inexion writes “PhyOrg is reporting that SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) scientists have found a way to test the revolutionary theory, which posits that there are 10 or 11 dimensions in our universe. This past December, Joanne Hewett, Thomas Rizzo, and student Ben Lillie published an article in Physical Review Letters which shows theoretically how to measure the number of dimensions that comprise the universe. By determining how many dimensions exist, Hewett and Rizzo hope to either confirm or repudiate string theory under specific conditions which would consist of creating and examining ‘micro-black holes’, which could be formed by smashing two high energy protons together. Using the predicted decay properties of the emitted neutrinos, Hewett and Rizzo solved equations to find that our universe may have more than 10 or 11 dimensions — too many dimensions to be explained by string theory.”

• Slashdot | Test for String Theory Developed

Roland Piquepaille writes “This image processor is not your typical digital camera. It took 6 years, 20 people, and $6 million to build the ‘Regional Calorimeter Trigger‘ (RCT) which will be a component of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The RCT will fill several racks of space in order to process 4 trillion bits of information per second while analyzing a billion proton collisions per second. The camera is currently being tested at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before being shipped to Geneva in June to participate in the first experiments in 2007.”

• Slashdot | The World’s Fastest Image Processor

The Finalists for the Extend Firefox Contest have been announced. Adblock, All-In-One Sidebar, Deepest Sender, DownThemAll!, Firefox Showcase, Forecastfox Enhanced, Groowe Search Toolbar, IE Tab, My Stickies, PDF Download, Platypus, Reveal, Sage, ScrapBook, Separe, Viamatic foXpose, Web Developer and Wizz RSS News Reader will be vying for awards in eleven categories, including Best New Extension, Best Upgraded Extension and Best Use of New Firefox 1.5 features. Winners will be announced mid-February.

• Extend Firefox Contest Finalists Announced – MozillaZine
  

NetBeans — My favorite Java / J2EE development environment, har just been released in version 5.0, much have changed since the 3.x, 4.x versions and I warmly recommend any Java developer to download and discover it’s open source glory, especially those who last tried it years ago.
I went from NetBeans 3.1 to JBuilder Enterprise and directly back to NetBeans 3.6 again, and since I haven’t really looked at the commercial IDE’s as an option for my own projects. I have also used Eclipse and IBM’s Websphere Studio Developer (which is based on Eclipse codebase), and although they are fine products, they don’t really do it for me, since I have quite big focus on Java Web Development, and Eclipse needs commercial third party plugins (MyEclipse) to do that well at the moment.

NetBeans IDE 5.0 introduces comprehensive support for developing IDE modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans platform, the new intuitive GUI builder Matisse, new and redesigned CVS support, Sun Application Server 8.2, Weblogic9 and JBoss 4 support, and a lot of editor enhancements.

Here are some of the cool features in this release:

• Developing NetBeans Modules
• Matisse GUI Builder
• Servers
• Web Frameworks
• Web Services
• Editor Enhancements
• Code Completion
• Refactoring
• Version Control
• Debugging
• Other Usability Improvements
• New NetBeans Add-on Packs

• NetBeans 5.0 Release Info