CERN is pouring cold water on the rumor it’s gonna announce the discovery of the Higgs at today’s seminar in Zurich. For the uninitiated: the Higgs-Boson is the particle that is believed to give all things mass: it surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together. The scuttlebutt is that the ATLAS sensor picked up a Higgs with a mass of 125GeV (gigaelectronvolts) and rated at three-point-five-sigma — a one sigma barely warrants a mention, a five-sigma is a bona-fide scientific discovery. CERN hasn’t confirmed or denied anything, claiming it’s still got five femtobarns worth of data (roughly 5 x 70 x 10^12 of individual collisions) to examine before it can be sure, so just chuck the one bottle of champagne into the refrigerator — better to be safe, eh?

CERN: ‘Don’t believe the Higgs-Boson hype’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gallium Nitride-on-diamond wafer technology

Can diamonds be a geek’s best friend? De Beers, the global diamond conglomerate, certainly thinks so. Element Six, a De Beers subsidiary focused on manufacturing synthetic diamonds, has opened a new venture capital office in Silicon Valley.

The fund aims to invest in technology companies that use synthetic diamond, a mineral that’s chemically identical to natural diamonds but produced in a lab rather than by the traditional geologic process.

Element Six Ventures Group has actually been active since 2006, but the decision to open up an outpost in the San Francisco Bay Area is an important step for the firm, managing director Susie Wheeler said in an interview last week. “Part of our goal in being here in Silicon Valley is to go out and really proselytize diamonds to the technology companies based here,” she said. Diamond is best known for its hardness, but its other properties, such as high thermal conductivity and high radiation resistance, make it useful in applications from semiconductor manufacturing equipment to clean tech.

Element Six Ventures has already invested “tens of millions” of dollars in its seven-company portfolio. One of Element Six’s notable investments is in Diamond Detectors, a UK-based firm that manufactures the synthetic-diamond-radiation detectors used on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Wheeler did not provide specific details on how much Element Six is looking to spend on investing in Silicon Valley companies; she said the firm’s deep-pocketed parent company De Beers has not set distinct limits in place.

And the new VC firm is only the beginning, Wheeler said. In the months ahead, Element Six is also planning to build a production site in Silicon Valley for the manufacturing of synthetic diamonds. But that doesn’t mean more glitz is on the way to add fuel to all that tech bubble talk going around — Element Six makes no gems, only diamond material for technological and industrial use.

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Last night, in response to a worldwide surge in interest, the OPERA experiment released a paper that describes the experiments that appear to show neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. And today, CERN broadcast a live seminar in which one of the work’s authors described the content of the paper. Both of those emphasized the point of our initial coverage: figuring out whether anything is traveling beyond the speed of light requires incredibly accurate measurements of time and distance, and the OPERA team has made an extensive effort to make its work as accurate as possible.

Wired Top Stories

Spotlight On CERN – The LHC Is Back! Geneva, 20 November 2009. Particle beams are once again circulating in the worlds most powerful particle accelerator, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o’clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010. — • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com — Its great to see beam circulating in the LHC again, said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. Weve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone were well on the way. The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again. The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago, said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. Weve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. Thats how progress is made. Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered …
Video Rating: 4 / 5

By Andrew Liszewski

The majority of people who are afraid of what will happen when CERN’s large hadron collider is finally put into operation probably have no idea what it really is, or what it’s designed to do. But what better way to educate the masses on the intricacies of the world’s largest science experiment than through an intricately detailed pop-up book? That’s what made me the amateur surgeon I am today!

Voyage To The Heart Of Matter – The Atlas Experiment At CERN was written by Emma Sanders, though it’s probably the paper engineering skills of Anton Radevsky that will make this a must-have Christmas gift for everyone from amateur physicists to the scientists actually working on the ATLAS experiment. But since it won’t be available until the end of November for about $33, it might be cutting it a bit close for the gift giving season.

[ Voyage To The Heart Of Matter - The Atlas Experiment At CERN ] VIA [ Shiny Shiny ]

In this week’s incidentally infringing app roundup: NASA enters the iPhone’s orbit, Earthworm Jim is ALIVE, your handset learns two tricks it should’ve known already, rhythm gaming goes pro, and Loopt users crudely proposition one another.

