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Is the Hadron Collider Still Going to Destroy the World?

Fox News Makes Unqualified Assertion that LHC Will Kill Us All

We thought that we had heard the last from the doom-sayers about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but of course leave it to that bastion of high-quality journalism, Fox News, to find a research paper that slightly contradicts accepted scientific assumptions about the LHC and twist them into prophecies of world-ending catastrophe.

A new study from three scientists, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna, and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama, suggests that the initial math regarding the decay of the microscopic black holes may have been slightly off. It was originally anticipated that the tiny black holes scientists hoped to create with the LHC would decay in under a millisecond. This new study, however, suggests that they may last much longer -- possibly past the one-second mark.

Of course, the Fox News science and technology department seems to think this means that the LHC will create a black hole that will grow at an uncontrollable rate and swallow the Earth. This position, however, completely ignores the findings of the new study, which clearly states that the black holes will still decay quicker than they can accumulate mass, and will disappear safely into the atmosphere or the Earth.

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Scientists Succeed With Teleportation Experiment

This story gets a little heady and, to be honest, we're not entirely sure we completely understand it ourselves. What we do know is that scientists have made a huge advancement in the field of teleportation, taking a step necessary to the development of quantum computers.

Scientists managed to teleport information from one atom to another from a distance of about one meter. While this isn't really getting us much closer to the 'Star Trek'-like ability to beam people around the universe, it does allow for instantaneous transmission of information without it passing through physical space. Previously, similar accomplishments have been made with photons (the basic unit of light) and between nearby atoms with the assistance of a third, but these have not proven useful for the long-term storage and long-distance transmission of information.

This breakthrough was accomplished using a phenomena known as quantum entanglement. Atomic and sub-atomic particles can be entangled, meaning their states (such as spin or polarization) are linked, regardless of distance and obstacles. The state is unknowable until a measurement of either particle is made (see Schrödinger's cat), but once the state of one particle is measured the state of the other is instantly determined.

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Researchers Unveil 'Unbreakable Encryption'

Call us devilish, but we just can't help but love these types of stories. Here we have yet another overly confident group of researchers grossly underestimating the collective power of the hacking underground, as gurus from all across Europe have joined together to announce "the first commercial communication network using unbreakable encryption based on quantum cryptography."

Interestingly enough, quantum cryptography has already been cracked in a kinda-sorta way, but that's not stopping these folks from pushing this claim hard to government agencies, financial institutions and companies with distributed subsidiaries.

We've no doubt this stuff is pretty secure, but the last time we heard someone utter a claim similar to this, we saw him uncomfortably chowing down on those very words merely months later.

[Via Physorg]

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