Science
The Recycling of the Tevatron
ananyo writes with an excerpt from an article in Nature about the decomissioning of the Tevatron: "It is a 4,000-tonne edifice that stands three stories high, chock full of particle detectors, power supplies, electronics and photomultiplier tubes, all layered like a giant onion around a cylindrical magnet. During 26 years of operation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, this behemoth, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), helped to find the top quark and chased the Higgs boson. But since the lab's flagship particle collider, the Tevatron, was switched off in September 2011, the detector has been surplus stock — and it is now slowly being cannibalized for parts."
Currently other projects are taking small bits and pieces of the Tevatron, but another Fermilab project, ORKA, wants to gut the collider to study kaon decay.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Recycling of the Tevatron
ananyo writes with an excerpt from an article in Nature about the decomissioning of the Tevatron: "It is a 4,000-tonne edifice that stands three stories high, chock full of particle detectors, power supplies, electronics and photomultiplier tubes, all layered like a giant onion around a cylindrical magnet. During 26 years of operation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, this behemoth, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), helped to find the top quark and chased the Higgs boson. But since the lab's flagship particle collider, the Tevatron, was switched off in September 2011, the detector has been surplus stock — and it is now slowly being cannibalized for parts."
Currently other projects are taking small bits and pieces of the Tevatron, but another Fermilab project, ORKA, wants to gut the collider to study kaon decay.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Categories: Science
KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Playbook OS 2.0 Released
Alt-kun writes "On February 21st, The Blackberry Playbook finally received its long-promised overhaul. Called Playbook OS 2.0, this major upgrade provides native email and calendaring apps, limited support for Android applications (the developer has to repackage the app for the Playbook), and a bunch of other features. There are some fairly positive initial reviews, although one can no doubt expect a lot of too-little-too-late naysaying from various quarters as well. The Globe and Mail article also contains this somewhat interesting note: '...until RIM began deep discounting ... the device languished way behind rivals such as the iPad in terms of market share. One recent report by Toronto-based Solutions Research Group, however, pegs RIM's share of the tablet market at around 15 per cent, a big jump after discounting over the holiday buying season.'"
ZDNet has some screenshots of the new features, and El Reg has a piece on an interesting bit of the new software.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Man Ordered To Apologize To Wife On Facebook
New submitter Marillion writes "Photographer Mark Byron was so bothered by his pending divorce and child visitation issues that he blasted his soon-to-be ex-wife on his personal Facebook page. That touched off a battle that resulted in a Hamilton County judge ordering Byron jailed for his Facebook rant — and to post on his page an apology to his wife and all of his Facebook friends, something free speech experts found troubling."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An 'off' switch for pain: researchers have now succeeded in inhibiting pain-sensitive neurons on demand, in the laboratory.
Categories: Science
Intel Opening Foundry To Third Parties
angry tapir writes "Intel is exploring whether it can branch out as a foundry by opening its chip manufacturing facilities to more third-party customers. Intel has expanded its chip-to-order business by signing up additional customers to take advantage of its 22-nanometer process facilities."
In particular, two FPGA design companies will be using Intel's fabrication plant, and "the unit has more than two customers but others are not disclosing their plans yet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Simply by touching a small piece of Power Felt, a promising new thermoelectric device, body heat is converted into electrical current
Categories: Science
An epidemic, the disease chytrid, is spreading among the world's amphibian population, decimating whole species. Now, scientists are building arks in an effort to save species before the disease can wipe them out
Categories: Science
ACTA Referred To Europe's Top Court For Analysis
superglaze writes "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is to get an extra level of scrutiny in the EU after the European Commission said it would refer it to the European Court of Justice, to check it really does comply with fundamental freedoms in the union. This obviously follows mass protests over ACTA, and it seems justice commissioner Viviane Reding was the one who pushed for ECJ scrutiny. It's not currently clear if this will delay the European Parliament ratification process, but it is hard to imagine the parliament voting on ACTA (scheduled for June at the moment) before the ECJ has had its say — and no-one can say right now how long that will take to happen."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Adobe Makes Flash on GNU/Linux Chrome-Only
ekimd writes "Adobe has anounced their plans to abandon future updates of their Flash player for Linux. Partnering with Google, after the release of 11.2, 'the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe.' Viva la HTML 5!"
And it appears that Mozilla won't be implementing Pepper anytime soon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed - Atmospheric oxygen really took off on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago. At this key juncture of our planet's evolution, species had either to learn to cope with this poison that was produced by photosynthesizi
Categories: Science
Earth's clouds got a little lower -- about one percent on average -- during the first decade of this century, finds a new NASA-funded university study based on NASA satellite data. The results have potential implications for future global climate.
Categories: Science
Have Bad Cars Gone Extinct?
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that global competition is squeezing lemons out of the market and forcing automakers to improve the quality and reliability of their vehicles. With few exceptions, cars are so close on reliability that it's getting harder for companies to charge a premium. 'We don't have total clunkers like we used to,' says Dave Sargent, automotive vice president with J.D. Power. In 1998, J.D. Power and Associates found an industry average of 278 problems per 100 vehicles, but this year, the number fell to 132. In 1998, the most reliable car had 92 problems per 100 vehicles, while the least reliable had 517, a gap of 425. This year the gap closed to 284 problems. It wasn't always like this. In the 1990s, Honda and Toyota dominated in quality, especially in the key American market for small and midsize cars. Around 2006, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were heading into financial trouble and shifted research dollars from trucks to cars after years of neglect and spent more on engineering and parts to close the gap. Meanwhile Toyota's reputation was tarnished by a series of safety recalls, and Honda played conservative with new models that looked similar to the old ones. Now it's 'very hard to find products that aren't good anymore,' says Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of the Edmunds.com automotive website. 'In safety, performance and quality, the differences just don't have material impact.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Emerging Science of Connected Networks - Complexity scientists have made great strides in understanding the behaviour of single networks. Now they want to know what happens when networks become connected to each other
Categories: Science
Nanowires have many potential applications including LEDs and sensors. Now, researchers have found a way of precisely controlling the width and composition of these tiny strands as they grow, making it possible to grow complex structures that are optimall
Categories: Science
