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Saniapower
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Re: Science News

Post by Saniapower »

According to the Big Bang theory the universe expanded faster than the speed of light in the initial stages (tiny moments of time)
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Re: Science News

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Today, July 4, 2012 is a big day. There is going to be an announcement at CERN, Geneva at 9:00am CEST (12:30am IST) on the Higgs Boson. http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/ I will post details once I digest the news.
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Re: Science News

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The thing exists. Confirmed. This Higgs Boson thingy.

Now if only somebody could tell me why it is important that I should care :) ... Seeing the hoopla, I think I should care, but everytime I try to read about it, I end up not caring. I must be missing something. This is God? I thought I read that it was never God but was "Goddamn" that was quietly changed to "God" on a book title. Whatever...

Jay
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Post by Omkara »

Sheldon Cooper explained that to Penny who rightfully called it jibber jabber. Let cross check with that episode!
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Re: Science News

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Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/ ... orter/all/

Pretty interesting. Narrative Science sells a service that takes structured data and generates "written" stories. For example, quarterly earnings can generate a recap article, detailed data from a baseball game can create a publication ready synopsis, etc.
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Re: Science News

Post by suresh »

jayakris wrote:The thing exists. Confirmed. This Higgs Boson thingy.
Now if only somebody could tell me why it is important that I should care :) ...
Jay
Why the Higgs Boson Matters
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Re: Science News

Post by jayakris »

suresh wrote:
jayakris wrote:The thing exists. Confirmed. This Higgs Boson thingy. Now if only somebody could tell me why it is important that I should care :) ... Jay
Why the Higgs Boson Matters
And I quote from the eminent physicist from my alma mater who wrote that article -
So what? Even if the particle is the Higgs boson, it is not going to be used to cure diseases or improve technology. This discovery simply fills a gap in our understanding of the laws of nature that govern all matter, and throws light on what was going on in the early universe. It’s wonderful that many people do care about this sort of science, and regard it as a credit to our civilization.
Thank you Steven Weinberhg, for candidly confirming to me that I should continue to not care. He thanks us for how civilized we are, which no no doubt is because he himself finds it unbelieveable that the world somehow allowed them to spend this much money on it. I will continue to not oppose funding these guys, but that is only because I am an academician who respects the extreme "pushing of the envelope" these guys do. But this Higgs Boson discovery is of importance only to these physicists ... Jay
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Re: Science News

Post by suresh »

Has the ABC conjecture been proved?

http://www.nature.com/news/proof-claime ... es-1.11378

A nice explanation of the ABC conjecture is given in the following blog post:

http://bit-player.org/2012/the-abc-game
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Re: Science News

Post by Lucia92 »

nice
thanks a lot for all the links, it's gotta be interesting

p.s nice to meet you all, i am new here :)
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Super-Jupiter' sized planet found near massive star:
A team of Canadian astrophysicists has discovered a 'super-Jupiter' sized planet around the massive star Kappa Andromedae, having a mass at least 13 times that of Jupiter and an orbit somewhat larger than Neptune's.
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Re: Science News

Post by suresh »

There is going to be an announcement from the BICEP collaboration at 4pm GMT on Monday, March 17, 2014. Rumor has it that they have detected primordial gravitational waves and put a non-zero bound on the tensor to scalar ratio in primordial fluctuations. This is going to be big news (worthy of a Nobel prize?) and will put constraints on inflationary models.

BICEP collaboration
Guardian article
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Re: Science News

Post by suresh »

The big news from the announcement is that BICEP2 have observed a non-zero value for something called the tensor to scalar ratio usually denoted by r. There are two sources of the anistropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiations -- those from scalar and tensor perturbations. The results so far including the one from Planck were consistent with r=0, i.e., there being no tensor perturbations. BICEP2 gives r=0.2+0.07-0.05 and rules out r=0 with about 5.2-7 sigma confidence -- I don't understand this but the two numbers have to do with some assumptions. The central value of r=0.2 is considered large (from the viewpoint of other data such as Planck) and future data might bring this number down.

Technicality aside, they have observed signatures of primordial gravitational waves, provided evidence for the inflationary model of cosmology. Along with Planck, we see the birth of precision cosmology (precision of the kind that we expect from LHC and other results in particle physics). The next decade is going to see models of inflation being ruled out and the emergence of new parameters in standard cosmology which incorporate tensor perturbations beyond r and fNL.
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Re: Science News

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Computer passes Turing Test NBC Article
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