Content about ATLAS

With the year almost over we look back at the debates, controversies, and achievements in the world of science and computing. Read our countdown of iSGTW’s most popular stories of 2012. 

The Higgs boson-like particle has been turned into music. Not only is this a way to bridge the gap between science and the public, but it could enable researchers to hear their work in a new light.

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have identified a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson. Confidence levels are as high as 5.0 sigma. This means the probability of the background alone fluctuating up by this amount or more is about one in three million. The director general of CERN, Rolf Heuer, said this global success was only made possible because of the experiments, infrastructure, and grid computing.

For the last 40 years, the way that large-scale services, such as global banks, and scientific experiments, such as the LHC at CERN, have been managing their data has been reminiscent of Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:there's only one tried-and-tested path, a 'yellow brick road', and it's relational databases. But over the last couple of years, some new, non-relational database models have emerged and may represent the next step in the evolution of data management.