Weird neutrino excess won’t go away, hints at new physics

One possible explanation is a fourth type of neutrino.

Enlarge / The interior of the MiniBooNE detector. (credit: Los Alamos National Lab)

There are indications that for several scientific areas of study, our current understanding of the particles and forces that govern normal matter is wrong. Many of these areas seem to involve neutrinos, and that's in part because these particles rarely interact with normal matter, making them incredibly difficult to detect.

But we've gradually gotten better at building detectors, which has allowed us to discover that neutrinos have mass (something unaccounted for in the Standard Model) and shift among different identities as they travel. But the process has also revealed some persistent oddities. One oddity is a long-standing excess in one type of neutrino, first described by researchers from Los Alamos back in the 1990s. The same thing was seen at Fermilab in the initial runs of an experiment called MiniBooNE, but neither of them gathered enough data to announce discovery.

Now Fermilab is back with its latest update, using two additional years of MiniBooNE data. The excess is still there, and it has edged even closer to the statistical standards for discovery. If you combine the Fermi and Los Alamos data, we're already there. It's looking more and more like another break in the Standard Model, and the possible explanations include an entirely new type of neutrino.

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ORNL Summit: Die USA haben wieder den schnellsten Supercomputer

Ganze 200 Petaflops für HPC oder 3,3 Exaflops für Deep Learning: Der Summit-Supercomputer des US-amerikanischen Energieministerium ist fast doppelt so flott wie Chinas bestes System, der Sunway Taihu Light. (Supercomputer, Prozessor)

Ganze 200 Petaflops für HPC oder 3,3 Exaflops für Deep Learning: Der Summit-Supercomputer des US-amerikanischen Energieministerium ist fast doppelt so flott wie Chinas bestes System, der Sunway Taihu Light. (Supercomputer, Prozessor)

NY Times reporter’s emails seized by Justice Dept. in Senate Intel Committee leak case

“Tens of thousands” of emails, calls, and texts between reporter and leaker grabbed from Verizon, Google.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Cogswell)

The New York Times revealed on June 7 that the Justice Department had seized records for two email accounts and a mobile account belonging to Times reporter Ali Watkins in connection with an investigation into alleged leaks of information regarding the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The data, from Watkins' Verizon and Google accounts, spanned years. Watkins was informed of the seizure in a letter from the Justice Department.

The records were seized as evidence in the case of James Wolfe, former director of security for the SSCI, who is alleged to have leaked classified information provided by the government to the committee to Watkins and other reporters. Wolfe's indictment alleges that Watkins and Wolfe had a romantic relationship dating back to 2013, when Watkins was a college student and intern with a news organization in Washington. Watkins worked at Buzzfeed and Politico before joining The New York Times in December.

Wolfe is alleged to have leaked information to Watkins that, among other things, exposed Trump campaign staffer Carter Page as the individual (identified as "Male-1" in court documents) Russian agents attempted to recruit in 2013. The FBI seized Watkins' emails and phone records dating back to 2014 as part of the investigation of Wolfe.

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Jolla’s Sailfish OS is still ticking, v2.2.0 brings fingerprint unlock and more

Jolla may be out of the hardware business, but the Finnish company is still bringing new features to its Linux-based Sailfish operating system for mobile devices. Earlier this year the company gave us a sneak peek at new features coming in Sailfish 3, …

Jolla may be out of the hardware business, but the Finnish company is still bringing new features to its Linux-based Sailfish operating system for mobile devices. Earlier this year the company gave us a sneak peek at new features coming in Sailfish 3, including a 30 percent performance boost and support for feature phones with […]

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AT&T imposes another $5 price hike on grandfathered unlimited data plans

Grandfathered data plan will cost $45, plus fees for voice and text.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Young)

AT&T is imposing another $5-per-month price increase on customers who have held onto a decade-old grandfathered unlimited data plan. The new price will be $45 a month.

The data plan's price was $30 monthly for seven years until AT&T raised it to $35 in February 2016. A second $5 bump brought the price to $40 a month in January 2017. The third $5 increase in three years will kick in next month.

"Customers who have a grandfathered $40 data plan will receive notifications of a $5 per month rate increase for the data plan," AT&T said in the price increase announcement. "The rate increase will take effect starting with the customer’s July, 2018 service."

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Dealmaster: Sony discounts a bunch of PlayStation 4 things ahead of E3

Promo includes deals on PS4 Pro, PS VR, and a number of newer games.

Enlarge

Sony on Friday began its annual "Days of Play" sales event, which includes a variety of discounts on PlayStation 4 hardware and games.

The promotion, which the company first announced late last month, will run from June 8 to June 18. It will coincide with the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the video game industry's largest annual trade event, which begins this weekend in Los Angeles, California. Sony and the rest of the industry's major players are expected to provide updates on several upcoming high-profile games at the event.

We've rounded up a few highlights of the promotion below:

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AIDS Simulator kicked off Steam as Valve grapples with “trolling” definition

Active Shooter still rejected under Valve’s new, less restrictive store policies.

Enlarge / Games like Active Shooter will still be banned from Steam for "outright trolling," Valve's Doug Lombardi says.

Yesterday, we noted that Valve's new "almost-anything-goes" policy for games on the Steam Store still includes a bit of subjective wiggle room in its ban on "outright trolling." Since then, a few things have happened that provide some hints as to what Valve might mean by that nebulous term.

First, in a statement to GamesBeat, Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi clarified that a game like School Shooter—which was removed from Steam last week after generating days of outraged mainstream headlines—would still be disallowed under the new policy.

"We rejected Active Shooter because it was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence," Lombardi told the site. "In addition, the developer had been involved in numerous misrepresentations, copyright violations, and customer abuses. There are no second chances for Active Shooter, or its developers. And to be explicit, while the developer behind it was also a troll, we’d reject Active Shooter if it had been submitted by any other developer."

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Deals of the Day (6-08-2018)

Today’s your last day to save $30 when you pre-order an Amazon Fire TV Cube… assuming you’re an Amazon Prime member who wants a media streamer that also functions as a smart speaker. If you’re just looking for a 4K-ready media s…

Today’s your last day to save $30 when you pre-order an Amazon Fire TV Cube… assuming you’re an Amazon Prime member who wants a media streamer that also functions as a smart speaker. If you’re just looking for a 4K-ready media streamer though, there are some pretty good deals on Roku devices today. You can […]

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Google Pixel 3 XL prototype shows an all-glass back, giant display notch

It looks like Google is following all the 2018 design trends for its next device.

XDA Developers

It looks like we're quickly learning more about Google's upcoming flagship smartphone. After a description of the phone and a leak of a screen protector, we've now moved on to apparent prototypes of the Pixel 3 XL.

XDA Developers is showing off pictures of a device that lines up exactly with previous reports. The prototype has a very large display notch housing an earpiece and two front-facing cameras. There's a chin at the bottom, and between the chin and the notch there are two front facing speakers. The notch looks much taller than what's on the iPhone X, OnePlus 6, or LG G7. For an idea of just how long it is, OnLeaks shared a set of measurements for the Pixel 3 XL, which shows an 8.1mm-tall notch. A typical Android status bar is about 4mm high, so the notch on this phone would stretch out the status bar to make it double-height, just like on the Essential Phone.

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Ajit Pai’s FCC lied about “DDoS” attack, ex-chair’s statement indicates

Wheeler: There was no “coverup” of 2014 DDoS attack, because there was no DDoS.

Enlarge / Tom Wheeler, when he was Federal Communications Commission Chairman, at left, listens to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai testify before the House Judiciary Committee about Internet regulation on March 25, 2015. President Donald Trump promoted Pai to chairman to succeed Wheeler. (credit: Chip Somodvellia/Getty Images)

There was no DDoS attack against the Federal Communications Commission comments system in 2014, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week. Wheeler's statement disputes claims made by the FCC under current Chairman Ajit Pai, who is under fire for unproven claims about DDoS attacks.

The controversy began in May 2017 after Pai unveiled an early version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC system for accepting public comments on Pai's plan failed just as many net neutrality supporters were trying to submit pro-net neutrality comments on the urging of comedian John Oliver.

The FCC claimed the May 2017 outage was caused by "multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)" rather than by the volume of legitimate pro-net neutrality comments or by a simple failure of the system. To bolster its case, Pai's FCC claimed that a similar outage during the 2014 net neutrality proceeding was also caused by a DDoS attack. But Wheeler, who was chairman at the time and led the implementation of strict net neutrality rules, says there was no such attack in 2014.

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