Story 2015-07-14

Large Hadron Collider discovers new pentaquark particle

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in science on (#E9EX)
story imageAfter restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they've found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks, a particle composed of four quarks and an antiquark.
From BBC:
It was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but, much like the Higgs boson particle before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHCb experiment. The findings have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.
The LHCb experiment is an experiment set up to understand what allowed matter to survive (as opposed to antimatter) by studying the properties of quarks.

Godaddy shuts down Ukrainian NGO domain at Russia's request

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in internet on (#E7SH)
story imageA Ukrainian nonprofit organization, started in 2012 as a watchdog for human rights and democratic development in Ukraine, had its website temporarily taken offline by a subsidiary of the U.S.-based registrar company GoDaddy.com at the behest of the Russian government.

The Maidan Monitoring Information Center announced today that one of its domain names-maidanua.org-had been blocked indefinitely by Wild West Domains, LLC, the GoDaddy subsidiary, following a formal request by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecom regulator and censor. "They refuse to reply to our requests," says Nataliya Zubar, board chair. However, following numerous requests by The Daily Beast to GoDaddy for comment, the URL appears to have been reactivated.

"We registered it with a U.S.-based registrar as an alias because we were afraid of censorship attempts from Ukrainian authorities at the time. The threat of censorship in Ukraine has dissipated after the political breakthrough of March 2014, but now, ironically, we are being censored by a U.S.-based company."