Hey, now, this is some great news, right? The trouble-plagued Large Hadron Collider looks to be doing a bang up job in some of its primary tasks. After breaking the energy record previously held by the Tevatron particle accelerator back at the end of November, 2009, reports are now coming in that the LHC is, in fact, producing some extremely high energy collisions. A research team led by MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary have released a report detailing findings that the collisions are producing an “unexpectedly” high number of particles called mesons, subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark. The research is considered one of the first steps in the search for rarer particles, and the elusive, theoretical Higgs Boson. The paper, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics has led scientists to fine-tuning their predictive models for how many mesons will be found in even higher energy collisions. Hit the read link for the full, high energy news.
Report: Large Hadron Collider producing tons of awesome collisions originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | 
MIT | Email this | Comments
Reading people’s annoying “I’m eating such-and-such” tweets gets pretty tiring (though we’re just as guilty as the next guy when we have a particularly impressive petit four). Someone with even more time on their hands than us had taken it upon themselves to make a little contraption that, it could be argued, increases Twitter‘s usefulness just a little. Popcorn Tweets (as it’s called) was built using Lego’s Mindstorm NXT and is powered by Labview software. Triggered by a #popcorn tweet, the machine’s motor is driven by a belt which turns an Archimedes’ screw, which in turn moves a kernal of unpopped corn from the hopper to the popper. Of course, you could always just get a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s microwave corn, but then… where’s the fun in that? The semi-annoying video is after the break.
Continue reading Twitter-powered robotic popcorn machine: media snacker deluxe
Twitter-powered robotic popcorn machine: media snacker deluxe originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | YouTube | Email this | Comments
It’s just been a little over a week since IBM researchers announced that they managed to open up a bandgap for graphene-based field-effect transistors, but they’re now already back to show off what that’s made possible: a 100GHz graphene transistor. What’s more, this latest record-setting transistor (which IBM hopes will one day replace silicon transistors) was made using processing technology that’s compatible with that currently used in advanced silicon device fabrication, which should no doubt help speed up its eventual commercialization. Of course, any widespread adoption is still quite a ways away, but IBM says that this new transistor “demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.” For those keeping score, this first-of-its-kind transistor already beats the frequency performance of current state-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length, which now top out at a mere 40GHz.
IBM demonstrates 100GHz graphene transistor originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
The Register | IBM | Email this | Comments
@facebook.com email addresses incoming
Will Amazon be forced to cede ground over E-Book pricing?
