Low-Energy Neutrinos Detected In Real Time

Roland Piquepaille sends us word of first results from the Borexino detector in Italy, where an international team of more than 100 researchers has detected low-energy solar neutrinos for the first time. These results confirm recent "theories about the nature of neutrinos and the inner workings of the sun and other stars." In particular, it's now almost certain that neutrinos oscillate among three types, namely electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. The Borexino detector lies almost a mile underground near L'Aquila, Italy, and it sets new standards in the purity of the materials used in its construction.

Comments

Oops! My bad!

[siglercm]

Well, I guess if you're dogmatic about a subject, you should expect to blow your whole leg off someday....

This is the first story of Roland's that, in my opinion: 1.) Isn't blog whoring (no link back to ZDnet blog, although his home page _is_ pri - midi); and 2.) Is a story of real scientific interest; and 3.) Isn't terribly mis-represented in his summary. So even _I_ won't tag this story.... Isn't that ironic? Don't 'cha think?

It surprises me how a scientific blogger could get the minor, or sometimes major, technical details of the story he posts about wrong, but at times Roland will. But not this time :^) Good story, Roland!

No, parent poster was correct

[Flying pig]

And in my view insightful rather than funny. Al Gore was a political proponent of the Internet. But the concept of the www (which is just one of the many services running on dat ole Internet)did indeed originate in CERN.

People often suggest on /. that progress on the Internet is driven by the needs of pornographers. But it would be interesting to know how much progress in networking and databases is actually driven by the (huge) data recording and analysis needs of particle physicists. My own interest in operating systems,networks and databases was started by the need to log large amounts of data very fast from lightning strike simulation experiments.

Low-Latency, Direct Communications

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I'm going to wax somewhat sci-fi here and imagine that detection in real-time of neutrinos might have potential application in regards to communication tech.

In my view I see the ability to detect neutrinos as the first step towards a truly peerless communication system. Imagine that instead of radio waves one were to use neutrino emissions for communication. There would be no (or very little) interference (pass straight through any material) and subsequently the latency of communication from any point on the globe would be decided by the diameter not the circumference of the com point's positions on the earth - meaning that communication delays would be greatly reduced.

Imagine if any communications device could simply connect directly to any other device on the planet at low-latency with high-signal strength - wouldn't that be neat!