At Long Last: IceCube Spots 28 High-Energy Neutrinos 109
Wired reports that IceCube, the detection facility built just to detect such things, has seen just what it was looking for, even though the researchers involved didn't know it at the time. High-energy neutrinos, the target that IceCube was seeking, weren't showing up as had been hoped, but it turns out that there were quite a few (nearly 30 already, with 2013's data still being recorded) in the three years that the detector has been operating — they just weren't obvious until the data was combed for it. "Most of the 28 high-energy neutrinos so far detected originate from parts of the night sky that don’t include the Milky Way, making it quite likely that they are arriving from a distant source. There are still too few neutrinos to make any specific conclusions about AGNs or gamma-ray bursts, but the IceCube team will continue gathering new data."
N-ice (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice to see another big science project providing results. The data from all these recent big experiments should be quite helpful in winnowing out some theories. It looks some supersymmetry theories appear inconsistent with the data being seen. Things seem to be resolving towards the standard model, and yet it has problems. Interesting times ahead I'm sure.
Electron Shape Measurement, Most Precise Yet, Rules Out New Physics Theories [nature.com]
Observation of micro–macro entanglement of light [nature.com]
I worked on this a bit (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2005 I was a sysadmin at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Biggest project I worked on was porting RS 485 serial drivers from a legacy unix system to Linux 2.6 and setting up the HP rack servers which we then shipped down to the pole from New Zealand on a C-130 Hercules. Also, I built a data visualization system in python+django which ran over a 1km-long DSL network between the drilling site and the south pole base. Never got to down there myself (my FTE boss did), but it was a fun project for a student and looks good on the resume and all. Did I mention SSH connections over satellite to Antarctica are pretty slow?