LHC achieves record collisions, starts gathering data

LHC achieves record collisions, starts gathering data | TG Daily

he two 3.5 TeV beams have been circulating in opposite directions since March 19. Once scientists were confident that the beams were stable, they were allowed to collide with a combined energy of 7 TeV.

It will take some time for any new discoveries to filter through, although data is already being analyzed, according to CERN spokesman Guido Tonelli.

“We’ll address soon some of the major puzzles of modern physics like the origin of mass, the grand unification of forces and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe. I expect very exciting times in front of us,” he said.

The next stage will be to aim for collisions at 14 TeV – although that won’t happen until the end of a maintenance shutdown planned for the end of this year.

A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas

A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas – life – 30 March 2010 – New Scientist

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. “This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity,” he says.

Other studies have hinted that white matter might be similarly affected in some psychiatric disorders (see “The brain’s other half”). So the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness. One of the triggers for Jung’s study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.

YouTube – Zile Cu Tine [ACTIV]

YouTube – Zile Cu Tine [ACTIV]

Smiley feat. Cheloo – Plec pe Marte [Official video HD]

YouTube – Smiley feat. Cheloo – Plec pe Marte [Official video HD]

Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists

One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things.

A few month’s ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over time. It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises entropy. This is the force we call gravity.

What’s exciting about the approach is that it dramatically simplifies the theoretical scaffolding that supports modern physics. And while it has its limitations–for example, it generates Newton’s laws of gravity rather than Einstein’s–it has some advantages too, such as the ability to account for the magnitude of dark energy which conventional theories of gravity struggle with.

But perhaps the most powerful idea to emerge from Verlinde’s approach is that gravity is essentially a phenomenon of information.

i3D’s glasses-free prototype screen aims to take on all of 3D’s problem areas

i3D’s glasses-free prototype screen aims to take on all of 3D’s problem areas — Engadget

Uncomfortable, expensive glasses and a lack of 3D content — that’d be the short list of stuff we dislike about current 3D TVs, but coincidentally it also happens to be the exact issues i3D is determined to wipe out with its glasses-free technology. We stopped by to meet with the young, Los Angeles-based company last week, and though it obviously isn’t the first to develop spec-less displays, its proprietary hardware and software combo was really impressive. The demo of a 7-inch prototype really tells the whole story — and we encourage you all to see it for yourself in the video after the break, though obviously you won’t be able to experience all three dimensions from your standard LCD. Our time screen-gazing was pretty breathtaking, even though the smaller display was far from immersive. As for the viewing angle issue that’s the Achilles’ heel of the others, i3D claims its technology allows for three-dimensional viewing at close to 90 degrees, though it was hard for us to really evaluate that on such a small screen.

The coolest thing by far is the software’s ability to convert 2D to 3D content on the fly.

Eye-Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0

Eye-Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0 | Epicenter | Wired.com

With eye-tracking technologies already in Apple’s possession, e-readers more popular than ever before, and Apple set to unleash an e-reader that’s more computer than it is book, the stage is set for eye-tracking technology to appear on next-generation tablets. This could present incalculable opportunities to reinvigorate the written word, and become a key differentiator from print — a positive one.

Review – Nvidia GeForce GTX 480

bit-tech.net | Review – Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB Review

Having waited over six months for Nvidia to deliver a DirectX 11 graphics card we can’t help but feel shocked by the GeForce GTX 480. While offering performance superior to the HD 5870 in some situations, most notably Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Dirt 2, the GTX 480 is unable to conclusively claim the title as fastest single GPU graphics card, with Crysis a dead heat and the Radeon HD 5870 cards offering much better performance in STALKER.

Even when ahead, at the high resolutions and demanding settings this kind of top-of-the-range card should target, the GTX 480′s performance advantage is rarely more than ten percent. Considering the six month wait since the release of the HD 5870 this is deeply disappointing, and we certainly hoped and expected more.

It’s hard to back the GTX 480 elsewhere though as it brings with it incredibly high power consumption, high running temperatures and a noisy stock cooling solution which really spoil the party.

The bad news continues. Nvidia has chosen to launch the GTX 480 quoting a price thirty per cent higher than that of its direct competitor. While you can find a HD 5870 1GB for around £310 in stock without too much effort, the GeForce GTX 480 1,536MB will hit e-tailers shelves on April 6th at an MSRP of £420 ($450). Even if you value the Nvidia exclusive features like PhysX, 3D Vision and CUDA support, such a high price will be tough to stomach.

Yes, the GTX 480 offers great performance in our test games, especially in Dirt 2 and Bad Company 2, but compared to the competition, it doesn’t make a strong enough case for itself, especially when you consider that there are just so many caveats involved with buying this card. The higher price, the 100W of extra power consumption, scorchingly hot temperatures and a much noisier stock cooler are all extremely detrimental to its desirability. The HD 5870 remains a far better choice if you’re a gamer; while we’ve yet to see how the GTX 480 performs with CUDA apps and Folding, at this stage Fermi looks like a flop.

HP Demos Rollup Flexible Displays (w/ Video)

HP Demos Rollup Flexible Displays (w/ Video)

(PhysOrg.com) — The Flexible Display Center, at Arizona State University, hopes to have flexible displays ready for test trials in approximately three years. The possibilities of using flexible displays are endless and one day will be used in many portable devices such as e-readers, cell phones, and tablets.

New period of brain ‘plasticity’ created with transplanted embryonic cells

New period of brain ‘plasticity’ created with transplanted embryonic cells

UCSF scientists report that they were able to prompt a new period of “plasticity,” or capacity for change, in the neural circuitry of the visual cortex of juvenile mice. The approach, they say, might some day be used to create new periods of plasticity in the human brain that would allow for the repair of neural circuits following injury or disease.

The many instances of Chrome

Process Lasso Developer Blog

As many readers of this blog may know, Google Chrome is different from other Windows web browsers. It isolates each of its tabs into an individual process, instead of containing them all in a single multi-threaded process. Google Chrome essentially forks itself each time you create a new tab. This can easily result in 10-20 chrome.exe processes running on your system. But, don’t worry — that doesn’t mean more memory or CPU use. Read on.

Fork? That’s when a process creates a new running copy of itself, identical to the first. As always (fork or not), the virtual memory between process instances is mostly shared. Therefore, additional RAM usage is negligible. From a RAM use perspective, there is no big difference between forking a process and spawning a new thread.

How does memory/RAM get shared between processes? Well, that’s a different subject, but its really simple – its all in the virtual to physical mapping. Physical memory is the actual RAM, where-as virtual memory is an abstraction of that RAM that can exist in RAM, on disk (i.e. a page file), or anywhere else.

As a sharing example, a page of memory may exist at location X in physical RAM. Well, if two processes reference that same physical page of memory, they both can have different virtual pointers to it. If one process writes to that shared memory, Windows will apply a principle known as copy-on-write. This is where the process that wrote to the memory gets its very own copy of the shared page, because its now uniquely modified for that process. Read more on virtual memory if you want to know more.. back to Google Chrome.

Forking is very common for *nix environments, where applications fork themselves all the time. Windows applications traditionally spawn new threads instead of forking the entire process. Google decided to take a different approach, using forks. Note that the technical aspects of the Chrome fork may differ from a traditional *nix fork, but its conceptually the same.

The biggest advantage of isolating each tab into its own process space is that a crash in any one tab can’t (or shouldn’t) bring down the entire application (all the tabs). Again, since identical virtual memory is shared between processes, there isn’t much extra memory overhead associated with all these Chrome processes. Each process will only allocate memory exclusively applicable to the tab it owns. Further, since the Windows CPU scheduler only sees threads, this forking design doesn’t affect how Chrome performs during periods of high CPU contention.

