Q: What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?

A: Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

Tell that to your oxytocin receptors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_motivation_and_hormones#Oxytocin_and_vasopressin)

I think the headline is correct, LHCb has observed CP violation in an experimental domain where it had not been observed before. The headline does not claim that LHCb has discovered CP violation.

FYI: wayland can use android drivers http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/2147208/jolla-ports-wayland-to-android-gpu-drivers

Well, I hope a clone comes out sooner or later.

Isn't this the plot of an old Michael Crichton novel? The only difference is that the protagonist was affected by epilepsia rather than parkinson.

And here you go!

CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.

A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.

(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.

It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.

The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).

For direct download:
http://av.vimeo.com/48323/967/69379567.mp4?token=1319148574_68f532a970ac33e3a5fb0a2b7cb02a82

If it does not work you can use this: http://savevideo.me/

What this guy did is awesome, but for a second while reading the summary I got confused and hoped that someone had mounted a rocket on a balloon to be ignited when the balloon is about to reach its peak altitude. THAT would have been absolutely awesome!

Fire, exactly!

Just put them in an oven that can do more than 250C, and possibly reach 500C, the typical stability temperature of cobalt alloys, the material that usually make the ferromagnetic surface of hard disk platters. Bonus points if you can do 650C, then you will start melting the aluminum and approach the Curie temperature of cobalt alloys. There is physically no way to recover anything once you do that.

Btw I don't know about microwaves, but that may be a nice (and fun) option too. Of course you'd need to dismantle the shielding first, but as someone has mentioned, that wouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

Nobody knows, but neither did Maxwell 150 years ago when he formuleted his theory of electromagnetism, nontheless without it you wouldn't have radios, ipods or cell phones. Einsten had no idea what his general relativity was good for but without it you wuoln't have GPSs and Li-ion batteries.

I could go on for a while, but let me tell you that real scientists work because they want to understand nature better, regardless of any pratical use that may stem from their work.