Einstein Proved Wrong In His Speed Of Light Limit

Scientists who recently reported subatomic particles moving faster than light are testing a revised experimental procedure to see if it will generate the same astonishing result as before.In September, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, announced that an international physics collaboration called OPERA had clocked particles called neutrinos travelling faster than light —something that is impossible according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity, which provides the basis for most of modern physics.

The scientists said they were very surprised by the finding, but were unable to trace it to an error, so they were asking others to scrutinize it carefully and independently verify the measurements. The announcement was greeted by skepticism from many physicists, who said a very high standard of proof is needed for such an extraordinary result, which was more likely the result of an undiscovered error.

However, scientists from the OPERA collaboration announced at a particle physics conference last week in Nagoya that they had recently begun running the experiment slightly differently, reported Matt Strassler, a theoretical physics professor at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., on his blog. Results were expected in a few weeks. Sergio Bertolucci , director of research at CERN, confirmed that information to BBC News late last week.

Originally, the neutrinos were generated from a beam of protons in an experiment at CERN, near Geneva at the border between France and Switzerland, in a pulse lasting 10 millionths of a second — a long time on the scale of the measurements. The beam of neutrinos travelled to Gran Sasso in Italy, 730 kilometres away, where their average arrival time was measured and compared to their average departure time and the distance to calculate their average speed.

The new measurements involve the release of protons in pulses lasting just one or two nanoseconds or 5,000 to 10,000 times shorter, with a long separation between each pulse. That would allow researchers to match each neutrino detection at Gran Sasso with a very precisely timed proton pulse from CERN instead of having to work with averages.

"We are not really repeating the experiment in the strict sense as beams are going all the time to Gran Sasso," said the CERN press office in a statement to CBC News Monday confirming the changes to the experiment. "It is just basically fine tuning.… There is not much more to say."

Strassler explained on his blog that the scientists had been reluctant to make the change to their experiment initially because it greatly reduces the production of neutrinos, which has a negative impact on their other experiments. "But apparently the concerns raised by the community have been strong enough to prompt OPERA to request that the CERN neutrino beam operators send them short pulses," wrote Strassler, who himself had been a critic of the original experiment.

Space Rock Asteriod Comes between Earth & Moon Give Cluse About Formation Earth

The asteroid, which is known as 2005 YU55 and is orbit around the Sun, has not been this close to Earth in 200 years and will come closer to Earth than any of its size in the past 35 years. The giant lump of space rock, which is about the size of an aircraft carrier, will pass between Earth and the Moon on Tuesday, November 8.

The last time a similarly large rock passed by at such a short distance was in 1976 – but it went largely unnoticed because everybody – Nasa included – failed to notice it.Now astronomers who missed that event will have another chance of a close encounter as the enormous rock shoots by at about 11.30pm on Tuesday, November 8.It will not be visible to the naked eye but amateur astronomers stand a good chance of catching a glimpse of it provided they have a telescope at least 6in in diameter.

The scientists worked for the space administration’s Near Earth Object (NEO) programme, a team tasked with identifying comets, asteroids and meteors that potentially pose a threat to Earth. A normal day meant scanning their screens for small white dots in our solar system — the vast majority of which were either too far away to ever be a problem or so small they would burn up in our atmosphere long before they could ever do any serious damage. On that Monday morning, however, Chodas noticed an asteroid about the size of a truck beyond the moon’s orbit. It was on a collision course with Earth.

He called Chesley over. The pair estimated the asteroid to be about 5m (16ft) long and they reckoned they had about 19 hours before it hit.

Nasa scientists, who have officially classified the asteroid as a "near-earth object", will use a radar telescope to analyse exactly what it is made of and get a better idea where it came from. A spokesman said: "We hope to obtain images that should reveal a wealth of detail about the asteroid's surface features, shape, dimensions and other physical properties."

If the Americans like what they see 2005 YU55 could even become the site for another giant leap for mankind on its next fly-by in 2028, with Nasa aiming to put an astronaut on an asteroid within the next 20 years.2005 YU55 is one of 874 near-earth asteroids, and if it were to smash into Earth it would be powerful enough to wipe out a city the size of Bath, the Sunday Times reported. But Dr Emily Baldwin, deputy editor of Astronomy Now magazine, said it posed no threat.

She told the Sunday Times: "It is a great opportunity to make close-up, detailed observations. Studies of asteroids are important not only to learn about the potential threat an impact may have on Earth but also to understand the history of our solar system. "Analysing what the rock is made of could help scientists understand how our planet was formed, she added.

Mozilla Firefox Learn To Share

Following the demise of the first Firefox initiative to bring a more modern range of social sharing to the browser, Mozilla has released today its second attempt in early alpha called Firefox Share.

If at first you can't learn your social skills, try, try again. At least, that's what the Mozilla Foundation is doing. Mozilla has lofty plans for Firefox Share. Along the same lines as the Firefox Weave add-on that later became the default-shipping feature known as Sync, Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, told during a meeting at the company's new San Francisco offices on Wednesday that Mozilla wants to bake Firefox Share directly into the browser.

"It's a new sharing option based off of F1, with the same team, but learning from the F1 experience," he said. F1 was the add-on first released about a year ago through the Mozilla Labs sub-group within the Mozilla organization. Even though Mozilla prefers to rely on add-ons to expand the browser's feature set, sharing was a no-brainer, said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's Director of Firefox Engineering. "We're doing it because we feel it's such a common thing to do today."

Like F1, Firefox Share is a restartless add-on, which means that installing it won't require a Firefox reboot. It appears on the right edge of your location bar as a paper airplane. Click the icon and you get a drop-down that asks you to log into one of three accounts: Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail. So right there, there's been a drop in share options as the add-on has been re-architected. LinkedIn, Google Apps, Yahoo, and multiple accounts per service have been abandoned for now, although Mozilla said in its blog post announcing the new add-on that it plans on bringing them back.

The company also noted that Firefox Share will take on the default style of the operating system that the browser is running on, which means that if you're on Windows, it will look native to Windows, and so on with Mac and Linux. The way that the add-on works under the hood has changed, too. F1 was powered by a stateless server as a proxy to communicate between service providers and the browser, "because it was faster," said the Mozilla blog post. Firefox Share, on the other hand, is built on a client-side-only solution where the browser talks directly to the service provider. This was done to avoid having to use Mozilla servers while eliminating some potential security issues.

In some brief hands-on testing, the add-on worked about as well as you'd expect an alpha add-on to work. The core functionality was there. Authentication was simple, and it was easy to jump from sharing in Twitter to sharing in Facebook. Direct message contact selection on the Twitter side appeared to be broken for me, although that's not surprising for an alpha.

Firefox has faced a number of growing challenges in the past few years, such as exploding interest in competing browsers like Chrome and on mobile devices, convincing its die-hard fans and businesses that a rapid-release cycle would benefit all, and maintaining a renewed emphasis on performance and stability. Dedicated, integrated social sharing would certainly be one thing that could help set it apart on a feature level, although, as with all things browser, it's rarely about who's first, but who does it best.