Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 6 Mar 2012 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100310/0704168504/dailydirt-if-i-could-catch-time-bottle.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100310/0704168504/dailydirt-if-i-could-catch-time-bottle.shtml

Neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light don't seem to exist, and the CERN team that first said they saw some FTL neutrinos, now admit they made a couple mistakes. the CERN team, after reporting unusual data, determined definitively that it was caused by a mistake (and what that mistake was) with input from the broader scientific community. As some expected, there were systematic errors that produced a timing error of just 60 nanoseconds. [url]

CERN scientists have trapped anti-hydrogen for a little over 15 minutes -- a new record that could allow them to determine more about how antimatter behaves. Does anti-hydrogen rise, fall or do nothing in a gravitational field? [url]

The Large Hadron Collider is still hunting down the elusive Higgs boson which might not exist at all. This sub-atomic particle has been nicknamed the "God Particle" -- but it looks like it's just a matter of time before people either find it or start re-writing modern physics. [url]

To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100310/0704168504 Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110216/15290313132/dailydirt-measuring-important-stuff.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110216/15290313132/dailydirt-measuring-important-stuff.shtml

Did you know that the speed of gravity is about equal to the speed of light with an error of less than 1%? It's a speed that's measured from the decay rate of binary pulsar systems. [url]

The Earth is radiating a lot of heat (forty-four trillion watts!), but the source of that heat isn't entirely obvious. About half of the heat seems to be accounted for (radioactive decay of elements, etc), but there's around 20 trillion watts that's still a bit of a mystery. [url]

Vikings probably didn't use magnetic compasses to help them navigate since magnet-based compasses weren't popular in Europe until the 1300s. Vikings might have used "sunstones" -- crystals of calcite -- and birefringence to determine the sun's position even in foggy conditions. [url]

To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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