Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN observed a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV, physicists announced at a seminar held at CERN today.
“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people… read more
A short burst of moderate exercise enhances the consolidation of memories in both healthy older adults and those with mild cognitive impairment, scientists with UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory have discovered.
In their study, post-doctoral researcher Sabrina Segal and neurobiologists Carl Cotman and Lawrence Cahill had people 50 to 85 years old with and without memory deficits view… read more
The unmanned experimental aircraft X-51A WaveRider is expected to fly above the Pacific Ocean near Point Mugu at Mach 6 — at 3,600 mph — for 300 seconds Tuesday, Los Angeles Times reports.
A passenger aircraft traveling at that speed could fly from Los Angeles to New York in 46 minutes.
Aerospace engineers say that harnessing technology capable of sustaining hypersonic speeds is crucial to the next generation… read more
In the face of mounting evidence that cancer cells communicate, cooperate and even engage in collective decision-making, biophysicists and cancer researchers at Rice University, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University are suggesting a new strategy for outsmarting cancer through its own social intelligence.
“We need to get beyond the notion that cancer is a random collection of cells running amok — these cells lead… read more
The exascale computing era is almost upon us and computer scientists are already running into difficulties. 1 exaflop is 10^18 floating point operations per second, that’s a thousand petaflops. The current trajectory of computer science should produce this kind of capability by 2018 or so.
How do humans access and make sense of the exascale data sets?
The answer, of course, is to find some way to compress… read more
The Prospect of Immortality is a six-year study by UK photographer Murray Ballard, who has traveled the world pulling back the curtain on the amateurs, optimists, businesses, and apparatuses of cryonics, the preservation of deceased humans in liquid nitrogen, Wired reports.
“It’s not a large industry,” says Ballard, who visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Phoenix, Arizona; the Cryonics Institute… read more
“The idea that the web will cause the TV business to ‘collapse’ is fantasy,” wrote Dan Frommer yesterday in a calm response to Henry Blodget’s actually-quite-alarmist Don’t Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse.
While Frommer is right that the business of TV is actually still doing well as it is, and technology-led change will probably be a lot slower than Blodget… read more
Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have achieved the hottest manmade temperatures ever, by colliding lead ions to momentarily create a quark-gluon plasma, a subatomic soup and unique state of matter that is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang, Nature News reports.
ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, said they have achieved a quark–gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record… read more
Electrical engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method, called acoustic-assisted magnetic recording, to use high-frequency sound waves to create durable solid state storage that allows for storing more data in a smaller space, using less power.
“We’re near the peak of what we can do with the technology we now use for magnetic storage,” said Pallavi Dhagat, an associate professor in the… read more
One of the biggest debuts in the science world could happen in a matter of weeks: the Higgs boson may finally, really have been discovered
Ever since tantalizing hints of the Higgs turned up in December at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists there have been busily analyzing the results of their energetic particle collisions to further refine their search.
The possible news has a… read more
Ray Kurzweil will join TIME Magazine writer Lev Grossman for a “mind-expanding keynote conversation about our future” at SXSW in Austin on Monday, March 12. 2 PM — 3 PM (Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 5).
Grossman wrote the Time cover story “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” on the Singularity and Ray Kurzweil’s “radical vision for humanity’s immortal future.”
Kurzweil and Grossman will discuss… read more
The open-source paradigm is now enabling creation of open-source scientific hardware by combining three-dimensional (3D) printing with open-source microcontrollers running on free and open-source software (FOSS), says Michigan Technological University scientist Joshua M. Pearce in the current issue of Science.
A key enabling open-source hardware project is the Arduino electronic prototyping platform. The $20 to $30 Arduino is a versatile yet easy-to-learn microcontroller that can run a number of associated scientific instruments, including Arduino Geiger (radiation detector), pHduino (pH meter), Xoscillo (oscilloscope), and OpenPCR… read more
A new Mayo Clinic study confirms the use of smartphones medical images to evaluate stroke patients in remote locations through telemedicine.
“Essentially what this means is that telemedicine can fit in our pockets,” says Bart Demaerschalk, M.D., professor of Neurology, and medical director of Mayo Clinic Telestroke.
“For patients this means access to expertise in a timely fashion when they need it… read more
The 3-D printing industry is on track to be a $3.1 billion business by 2016 and the innovations on display this week at Euromold, a manufacturing trade show, show its foundation is growing — both in revenue and in physical print size, Wired News reports.
Objet 1000
The big news out of Euromold is the new Objet 1000 3-D printer,… read more
Teri Krebs and Pål-Ørjan Johansen, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), have taken a closer look at experiments in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, treating alcoholics with LSD.
The researchers found six different studies of LSD and alcoholism that were scientifically sound, involving a total of 536 people. They showed that a single dose of LSD, provided for treatment purposes, helped… read more