Hasta La Gadget!

Physicists from the Brookhaven National Laboratory have gone down in the Guinness World Records book as having created the highest man-made temperature ever recorded. The scientists were smashing gold ions together using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The smashing together of the ions created a fluid called quark-gluon plasma.

The smashing together of those gold ions simulated conditions similar to those during the creation of the universe and generated a temperature of 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. That is 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is a gigantic 2.4 mile long ring where ions are accelerated to speeds close to that of light.

The experiment being conducted was called PHENIX. The experiment saw gold ions being accelerated around the ring from both directions and crashed together in one of six experimental chambers around the accelerator. The researchers observed the very brief formation of quark-gluon plasma, which is described as and nearly frictionless fluid with a temperature of 4,000,000,000,000°C.

[via LA Times]

Physicists create highest man-made temperature ever is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I’ve watched a few episodes of the show on Discovery Channel called Meteorite Men. I’ve really of only watched enough to know that tiny little fragments of meteorites can be worth huge amounts of money. The amount of money meteorites are worth to collectors pales in comparison to their worth to the scientific community. The study of an old meteorite has yielded the discovery of an entirely new mineral that was previously unknown to science.

The new mineral has been called panguite. The mineral was embedded in what’s called the Allende meteorite, which fell to the earth in 1969. This particular meteorite has been studied since 2007 and a geologist working at Caltech named Chi Ma has so far discovered nine new minerals during his electron microscope study of the meteorite.

According to Ma, panguite was one of the first solid materials to coalesce in our solar system approximately 4.567 billion years ago. The minerals name comes from a reference to Pan Gu from Chinese mythology. In Chinese mythology, Pan Gu separated yin and yang with a giant axe creating Earth and sky. The chemical name of the mineral shows that it has zirconium as one of its elements. That particular element is believed to be a key element to help scientists determine what the environment before, and during the solar system’s formation was like.

[via Wired]

Meteorite study yields new mineral discovery is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Computers are normally limited by the fixed nature of their chipsets: once the silicon is out of the factory, its capabilities are forever locked in. The City College of New York and University of California Berkeley have jointly developed a technique that could break chips free of these prisons and speed along quantum computing. They found that hitting gallium arsenide with a laser light pattern aligns the spins of the atoms under the rays, creating a spintronic circuit that can re-map at a moment’s notice. The laser could be vital to quantum computers, which can depend heavily or exclusively on spintronics to work: a simple shine could get electrons storing a much wider range of numbers and consequently handling many more calculations at once. Research is only just now becoming public, however; even though gallium arsenide is common in modern technology, we’ll need to be patient before we find quantum PCs at the local big-box retail chain. Despite this, we could still be looking at an early step in a shift from computers with many single-purpose components to the abstracted, all-powerful quantum machines we’ve held in our science fiction dreams.

CCNY, UC Berkeley develop lasers that could rewrite quantum chips, spin those atoms right round originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 04:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This rudimentary robot hand, developed by the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Japan, never loses at Rock, Paper, Scissors. It has a perfect record against everyone who’s ever challenged it, but that’s only because it can see and react faster than any human being can. More »

Don’t tell Google, but its latest X lab project is something performed by the great internet public every day. For free. Mountain View’s secret lab stitched together 1,000 computers totaling 16,000 cores to form a neural network with over 1 billion connections, and sent it to YouTube looking for cats. Unlike the popular human time-sink, this was all in the name of science: specifically, simulating the human brain. The neural machine was presented with 10 million images taken from random videos, and went about teaching itself what our feline friends look like. Unlike similar experiments, where some manual guidance and supervision is involved, Google’s pseudo-brain was given no such assistance.

It wasn’t just about cats, of course — the broader aim was to see whether computers can learn face detection without labeled images. After studying the large set of image-data, the cluster revealed that indeed it could, in addition to being able to develop concepts for human body parts and — of course — cats. Overall, there was 15.8 percent accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories, which the researchers claim is a 70 percent jump over previous studies. Full details of the hows and whys will be presented at a forthcoming conference in Edinburgh.

Google simulates the human brain with 1000 machines, 16000 cores and a love of cats originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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