Slashdot Mirror

ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."

New submitter Ginger Unicorn writes "In a seminar held at CERN today, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Their results are based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery."

gbrumfiel writes "For forty years, the Higgs boson has remained a theoretical construct, but by Christmas, scientists may have a pretty good idea of whether it's real or not. Nature News reports that a new analysis has further narrowed the Higgs range, and data gathered this autumn at the LHC should be enough to show a faint signal from a Higgs, if it's there. (Already one signal has disappeared earlier in the year.) Physicists hope to finish their analysis of the autumn data by the year's end, but even if they come up empty-handed it won't be the end of the story. The Higgs is commonly referred to as the particle that endows others with mass, but its real appeal is the ability to unify the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism. If there is no Higgs, some other mechanism for creating a unified 'electroweak' force should be found inside the LHC."

suraj.sun sends this excerpt from the BBC: "Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly differently from their antiparticles, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday. The result may help explain why we see so much more matter than antimatter. The team stresses that further analysis will be needed to shore up the result. At the moment, they are claiming a statistical certainty of '3.5 sigma' — suggesting that there is less than a 0.05% chance that the result they see is down to chance. The team has nearly double the amount of data that they have analyzed so far, so time will tell whether the result reaches the 'five-sigma' level that qualifies it for a formal discovery."

decora writes "Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports on another piece of evidence hitting the beleaguered Supersymmetry community. Scientists at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India confirmed that extra levels of B-Meson decay have not been found in the LHC beauty experiment. Coming on the heels of a March report in Nature, this news seems to reinforce what many have suspected all along. Dark Matter is probably not explainable through massive shadow particles like squarks and selectrons, and for all practical purposes, the Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model of Physics is dead."

hypnosec writes "Research institute CERN has launched a new project to tap into the extra computing power from the public for its Large Hadron Collider atom smashing project. According to the organization, the LHC@home project will, for the first time, allow volunteers to aid in high-energy collisions of protons in CERN's Large Hadron Collider and in turn helping physicists to unravel the mysteries of the origin of the universe"

sfcrazy writes "CERN has launched version 1.1 of the Open Hardware License (OHL), a legal framework to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community. The alpha version was launched four months ago. In the spirit of knowledge and technology dissemination, the CERN OHL was created to govern the use, copying, modification and distribution of hardware design documentation, and the manufacture and distribution of products."

felipe13 writes "We are working on a new piece of code that will be protected under a GPL license, this is fine for the code itself, but what about our 'innovations'? Are there any 'Open Patent License' models similar to the GPL or Creative Commons? We have Google patenting the highlight of search occurrences, Facebook protecting the word 'Book,' and Apple registering body movements. This is becoming ridiculous to a point. Now the patent trolls are making a killing as well. Does the open source community has a good way to protect its innovations and inventions? There are some initiatives to buy patents and release them to the public or at least place them is a protected area, but where would my very small company register a new way to include titles in a private message? Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.) I don't want to wake up in 10 years and discover that X huge company patented my innovation and that now I actually have to pay them for it." There's OpenPatents.org, there's the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, there's CERN's newly-updated Open Hardware license, and there are domain-specific patent sharing organizations like the Open Patent Alliance; what else is out there?

An anonymous reader writes "Since last night, the Large Hadron Collider is officially the most powerful accelerator in the world. While a record energy level had been reached last year, the new luminosity level, surpassing Fermilab's capabilities, is a new achievement. 'Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential,' as CERN Director General Rolf Heuer says."

An anonymous reader writes "In a ground-breaking announcement issued today, CERN NASA PETA NAMBLA , the European Organization of Nuclear Research (which hosts the enormous and magnificent glorious orgasmic catastrophic Large Hadron Collider) has announced the discovery of the hugs boson, an unexpected gauge boson which was not predicted prognosticated invented baked by the Standard Model. Unexpectedly, the discovery was made by a high-school mascot student teacher gymnasium during his scholarship. Due to his Tourette's age face breath , it is not clear whether he can be awarded the Nobel Prize. However, his teacher has generously agreed to be awarded in his name, in case of any problems reprisals assassins aliens ."

eldavojohn writes "Back in 2006 there was a lot of talk of testing String Theory. Well, today CERN has released a statement for the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment. The short of it is simply that as far as they could tell, 'No experimental evidence for microscopic black holes has been found.' The long statement indicates that since the highly precise CMS detector found no spray of sub-atomic particles of normal matter while LHC smashed particles together, the hypothesis by String Theory that micro black holes would be formed and quickly evaporated in this experiment was incorrect. These tests have given the team confidence to say that they can exclude a 'variety of theoretical models' for the cases of black holes with a mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts). Not Even Wrong points us to the arxiv prepublication for those of you well versed in Greek. While you may not be able to run around claiming that String Theory is dead and disproved, evidently there are some adjustments that need to be made."

