bshort.com

It turns out Kodak had a secret underground nuclear reactor in its headquarters that contained 3.5 pounds of highly enriched uranium. The existence of this reactor was kept secret from state and local authorities for years and the reactor was finally dismantled in 2006.

Kodak used it to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, Filo said. It also was used for tests related to neutron radiography, an imaging technique.

The device was not much larger than a refrigerator and, in the one available photo, looked vaguely like Robby the Robot from a 1950s science fiction movie. To house it, Kodak dug a cavity below the basement level of Building 82, part of the company’s research complex along Lake Avenue.

From Did you know? Kodak Park had a nuclear reactor | Democrat and Chronicle | democratandchronicle.com

This is probably coming sooner than you think...

I had just posted this other entry on CP violation and was reading up on antineutrinos. Since they don't interact via the electromagnetic force I was puzzled as to how there can even be an anti-particle for something that only interacts via the gravity and weak forces. It turns out that antineutrinos are distinguished from neutrinos by chirality. There's also some serious discussion about neutrinos possibly being Majorana particles which would mean that a neutrino is actually its own antiparticle.

Then just the next day there's news that a Majorana fermions may have been discovered.

In his group's set-up, indium antimonide nanowires are connected to a circuit with a gold contact at one end and a slice of superconductor at the other, and then exposed to a moderately strong magnetic field. Measurements of the electrical conductance of the nanowires showed a peak at zero voltage that is consistent with the formation of a pair of Majorana particles, one at either end of the region of the nanowire in contact with the superconductor. As a sanity check, the group varied the orientation of the magnetic field and checked that the peak came and went as would be expected for Majorana fermions.

Now, it's not entirely clear what these particles would be since the results are so early, but there's some possibility that they might be something from the world of supersymmetry such as a neutralino.

So there's some pretty exciting news coming out of Fermilab:

To witness CP violation, physicists study particles to see if there is any difference in the rate of decay between normal particles and their antiparticles. The accepted theory of elementary particles, the standard model, allows for a low level of CP violation—including that revealed in the discoveries of the 1960s and 2000s—but not enough to explain the prevalence of normal matter. So researchers have been trying to find cases in which CP violation is higher. In November, the LHCb team reported that the decay rates differed by 0.8%—some eight times the amount the standard model is generally expected to allow, and perhaps enough to help explain the origin of matter's prevalence over antimatter.

This sort of difference in decay rates is a pretty difficult thing to measure since it's really a very slight difference, and as the article talks about, it's not entirely clear if this actually violates the Standard Model or not. And, even if it did, it's not totally clear where this would take us. Is the difference due to some essential difference between quarks and antiquarks? Are there differences between electrons and positrons as well? Muons and anti-muons? I won't even get into antineutrinos, since they're neutral particle anyway, and the difference that is coming to light from these experiments is likely due to some sort of electrical charge difference.

Here's a video showing the growth of the microlending site Kiva.

I'm still a little pissed about Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, but this looks great. Note: Tim Burton is not involved in this production. That's a good thing.