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

Facebook Apps are going to be more secured. Facebook has already announced 4 months ago that the apps should be upgraded so as to support OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS  to make the platform more secure. Facebook is already upgraded to HTTPS but apparently most of the apps are not… which makes the user to switch from a secured HTTPS to relatively unsecure HTTP just to use the apps. It is a tedious job and while switching, user also had to login again .. which is not safe at all.


It will be a good upgradation, just to ensure the security of the users. With all the upgrades coming your way like FaceBook Timeline Subscribe Feature and all… Facebook is gearing up for the competition from Google+ and Twitter.


Hence, FaceBook urges apps developers to upgrade their apps by 1st of October, 2011 to make the platform more  secure. You may visit following link for further instructions:-

•  Developer Roadmap

Visit the link above and avoid having your apps disabled.

Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story. People use it to share everything from the small stuff like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child.

Pretty early, your facebook profile was very basic – with your name, photo and your school and other things that was like a very basic introduction of yours.  But with time, your profile now represents almost everything you want to share with others. Your Name, Pics, Education, Employer, Interests, every status of yours, Pages you like, Groups you’ve been added to, Apps you use … list is  endless.

Now the most important point is that, when you share stuffs regularly the important updates got lost at the bottom. Like your party/ graduation pics are lost in the bottom when you post any update of any app or status updates. the only way to get to those updates is going at the bottom and click Older Posts.


Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place.

Hence “The Timeline” – a new kind of profile

With this new TimeLine, you will now have a center for all the great stories you’ve already shared. This will not just disappear as you update status or share stuffs. you get to keep the old stories as well. Timline is comparatively wider and more flexible than your old facebook profile and is visually more appealing. Profile starts from a big image at the top, which is known as Your Cover and ofcourse you get to choose your cover

Below the cover are your posts, updates, photos and other activities. You can set all of them manually and control the size of each of the items on your profile. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

• If the things that you want to add in your profile are not in timeline, you can go back and add them to Timeline.
• Add apps to Timeline – new kind of social app that lets you show the things you like to do on your timeline – the music you listen to, the recipes you try, the runs you take and more

You can start adding some of these new apps today, but timeline won’t be available for a few weeks. When you get your timeline, you can choose to publish it immediately or take a few days to review what’s there and add anything that’s missing.

Source : Facebook Blog

To Look What Timeline looks Like: Click Here

The Subscribe Feature: Facebook has recently addeed a new feature “Subscribe”. Facebook users can allow others to subscribe to them, without adding them as friend. It is like following a person on twitter only a lot more than that. Subscribing a person on facebook will mean  that you will get every single update of his/hers. Just like receiving your friends’ updates .. only the person you have subscribed to is not your friend.

This feature has received mixed reactions from the users. People are also calling it a feature that will help Stalkers. But.. in response to that, we can only say that its upto to you whether you letpeople to subscribe you or you choose not to.

Well .. only time will tell.

What do you think ? Post your responses.. We are waiting

Please Share This Page … Help Us

Stay Tuned… Get Gyan !

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.

Make way for the touchbook – Acer’s new dual touchscreen laptop. The device has two touchscreens and no physical keyboard whatsoever. In fact, apart from the power button and the display keyboard button, there are no physical buttons on the device. Put simply, the device looks like two 14-inch tablets glued together on a hinge.
So is the Acer ICONIA dual screen laptop just another trophy for your ‘show off’ wall or does it pack in some utility as well?

First Impression

The device is quite heavy, weighing in at over 2.5 kgs. Open the lid and instead of seeing the usual keyboard, you will find two 14-inch HD touchscreens screens. The device is quite thick and you’d expect such a thick device to house a CD drive at the least but it doesn’t. It doesn’t even house a card reader, which is an extra accessory available with the device. An upside – the device houses one USB3.0 port.

TOUCHSCREEN

Both the displays have a resolution of 1366×768. The upper display is a standard touchscreen where as the lower display has gorilla glass making it scratch resistant.

The touch response on the upper display is pretty bad. The close, maximize and minimize icons along with the scrolling bar have been increased in size to make the touch inputs more responsive but it’s the little things such as trying to control the volume/navigation on VLC, clicking on File, Menu, etc. that becomes quite problematic. The overall experience of touching the monitor to launch, close or perform any action feels quite inconvenient and after some time this reviewer’s arm started hurting with the effort of keeping it up to use the touchscreen.