eldavojohn writes "Back in 2006 there was a lot of talk of testing String Theory. Well, today CERN has released a statement for the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment. The short of it is simply that as far as they could tell, 'No experimental evidence for microscopic black holes has been found.' The long statement indicates that since the highly precise CMS detector found no spray of sub-atomic particles of normal matter while LHC smashed particles together, the hypothesis by String Theory that micro black holes would be formed and quickly evaporated in this experiment was incorrect. These tests have given the team confidence to say that they can exclude a 'variety of theoretical models' for the cases of black holes with a mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts). Not Even Wrong points us to the arxiv prepublication for those of you well versed in Greek. While you may not be able to run around claiming that String Theory is dead and disproved, evidently there are some adjustments that need to be made."

Anonymous Dupaeur writes "The goals for the first run of the most powerful particle collider (and the most energetic storage ring since ISR) were recently surpassing the 10^32 level of luminosity, with a destructive 15 MJ energy per-beam. This is a significant milestone, opening the way to collect more and more data. The current plan is to stop the proton collisions soon, and provide an ion (Pb) beam and conclude this year with a X-mass break. The next year is expected to bring at least one inverse femtobarn of data, which is achievable with such beam power. After that, the entire accelerator complex will be shut down for a year, due to budget costs for science in Europe."

Anonymous Apcoheur writes "Scientists from CERN and INFN of the OPERA Collaboration have announced the first direct observation of a muon neutrino turning into a tau neutrino. 'The OPERA result follows seven years of preparation and over three years of beam provided by CERN. During that time, billions of billions of muon-neutrinos have been sent from CERN to Gran Sasso, taking just 2.4 milliseconds to make the trip. The rarity of neutrino oscillation, coupled with the fact that neutrinos interact very weakly with matter, makes this kind of experiment extremely subtle to conduct. ... While closing a chapter on understanding the nature of neutrinos, the observation of neutrino oscillations is strong evidence for new physics. The Standard Model of fundamental particles posits no mass for the neutrino. For them to be able to oscillate, however, they must have mass.'"

Anonymous Dupeur writes "Only 12 hours after the start of operation of the Large Hardon Collider at an unprecedentedly high energy level, a discovery had been made. Today, in its press release, CERN disclosed the observation of a new class — paleoparticles. 'It's awful,' explains Alain Grand, still shocked by the discovery. 'It left horrible tracks inside the detector that made the physicists on duty at the time feel quite sick.' No wonder. The particle consists of two strange quarks and one top quark but no beauty or charm quark. The physicists have nicknamed it the 'neutrinosaurus.' This marks a first success of the — finally — started experiment."

Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."

Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."

Inovaovao writes "As announced on Twitter by the CMS experiment, the LHC has finally accelerated both beams to 3.5 TeV for the first time. It thus broke the previous energy record of 1.18 TeV it had set last fall, about a month since operations started again this year. It'll be a while yet before we see stable beams and collisions at 3.5 TeV. You won't get much of a clue to the timetable by reading the General Manager's pompous announcements. If you want to follow what's going on, look at the Status Ops."

toruonu writes "Yesterday evening the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the first time accelerated protons in both directions of the ring to 1.18 TeV. Even though the 1 TeV barrier per beam was first broken a week ago, this marks the first time that the beam was in the machine in both directions at the same time, allowing possibly for collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.36 TeV. Although the test lasted mere minutes, it was enough to have detectors record the very first events at 2.36 TeV. LHC passes Tevatron (the particle collider at Fermilab that operates at 1.96 TeV) and becomes the highest energy particle collider in the world (so far it was effectively just the highest energy storage ring...)"

An anonymous reader writes "Only four days after the first attempt to send a particle beam around the LHC, we have arrived at the point when all four experiments got their first real collisions from the machine. This was met by celebrations and champagne, as people have been waiting years and years for this moment. It is a testament to the engineering of the machine that collisions were reached already, so few days after restarting. The LHC had already demonstrated ca 10h stable beams, and now also stable beams in both directions at the same time. In the coming weeks, we need only wait for increased intensity and the first attempts at acceleration."

suraj.sun tips this story at ZDNet about a new problem with the LHC. Quoting: "The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment. The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a CERN press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October. To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats,' while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, CERN said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. CERN has pushed back the restart a number of times, as repair work has continued. To begin with, scientists said the LHC experiment would restart in April 2009. In May, CERN [said] that the restarted experiment could run through the winter to make up some of the lost time."

gaijinsr writes "The damage done in what CERN calls the 'S34 Incident' (and what other people call a major explosion in the cryogenics system) is much more serious than originally admitted: The earliest possible restart date is late summer next year, but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010. They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN."

sash writes "From the fresh press release: 'Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel have confirmed that cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no one was put at risk. Sufficient spare components are in hand to ensure that the LHC is able to restart in 2009, and measures to prevent a similar incident in the future are being put in place.'"

