Million Degree Laser Could Usher in Age of Fusion Energy

 

Two-million degrees Fahrenheit

That is temperature produced by a new laser beam, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator

The department, which on Wednesday announced the successful experiment of the fastest and purest x-ray laser pulses ever achieved, said the laser could achieve temperatures as hot as 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the sun’s corona. Scientists say the laser beam is billion times brighter that any other man-made X-ray source, making it the brightest entity ever created.

Black Holes True Power

 — Following a study of what is in effect a miniature galaxy buried inside a normal-sized one -- like a Russian doll -- astronomers using a CSIRO telescope have concluded that massive black holes are more powerful than we thought.

An international team of astronomers led by Dr Manfred Pakull at the University of Strasbourg in France has discovered a 'microquasar' -- a small black hole, weighing only as much as a star, that shoots jets of radio-emitting particles into space.

Called S26, the black hole sits inside a regular galaxy called NGC 7793, which is 13M light-years away in the Southern constellation of Sculptor.

Giant "Sea Monster" Fossil Discovered in Arctic

James Owen
for National Geographic News

February 26, 2008

A massive prehistoric sea reptile that was longer than a humpback whaleand had teeth the size of cucumbers has been found by fossil hunters on a remote Arctic island.

Measuring some 50 feet (15 meters) in length, the bone-crunching predator represents one of the largest marine reptiles ever known, according to a team led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.

Hacker vs Cracker

The word “hacker” gets used in a pejorative sense by journalists an awful lot. Some people think this is perfectly reasonable; others find it offensive, and recommend an alternative term for that meaning. 

In mainstream press, the word “hacker” is often used to refer to a malicious security cracker. There is a classic definition of the term “hacker”, arising from its first documented uses related to information technologies at MIT, that is at odds with the way the term is usually used by journalists. The inheritors of the technical tradition of the word “hacker” as it was used at MIT sometimes take offense at the sloppy use of the term by journalists and others who are influenced by journalistic inaccuracy.

Neutrino "The Ghost particle"

 

Scientists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the mass of a mysterious neutrino particle.

Neutrinos are sometimes known as "ghost particles" because they interact so weakly with other forms of matter.
Previous experiments had shown that neutrinos have a mass, but it was so tiny that it was very hard to measure.
Using data from the largest ever survey of galaxies, researchers put the mass of a neutrino at no greater than 0.28 electron volts.
This is less than a billionth of the mass of a single hydrogen atom, the scientists say.
Their nickname is fitting: a neutrino is capable of passing through a light-year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom.