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Hardware

Submission + - Inside Newegg's east coast distribution center (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Did you know that Newegg is the second largest e-tailer in the US, after Amazon? Perhaps building your own computer isn't dead yet! ExtremeTech's Matthew Murray was recently invited to take a tour of the Newegg east coast distribution center, and the facts that he dug up — and the pictures he shot — make for perfect curiosity-sating, Friday afternoon surfing fodder for any American build-it-yourself computer geek."
Space

Submission + - Atom Smashers Get an Antimatter Surprise (io9.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart.

Specifically, particles called D-mesons appear to decay in a slightly different way than their antiparticles, and this seemingly small finding could explain why the early universe became dominated by matter instead of antimatter. According to project physicist Matthew Charles, the results have a statistical certainty of 3.5 sigma — meaning there's a 99.95% chance that these results will hold up, but still short of the 5 sigma level needed to declare this a formal discovery.

However, the team still has a huge amount of data still to work through, so there's an excellent chance that we'll know one way or the other about this result in the near future.

http://io9.com/5859845/the-large-hadron-collider-may-have-discovered-why-we-dont-live-in-a-universe-of-antimatter
Android

Submission + - B&N Pummels Microsoft Patent Claims with Prior (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplemental notice of prior art that contains a 43-page list of examples it believes counters Microsoft's claim that Nook violates five of Microsoft's patents. 'The list of prior art for the five patents that Microsoft claims the Nook infringes is very much a walk down memory lane,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The first group of prior art evidence presented by Barnes & Noble for U.S. Patent No. 5,778,372 alone lists 172 pieces of prior art' and 'made reference to a lot of technology and people from the early days of the public Internet... like Mosaic, the NCSA, and (I kid you not) the Arena web browser. The list was like old home week for the early World Wide Web.'"

Submission + - The Light Stuff (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ackthpt
ackthpt writes: A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material. Made from a lattice of hollow metallic tubes, the material is less dense than aerogels and metallic foams, yet retains strength due to the small size of the lattice structure. Projected as useful for insullation, batteries electrodes, sound dampening.
Science

Submission + - US Army Has First Test Flight of Mach 6 Weapon (defense.gov) 2

Submitted by
Stirling Newberry
Stirling Newberry writes: "In a terse press release the US Department of Defense announced the first test of the the AHW, which uses rockets to launch and then glides to its target, in a manner similar to the Space Shuttle's re-entry. Earlier ABC News posted a story with animation video of the concept. Over at DefenseTech they argue that the trajectory being different from an ICBM is meant to show that it is not a first strike, but even the comments don't think that explanation flies.

More likely it is the speed of deployment, the ability to strike targets without going high enough to be seen by many advance warning radars, and without using nuclear warheads makes it a precision surprise attack weapon, a kind of super cruise missile for surprise asymetric attacks."

Submission + - Quantum wavefunction is a real physical object aft (nature.com)

Submitted by cekerr
cekerr writes: Nature reports:
  Quantum theorem shakes foundations
The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers.

"... the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all.

David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the theorem is the most important result in the foundations of quantum mechanics that he has seen in his 15-year professional career. “This strips away obscurity and shows you can’t have an interpretation of a quantum state as probabilistic,” he says.

Submission + - Experiment affirms faster-than-light claim (nature.com)

Submitted by
gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: "Earlier this year, the OPERA experiment made the extraordinary claim that they had seen neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The experiment, located at Gran Sasso in Italy, saw neutrinos arrive 90 nanoseconds early from their starting point at CERN in Switzerland. Others have doubted OPERA's claim, but in a new paper, the group reaffirms its commitment to the measurement. “It’s slightly better than the previous result,” OPERA’s physics coordinator Dario Autiero told Nature News . Most members of the collaboration didn't sign up to the original paper out of skepticism have now come on board. But scientists outside the group still aren't sure. "Independent checks are the way to go", says Rob Plunkett, co-spokesman a rival experiment called MINOS."
Moon

Submission + - High Resolution Global Topographic Map of Moon (nasa.gov)

Submitted by stuckinarut
stuckinarut writes: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has released the highest resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever created.

“Our new topographic view of the moon provides the dataset that lunar scientists have waited for since the Apollo era,” says Mark Robinson, Principal Investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) from Arizona State University in Tempe. “We can now determine slopes of all major geologic terrains on the moon at 100 meter scale. Determine how the crust has deformed, better understand impact crater mechanics, investigate the nature of volcanic features, and better plan future robotic and human missions to the moon.”
Science

Submission + - Ozone Detected In The Venus' Atmosphere (gizmocrazed.com) 1

Submitted by
Mightee
Mightee writes: "Astronomers these days are busy searching for life on other planets of the universe. They search for the environment and the necessary elements for establishing a habitat for Homo sapiens. After mars, it's Venus this time that has shown a green signal. Surprisingly it isn't NASA but the Venus Express spacecraft of 'the European Space Agency' who has found it.

The signal is actually the presence of Ozone layer similar to that surrounding our mother Earth and Mars already. It is a layer of Ozone (O3) surrounding the earth which absorbs harmful ultraviolet rays coming from the sun. It bears quite a lot importance in the presence of life on earth. In fact, it is thought to have been brought into being by the life itself."
Canada

Quark-Gluon Plasma Observed At LHC 155

Posted by timothy from the particular-particles dept.
Canadian_Daemon writes "A phase of matter created moments after the Big Bang is thought to have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. 'Striking' evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday."

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