RaaVi writes "Yesterday CERN launched the largest computing grid in the world, which is destined to analyze the data coming from the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The computing grid consists of more than 140 computer centers from around the world working together to handle the expected 10-15 petabytes of data the LHC will generate each year." The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid will initially handle data for up to 7,000 scientists around the world. Though the LHC itself is down for some lengthy repairs, an event called GridFest was held yesterday to commemorate the occasion. The LCG will run alongside the LHC@Home volunteer project.

RaaVi writes "Yesterday CERN launched the largest computing grid in the world, which is destined to analyze the data coming from the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The computing grid consists of more than 140 computer centers from around the world working together to handle the expected 10-15 petabytes of data the LHC will generate each year." The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid will initially handle data for up to 7,000 scientists around the world. Though the LHC itself is down for some lengthy repairs, an event called GridFest was held yesterday to commemorate the occasion. The LCG will run alongside the LHC@Home volunteer project.

RaaVi writes "Yesterday CERN launched the largest computing grid in the world, which is destined to analyze the data coming from the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The computing grid consists of more than 140 computer centers from around the world working together to handle the expected 10-15 petabytes of data the LHC will generate each year." The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid will initially handle data for up to 7,000 scientists around the world. Though the LHC itself is down for some lengthy repairs, an event called GridFest was held yesterday to commemorate the occasion. The LCG will run alongside the LHC@Home volunteer project.

rufey writes "The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand."

rufey writes "The recent problems at the Large Hadron Collider will now keep it idle until spring 2009. The official press release is here. The LHC went offline due to a suspected failure in a superconducting connection, which overheated and caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. This resulted in the accidental release of a ton of liquid helium. The process required to repair the failed superconducting connection involves weeks of warming up the affected area from -456 degrees Fahrenheit to room temperature, and then several more weeks to cool it back down after the repair is made. The total amount of time to do this will spill over into CERN's scheduled winter maintenance/shutdown period, which is partly done to save money on electricity during the period of peak demand."

BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight." Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."

BTJunkie writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the worlds most expensive science experiment, is set to be turned on tomorrow. We've discussed this multiple times already. A small group of people believe our world will be sucked into extinction (some have even sent death threats). The majority of us, however, won't be losing any sleep tonight." Reader WillRobinson notes that CERN researchers declared the final synchronization test a success and says, "The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made this Wednesday, Sept. 10 at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). The start up time will be between (9:00 to 18:00 Zurich Time) (2:00 to 10:00 CDT) with live webcasts provided at webcast.cern.ch."

Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."

Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."

phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."

ribasushi writes "The last open day at the Large Hadron Collider is one week away. While I have a solid chance to go, I am dumbstruck by the insane amount of things to see during the 10 hours of the event. Since I do not know all that much about physics, I am turning to the knowledgeable crowd here at Slashdot — what do you think are the most awesome 5 must-see things on the agenda next Sunday?"

maximus1 writes "In an interview with IT World, Tim Berners-Lee explains his vision of the Semantic Web. He says: 'The Semantic Web is going to take off particularly when we see people using it for data processing, when we see people using it in more and more things, adding personal data, adding files to government data.' His position on net neutrality: 'We've seen cable companies trying to prevent using the Internet for Internet phones. I am concerned about this, and am working, with many other committed people, to keep it from happening. I think it's very important to keep an open Internet for whoever you are. This is called Net neutrality. It's very important to preserve Net neutrality for the future.' And a fun tidbit — He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web."

GrepNut writes "CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab." While safety precautions were followed, and no one was injured nor were any rifts in the space-time continuum opened, it's still a rather large setback for the project.

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."

Maria Williams writes to tell us about worry surrounding the impending startup of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Some fear that the device, in creating mini black holes, could jeopardize Life As We Know It. While the tiny black holes should evaporate quickly — throwing off so-called Hawking radiation that can be detected — CERN software developer Ran Livneh reminds us that "Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay." The LHC site assures us there's nothing to worry about. The flap is reminiscent of the time the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider went live. The worry then was that "negative strangelets" could gobble up the world.

neutron_p writes "When the LHC Computer Grid starts operating in 2007, it will be the most data-intensive physics instrument on the planet. Today eight major computing centers successfully completed a challenge to sustain a continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second on average for 10 days from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to seven sites in Europe and the US. The total amount of data transmitted during this challenge -- 500 terabytes -- would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit per second household broadband connection."

