Celebrations are afoot at the Fermilab, after the conclusion of a twenty year search for a single number – the frequency of oscillation between matter and anti-matter. The details won’t mean much to anyone without a physics degree of one stripe or another, but in broad terms the discovery not only vindicates the ‘Standard Model’ (which describes the theorised relationships between fundamental particles), but narrows down the field for further research into supersymmetry. In other words, they’ve found exactly what they were hoping to find.

There are some jobs where computer use isn’t practical – namely the ones where you have to be on foot a lot, or where there are too many risks to fragile gadgets. Warehouse workers and builders may soon be getting their fix of mobile technology, however, if more ‘ruggedized’ portable devices like the latest from Symbol Technologies make it to market. Give it a few years more, and maybe they’ll be using them to control and command a fleet of robotic machines and plant hardware.

Clay Shirky takes apart Larry Sanger’s Citizendium (like Wikipedia, only the kids have to answer to the parents) with typically insightful and incisive analysis. Particularly cogent but easily overlooked — expertise is a social phenomenon, and cannot simply be assumed.

There are a plethora of ideas for interstellar propulsion units around, some of which are pretty bizarre or extreme. That’s hardly a recent phenomena, however – Centauri Dreams takes a retrospective look at Project Orion, the brainchild of (among others) Freeman Dyson, which was based around the concept of a generation ark mounted on a huge copper plate that would drop nuclear bombs behind itself every thousand seconds to provide the propulsive force.

Sometimes the oldest of scientific tools can still produce data that turn the cutting edge of theory on its head. The venerable Voyager probes are just that sort of tool. These aging probes are still functioning well and sending back valuable results from the heliosheath, the poorly understood outer regions of the solar system. Those results are sending the theorists back to the drawing board – the heliosheath’s role as our first line of defense against galactic cosmic rays is far more complex than they imagined.