Content about physics and astronomy

CERN and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics last week inaugurated the Hungarian data center in Budapest, marking the completion of the facility hosting the extension for CERN computing resources. About 500 servers, 20,000 computing cores, and 5.5 petabytes of storage are already operational at the site. The capacity at Wigner will be remotely managed from CERN, substantially extending the capabilities of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Tier-0 activities.

One of the highlights of the recent TedxCERN conference was a talk given by Ian Foster, widely known as one of the founders of grid computing. He also spoke to an audience of CERN IT department staff about Globus Online and the challenges of big data.

Warp drives aren’t just the stuff of science fiction. Researchers inspired by Star Trek are currently working to make the dream of interstellar travel for human civilization a reality – one day. While the kinks are being worked out, distributed computing may help address the multi-dimensional issues of warp travel.

On February 15, 2013, as an asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over the Chelyabinsk region in the Russian Urals. Many amateur videos from the region captured the asteroid streaking across the sky and exploding in a bright light. Read about the science behind the atmospheric event and similar impacts on Jupiter.

The Planck’s space telescope's ability to measure tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background may lead scientists to rethink theories of how the universe began and how it is evolving. Learn more about the cosmic microwave background and the surprises it revealed.

Next week, iSGTW will be at the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds 2013 and the CRISP 2nd Annual meeting. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for regular updates from both events.

On Friday 1 February, 2013, CERN and Oracle celebrated 30 years of collaboration. In addition to providing hardware and software to CERN for three decades, Oracle has now been involved in the CERN openlab project for 10 years.

Using an ultraviolet telescope and imaging spectrograph, NASA's IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) spacecraft will set out on a two-year mission to answer how the sun's corona gets so hot.

Discover how rescuing data stored on tapes and magneto-optical disks abandoned under a staircase at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory led to finding the solution to one of our solar system's most perplexing puzzles.