neutron_p writes "When the LHC Computer Grid starts operating in 2007, it will be the most data-intensive physics instrument on the planet. Today eight major computing centers successfully completed a challenge to sustain a continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second on average for 10 days from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to seven sites in Europe and the US. The total amount of data transmitted during this challenge -- 500 terabytes -- would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit per second household broadband connection."

rcastro0 writes "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes" was the first ever to grace a web browser window, according to Silvano de Gennaro from the CERN Music Club site. He writes 'Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".' As an aside, the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet.""

rcastro0 writes "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes" was the first ever to grace a web browser window, according to Silvano de Gennaro from the CERN Music Club site. He writes 'Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".' As an aside, the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet.""

rcastro0 writes "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes" was the first ever to grace a web browser window, according to Silvano de Gennaro from the CERN Music Club site. He writes 'Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".' As an aside, the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet.""

mlp68 writes "This is from the floor of the 'Computing in High-Energy Physics' conference in Interlaken, Switzerland, which has been going on this week and closes today. Computer experts and scientists from large physics experiments around the world discussed their work and progress on various fronts. Data logging rates of 100's of MB/s and Linux farms with 100's or 1000's of machines are standard fare. Most of the talks presented, as well as today's summary talks, are available online. An interesting tidbit is that one experiment is now using P2P technology to configure their data acquisition components faster than was possible before."

mlp68 writes "This is from the floor of the 'Computing in High-Energy Physics' conference in Interlaken, Switzerland, which has been going on this week and closes today. Computer experts and scientists from large physics experiments around the world discussed their work and progress on various fronts. Data logging rates of 100's of MB/s and Linux farms with 100's or 1000's of machines are standard fare. Most of the talks presented, as well as today's summary talks, are available online. An interesting tidbit is that one experiment is now using P2P technology to configure their data acquisition components faster than was possible before."

mlp68 writes "This is from the floor of the 'Computing in High-Energy Physics' conference in Interlaken, Switzerland, which has been going on this week and closes today. Computer experts and scientists from large physics experiments around the world discussed their work and progress on various fronts. Data logging rates of 100's of MB/s and Linux farms with 100's or 1000's of machines are standard fare. Most of the talks presented, as well as today's summary talks, are available online. An interesting tidbit is that one experiment is now using P2P technology to configure their data acquisition components faster than was possible before."

deglr6328 writes "Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's "l'OASIS" group have, for the first time, discovered a way to create high quality monochromatic beams of relativistic electrons using a 10 terawatt laser pulse focused on a specially formed plasma channel. The work is considered a landmark in new accelerator physics due to the fact that they are theoretically capable of creating extraordinarily high field accelerating gradients in the 100's of GeV per meter range; much higher than what's possible with the current gradients created by microwave frequency accelerators. The discovery could therefore open the door to far more efficient and compact staged particle accelerators utilizing next generation petawatt power lasers to achieve TeV scale particle energies and at lower energies, allow things like proton beam cancer therapy to be made affordable and widely available."

Anonymous Coward writes "The facility that has earned three scientists Nobel prizes, provided the impetus for Berners-Lee's hypertext program (aka the WWW), oh and has also helped answer some fundamental questions regarding the universe has turned fifty today! And with the LHC in development, here's hoping for another 50!"

Nightshade queries: "I work for a department in a big financial company that uses equal amounts of C++ and Java. For a variety of reasons, we've decided that Java is the future of the group because of all the benefits of the language (it's so easy to use compared to C++, we can use Eclipse, Ant, jUnit, etc). The problem is that we do a lot of numerical computing and Java has no operator overloading! Languages like C# have operator overloading and because of this company's like CenterSpace have popped up with some nice looking numerical libraries. Try to find numerical packages for Java and it'll be pretty tough. What have people done in terms of numerical computing in Java? We currently use the Jama and Colt libraries for matrices and complex numbers, but these have awkward interfaces without operator overloading and are incomplete (no support for things like symmetric matrices) so we're looking for better solutions. So should we bite the bullet and switch to C#? Should we use a pre-processor like JFront? What have other people done?"

zoglmannk asks: "I've become interested in grid computing. A lot has happened since the last time that I looked at it several years ago during the SETI@home heyday. Now several public supported grid applications are coming to fruit: climate modeling, cancer research, protein folding, smallpox therapies, fighting bioterrorism, mersenne prime search, evolution, SETI, and others. All of these have public interest to make a better world. Is mass adoption of public interest grid computing just around the corner? Is there really a need for a majority of those spare CPU cycles? Or is there more computing power than can reasonably be used for the types of problems that can be distributed to home and educational PCs? What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?"