dphidt

Ten total presidential aircraft and four you can walk through at the Dayton USAF museum [1]! You can walk through SAM 26000, the VC-137C used by 8 presidents including Kennedy. Amazing collection.

[1] https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Pres...

Just to add for reference, the strongest bounds (for any NLDBD candidate isotope) are from KamLAND-Zen using Xenon-136, also last year: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13....

If there's a prior in the community, my impression (as a neutrino physicist) is that if anything it's more toward Majorana than not, in the absence of evidence either way. It is surely nicer from a theory perspective, with a (seesaw) mechanism to help explain the very light neutrino masses, and lepton number violation that helps in the case for leptogenesis as an explanation for the universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, etc. One way I think about it is that it's pretty interesting either way: Majorana demands physics beyond the Standard Model, while Dirac would seem to suggest that lepton number is more than an accidental symmetry of the Standard Model, implying some unknown quantum number. Meanwhile, many experimental searches for neutrinoless double beta decay go on, with many new/clever ideas to carve through the quite large allowed parameter space.

I am curious why the door plug is not a plug door — that is, a design wherein the desired panel would be installed from the inside and sealed by the differential pressure, like a cabin door. This part looks more similar to cargo door; those usually have to open outward for space, but what is the design constraint for this case?

+1 for GeoWorks which ran a lovely suite of bundled programs amazingly well on a 286, and was preinstalled alongside MS-DOS on some systems in the early 90s. Despite being a quality product, apparently development was a major pain (expensive documentation and bad workflow), while Windows rode a wave of third party software to market domination. An interesting footnote to the Windows story of the era, and a cautionary tale perhaps. But FWIW I still run Ensemble in a VM :).

Another perspective on this is that departments will have a long term hiring strategy that balances breadth of the overall research program against depth in a particular subdiscipline, with the goal of building a coherent ecosystem with good opportunities for faculty and students. That may be a factor beyond a candidate's control, but not necessarily just anticompetitive behavior in the hiring process.

Even better, the actual in situ delays are measured and compensated for, and it works independent of the physical connection (and through fiber/copper, switch layers, etc.).

It's also assumed that "i" is an integer, a contextually plausible but potentially bad assumption. By one interpretation of the prompt, foobar(9) should print "yam" but foobar(9.5) still "baloney", for example.

It's not quite so bad, with many experiments looking at solar or atmospheric neutrinos seeing hundreds to thousands of neutrino events per year. Experiments at particle accelerator-based neutrino beams can see much larger event rates despite the small cross section, and as one example, the upcoming SBND experiment (https://sbn-nd.fnal.gov/) will see 7 million neutrino interactions in about three years.

They are primarily coming from neutron capture (electron + proton -> electron neutrino + neutron). During much of the collapse even these weakly-interacting neutrinos get trapped behind the high-density shock wave. As it expands and the density becomes lower, they escape in what's known as the neutronization burst.

I am a physicist working as a physicist! My field of experimental particle physics, at least, is very hacker-ey: we develop instrumentation hardware, low-level data acquisition software, database and web apps for experiment operations and monitoring, and the like, beyond the data analysis. Of course, there are many industry opportunities for people with this kind of experience. In addition to the issues pointed out in other comments (small number of academic positions, salary differences), I think there are two cultural factors that are helping people transition out of academia: an increasing awareness on the part of advisors and institutions that students need more broadly marketable experience, and a corresponding decrease in the stigma of leaving academia. As one example, I routinely see notices distributed for Insight data science programs within our community.

It's really interesting work! Just a year or so ago, the features in the energy spectrum appeared to be independent of burn-up, so it's exciting to see higher precision data coming in. No matter what, we'll get a much better model for reactor antineutrino spectra.

It's about a year old, but I like this talk from Patrick Huber (one of the developers of the new reactor models), in particular his "Score Card" for the various evidence on slide 25: https://absuploads.aps.org/presentation.cfm?pid=13003. I keep this in mind as I am updating my personal priors :).

The other comments are spot-on. I'll just add that the neutrinos flavors are defined by the way they interact: electron neutrinos interact to produce electrons, never muons. So they're quite different in that sense, and in the current Standard Model of particle physics, they're treated as independent particles. (This is not to say that in the future, we won't require a more comprehensive model that could relate particles in a deeper way.)

We know from experiments like LEP (electron-positron collisions) that there are only three kinds of neutrinos that participate in weak interactions (electron, muon, and tau). Thus the fourth neutrino type suggested by these anomalous oscillation measurements cannot interact via the weak force, meaning it doesn't interact at all,* hence sterile. The only way to detect them is through their influence on the oscillations of other neutrino types.

* They'd still feel gravity, which isn't included in the Standard Model anyway.

Hi, neutrino physicist here. There are indeed a handful of results that point to a more-or-less consistent picture with sterile neutrinos, including MiniBooNE (now updated with 2x more data), LSND, antineutrinos from nuclear reactors, and calibrations of solar neutrino experiments (GALLEX/GNO and SAGE). All very different experiments with different uncertainties, which makes it hard to explain away. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of other experiments that should see this effect but don't (IceCube and MINOS, KARMEN, NOMAD, CDHS, CCFR, ...). With all this tension, most of the possible parameters for sterile neutrinos are ruled out, but there is still a little room. Next-generation experiments will go after the parameter space that remains, and definitively confirm/reject the sterile neutrino hypothesis at high confidence. See e.g. the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, which puts a set of three detectors in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE: https://sbn.fnal.gov/.

I'd be curious to know whether there was any context given with Nathalie's exoneration. For example, "it was invented by her jealous peer" rather than just "it wasn't true." Might the revelation of deception induce extra skepticism, inhibiting someone from believing the truth? Could a model explaining fake news could help people to better integrate the truth?