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To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2597)	9/22/2011 3:23:25 PM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

22 September 2011 Last updated at 13:28 ET Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Alps at Gran Sasso Continue reading the main story Related Stories Particle 'flips to all flavours' Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light. Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early. The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists. In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims. "We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration. "We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News. "When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'" Caught speeding? The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of 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. But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that. Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern 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 a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 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, and 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 said. 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". "And of course the consequences can be very serious."

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2597)	9/22/2011 4:14:47 PM
From: longnshort	3 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

OBAMA KEPT AT LEAST ONE PROMISE!! h/t Bald Eagle Remember this famous speech from then-Senator Obama -- the one from 2008, in which he declared that his election would cause the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal? Of course, this immediately became the butt of many conservatives' jokes. But who's laughing now? As it turns out, this is one of the few promises Obama has kept. Or at least, the oceans have kept it for him. Over at Climate Depot, Marc Morano has the details: Earlier this month, the European Space Agency's Envisat monitoring, global sea level revealed a “two year long decline [in sea level] was continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year.” In August 2011, NASA announced that global sea level was dropping and was “a quarter of an inch lower than last summer.” See: NASA: 'Global sea level this summer is a quarter of an inch lower than last summer' The global drop in sea level followed NASA's announcement that sea level around the U.S. was declining in February 2011. Most surprising, despite the fact that Obama only said he would only “slow” the rise of the oceans, his presidency has presided over what some scientists are terming an “historic decline" in global sea levels. Obama appears to have underestimated his own powers to alter sea level. So who said Obama wasn't the Messiah?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (2597)	9/23/2011 7:30:45 PM
From: Sdgla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Done. At what cost and over what kind of time frame ?