Awesomesauce

[Wraith]

Two research teams have found new evidence of
transformations in elusive elementary particles called neutrinos. The findings
may finally help explain why the universe didn’t vanish shortly after its
birth.

“These results are just the beginning of the story for
neutrinos,” said physicist Robert Plunkett of Fermilab in Chicago. “They could lead to
clues … and tell us why there’s now far more matter than antimatter.”


Most neutrinos are emitted by the sun, and are so small and
ghostly that billions pass through our bodies every second. Most go right
through Earth without hitting anything. But some human-built devices — slabs of
iron and plastic, big chambers of oil or water lined with photon detectors, or
detector arrays plunged into seawater or Antarctic ice — can record the blip of light when a
neutrino occasionally slams into an atom.

Using these detection events, physicists have identified
three types of neutrino, called muon, tau and electron neutrinos. Further
discoveries suggested that each type can transform into another, with
muon-to-tau neutrino transformations being dominant, at least in
particle-accelerator-powered experiments.

Researchers proposed a third and weaker change, that of
muon-to-electron neutrinos, but until now lacked evidence for its existence.

On June 14, the Japanese Tokai-to-Kamioka experiment reported the significant
detection of muon-to-electron neutrino changes. On June 24, the Main Injector
Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment at Fermilab reported on the
same phenomenon. While the ranges of their data varied, the basic claims
jibed.

“[The values] differ because we used different techniques
and distances, but they overlap at one part. They’re complementary,” said
Plunkett, a co-spokesperson of MINOS. They may differ only because of
statistical fluctuations, he said.

With a more complete understanding of neutrino
transformation in hand, Plunkett said physicists can now design experiments to
investigate larger questions about the universe. The largest among them: Why
there’s far more matter than antimatter.

Matter and antimatter particles annihilate when they meet.
Each type is thought to have appeared in equal proportions shortly after the Big
Bang, yet the matter-rich universe as we know it still exists. As a result,
physicists are seeking evidence of “asymmetries,” in which matter-antimatter
encounters end up emitting more matter particles.

Some matter-favoring asymmetry shows up in the annihilation
of quarks, though the effect is relatively meager. But physicists say a
muon-to-electron neutrino transformation supports the possibility of more
significant asymmetries.

“We now have a good enough handle on neutrinos to design
experiments and try to address such a big mystery,” Plunkett said.

Source

And can't those morons use SI units?

Typing out the zeros makes it look more impressive and gives a better idea of the scale to laymen, I'd imagine.

[Khendraja'aro]

Typing out the zeros makes it look more impressive and gives a better idea of the scale to laymen, I'd imagine.

I'm sorry, but "This is a number with 31 zeroes behind it" is rather better to grasp than "Well, we let you count the zeroes, see that you don't miscount!"

[Flixy]

If you're not familiar with the SI units, or with the powers of ten, it can be a bit hard to imagine how small it is, while a lot of zero's looks impressive. I suppose. The actual amount of zero's doesn't really matter to most people, doesn't mean anything to them anyway. But hey, that many zeros, that looks REALLY small!

[Ziggy Stardust]

To put that in context; if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.

That's pretty fucking round right there.

[Wraith]

After five years of steady progress, scientists are now edging closer and closer to mastering real-world invisibility.

Sure, researchers have already made marked strides toward making objects unseeable. But much of the work was more like mimicry: Meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it, but only worked in two dimensions. Or a device that played tricks on the eye, by harnessing the mirage effect to make objects behind it “disappear.”

Now, a team of researchers have taken an incredible leap forward. They’ve successfully made a 3-D object disappear.

A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have figured out how to “cloak a three-dimensional object standing in free space.” That means the object is invisible, from any angle of observation.

“This object’s invisibility is independent of where the observer is,” Professor Andrea Alu, the study’s co-author, tells Danger Room. “So you’d walk right around it, and never see it.”

Of course, the Pentagon’s been hot on the invisibility trail for years, and for obvious reasons. Invisibility would make plenty of covert operations way easier to execute, not to mention safer for U.S. personnel and deadlier for their foes.

Already, scientists have taken impressive steps forward, and at a freakily fast pace. Researchers in the U.K. have harnessed the mirage effect to mask objects placed behind a device, and Army-backed research is making impressive strides using meta-materials to bend light around objects. Just a few weeks ago, the world’s mind was collectively blown when Pentagon-funded scientists managed to cloak an actual event.

The latest research, published this week in the New Journal of Physics, uses “plasmonic meta-materials” to make an 18-inch cylindrical tube invisible. Put simply: An everyday object is visible because light rays bound off it, hitting our eyes and allowing our brains to process the info. Different cloaking techniques take different approaches to messing with those light rays.

Meta-materials, for one, redirect light to conceal a given object. But that technique makes it hard to render three-dimensional invisibility. The mirage effect relies on a panel of nanotubes that are electrically stimulated, causing them to bend rays of light and hide whatever is behind the panel. Plasmonic meta-materials, on the other hand, actually cancel out the light scattering from an object. So when coated over the cylinder, they block the rays — from every angle — that would ordinarily make that object visible.

It’s an incredible breakthrough, but one that won’t turn soldiers into ghostly GIs just yet. So far, researchers have figured out how to cloak free-standing objects from high-frequency wavelengths, like the microwave spectrum. They’ve still got to tackle the challenge of making a 3-D object invisible at optical wavelengths — what the human eye would be able to see.

“We have some ideas to make it work,” Alu says. “But the human eye is not our priority. Right now, we’re focused on improving biomedical imaging.”

Probably for the best. I, for one, still need to figure out who I’m gonna stalk first.

Source

[Wraith]

Don’t you dare even think about your banking account password when you slap on those fancy new brainwave headsets.

Or at least that seems to be the lesson of a new study which found that sensitive personal information, such as PIN numbers and credit card data, can be gleaned from the brainwave data of users wearing popular consumer-grade EEG headsets.

A team of security researchers from Oxford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Geneva say that they were able to deduce digits of PIN numbers, birth months, areas of residence and other personal information by presenting 30 headset-wearing subjects with images of ATM machines, debit cards, maps, people, and random numbers in a series of experiments. The paper, titled “On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain Computer Interfaces,” represents the first major attempt to uncover potential security risks in the use of the headsets.

“The correct answer was found by the first guess in 20% of the cases for the experiment with the PIN, the debit cards, people, and the ATM machine,” write the researchers. “The location was exactly guessed for 30% of users, month of birth for almost 60% and the bank based on the ATM machines for almost 30%.”

To detect the first digit of the PIN, researchers presented the subjects with numbers from 0 to 9, flashing on the screen in random order, one by one. Each number was repeated 16 times, over a total duration of 90 seconds. The subjects’ brainwaves were monitored for telltale peaks that would rat them out.

The EEG headsets, made by companies such as Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky, have become increasingly popular for gaming and other applications. For the study, the researchers used the Emotiv Epoc Neuroheadset, which retails for $299.

The researchers — Ivan Martinovic of Oxford University; Doug Davies, Mario Frank, Daniele Perito, and Dawn Song of UC Berkeley; and Tomas Ros of the University of Geneva — analyzed P300 peaks, an important component of event-related potentials — electrical potentials that happen after the user is presented with a stimulus.

The P300 “occurs approximately 300 milliseconds after an event happens,” said Frank, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley, in a phone interview with Wired. “The potential arises if you already prime your thoughts toward a particular event…. An attacker could try to prime the thoughts of the victim towards a particular secret that a victim has in mind. For instance, if you know the face of some person, you might be able to observe a brainwave pattern that is evidence of the user thinking about the face.”

“Brain Spyware”

Emotiv and NeuroSky both have “app stores,” where users of the devices can download third-party applications. The applications use a common API for access to the EEG device.

“In the case of the EEG devices, this API provides unrestricted access to the raw EEG signal,” write the researchers. “Furthermore, such applications have complete control over the stimuli that can be presented to the users.”

The researchers envision a scenario in which a potential malicious attacker could write “brain spyware” to harvest private information from the user, which could be legitimately downloaded as an app.

“We simulated a scenario where someone writes a malicious app, the user downloads it and trusts the app, and actively supports all the calibration steps of the device to make the software work,” said Frank. In these seemingly innocuous calibration steps, which are standard for most games and other applications using the headsets, there could be the potential to harvest personal information.

“We realized that these devices are becoming increasingly popular — maybe in five, 10 years, it’s very likely that many households will have one,” Frank said. “At the same time, you can use all kinds of third-party apps for these devices. In this setting, as security researchers, we identified that there is a potential to make some bad stuff, to turn this technology against the user.” He said, however, that there was no immediate threat in using the devices. But the experiments devised by the researchers point to the devices’ darker potential.

“The simplicity of our experiments suggests the possibility of more sophisticated attacks,” write the researchers, warning that “with the ever-increasing quality of devices, success rate of attacks will likely improve.”

Source

[Loki]

The only logical solution is to ban brains.

[Dreadnaught]

I'm not too familiar with these headsets (clearly I should play more computers games...for the technology immersion), but holy shit.

The real question is: at what point does this stuff become admissible in courts?