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The vast new Cern particle collider has only just hummed into life, but physicists are already drawing up plans for a still larger machine to answer the questions even Albert Einstein was unable to resolve.
The International Linear Collider (ILC) would be a machine up to 31 miles long, comprising two giant “guns” that would accelerate electrons and particles of anti-matter called positrons to near-light speeds before smashing them together. The results could open up some of the hottest topics in physics, such as the existence of extra dimensions, the origins of gravity and even how the big bang — the event that created the universe — happened.
“The ILC would build on the work of Cern’s new Large Hadron Collider (LHC),” said Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at Oxford University and European director of the project. “The LHC smashes protons together to discover new particles but also generates lots of debris that obscures the fine detail. The ILC would be a much cleaner machine and tell us far more about their real nature.”
Physicists around the world have spent about £150m on designs for the new machine, nicknamed “Einstein’s telescope”, since the project was set up three years ago. About £10m has come from Britain.
This weekend 80 researchers from many countries gathered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study plans for the giant detectors that would investigate the collisions. Mark Thomson, Cambridge’s newly appointed professor of experimental particle physics, who was among those present, said the new machine would cost about £4 billion, with a final design expected around 2012.
“Physics theory suggests the LHC will find a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, but if it does, this will raise many new questions,” he said. “It would be a completely bizarre and new form of matter and we would need the ILC to really pin down its properties.”
Such a machine would have to be huge — and very different from the circular LHC. When accelerated along a curved path, electrons and positrons lose much of their energy as they emit bursts of X-rays.
The ILC would need to be completely straight, with two huge linear accelerators pointing at each other and collisions happening at the point where their respective particle beams meet. They would at first be 11 miles long but could be extended to 15 miles each. The accelerators would hurl 10 billion electrons and positrons at each other every second.
When matter meets antimatter, the particles annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy that is converted into yet more particles plus radiation. The ILC’s beams would generate around 14,000 such collisions each second, possibly creating new combinations of particles that could answer fundamental questions.
Physicists have dreamt of such a machine for decades but the technology needed to accelerate electrons and positrons to such high speeds has been developed only in the past few years. It works by sending massive bursts of radio waves into the tunnels. The particles can lock onto these waves and “surf ” them, becoming faster with each successive wave.
Such a machine might be able to resolve some of the questions raised by Einstein’s theories of relativity. The problem for Einstein, still unresolved, was that he could not reconcile the laws of the very large with the laws of the very small. SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON

Source: Times of India

Everyone was impressed last month when Apple announced moving 30 million downloads through the new iPhone Apps Store, bringing in $30 million of revenue (or a million dollars per day). Well, growth more than doubled this month, bringing a total of 100 million downloads (and somewhere around another $70 million of software revenue). This has some interesting implications.
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Even if growth hits a plateau today and sales stay where they are right now, by next year Apple will have sold a billion iPhone apps (bringing in around a billion dollars of revenue), before the Windows Mobile 7 Skymarket launches. Of course, Apple’s mobile software sales are not likely to remain at 70 million per month, as its historical iTunes song sales indicate.

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Google plans to launch the beta version of its open source web browser called Google Chrome. “So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web,” reads Google blog.

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. more…

“Google Chrome” joins IE, Firefox, and Safari. (And Opera, if you’re into that sort of thing.) It’s a super-competitive field, partly because browser-makers get paid every time you use the built-in search box.

Google chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine, but has a new, superfast javascript engine (I’d love to see a comparison with the new firefox thing — tracemonkey?) and some novel stability/security measures. It also hooks into google’s cloud supercomputer in a few ways.

Washington: In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice haemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said on Thursday.
And that’s led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere’s largest floating glacier within the year. If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland. The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.
“The pictures speak for themselves,” said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. “This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It’s just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off…. It is imminent.” The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan. AP

Source: Times of India

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