How sure? Well, these are scientists so there’s still a note of caution, but Joe Incandela, a spokesman for one of the LHC experiments, went on-record with a pretty confident statement: “The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson.”

However, they’re still not sure what kind of Higgs boson they’re looking at. From today’s statement:

“Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they find that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding the answer to this question will take time.”

It’s not surprising that this task takes time. CERN said a month ago that its storage systems were holding 100 petabytes of data.

The research organization has been working closely with companies such as Yandex to sift through that information in search of unusual events, and in Thursday’s statement CERN pointed out that finding one event means looking through around a trillion proton-proton collisions.

“To characterize all of the decay modes will require much more data from the LHC,” the statement read. For now, the LHC is turned off – it will come back online next year.

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The technology in question is called MatrixNet. It’s a machine learning tool that helps Yandex rank search results for relevancy, but in this case CERN is testing it out alongside other proprietary Yandex data-processing technologies in order to pick rare but important events out of the masses of data produced in CERN’s experiments. Essentially, it is being used to more accurately establish statistical relevance, so that CERN can call something a ‘major discovery’ with more certainty.

The research facility is already using MatrixNet to sift through data on B-meson decay analysis (this is part of the quest for supersymmetry, which tests the boundaries of the Standard Model of physics), but now CERN will also see whether it can help across other aspects of its work.

To accomplish that, Yandex has been brought in as an associate member of CERN openlab, the mechanism CERN uses to collaborate with private-sector IT firms such as Oracle and HP. This is actually an expansion of Yandex’s work with the research facility, as it has already been supplying it with computing resources since 2011. The company also came up with a specialized search tool last year for the data emanating from one of the Large Hadron Collider experiments.

CERN openlab head Bob Jones said in a statement:

“Today’s physics deals with large datasets that need to be properly processed and interpreted. New discoveries are all but impossible without meticulous data analysis. To this respect we are very interested in using and testing the services and technologies Yandex is developing.”

This is sort of a sponsorship deal, giving Yandex added respectability, but it’s also win-win from a technological standpoint — after all, we’re talking about machine learning here. As Yandex’s Andrey Ustyuzhanin put it: “Being a CERN openlab associate member opens up new opportunities for contributing to the organization’s projects and gives us a wide access to the LHC experiment data. These datasets allow us both to improve our technologies and contribute to advances in physics.”

The Russian web giant previously had to supply CERN with specialists in order to work with MatrixNet, but it said in Monday’s statement that it is developing “a user-friendly service that will give physicists an opportunity to use Yandex’s machine learning technology on their own”. It’s not clear whether this is to do with the fact that MatrixNet is proprietary, but it is worth pointing out that Yandex’s willingness to even let outsiders near its secret search sauce sets it apart from chief rival Google.

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Gallium Nitride-on-diamond wafer technology

Can diamonds be a geek’s best friend? De Beers, the global diamond conglomerate, certainly thinks so. Element Six, a De Beers subsidiary focused on manufacturing synthetic diamonds, has opened a new venture capital office in Silicon Valley.

The fund aims to invest in technology companies of all sizes that use synthetic diamond, a mineral that’s chemically identical to natural diamonds but produced in a lab rather than by the traditional geologic process. Diamond is best known for its hardness, but its other properties, such as high thermal conductivity and high radiation resistance, make it useful in applications from semiconductor manufacturing equipment to clean tech.

Element Six Ventures Group has actually been active since 2006, but the decision to open an outpost in the San Francisco Bay Area is an important step for the firm, managing director Susie Wheeler said in an interview last week. “Part of our goal in being here in Silicon Valley is to go out and really proselytize diamonds to the technology companies based here,” she said.

Element Six Ventures has already invested “tens of millions” of dollars in its seven-company portfolio. One of Element Six’s notable investments is in Diamond Detectors, a U.K.-based firm that manufactures the synthetic-diamond-radiation detectors used on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Wheeler didn’t provide specific details on how much Element Six is looking to spend on investing in Silicon Valley companies; she said the firm’s deep-pocketed parent company De Beers hasn’t set distinct limits in place.

The new VC firm is only the beginning, Wheeler said. In the months ahead, Element Six is also planning to build a production site in Silicon Valley for the manufacturing of synthetic diamonds. But that doesn’t mean more glitz is on the way to add fuel to all that tech bubble talk going around; Element Six makes no gems, only diamond material for technological and industrial use.

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CERN Scientists monitoring the LHC

In the age-old quest for humankind to discover the secrets of the universe, humankind has progressed today as the Large Hadron Collider successfully smashed protons by zipping the subatomic particles around a 17-mile loop at speeds that were about 99 percent of the speed of light. The goal, nothing less than to figure out how the universe works and what holds it together. What does this have to do with broadband, cloud computing or wireless? Frankly, I have no idea, but I’m convinced that such efforts advance technology, and act to inspire future generations of engineers and scientists.

Indeed, while it may not be apparent from my normal coverage, the LHC built by CERN represents why I spend my days writing about technology — not because I’m excited to play with the latest gadgets, but because I value the spirit of curiosity and discovery that leads scientists to spend $16 billion to build something that may (not will, but may) give us an inkling about how the universe works. And if it enables us to teleport, that’s cool, too. So if you’re interested (and how can you not be?), step away from the iPad coverage and check out these links:

• Official CERN Announcement of Success
• Time Traveling Particles Out to Destroy the LHC
• The LHC Will Kill Us All
• A Photo Tour of the LHC
• CERN’s Twitter Page and its live webcast
• Comic from Jorge Cham explaining LHC
• Because I love it: The Large Hadron Rap
• The BBC’s guide to the LHC
• TED video on LHC (embedded below)


http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Although the picture below is from CERN, it’s much more akin to a boring office space than a scientific laboratory. However, look a little closer and you might notice something out of the ordinary. It seems that some of the research at CERN may be powered by Apple.

The scientists over at CERN are doing some serious research, using data from the Large Hadron Collider for something called the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment. While it’s not clear if this is an officially sanctioned MacBook, using Apple gear for scientific research is nothing new.

Drew McCormack is Chief Developer over at The Mental Faculty. Alongside creating apps for Mac and iPhone to aid learning, he’s also a board member of MacResearch.org, an independent community of scientists using Apple software and hardware for their research.

Drew took a moment to explain why Apple is on the rise in the scientific community, “There has been a trend over the last few years in US Universities for students to buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro. This has given Apple a leg up in higher education.”

Mac’s aren’t just for science students though, as Drew explains, “The rise in student uptake of Macs is gradually leading to more and more interest in Macs as scientific workstations. A Mac can be used to answer email, surf the web, and write scientific articles, but it can equally run high-performance calculations. This is due to the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, and more recently to Apple’s emphasis on performance in Snow Leopard. Technologies like OpenCL and Grand Central are very attractive to scientists who need to crunch numbers.”

Over the coming years, perhaps we’ll see a few scientific breakthroughs made possible by Apple devices, that is if the LHC doesn’t trigger the end of the universe and ultimate destruction of humankind first.

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