It seems that conflicting reports are making it difficult to determine if the Higgs-Boson has been found at last. The four experiments designed to find evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson and possibly solve the mystery of why baryonic matter has mass (an elementary and experimentally provable observation) are returning conflicting results. Two of the experiements in the United States have collected data suggesting that they may, in fact, have spotted the elusive and as-yet hypothetical particle. The other two... not so much.

While browsing the newsfeeds a couple of nights ago, I came across an interesting article from ABC News about people dropping out of workaday life and preparing for the end of the world. From the United States to France to the Russian Confederation, stockpiles of crop seeds are being built, water purefiers are vanishing from the shelves, and basic knowledge about farming, medicine, and engineering is being crammed into many a brain. Normally, this isn't a very interesting phenomenon because people have been doing this for literally centuries - the end of the world as we know it is a hot …

In slightly less technical terms, researchers at the Toshiba Research Europe facility in Cambridge, England have figured out how to make it harder for eavesdroppers to steal keying information from a quantum cryptosystem (registration required, Bugmenot has login credentials for this site). For an attacker to have a chance at breaking a quantum cryptosystem, he or she would have to splice a tap into the optical fibre which connects the two crypto units and record the pulses of light that encode the key used to encrypt the data. There are ways to use the principles of quantum mechanics to detect …

Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.

Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.