GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers from the BASE Collaboration at CERN sealed 92 antiprotons inside a specialized ultrahigh-vacuum trap, then drove them 7.5 kilometers around the lab's grounds without losing them. The experiment, published in Nature, demonstrates that antimatter can survive real-world transport rather than staying confined to the site where it's produced.
CERN's BASE-STEP experiment built a compact catching trap using 15 stacked electrodes and magnetic confinement to capture antiprotons from a degraded beam, cool them with cotrapped electrons, and clean out contaminant particles like electrons and negative ions through voltage ramping and dipolar drives. The particles are then moved into a compensated Penning trap at the center of the device for stable, non-destructive detection and storage.
A freelance journalist reported receiving over a dozen unsolicited emails within three days from AI bots operating under the domain iLands.app, each pitching fact-checking or research services for roughly $25. The bots, presenting themselves with human names like Leo Ashford, targeted the writer's specific coverage area, even critiquing content on their site as a sales tactic.
CERN engineers announced at a Winterthur conference that the lab will shift over 2,200 machines from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian. The move stems from RHEL 9 and 10's newer compiler requirements, which drop support for older CPU architectures still used in many of CERN's embedded control systems.
CERN halted its injector complex and Antimatter Factory this morning, stopping the final proton and ion beams that had continued running since the LHC itself went dark in June. This completes the transition into Long Shutdown 3, a multi-year pause across the entire accelerator chain. Engineers used the last weeks of operation to gather performance data and finish physics measurements before maintenance begins.
CERN researchers and international collaborators generated quark-gluon plasma—the hot, dense matter thought to have existed microseconds after the Big Bang—by colliding oxygen-16 and neon-20 nuclei, elements far lighter than the lead atoms typically used for such experiments. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, show this exotic state of matter can form in much smaller collisions than previously assumed.
CERN is proceeding with a major upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider intended to significantly increase the rate of particle collisions, giving physicists more data to search for phenomena beyond the Standard Model. This follows years in which the collider largely confirmed existing theoretical predictions without producing the unexpected results many researchers had hoped for.