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Companies are increasingly collecting amounts of digital information that are so large as to be unwieldy. It's no surprise that finding a way to securely store, categorize and recall this information efficiently is a huge advantage for any enterprise or organization.

The growth of information has introduced an entirely new category of software in the big-data arena, which includes a variety of databases, processing engines, and applications. The main objective of all of these tools is to make data more malleable and consumable so that it can be used in an easier way.

This week, CERN, the European Organization … Read more

European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul.

The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary … Read more

On today's show, an exhausted Molly and Brian Cooley wrap up the longest Apple keynote in years, and try to make sense of the things you can and can't accomplish with iCloud. Plus, the latest from Microsoft at E3, a little bit of cursory science news, and finally time for pizza. Phew.

The Large Hadron Collider has surpassed a record set by Fermilab's rival particle accelerator for what's called luminosity, a milestone that improves the odds that the gargantuan scientific experiment will produce new physics discoveries.

The LHC operators yesterday packed more bunches of protons into the beam, increasing the likelihood of collisions and therefore of the detection of very rare outcomes from those collisions.

"Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step," said General Rolf Heuer, director of the CERN facility that operates the LHC, in a statement. &… Read more

The Large Hadron Collider, CERN's particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is due to shut down for a major upgrade later than expected, after managers concluded the current rate of operational improvements could reveal new physical phenomena.

The LHC is a mammoth tool best known for its search for the Higgs boson--or more likely, some believe, a suite of them--and its other probes of the bizarre realm of subatomic physics. By colliding particles in two high-energy beams of protons, or more recently lead ions, physicists can re-create conditions present near the Big Bang.

Currently the … Read more

Physicists at CERN have taken a major step forward in antimatter research, according to the European science organization.

For the first time, scientists have managed to produce antimatter atoms and trap them using magnetic fields, the world's premier particle physics laboratory announced yesterday.

Learning how to trap the antimatter atoms, which were antihydrogen, will allow scientists from CERN's Alpha experiment to study the antiparticles, CERN told ZDNet UK yesterday. "This is a momentous step in the study of antimatter," Alpha experiment spokesman Jeffrey Hangst said.

Read more of "Cern scientists trap antimatter" at ZDNet … Read more

Turns out, you get punished for being a cute girl on Facebook ... at least that's our speculation about the bug that was disabling some women's profiles. Also, Google Voice debuts in the iTunes app store, Hulu Plus drops to $7.99, and we watch the Green Lantern trailer live and ... we're not impressed. Plus, Cooks Source Magazine elects to go quietly and passive-aggressively into this dark publishing night. --Molly

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a module that will go into space to conduct particle physics experiments, is set to leave CERN for the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.

The AMS module is being prepared for its transportation to the space center in Florida on board a U.S. Air Force Galaxy transport aircraft, CERN--the European Organization for Nuclear Research--said in a statement Wednesday. Once launched, AMS-02 will operate as an external module on the International Space Station (ISS). It will look for antimatter and dark matter while measuring cosmic ray composition, in a series of experiments designed to complement the … Read more

It took 100 years to discover all the physics particles that have thus far been observed. It took the Large Hadron Collider four months.

That's the report Monday from the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Paris, where LHC researchers announced they've successfully retraced the steps of earlier particle accelerators. The final step was the likely view of a super-heavy and short-lived particle called the top quark, first seen in 1995 at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator near Chicago.

"They have re-found all the known particles in the standard model," the successful but ultimately insufficient explanation that … Read more