9 ms·
IceCube observes seven potential tau neutrinos
- jprd 3y agoEvery. Time. Every single time this science hits headlines I have at least (5) seconds of trying to understand how O'Shea Jackson suddenly had a scientific addendum to neutrinos and if that is as-cool or cooler than "No Vaseline".
- anonym29 3y ago[flagged]
- morgango 3y agoWell, there ain't no tellin' when he's down for a jack move ...
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- lagrange77 3y agoRight, i was also like "well, that's even more impressive, than the truck driver becoming a coder at 38 from a few days ago.".
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- aidenn0 3y agoStraight outta Amundsen-Scott / Crazy observatory named Ice Cube / From the gang called "physicists with attitude" / when I'm called on / I find a lepton / they emit Cherenkov radiation
- microtherion 3y agoFinding seven potential tau neutrinos must have been a good day for him.
- racl101 3y agoSeven or eleven?
- racl101 3y agoOne Neutrino Under a Groove.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoYou are not alone. I was like tf is dude doing hanging around physics labs???
- ackbar03 3y agoNWA come a long way
- dredmorbius 3y agoNeutrinos with attitude.
- huytersd 3y agoDo you think the people that named this program knew about the rapper?
- ericcholis 3y agoI got more than a little excited that somehow O'Shea Jackson picked up an interesting hobby.
- exmadscientist 3y agoProbably! There were lots of us grad students on Francis's floor! But I don't think he cared very much about that sort of thing. (Maybe more than he cared about being on my committee, though? OK, low bar.) I really do think it's named that because it looks like a cube and it's made in the ice. So, y'know, icecube.
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- ambicapter 3y agoI mean, ice cubes are also a real thing that existed before the rapper.
- huytersd 3y agoYeah but the question was about how familiar the people involved might be with the rapper. I would imagine any 30+ American or European (probably) would.
- ars 3y agoNot me. I was very confused by some of the messages here until I saw your comment. I take it he's a well known? I've never heard of him.
- huntertwo 3y agoVery well known in the states - take a look at his wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cube
- m3kw9 3y ago[flagged]
- anonym29 3y ago[flagged]
- anonym29 3y ago[flagged]
- wanderingstan 3y agoThe IceCube observatory is incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory Incredible to image a square kilometer of pure ice transformed into a sensor to detect rare subatomic particles!
- packetlost 3y agoI worked with a former SW technical coordinator who came right from IceCube. The software that runs their analysis and stuff like that is insane. Many, many terabytes of data to crunch. It's very cool stuff
- peteradio 3y ago[flagged]
- fch42 3y agoI did an internship with the Amanda (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) project - IceCubes "Pathfinder" - in the mid-1990s, and found it one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. There are over 30 years of work from hundreds of people in this project, and to see how it has really made it from "madcap folly" to "a new lens to the universe" gives me the shivers. Hat's off to them.
- packetlost 3y agoIt's a truly impressive project. Glad to hear your experience there was also a good one.
- SamBam 3y agoThat's the kind of thing where I can't even imagine how the project conceivers and directors can even have the creativity and chutzpah to envision a $300 million dollar lab made by boring dozens of tubes 2 kilometers into the south pole to create a giant cubic kilometer of sensors. Obviously I'm glad such people exist.
- Ringz 3y ago[flagged]
- karaterobot 3y agoI was thinking about how it was good he observed potential tau neutrinos and not some motherf*ckers in a blue uniform, otherwise this could have gone different. He could have swarmed!
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- charlie0 3y agoI've been watching too much Rick and Morty. I thought this was related to Water-T and the show at first glance.
- hn_version_0023 3y agoSeems like it might be time to _crunch the numbers_
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- duffyjp 3y agoI went to UW Madison and now work there and know someone who did a rotation at IceCube (doing tech support). It would be a really neat life experience but Wisconsin is already too cold for my taste. What they do it totally out of my field, but I love hearing about it. It's a big source of pride in the university.
- wddkcs 3y agoYou didn't eat enough cheese, it wards off the cold in sufficient quantities.
- concomitant 3y agoClearly, it was a good day
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- nimbius 3y agoyou could say today was a good day...
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- timmattison 3y agoI was hoping to hear he went from rapper to physicist. Guess not.
- simple10 3y agoI immediately went to ChatGPT to generate an image of a rapper observing neutrinos. Sigh.
