LHCb detector causes trouble for supersymmetry theory
Two of the general purpose detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, tend to keep a high profile, as they're designed to be able to spot anything that comes out of the collisions—the Higgs, dark matter, or something even more exotic. LHCb is quite a bit more specialized, as it is designed specifically to track those collisions that include a particle that contains a bottom quark (generically, these particles are called B mesons). In doing so, it's meant to provide the most precise test of a number of predictions made by the Standard Model; should the test show it fails, they could provide indications of supersymmetry or a mechanism that explains why our Universe is filled with matter and not antimatter.
As with the other two detectors, the people behind LHCb have put together their preliminary data for the summer physics meetings, and so far, it all looks ver good; the detector has already provided the most precise test of some features of the Standard Model. And, so far, it has emerged unscathed, which may mean bad things for supersymmetry and send theoreticians back to the drawing board on our matter/antimatter asymmetry.
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The journey to 60FPS: Ars talks God of War: Origins on PS3
The God of War series has produced a number of brutal, critically acclaimed games on both the PlayStation 3 and the PSP. Now, with the upcoming release of God of War: Origins, you'll be able to play through the entire series on your PS3. The $40 package includes both portable God of War games, upgraded to run in full 1080p at 60 frames per second. It's a noticeable upgrade, to say the least.
We caught up with Ready at Dawn, the game's developer, to explore the work it takes to bring a PSP game to the PS3. It's not easy, but the results speak for themselves.
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Piece of crust stolen from Texas found in Antarctica
You’ve likely heard of Pangaea (not the one that sounds similar from Avatar), but you may not realize that it wasn’t the first supercontinent; several have been identified from the rock record. About a billion years ago, a supercontinent named Rodinia formed from the collision of a number of cratons which comprise parts of today’s continents. Evidence of the collisions that built Rodinia remains in a geological remnant called the Grenville mountain range.
Collisions of continents compress the crust between them, driving up a range of mountain peaks. We see a process like this going on today in the Himalayas, where the Indian plate is pushing northward into the Eurasian plate. With time, however, erosion will level out these mountains.
The Appalachian mountain range no longer reaches the impressive heights it once did because it has been eroding for over 400 million years. Deep in the roots of the Appalachians, though, we can see evidence of an even older mountain range that has long-since eroded from sight. The remnants of the Grenville range extend along the East Coast of the United States, but also continuing north into Canada as well as south through Texas and into Mexico.
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Android tablet software: a fresh look at Honeycomb app hits and misses
The first Honeycomb-based tablet, the Motorola Xoom, was released towards the end of February. In our review of the device, we highlighted a handful of well-designed applications that fit the form factor. The number of third-party tablet applications for Android is still small compared to the iPad, but it's growing modestly.
In the six months that have passed since the launch of the Xoom, the Android tablet application ecosystem has seen some nice additions. There are, however, still a lot of missing pieces. In this article, we will take a brief look at some of the new apps and we will discuss some of the gaps that are still waiting to be filled.
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Trading IPv4 addresses will end in tears
As we run out of IPv4 address space, is it time to create an exchange for trading unused address blocks? Ars contributors Iljitsch van Beijnum and Timothy Lee tackle the issue. In this article, Iljitsch explains why this is a bad idea. You can read Tim's take here.
The Internet is a packet-switched network. That means all communication going across the network is put in packets, which are transmitted individually. This has
the advantage that there's no call setup overhead, like in connection-based networks (think landline phones). But the downside is that each of those packets, holding not much more than one kilobyte of data, must be routed through the network individually. So a big router that handles many millions of packets per second has to take the destination Internet Protocol (IP) address from each packet and then walk through its routing table to find where next to send the packet. This makes the design of routing table data structures and the algorithms to
search through them an extremely critical part of the Internet.
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The case for a free market in IPv4 addresses
As we run out of IPv4 address space, is it time to create an
exchange for trading unused address blocks? Ars contributors Iljitsch
van Beijnum and Timothy Lee tackle the issue. In this article, Tim
explains why this is the way to go. You can read Iljitsch's take here.
Officially, the world ran out of IPv4 addresses earlier this year, when a final batch of addresses was divided among the five Regional Internet Registries. The authorities hope that declaring the IPv4 cupboards bare will push expanding networks into making the leap to IPv6, which has a 128-bit address space that's unlikely to ever be exhausted.
But the IPv6 transition is happening slowly, and expanding networks need more IPv4 addresses now. This need is especially acute in Asia, where rapidly growing economies and huge populations have created demand for tens of millions of new addresses each year.
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Portal designer proposes a Quantum Conundrum at PAX
Kim Swift, one of the designers of the groundbreaking Portal, is at Penny Arcade Expo to show that she’s not out of clever game ideas.
On Saturday evening, Swift and her team at Airtight Games will host a PAX panel and give fans the first glimpse at Quantum Conundrum, a first-person, physics-based puzzle game coming next year for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Fans of Portal will find the downloadable game to be comfortingly familiar, from the quirky sense of humor to the clever puzzle design.
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BitTorrent users don't "act in concert," so judge slashes mass P2P case
Steele Hansmeier, the antipiracy law firm that has been routinely hammered by judges in Illinois, is now getting hammered by judges in California. The firm has tried desperately to head off all the common objections to its mass file-sharing lawsuits over online porn, and has even taken to geolocating IP addresses before filing a lawsuit; its Hard Drive Productions case in California only went after 188 IP addresses that appeared to be located in the state. But the firm still had its entire case severed down to a single defendant last week.
Geolocation tools may help convince skeptical judges that a lawsuit is more than a national fishing expedition, one mainly targeting people outside a court's personal jurisdiction. (Judges in other jurisdictions have expressed annoyance such tools weren't first used to winnow the list of IP addresses.) But P2P lawsuits have other problems, including the fact that they generally "join" people who have little in common except for a taste in digital porn (in this case "Amateur Allure - Erin"). And increasingly savvy judges are now parsing claims about BitTorrent with a scholar's eye to see if these defendants really should be linked.
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F2P Super Monday Night Combat will bring third-person shooting to DotA formula
Monday Night Combat found success on the Xbox Live Arcade before moving over to the PC a number of months later. The game combined a simplified take on the DotA formula with third-person shooting and wrapped it all up in a hyper-stylized take on American sports. Uber Entertainment has now announced its next game, and the developer is ready to dive deeper into its own creation.
Super Monday Night Combat is part sequel, part reimagining. The game will be free to play, and will add greater emphasis on teamwork while giving you a persistent leveling system. You'll be dying much less in the game, so expect to spend less time respawning. The trade-off is a deeper, more strategic game.
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Thai censorship critic strikes back at snitch Web host
In May 2006, Anthony Chai, a naturalized United States citizen from Thailand, took a flight back to the land of his birth to catch up with relatives and friends. He visited his nieces and nephews and spent some time at the resort town of Hua Hin.
But according to a new lawsuit, when Chai tried to return to California via Bangkok airport, he was stopped by a quintet of security agents. Employed by Thailand's Department of Special Investigation, they informed him that they had a warrant for his arrest for committing an act of lèse majesté—a public statement that supposedly violates the "dignity" of a ruler.
Thailand's version of the law, which was deployed against YouTube in 2007, seems (relatively) narrow at first glance. "Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years," it stipulates, and punishes those found guilty of making these insults with long prison sentences. But human rights advocates say it is now used against anyone who utters a statement critical of the government.
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Feature: How-to: run new media center software on your original Apple TV
For me, acquiring new gadgets is painfully easy; offloading old ones is more difficult. The predictable result: a closet, garage, or basement full of aging but not quite obsolete tech. As an Ars reader, you can probably relate.
I recently ran into my first-generation Apple TV during a spelunking expedition into the depths of my home office closet. After upgrading to a second-gen Apple TV last year, I had actually forgotten the old one was in there. The rediscovery piqued my curiosity. Though I have long avoided performing jailbreaks on my Apple products, the old Apple TV gave me a chance to find out what else I could watch on this thing besides iTunes content.
You can actually watch all manner of other content on an old Apple TV if you're willing to tinker. The two most popular software interfaces are a version of Boxee and a version of XBMC, both designed for the original Apple TV. Here, I offer you a chronicle of my own experiences setting up these both solutions, and show you how to do the same.
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Minecraft developers release trailer for new game Scrolls
A trailer for the upcoming game Scrolls from Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson was released to Kotaku today during PAX Prime. The trailer shows off the art style of the game, and it features a character creating a drawing of a burly warrior that we see briefly brought to life and engaged in combat.
Scrolls is intended as a cross between collectible card games and strategy board games where players use their set of scrolls with characters or attributes to battle through the world, with both timing and positioning of scrolls contributing to success or failure. The game is being developed by Mojang, the company that created Minecraft, and is written by Jerry "Tycho" Holkins of Penny Arcade, though the short trailer doesn't betray his sense of humor.
On the Scrolls website, lead designer Jakob Porser notes that he intends to use "ever changing content" in the game, and that players will explore the world while refining their arsenal of scrolls to maximize tactical advantages. Recently, the game came under fire from Bethesda, developers of the Elder Scrolls series, for using the word "scrolls" in its title.
The trailer states that Scrolls is "coming eventually," though past press releases have indicated that the game will be available before the end of this year.
Trailer: Scrolls
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Weird Science rejects the sperm of low-status mates
Social subordinates risk rejection—of their sperm: Hens don't have to be too choosy about whom they mate with; they still exert some control over who fathers their offspring. Hens have the ability to eject sperm that's just been deposited into them. Now comes word that hens take the social standing of the male into account when deciding which sperm to eject. Despite the fact that "patterns of sperm utilization by females are difficult to demonstrate," the authors managed to measure both the volume of sperm that's ejected and what that represents in terms of a fraction of the total rejected sperm (the "ejection intensity," in their terms). Males that are lower down the pecking order suffer from the highest ejection intensity.
It seems easier to answer "are we there yet?" in the affirmative on the way home: Researchers have now come to terms with the "return trip effect," which is the sense that coming home from a distant destination goes more quickly than getting there did in the first place. After showing that it applies to travel by bicycle and bus, and even when people simply watching someone else travel, the authors had some people return by a different, equidistant route. The return trip effect still occurred. The authors suggest that most people underestimate the trip before taking it, creating an impression that it takes a long time. That impression then sets them up to experience the return as shorter, even if it's not.
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Bias lighting and your computer monitor: $13 for more comfortable gaming
It's hard to stare at a computer monitor for hours after dark, with the rest of the lights turned off in your home or office. Still, this is how many of us play games, myself included. When Antec offered to send the soundscience halo 6 LED bias lighting kit—which is a long official name—I had nothing to lose. If it didn't work, I could write a short, snarky post dismissing it as hokum. If it did work, my eyes would be more comfortable.
The $13 product came in a small box, and it took under a minute to install. You simply remove the adhesive backing from the 14.5 inches of LED lighting, attach to the back of your monitor, and connect the cable to an empty USB port. The strip lit up, I sat down, and began an epic six-hour gaming session for my Deus Ex: Human Revolution review.
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