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Submission + - LHC offline until April 2009 (or longer) 1

Submitted by rufey
rufey writes: The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand.
Earth

Submission + - Chimneys of methane observed in Arctic (rewritten)

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes: A Swedish-Russian expedition in the Arctic ocean has observed "chimneys" of methane rising from holes in the permafrost lid which covers the seabed. (See also translations from the expedition blog here and here). Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more effective than CO2, and runaway methane hydrate breakdown has sometimes been connected with the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction event 251 million years ago.If the Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely, a release of 10% of the methane hydrates in Siberia would be enough to increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. So far, the undersea melting has been concentrated where greatly increased volumes of meltwater have been discharged from Siberian rivers flowing north, releasing methane and methane hydrates trapped on the seabed under an ice layer. The observations tally with increasing numbers of methane hotspots that have appeared since 2003, which are now estimated to match the total organic methane release from the whole of the rest of the world's oceans combined.
Earth

Submission + - Chimneys of escaping methane observed in Arctic

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes: A Swedish-Russian expedition in the Arctic ocean has observed "chimneys" of methane rising from holes in the permafrost lid which covers the seabed. The undersea melting appears to be concentrated where greatly increased volumes of meltwater have been discharged from Siberian rivers flowing north, releasing methane and methane hydrates trapped on the seabed under an ice layer. The observations tally with increasing numbers of methane hotspots that have appeared since 2003, which are now estimated to match the total organic methane release from the whole of the rest of the world's oceans combined. (See also translations from the expedition blog here and here). If the Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely, a release of 10% of the methane hydrates in Siberia would be enough to increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more effective than CO2, and runaway methane hydrate breakdown has sometimes been connected with the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction event 251 million years ago.
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia wins defamation case

Submitted by Raul654
Raul654 writes: Yesterday, a french judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for defamation. The judge found that "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature". According to the inquirer: "Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros ($100,000) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website."
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Best Obsolete Technologies

Journal by Billosaur
Given the nature of the world today, where it seems a technology, application, or piece of equipment is rendered obsolete 15 minutes after it becomes available, Wired has gone back and looked at some of the best obsolete technologies. What's interesting about the list is that despite many of the items having been superseded by more modern technologies, several of them (like the Sundial or the Slide Rule) could sti
The Courts

Submission + - FTC asked to investigate copyright warnings

Submitted by JPMH
JPMH writes: A formal Federal Trade Commission complaint has been filed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association — a group which includes Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat, among others. According to Ars Technica's report, "the CCIA's complaint fingers the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group (USA) for deceptive trade practices, accusing them of systematically misrepresenting the rights of consumers to use copyrighted material. 'These warnings that we have been seeing for decades are false,' CCIA spokesperson Jake Ward told Ars Technica in a Monday interview. 'They are a misrepresentation of the law and a violation of consumers' rights.'"

Comment Grain of Salt (Score 1) 311

by Y2 (#16415035) Attached to: Changes in Earth's Orbit Linked to Extinctions
Let me first say that I've read TFA but not the original paper. The following criticism is based on a presentation I attended long ago on another proposed mechanism to explain periodic extinctions.

When you look for a periodicity in a bunch of data, you might do a fourier transform and look for peaks. (The other work did that.) Essentially you're doing a large number of correlations. If you try 100 corelations, you should not be surprised to see one that's significant at the 99% level, just by chance!

On the other hand, if the periodicity they found matched known astronomical phenomena (as opposed to the other work I looked at), the probability of a chance result is much reduced.

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