- monktastic1 3y agoOne who can observe Tau neutrinos, no less.
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- deadbabe 3y agoThere’s a lot of other rappers that have made the move from rap into tech. Chamillionaire went from writing Ridin’ Dirty to investing in Lyft. Even wears glasses now.
- dools 3y agoCompletely OT but if anyone wants a good laugh at Ice Cube’s expense check out this bit by Kumail Nanjiani: https://youtu.be/5HDgULSW1T8?si=jY6mSLB6jwHMEFT0 https://youtu.be/5HDgULSW1T8?si=jY6mSLB6jwHMEFT0
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- khazhoux 3y agoDidn't even have to use the Antarctic Kymograph! I gotta say...
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- ceva 3y agohttps://youtube.com/shorts/r58aahFdSpM?si=3Bc14VJ7xj_Xre-G https://youtube.com/shorts/r58aahFdSpM?si=3Bc14VJ7xj_Xre-G No idea if this is true but…
- p1dda 3y agoWe're through the looking glass so there's a relatively high probability it's true
- Palm7 3y agoMy first thought was that this person is a grifter, but then I remembered Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y agoNow that plate tectonics has been debunked, how else do you explain earthquakes if not the IceCube causing them?
- defrost 3y agoTikTik coordinating K-Pop army scale Gangnam Style like dance parties. Sounds innocent, but it creates a focused directed energy wave from a source array much larger than a measy square kilometer.
- maxlin 3y agoSo a volumetric camera of sorts utilizing existing clear ice as a transparent rig and a datacenter on the south pole. Probably deserves more recognition than the rapper it they stole the name from lol
- joshvm 3y agoThe most impressive part to me (having wintered for IceCube) is how well organised the stack is, and how reliable the in-ice hardware is. The systems folks have had a decade to iron out most of the bugs and there are fairly tightly scoped teams that work on different components. The failure rate of the DOMs is extremely low for something that's deep in the ice and impossible to physically access. They were very well built and designed, but it helps having people on call 24/7. All the telescopes here have some sort of data center. Icecube happens to have a lot more computers because of the sheer number of detectors, and a desire to filter data so that preliminary/candidate detections can be sent North as soon as possible. Though unlike the other installations, IceCube is far more sensitive to downtime. The Event Horizon Telescope setup at SPT probably takes the crown for superlatives in terms of data rate, clock accuracy, etc.
- staunton 3y agoUsing neutral networks to pre-filter data, especially networks trained on stimulations, should be seen as somewhat suspect as it potentially introduces bias into the analysis that is very hard to quantity, let alone control. Unfortunately, the current hype around neural networks incentivizes scientists to use them even in situations where there is no need. (maybe in this case there's no other way, I'm not sure...)
- yccs27 3y agoNeural networks for data selection in particle physics have been used since before the current AI hype cycle took off. This means there are already some established guidelines on how to mitigate and conservatively estimate pontential biases. I certainly hope the IceCube researchers have followed them.
- dguest 3y agoI promise you, in particle physics it is seen as somewhat suspect. But a very careful analysis with machine learning costs a couple PhD-years: it would be even more suspect to forgo an improvement on a 400m dollar experiment. As you say, it's easy for a neural network to pick up on simulation artifacts, rather than real physical features. The appendix of the original paper [1] explains how they quantify the failure modes of this approach. One kind of cool approach was training an adversarial network to corrupt simulated backgrounds to make them signal-like. The details are sparse, but it sounds like fooling the classifier required a level of corruption that would have been noticeable when comparing the simulation to data. Can you do this wrong? Sure, but you can also go wrong with the feature engineering that particle physicists have used in cases where they don't trust machine learning. You won't really know if the methodology is sound unless you: - read the paper - follow some references (the paper is a short-form "Physical Review Letter", which means it's impossible to give any meaningful review using the text itself) - hopefully find some more detailed description of what they did The last point is often the difficult for particle physics collaborations, they are generally a bit protective of their data and internal working. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02516 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02516
- jordanpg 3y agoOur ability to extract such a small signal from noise that is so large we don't even have words for it is truly extraordinary. It strains credulity to the absolute maximum -- and yet these results are repeated, again and again, all over the world by different groups, using different equipment, based on different detection principles, using different methods.
- southpolesteve 3y agoI worked on this project in college and went to the South Pole in 2009. Happy to see it is still making discoveries!
- dguest 3y agolink to the original paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02516 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02516