The Best

NASA: NASA’s really stepped up their online presence in the last few years, giving armchair astronauts more media, stats and news than they could ever want. Nasa’s iPhone app, matter-of-factly named “NASA app for iPhone,” aggregates it all, including Twitter feeds, orbit trackers, images, video and mission updates. Free, unless you count income tax.

GameCenter: A free encyclopedia of games, GameCenter taps into GameFly’s massive database of titles to immediately spit out everything from release dates to platform availability to screenshots to reviews. It’s a field guide for games, essentially—a type of tool which lends itself well to the iPhone.

Pet Semetary: A gored-up mobile take on Stephen King’s eponymous book and film, Pet Sematary is proudly straightforward: You shoot zombies; the zombies are often cats. It’s a slow-build game, with short stages that get progressively harder, and accordingly, it’s great timekiller. A dollar.

Wolfram Alpha: For this week’s obnoxiously contrarian pick, how about a calculator app that costs $50, and doesn’t do a whole lot more than the web-based version, available for free through the iPhone’s browser? Yes, perfect. I don’t totally buy that whole “graphing calculators are $100, this app is just $50″ reasoning, but the mathematical shortcut keyboard as well as a streamlined interface are pretty great. In other words, if (and only if) you can somehow expense something like this—ie, you work at CERN—totally do it.

ReelDirector: This is as close as you’re going to get to iMovie on your iPhone (which is still not very close, at all). Video stitching alone, though, will be worth the ($8) price of entry for many people, at least until Apple builds it into their camera app.

Rock Band: Despite the obvious success of games like Tap Tap Revolution, the big rhythm game players have generally steered clear of the App Store. Until this week! Rock Band, late as it is, is pretty good, with caveats: the control scheme isn’t ideal; the singing mode isn’t actually a singing mode; and it could stand to include a few more than the base 20 songs. Which are licensed, popular songs, by the way—not lame mashups or no-name material like you see in some other rhythm apps. $10.

SongSift: It’s easy to let your iPhone library get cluttered with odd singles, poorly-tagged strays, and one-off playlist refugees. The real solution is to sort your freakin’ colllection, you slob, but until you do, SongSift lets you filter albums by length, so if you’re setting out on a run, or want to set-and-leave your iPhone for a while, you’ll be able to find large, contiguous chunks of music with a simple slider. A dollar.

NFB: Canada’s National Film Board funds all kinds of interesting films, documentaries and miscellaneous video projects, which their new iPhone app offers up for free. It’s hard to argue with that, so I won’t.

Earthworm Jim: The iPhone-ified Earthworm Jim could be a little cheaper, and the controls could be a bit more refined. But really, it’s hard to imagine a more authentic port for this game, especially to a platform without buttons.

Loopt Mix: Loopt doesn’t just keep track of friends now, it finds new ones. With the “Mix” feature, you can send any nearby Loopt users a friend request. And from the looks of the promotional shots, you’re supposed to parlay that request into an entirely different kind of request, which we’ll talk about after the kids go to bed.

Honorable Mentions

The Colbert Report’s The Word: To be fair, The Word is a highlight of every episode of the Colbert Report. It just seems like, you know, you’ve made this nice video app an all, so why not throw in rest of the otherwise free ColbertNation.com content as well? Oh well. A dollar.

SuicideGirls: A video choose-your-own-adventure story in which one of the possible ending is engaging in light petting with an angry, tattooed, seminude lady. Remember when Apple used to ban dictionary apps for swearing?

Gucci: A free promotional tool for a company I have a feeling our readers aren’t all that in to, Gucci’s iPhone app actually has some neat features, including a in-app DJ tool, local restaurant/bar/whatever recommendations, and, uh, some stuff about clothes, or bags, or something.

Other News

• Lala iPhone App And Its 10-Cent Songs Might Be Reality By Year End

• Nokia Suing Apple for 10-Patent iPhone Infringement

• Graphs and Charts Prove iPhone to Be the Most Successful Gadget Ever (Sort of)

• Ballmer: “The Internet Is Not Designed For The iPhone”

• Apple: “People Are Still Just Trying to Catch Up With the First iPhone”

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!