Faster than Light?

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists - because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

The result - which threatens to upend a century of physics - will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.

In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," he told BBC News.

"When you don't find anything, then you say 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'"

Caught speeding?

The speed of light is the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.

But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.

The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.

But the group understands that what are known as "systematic errors" could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.

"My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said.

But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"And of course the consequences can be very serious."

Source: BBC Online

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World's Greatest Sportsperson?

Is it possible to work out which living athlete is the best? Mathematician Rob Eastaway, co-author of The Hidden Mathematics of Sport, investigates.

The case for Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar is certainly strong. His international career has spanned an astonishing 22 years, during which time he has never been dropped from the Indian Test side.

The "Little Master" has scored more runs and notched up more international hundreds than anyone else in the history of the game, although cricket fans will always be compelled by Donald Bradman's famous 99.94 batting average. And it's not just that he has scored more, it's the huge margin by which he tops the table.

Longevity and the accumulation of trophies is certainly an important factor in making greatness, but it is surely not the only one. After all, if you're only looking at durability at the top, then Tendulkar is outstripped by US golfer Tom Watson, who has been a serious challenger in the Open since 1975.

The trouble is, there are so many statistical ways to measure greatness.

One is to pick out those sportsmen and women who for a period of time are in a different class from their peers. The goal-scoring feats of Lionel Messi make him a candidate, but statistical measurements of footballers are always tricky, not least because it can be hard to disentangle one player's performance from the contributions of his team mates.

Champion of champions?

• Sachin Tendulkar - achieved 99 centuries in international cricket
• Usain Bolt - world record and Olympic record holder in the 100m, the 200m and the 4×100m relay
• Tom Watson - five-time Open winner, challenged at the top level since 1975
• Phil "The Power" Taylor - won a record 15 world darts championships
• Jenny Thompson - won more swimming medals and gold medals than any woman in Olympic history

The feats within individual sports are easier to assess, and in terms of quantum leaps, can anyone rival Usain Bolt?

The 100 metre sprint is the pinnacle of athletics where the world records normally mean shaving 1/100th of a second off the previous best time. Yet Bolt has broken that record not just once but three times, and in his most recent, mathematicians reckoned he could have knocked more than a tenth of a second off the record time had he not slowed up at the finish because his shoelace was undone.

Great sportsmen are head and shoulders ahead of the competition. In Bolt's case it's head, shoulders and a couple of strides too.

Or you can take a look at a sport's world rankings. Every sport uses a different system for rankings its members, but all of them are based on some form of objective, mathematical model.

To identify the world's greatest, why not look at which sportsman has managed to spend the longest amount of time as world number one. Tiger Woods managed to be top of the golf rankings for over 10 years, before his recent fall from grace. By this measure, though, there's a British sportsman who pips Tiger for the title.

Phil "The Power" Taylor has had an almost unbroken position as world number one in darts since 1998. And yes, darts is now officially a sport.

We can of course let the market decide. If a sportsman earns a lot of money, it must reflect his global appeal and success.

David Beckham, surely a great, has earned tens of millions over his career.

Yet on this score, the world's greatest sportsmen at the moment could be Alex Rodriguez. He's paid around $30m (£18m) per year, and that's before all the product endorsements. He plays baseball.

But can he really be called the world's greatest when his name barely registers in public consciousness outside his own country?

Of course greatness also depends on many things that are hard to measure - charisma, style and an ability to hit the headlines, for example.

With all this complex and sometimes conflicting data, perhaps we should put our trust in the wisdom of crowds.

Despite the diverse and often ill-informed opinion of the public, put enough people together and they often manage to come up with the right answer.

And if we ask the crowd who is the greatest sportsman, I think I know who'll come out top. Sachin Tendulkar.

Why? He would win by sheer weight of population. There are over a billion people in India who have little sporting interest other than cricket. And a billion people can't be wrong - can they?

Source: BBC

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11 year old calls Police for forced labor

A boy of 11 called a German police emergency line to complain of "forced labour" after his mother told him to help clean the home.

Police say the boy from Aachen, who has not been identified, spoke to an officer via the 110 number.

They say he complained: "I have to work all day long. I haven't any free time."

His mother told the officer the boy had kept threatening to call them, having repeatedly complained of having to do housework during the school holidays.

A transcript of the conversation, printed in local newspapers, revealed the officer asking the boy to describe the kind of "forced labour" he was doing.

The boy replied that he had to clean the home and terrace, it said.

Asked if he knew what forced labour was, the boy said he did, and the police officer asked to speak to his mother, who at that stage was standing next to him.

She explained he had called after being asked to pick up paper from the floor, adding: "He plays all day long and when told to tidy up what he's done, he calls it forced labour."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14533749

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Itsy bitsy bar code bikini

(Reuters) - Soccer teams have home and away shirts,tennis and golf stars have clothes and gear with sponsored logos, but if you're a female beach volleyball star there's not a lot of costume real estate to hire out to the marketing folks.

That's why British beach volleyball stars Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney will be sporting a teensy weensy high tech bar code on their itsy bitsy bikini bottoms when they compete in a high profile London tournament this week.

The Olympic pairing -- ranked 26th in the world -- will have a Quick Response (QR) code on their costumes at the Visa FIVB Beach Volleyball International, an intercontinental women's volleyballexhibition.

When photographed on a smartphone, the QR matrix barcode directs users straight to a specific website, in this case a site owned by online sports betting company Betfair.

The barcode, part of a sponsorship deal with Betfair, will be printed on the back of the bikini bottoms, where advertisers think it will attract the most attention.

"There is huge interest in beach volleyball and we want to ensure that our advertising campaign is seen and remembered by as many sports fans as possible," Betfair's Andy Lulham said in a statement.

"As far as we're aware this is the first time QR codes have been used in in-play sports advertising and what better way to test its effectiveness than by putting them on one of the places that is likely to get photographed the most."

The tournament, which is part of the official 2012 London Olympic Games sports testing programme, takes place in Horse Guards Parade, London, the ceremonial grounds which hosts the Trooping of the Colour each year on the Queen's birthday.

This venue will host the 2012 London Olympic Games beach volleyball tournament in a temporary arena which will be built next year and have a capacity of 15,000.

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Earth in Antimatter Belt?

A thin band of antimatter particles called antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time.

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.

These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.

Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.

Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.

'Abundant source'

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place - at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they "annihiliate" in a flash of light.

The band is "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

"Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism," he told BBC News.

"Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced."

Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405122

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