The bottom touchscreen, however,is an entirely different story. Its response is fabulous,much better than expected. A nifty feature – put all 10 fingers on the display to launch the keyboard, put 5 fingers on the display to launch the Acer ring.

Typing on the keyboard takes some getting used to. The keys are well spaced out and you do get an audio feedback for every key you press a key but the experience isn’t the same as a regular keyboard. In fact, the experience feels rather odd. Especially since we are used to a physical keyboard.

The trackpad on the device is very disappointing. There is no way to distinguish whether your finger is on the trackpad or not. So many times while navigating, this reviewer’s finger subconsciously left the track pad with resulting confusion about why the mouse wasn’t moving. The trackpad could have been bigger and had a different feel to distinguish it from the rest of the surface.

You also have the option to put custom skins on the keyboard display, which is nice.

One Ring to rule them all

As mentioned earlier, upon touching the secondary display with 5 fingers, the Acer ring launches. Conceptually, the Acer ring is a good idea. Practically, it’s a bit buggy, which is to say that the applications crashed sometimes.

Gesture Editor is a cool feature. You can customize and assign specific gestures to launch certain programs or applications. For instance, one swipe of the finger and your browser pops up, or draw the symbol “D” to show the desktop.

You also have As certain essential options such as screen brightness, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, screen saver, hibernate, sleep, shut down, etc. on one click of the Acer ring. Although this feature isn’t a game changer, the availability of the option is nice.

The ring feature also offers one touch access to your music, movies photos and web browsing. Here, the Social Jogger app deserves special mention. This app integrates your social networking and YouTube streams under one roof. The visual representation looks a lot like tweet deck.

Another way in which you can use the dual screen is by expanding the web browser on both the screens. This will reduce the amount of scrolling you do on a particular page but the experience of reading the information feels disjointed. Plus, it’s very inconvenient trying to read text on an inclined screen and then text on a flat surface.

In terms of audio, the speakers on the device are average performance-wise. The midrange and vocal output is good but the speakers lack bass. Movie playback on the device was good. We ran Iron Man 2 in 1080p .mkv format and the movie played without any hiccups. The only way to take advantage of the 2 touchscreens while watching a movie is use the second screen for the controls through the videos app in the Acer ring.

Performance

Performance as a notebook is where the Acer ICONIA dual screen laptop truly disappoints. If you do not get used to the touch keyboard typing will be tedious. You would think that integration of touch on the monitor would add to convenience but there are times when it just frustrates you. Good luck trying to see the virtual keyboard if you are sitting out in the open with a lot of direct sunlight hitting the device.

The device is really heavy and scores low on portability factor.
In terms of connectivity, the device has the charging port, HDMI out and two USB 2.0 ports on the left. The right has the Ethernet port, VGA out, one USB 3.0 port (nice!!) and the headphones and microphone port. A display keyboard and power button is present at either side of the hinge. The device also boasts of a 1.3MP camera for video chatting and Bluetooth 3.0.

A disappointing factor is that the previous generation Intel core i5processors and not the Sandy Bridge powers the device. It also lacks a dedicated graphics card so don’t expect great gaming results. On the 3D mark 06, the device had a score of 2728. The PC mark Vantage gave a score of 6150.

The battery life of the device is bad. The device possesses a 4-cell lithium ion battery that powers two LED displays. Pushing the device to itslimits, the battery barely lasted an hour. But use the device conservatively and you may be able to touch the three-hour mark.

Verdict

The device has some interesting features such as the Acer ring app and USB 3.0. But the device needs some serious dedicated apps to justify the use of dual touchscreens. As a multimedia device,it is an unique and fun experience but falls short when you decide to use it as a notebook. If you want a new toy to show off then by all means this is for you, but if you want the biggest bang for your bucks -all 70,000 of them -look elsewhere, as the Acer ICONIA dual screen notebook is pretty much only good for novelty value.

Pros

Cool Acer ring UI
USB 3.0 support
Great touch response on the lower display
Innovative design
Cons:
Uncomfortable typing experience
Small trackpad
Monitor touch experience is disappointing
Heavy
No CD Drive

Price: Rs. 69,990

RATINGS

Performance: 3
Price: 2.5
Ease of setup: 5
Ergonomics: 3
Wow Factor: 3.5
Overall: 3