… For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.” …

• New Scientist: Our world may be a giant hologram – 15 January 2009

“Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors? The whole shebang — seven reports totaling 1600 pages, 115 MB, with contributions from 8000 scientists and engineers — has been published electronically by the Journal of Instrumentation, free to read without a subscription.”

• Slashdot | LHC Fully Documented Online

Physicist may have finally cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has befuddled physicists for the past 40 years, according to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, which concludes that that an outside observer can never lose objects down a black hole.Case Western Reserve University physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss came to this conclusion after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes.

“It’s complicated and very complex,” noted the researchers, regarding both the general problem and their particular approach to try to solve it.

The question that the physicists set out to solve is: “what happens once something collapses into a black hole?”

• Black hole information loss paradox cracked | Press Esc
• The Black Hole Information Loss Problem

“The New York Times has up a lengthy profile of the Large Hadron Collider. The article covers the basics (size = 17 miles, cost = 8 billion, energy consumption = 14 trillon electron volts) and history but also provides interesting interviews of the scientists who work with the facility every day. The piece also goes into some detail on the expected experiments. ‘The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.’ There are photos, video and a nifty interactive graphic.“

• Slashdot | A Detailed Profile of the Hadron Super Collider

As most of you don’t know, I am a big cloud fan and it never siezes to amaze how infinite chaos can reveal such beauty. I have never seen this type of clouds before – the Mammatus clouds, remind me of melting snow, and have a remarkable dense substance that makes them very special to look at. I will definitely be looking forward to experiencing these wonders in person.

Photos of the Mammatus clouds are (c) copyrighted by Jorn C. Olsen.

See more Spectacular Mammatus Clouds over Hastings, Nebraska.

Be sure to visit Jorn C. Olsen’s Gallery.

Several early grid computing projects were focused on the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources and providing this aggregated computing power for work that comprised lots of tasks — from hundreds to millions — that could be executed individually.

Today, there are several commercial and open source grid computing software packages that support this form of distributed computing on the desktop or other nondedicated computing resources. In this article, we will take a look at a popular commercial software package designed to help execute this function: the United Devices Grid MP platform.

Grid MP has several interesting and unique features, including:

* Support for heterogeneous desktops/nodes
* Nonintrusive client execution
* Tolerance to failures of desktop resources

We will provide an overview of the Grid MP features designed for harvesting idle cycles from nondedicated resources, and we’ll describe the types of applications that can effectively use the type of “desktop grid” we’re discussing.

Read the full article:
* Grid in action: Harvesting and reusing idle compute cycles

Also see:
* BOINC (SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, ClimatePrediction.net, LHC@Home, Predictor@Home, Cell Computing (JP))
* Team GiGA Productions Computing Group

* Slashdot | Open Source Molecules

Slashdot | Fab

You might want to check out my own project “Droids API“, which was actually called Bacteria API in the beginning, but I changed it to Droids to sound less like a vira

* Bytefarmers Droids API

* Slashdot | Open source Digital Bacteria

Slashdot | Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought