” provision allows the FBI to obtain wiretaps from a secret intelligence court, known as the FISA court, without identifying the target or what method of communication is to be tapped.

  The “lone wolf” measure allows FISA court warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for whatever reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. The government has said it has never invoked that provision, but the Obama administration said it wanted to retain the authority to do so.

  The “business records” provision allows FISA court warrants for any type of record, from banking to library to medical, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

The failure of the bill, sponsored by Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis), for the time being is likely to give airtime to competing measures in the Senate that would place limited checks on the act's broad surveillance powers. The White House, meanwhile, said it wanted the expiring measures extended through 2013.
Android

Submission + - Android dethrones Symbian for #1 spot (chicagobreakingbusiness.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Google’s Android dethroned Nokia’s Symbian as the most popular smartphone platform in the last quarter of 2010, ending a reign that began with the birth of the industry 10 years ago.

Research firm Canalys said on Monday phonemakers sold 32.9 million Android-equipped phones in the last quarter, roughly seven times more than a year ago, compared with Symbian’s sales of 31 million.

The phones are produced by manufacturers that include Libertyville-based Motorola Mobility, Samsung and HTC.

The landmark piles pressure on Nokia as it struggles to reassert itself at the top end of the mobile handsets market.

The success of the open-source Android operating system, which has become the standard for most phone makers, leaves Google well placed as cellphones are due to surpass computers for accessing the web.

Hit models from Samsung Electronics, HTC and LG Electronics helped Android in the quarter, and telecom operators in many regions aggressively promoted Android phones.

“We have seen some strong products from a number of vendors,” said Canalys analyst Tim Shepherd.

In the last quarter Symbian suffered from the troubles of its owner and main user, Nokia.

Last week Nokia warned of a grim start to 2011 after rivals ate even more of its smartphone market share, highlighting the scale of the turnaround task facing its new boss.

Stephen Elop, who took over as chief executive in September, will unveil his plan to revamp Nokia’s strategy on Feb. 11.
Medicine

Submission + - Self-control in kids predicts future success (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Will your toddler grow up to be a healthy, financially stable, drug-free human being? It all depends on self-control, a new study says.

Signs of self-control in children as young as 3 could predict how successful that child would be as an adult, according to a paper published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The international team of researchers looked at 1,037 children in New Zealand born in the early 1970s, observing their levels of self-control at ages 3 and 5. At ages 5, 7, 9 and 11, the team used parent, teacher and the children's own feedback to measure such factors as impulsive aggression, hyperactivity, lack of persistence and inattention. At age 32, they used physical exams, blood tests, records searches and personal interviews of 96% of the original participants to determine how healthy, wealthy and law-abiding the subjects had turned out to be.

The results were startling. In the fifth of children with the least self-control, 27% had multiple health problems. Compare that with the fifth of kids with the most self-control — at just 11%. Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth. And 43% of the bottom fifth had been convicted of a crime, far outstripping the top fifth's 13% rate.
NASA

Submission + - NASA says Thunderstorms Make Antimatter (nasa.gov)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.
Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed inside thunderstorms in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
"These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
Science

Submission + - Primordial star wreckage found (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: UK and US scientists have found the remnants of a star that exploded more than 13 billion years ago.

It would most probably have been one of the very first stars to shine in the Universe, they say.

All that is left of this pioneer is the gas cloud it threw out into space when it blew itself apart.

It was identified when its contents were illuminated by the brilliant light coming from the surroundings of a distant black hole.

The cloud's atoms occur in abundances that are quite unlike that found in the nearby cosmos today and are more what one would expect from stars that were originally made only of hydrogen and helium.

The research required the observations of two of the world's most powerful telescopes — the Keck facility in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

It has been written up in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Working on the Keck and VLT, Pettini's team probed the composition of distant clouds of gas known as "damped Lyman alpha systems". They did this using the light provided by quasars, extremely luminous galaxies whose brilliance is powered by a mighty black hole at their core.

The investigation identified one particular DLA that had a unique chemical signature — one where the ratio of carbon to iron atoms was 35 times greater than what can be measured in the Sun. It enabled the group to infer that the gas was released by a star 25 times more massive than our star and which originally consisted of only hydrogen and helium — exactly the type of star expected to have ended the Dark Ages.