One interesting performance note is that Chrome dynamically lowers the priority class of processes hosting background tabs, similar to what Process Lasso’s ProBalance does. So, when you switch tabs, Google Chrome lowers the priority class of the old tab’s process and raises the priority class of the new tab’s process (to below normal and normal, respectively). I would hope that traditional single-process browsers do the same with individual thread priorities, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Quantum Dot Camera Phones

Technology Review: Quantum Dot Camera Phones

Now, InVisage, a Menlo Park, CA-based startup, is demonstrating a way to improve the quality of pictures, at least on the sensor side, without adding size, significant complexity, or cost. At the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, CA, today, the company’s executives announced a new technology called QuantumFilm that lets small camera sensors, like those in cell phones, capture more light than ever before. QuantumFilm is simply a layer of quantum dots–tiny crystals that efficiently absorb light and emit either photons or electrons–in a top layer of the sensor. The electrons emitted by QuantumFilm are collected and sorted the chip’s circuitry.

The result is a sensor that collects twice the light of the standard chip, converts it to electricity twice as efficiently, and is just as cheap to make, says Ted Sargent, chief technology officer of InVisage and professor of electrical and computer engineering and the University of Toronto, where the early research for QuantumFilm began. “Silicon image sensors have a really severe problem in that they just throw away photons left right and center,” says Sargent. Quantum dots, he says, provide a “fundamental solution to the problem.”

For a trimmer figure, add an extra helping of gut bugs

For a trimmer figure, add an extra helping of gut bugs – health – 25 March 2010 – New Scientist

Yukio Kadooka of Snow Brand Milk Products, a dairy company in Saitama, Japan, and colleagues gave 87 overweight volunteers 100 grams of fermented milk – which is used to make yoghurt – twice a day, while they continued with their normal diets. The milk drunk by half of the group was enriched with Lactobacillus gasseri. After 12 weeks, these volunteers had lost an average of 1 kilogram, while their counterparts showed no change in weight.

Love, sex and the male brain

Love, sex and the male brain – CNN.com

(CNN) — Although women the world over have been doing it for centuries, we can’t really blame a guy for being a guy. And this is especially true now that we know that the male and female brains have some profound differences.

Our brains are mostly alike. We are the same species, after all. But the differences can sometimes make it seem like we are worlds apart.

The “defend your turf” area — dorsal premammillary nucleus — is larger in the male brain and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other males. And his amygdala, the alarm system for threats, fear and danger is also larger in men. These brain differences make men more alert than women to potential turf threats.

Meanwhile, the “I feel what you feel” part of the brain — mirror-neuron system — is larger and more active in the female brain. So women can naturally get in sync with others’ emotions by reading facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice and other nonverbal emotional cues.

Static logger pattern issue

Logging/StaticLog – Commons Wiki

There are two very common patterns used with logging:

public class Foo {
private Log log = LogFactory.getLog(Foo.class);
….
}

and

public class Foo {
private static Log log = LogFactory.getLog(Foo.class);
….
}

The use of the static qualifier can be beneficial in some circumstances. However in others it is a very bad idea indeed, and can have unexpected consequences. This page describes when each solution is appropriate.

Portable mind-reader lets users write with their thoughts

Portable mind-reader lets users write with their thoughts | TG Daily

“With a much simpler design, relying on a power-efficient on-chip implementation, the Mind Speller is the first step in the development of a generic, easy-to-wear, accurate and cost-efficient communication solution for people with motoric disabilities,” says Chris Van Hoof, Program Director at IMEC.

“Currently, we are adapting the electronics to work with dry electrodes, making the system even more unobtrusive.”

Pixie Lott – Gravity. Alan Titchmarsh Show 2010

YouTube – Pixie Lott – Gravity. Alan Titchmarsh Show 2010

Review: A $499 E-reader That Opens Like a Book

YouTube – Review: A $499 E-reader That Opens Like a Book

The human ancestors that show how scientific opinion on the evolution of man has changed

The human ancestors that show how scientific opinion on the evolution of man has changed | Mail Online

Emerging from the gloom these spectacular skull reconstructions tell mankind’s story of evolution.

Gathering bone fragments from across the globe, scientists have created these images of what man looked like millions of years ago.

Paleoanthropologists used sophisticated research methods to form the 27 model heads, which are on show at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.

Cerșetor cu iPhone în metrou

Cerșetor cu iPhone în metrou | Blogatu

România e într-adevăr o țară a contrastelor. Dar și a viralelor… În metroul bucureștean riști să dai ori peste una cu gura mare, ori peste un cerșetor cu iPhone: