Medevilae - Slashdot User

Submission + - Iran Tried and Failed to Launch a Monkey Into Spac (popsci.com)

Submitted by Medevilae on Sunday October 16, 2011 @08:12PM

Medevilae writes: This morning, PopSci’s dedicated “space monkey” news feed lit up with some distressing news: When Iran indefinitely suspended its plans to launch a monkey into space earlier this month, it was actually because they had already tried and failed. Iranian Deputy Science Minister Mohammad Mehdinejad-Nouri told state media that the Kavoshgar-5 rocket carrying a capsule with a live monkey launched during Shahrivar, which is the Iranian month spanning August 23 to September 22, but the launch was not publicized because it did not accomplish all of its mission objectives. Assuming one of the objectives was to safely carry the monkey to space and back, things don’t sound good for the monkey.

Submission + - Anti-helium discovered by STAR (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Medevilae on Monday April 25, 2011 @11:29AM

Medevilae writes: Eighteen examples of the heaviest antiparticle ever found, the nucleus of antihelium-4, have been made in the STAR experiment at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“The STAR experiment is uniquely capable of finding antihelium-4,” says the STAR experiment’s spokesperson, Nu Xu, of the Nuclear Science Division (NSD) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “STAR already holds the record for massive antiparticles, last year having identified the anti-hypertriton, which contains three constituent antiparticles. With four antinucleons, antihelium-4 is produced at a rate a thousand times lower yet. To identify the 18 examples required sifting through the debris of a billion gold-gold collisions.”

Slashdot Top Deals