Hasta La Gadget!

Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram (see image above) have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface contamination. Since that unit of measure is the last to be based on an artifact and not a physical constant of nature — for instance, a meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second — it means that scientists no longer know exactly how much a kilogram is. That makes experiments requiring extreme precision more difficult, so researchers from Mettler Toledo, CERN and the EPFL have been working for the last 15 years on a so-called Watt balance, which works on the principle of electromagnetic force restoration. The team managed to created a “load cell” that’s accurate to a 0.3 µg resolution for a 2kg weight, well below the desired level of 1 µg — meaning the goal of replacing a hunk of metal from 1878 with something more, ahem, solid is within reach by the 2015 target date.

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Source: Mettler Toledo

The web as we know it was famously invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, but it wasn’t until a few years later — 1993 to be precise — that it’d truly be set free. On April 30 of that year, Berners-Lee’s then employer would make the technology behind the WWW available license free, bundling a basic browser and some key chunks of code into the deal. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this event CERN has recreated the first ever website, complete with its original URL. The preservation doesn’t stop at copying over some old files, either, with CERN also looking to preserve the first servers used, restoring as much as possible to its original state. Beyond a little geeky nostalgia, the project hopes to safeguard the web’s earliest days, before it became the ubiquitous phenomenon it is now, so that future generations can enjoy (and scoff) at the web’s origins. Best of all, no drawn-out field trip is required to enjoy the spectacle, you can see it just as nature intended by heading to the source.

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Via: BBC

Source: The WWW Project, CERN, (2)

CERN’s latest update to its elementary particle project is that the new particle that it was able to pick up is behaving “more and more like a Higgs boson.” The team isn’t being particularly specific here, as its not certain just yet whether it’s detected a ‘standard model’ particle or the lightest of several possible bosons predicted in other spin-off theories. Researchers are referencing the interactions of the particle (particularly its spin, or lack off) as the main reason why they reckon they’re dealing with a genuine Higgs boson and work will now focus on exactly what kind of boson they’ve managed to snag.

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Source: CERN

As a prominent musician once noted: all that hype doesn’t feel the same next year, boy. And that’s sadly proving true for our old friend Higgs Boson, who shot to fame last Summer but is now waking up to find only a handful of fans camped outside his collider. Part of the problem is simply that things have become procedural and academic — CERN scientists met in Italy this week to share their latest findings, but the updates were mostly either inconclusive or suggestive of a rather mundane-seeming subatomic entity.

At the time of Higgs’ discovery, observers were especially interested in the possibility that this mysterious particle didn’t decay in exactly the way science had predicted. It seemed to break down into an excess of photons, such that it might potentially reveal something unexpected about dark matter and the structure of space-time. But as data continues to be gathered, it appears more likely that the extra photons may have been a statistical anomaly, leading one researcher to admit on Twitter that his ATLAS team is “not too excited” about it anymore. Nothing is confirmed at this point, however, and other scientists have since tweeted to caution against jumping to conclusions. At least we can say for sure that Higgs still exists. And if the poor thing can’t hold the universe together and mess with the laws of physics at the same time, then so be it.

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Source: New Scientist, @Resonaances (Twitter)

We’ve long known that the Large Hadron Collider would need to take a break, but that doesn’t take the edge off of the moment itself: as of Valentine’s Day, the particle accelerator has conducted its last test for the next two years. The giant research ring will undergo sweeping repairs and upgrades that should should give it the superconducting connectors needed to hit the originally planned 14TeV of combined collision energy, versus the 8TeV it’s been limited to almost since the beginning. CERN’s machine arguably earned the downtime. After a rough start, it went on to produce rafts of collision data and healthy evidence of the elusive Higgs boson. If you’re still down, think of the hiatus as doing us a favor — it postpones any world-ending disasters until around 2015.

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: CERN