"The first stars have been a bit like the Holy Grail for astronomers," said Professor Pettini, who led the research with PhD student Ryan Cooke.
Businesses

Submission + - Software Engineer named the Best Job of 2011 (careercast.com)

Submitted by BigTex200
BigTex200 writes: Study names Software Engineer as the best job for 2011, Systems ranks #5! Others on the list include number-cruncher jobs like Mathematician, Statistician, Actuary, etc.
From study:
"Software Engineer, a job that involves the design and creation of software for everything from operating systems to cell phone "apps" to interactive games, ranks as the best job of 2011, according to this year's Jobs Rated report. Surveying 200 different professions across a wide variety of industries, skill levels and salary ranges, Jobs Rated researchers determine their rankings according to five core criteria: Work Environment, Physical Demands, Outlook, Income and Stress. The goal of each Jobs Rated report is to determine how gratifying each job will be for a majority of workers – not just those who are famous or exceptional – so they can be sorted into a list of the "worst" and "best" professions"
Space

Submission + - Incredible double eclipse pic: Sun, Moon, and ISS (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer
The Bad Astronomer writes: The exceptionally talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a picture extraordinary even for him: the space station passing in front of the Sun while the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon! He traveled all the way from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take this amazing shot. I have more information about the picture itself on the Bad Astronomy blog, but you should go to Thierry's website to see more amazing pictures he's taken over the years. They're simply jaw-dropping.
NASA

Submission + - 2010 budget forces NASA to spend $500M on ARES (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: 2010 budget extension forces NASA to spend $500M on defunct ARES project

Thanks to congressional inaction, NASA must continue to fund its defunct Ares I rocket program until March, a requirement that will cost the agency nearly $500 million at a time when it is struggling with the expensive task of replacing the space shuttle.

About a third of that money, $165 million, will go to Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, which has a $2-billion contract to build the solid-rocket first stage for the Ares I, which was supposed to fill the shuttle's role of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.

But under a new NASA plan signed into law by President Obama in October, there's no guarantee that the new rocket required by that plan will use solid-fuel propulsion. And many in the agency say a liquid-fueled rocket would be cheaper, more powerful — and safer.

The money to ATK is part of the $1.2 billion NASA will spend on its canceled Constellation program from Oct. 1 through March. Most of the rest will go to Lockheed Martin Corp., which is building the Orion capsule intended to take astronauts into space aboard whatever rocket NASA selects. That program was largely spared by the new NASA plan.
What's more, constraints on NASA spending resulting from congressional budget gridlock will delay the scheduled start this year of a program to modernize aging facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to transform it into a "21st century spaceport." It's now unclear when the program will begin.

The odd scenario, in which NASA is throwing money at a canceled rocket program but can't fund a modernization program, is because of several twists in the legislative process that started a year ago and came to a head this month.

At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later.

That should have happened before the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year.
NASA

Voyager 1 Beyond Solar Wind 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the merging-with-the-infinite dept.
healeyb noted that Voyager 1 has now reached a distance from the sun where it is no longer able to detect solar wind. Launched in 1977 to get up close and personal with our solar system's gas giants, scientists estimate that in another 4 years it will cross the heliosphere.
Science

Submission + - Cosmos may show echoes of events before Big Bang (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted.

Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.

The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.

Much of high-energy physics research aims to elucidate how the laws of nature evolved during the fleeting first instants of the Universe's being.

"I was never in favour of it, even from the start," said Professor Penrose.

"But if you're not accepting inflation, you've got to have something else which does what inflation does," he explained to BBC News.

"In the scheme that I'm proposing, you have an exponential expansion but it's not in our aeon — I use the term to describe [the period] from our Big Bang until the remote future.

"I claim that this aeon is one of a succession of such things, where the remote future of the previous aeons somehow becomes the Big Bang of our aeon."

This "conformal cyclic cosmology" (CCC) that Professor Penrose advocates allows that the laws of nature may evolve with time, but precludes the need to institute a theoretical beginning to the Universe.

Professor Penrose, of Oxford University, and his collegue Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, have now found what they believe is evidence of events that predate the Big Bang, and that support CCC.

The search turned up 12 candidates that showed concentric circles consistent with the idea — some with as many as five rings, representing five massive events coming from the same object through the course of history.

The suggestion is that the rings — representing unexpected order in a vast sky of disorder — represent pre-Big Bang events, toward the end of the last "aeon".

"Inflation [theory] is supposed to have ironed all of these irregularities out," said Professor Penrose.

"How do you suddenly get something that is making these whacking big explosions just before inflation turns off? To my way of thinking that's pretty hard to make sense of."

Shaun Cole of the University of Durham's computational cosmology group, called the research "impressive".
Image

Students Banned From Bringing Pencils To School 426

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-how-you-play dept.
mernilio writes "According to UPI: 'A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday. The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials 'to build weapons.'"
Networking

Claims About China's April Internet Hijack Are Overblown 78

Posted by Soulskill from the as-are-most-things dept.
sturgeon writes "Yesterday, we discussed what most of the world's major media outlets were reporting on China's April 2010 hijack of '15% of Internet traffic,' including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report (see page 244) on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday. Unfortunately, few bothered with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from). In a review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second, or a 'statistically insignificant' percentage of Internet traffic)."

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