A meeting at Cern, the world’s largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light

Enormous underground detectors are needed to catch neutrinos, that are so elusive as to be dubbed "ghost particles"

The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.

Antonio Ereditato added “words of caution” to his Cern presentation because of the “potentially great impact on physics” of the result.

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics – as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” the report’s author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.

“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t.

“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this’.”

Friday’s meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.

“Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects,” Dr Ereditato told the meeting.

“We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The Cern team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, and sends them through the Earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second earlier than they would have done if they had travelled at the speed of light.

This is a tiny fractional change – just 20 parts in a million – but one that occurs consistently.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 16,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But the group understands that what are known as “systematic errors” could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit.

That has motivated them to publish their measurements.

“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing – then I would be relieved,” Dr Ereditato told BBC News.

But for now, he explained, “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result – because it is crazy”

Source: BBC news

We all want to get the maximum  out of our CPUs but the guys at AMD have taken it to a whole new level. They’ve set a Guinness World Record for the “Highest Frequency of a Computer Processor,” by overclocking the upcoming 8-core AMD FX desktop processor.

The AMD FX CPU, set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2011, achieved a top speed of 8.429 GHz, surpassing the previous record of 8.308 GHz. The record was set on Aug 31, 2011, in Texas, by “Team AMD FX,” a group comprised of elite overclocking specialists working alongside top AMD technologists, who will also be named in the Guinness World Records.

Whether it lasts or not, tablet craze is real. To realize it, you just need to see the number of tablets – especially those costing less than Rs 15,000 – that have been launched in India in the last few weeks.

One of these – Reliance’s Tab 3G – seems most versatile. It ticks almost all the right boxes as far as specifications go. But can it offer a compelling tablet experience on the budget? Let’s find out….

Reliance 3G Tab

Light, feather light

Tab 3G has the classic 7-inch tablet design. It’s a minimalist, gets-the-job-done shape and size. The back cover is all plastic with a faux aluminum look. The front is all capacitive screen with black bezel and three – Home, Options, and Back – touch-sensitive buttons. The tablet looks neat and even though a slightly sturdier build would have been better, the quality of construction is good for its price.

Tab 3G is powered by a 800Mhz processor. There is 512 MB RAM and a 4GB SD card has been bundled with it.

One thing that surprises us about Tablet 3G is its weight. It’s very light, which is good. A simple design and 389 grams weight makes the tablet quite comfortable to use on the move.

3G Tab

Better than the average

Tab 3G ships with the latest version of Android, which is Gingerbread (2.3.4). This means it comes with all Android goodies like tethering, a huge number of apps and a user interface that has made Google’s operating software such a big craze.

More importantly, it’s a capacitive screen with decent touch response. It’s not as buttery smooth as what is found on expensive tablets but works without much fuss. Somewhat better viewing angles – the colours look faded if screen not held at the right angle – would have made the touch screen on Tab 3G truly exceptional for it price.

Tab 3G comes with a 3400 mAh battery. In real life, this translates to all-day computing when the used for accessing mails and Twitter feed etc, occasional web browsing and little bit of gaming.

Worth the money

Reliance Tab is not perfect. But then no tablet – not even iPad – is. What matters is how much it offers for its price. And Tab 3G offers a lot. Despite a modest price of Rs 12,999 Tab 3G manages to give users a compelling tablet experience.

Yes, we would have liked to get a screen with better resolution (like 1024×600) and slightly better viewing angles. But what Tab 3G offers at its price is a pretty compelling deal for anyone looking to buy a tablet on the cheap.

Launched on Feb 26, 2008.

Yahoo! Buzz was a community-based news article website, heavily derived from Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control.  So finally, Yahoo has decided that it will concentrate more on its core products.

Users were allowed to publish their own news stories, and link to their own or another person’s site that links to a full story of the information, therefore driving traffic to that person’s website and creating a larger market for sites that research and publish their own news articles and stories, such as CNN or smaller, privately owned websites.


A brief statement is given in their buzz page:

Buzz Service Announcement : Beginning on May 16 Yahoo! will no longer support Yahoo! Buzz. Click here to learn more.

A screen-shot of the same

Yahoo created buzz hoping that it would drive huge traffic to their site and to the submitter. Buzz also allowed its users to modify the submissions providing flexibilities. Perhaps the plan didn’t succeeded & hence the announcement came wasting no more time.  Now  that buzz is shutting down, let’s see what future holds…

Stay Tuned .. Get Gyan

Thought the Google/Oracle (Java) debacle was bad news for Android? Well, this time around, Google has been accused of stealing 2.5 megabytes (MB) of Linux code for their Android OS mobile operating system, which is likely much more serious than the Java allegations.

Florian Mueller, the man accusing Google of stealing the Linux kernel header file, says that the only way the search giant can address the issue without the collapse of the Android ecosystem is to replace the stolen code. An alternative library could be used to replace the code; the industry standard, GNU C Library, which is used in other Linux mobile operating systems, like MeeGo and WebOS.


Replacing the existing code with a new library would require Google to rewrite a large chunk of the operating system, which would take a long time to accomplish. Furthermore, there would be a good number of compatibility issues. The only alternative to switching to another library and rewriting a large portion of the code is to take the code and put it under the GPL, but that would mean that any part of the OS, or third-party application, would be able to be freely modified by anyone. If that happens, generating revenue would be impossible for developers using the “stolen” code.

Mueller goes on and on. And on. But without getting bored to tears, it’s easy to see that this could end up being one huge mess for Google. If it’s proven that there was code stolen for Android, Google would need to come up with an elegant, fast solution. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one. The consequences are ugly, and while it may not spell the end of Android, it could potentially alter it significantly, and not for the better.

Whatever comes of this, Google best have a plan if it intends to retain or extend its mobile OS dominance.

That’s it for now !

Stay Tuned for more…