You are correct. This isn't a discovery of a new fundamental particle.

The math that describes particles can also be used to describe various quasiparticles that arise in materials. For instance, one can rigorously define a "phonon" as a particle that carries vibrational energy in a solid material (the phonon is essentially a localized packet of atoms vibrating), or an "exciton" as an electronic excited state (an electron and the corresponding positively charged "hole" it leaves behind), or a "plasmon" as wave of electron excitations at the surface of a metal. All of these are interesting concepts, and defining them as particles is extremely useful. But they are not fundamental particles. They are collective excitations of known entities (electrons, atoms, etc.).

One can thus establish a mapping between the math of fundamental particle physics (the standard model), and the math/behavior in various electronic systems (like superconductors or other "strongly correlated electron" systems). This is useful because in principle if you prove something in one instance, then there is a good chance the analogous thing is true in the other system. So discoveries can go both ways.

The problem is with media reports that do not make these distinctions clear. What the current researchers did was identify an "axial Higgs mode" in a "charge density wave" (CDW) system. They basically discovered a particular kind of excitation of the electron configurations in that material. Very cool stuff. But to then make the leap and pretend that this means they've discovered a new fundamental particle is just bad reporting.

There isn't a single project plan for fusion (that I'm aware of), mostly because this is a challenging problem being attacked by a host of different organizations (some publicly funded, some commercial) across many different countries. However, there is communication and coordination among these efforts, and they do have concrete plans that are moving steadily towards viable fusion power.

For example, the US fusion community has produced several reports (2018, 2019, 2020). The US Department of Energy is one key player in this space (here are the reports for various sub-topics). A key aspect of the current fusion strategy is ITER, which has a set of concrete milestones.

If you glance through those reports, you will see they are more focused on fundamental science aspects, rather than the more practical milestones you mentioned. This is in part because these public reports are issued by organizations whose mission is to pursue fundamental research (and then pass those results onto industry for commercialization), and partly because there are indeed many fundamental science and engineering questions that need to be resolved.

The EUROfusion roadmap (2018) provides a plan for successive projects (ITER and beyond) in a transition to viable power plants.

The NIF press release is a bit better.

Fusion yield was 1.3 MJ per pulse/capsule. Laser energy delivered to the fusion capsule was 1.9 MJ, so the efficiency is 68% by that metric. However this omits the laser energy that didn't get correctly focused/absorbed by the capsule, as well as the energy lost in the lasers themselves (which are probably ~1% efficient). The press release doesn't list a gain factor, but based on other results NIF has reported, I believe this new result is roughly Q ~ 0.007. This is a huge achievement for NIF (who were sitting at Q ~ 0.00008 in 2013 and Q ~ 0.0003 in 2018). However Q = 1 is what's necessary to reach "scientific breakeven" where the fusion energy output equals the energy input for heating the plasma. Obviously a viable power plant needs to be Q > 1 to account for other losses (like the inefficiency of capture/conversion into electricity). Q > 5 ("ignition") is considered necessary to achieve a self-propagating fusion reaction.

By way of comparison, the current record for magnetic confinement fusion is Q = 0.67 achieved by JET in 1997.

Should we be excited? This is great progress, and every new experiment increases our understanding of the complicated physics of fusion plasmas. From a scientific and engineering perspective, this is amazing. However, if you're most interested in eventual fusion power, then magnetic confinement (tokamak designs) are well ahead, and ITER is much more likely than NIF to provide a pathway to fusion power plants.

The underlying point TFA is trying to make (though not necessarily making it well) is that there is one class of problems for which quantum computers are already better than classical computers: simulating the behavior of small quantum systems.

You are right that current QCs are still too small (and have too high an error rate) to implement any of the "quantum supremacy" algorithms that people dream about (like breaking cryptography). It will be a long time still before those are ready for realistic use. However, many scientists are actively studying quantum mechanics, and simulating such systems on conventional computers is extremely computationally expensive, owing to the complex non-classical correlations that underlie quantum effects (superposition, entanglement, etc.). There are rigorous theories/proofs showing how the effects go beyond the classical.

So the idea is to use a quantum computer to simulate a quantum system. You get all these "quantum correlations" for free. Of course you may consider this "cheating". It starts to sound less like quantum computing and more like doing a physical experiment that is highly analogous (rigorously analogous) to the experiment you are trying to understand. And you are limited to rather small systems. But, at least, this points to some interesting near-term goals for quantum computing folks to work on: how to make these systems better and better at simulating larger-and-larger quantum systems.

This opinion is reasonable on the face of it. Why indeed should innumerable low-wage employees subsidize basic science?

However when one digs into the details, one soon realizes that technological advancement, economic activity, high standard of living, and social progress do not appear in a vacuum. They occur when the local context supports them. In particular, putting funding into basic research is a way to generate a local ecosystem where one has access to highly-skilled people, where new ideas and technologies appear, where citizens are politically engaged, etc. It's more than just "workforce development" and "technology incubation" (though it does achieve those aims); it's about creating environments where progress thrives, which ultimately benefits all citizens. One can look at the diversity of countries that have attempted different approaches to confirm that the most desirable places to live are the countries with the most technological/economic progress, which are the ones that invested in themselves in these seemingly unnecessary ways (such as basic science).

Of course, finding the right amount of common funding to divert into things like education and basic science is not easy. And of course it depends on how strongly one values the kinds of progress that flow out from these investments. But there is a very good reason why it is in the interests of all taxpayers to subsidize a certain amount of basic science.

Actually, I would be entirely happy to pay $230/year for ad-free Internet; meaning that I would continue to have access to all the sites that I want, but those sites would be directly supported by my yearly subscription, and so they wouldn't need to display ads or be otherwise beholden to advertisers. I'm sure a great many people would be willing to do so.

The problem is that such a state of affairs is impossible. If people actually started paying for subscriptions, the ads would disappear only temporarily. Eventually companies would realize "Sure, they're paying subscription fees, but if I just put a little unobtrusive link to 'related products' in the sidebar, no on will complain. And, yeah, sure, I'll get a little extra money on the side for displaying links to specific (paying) partners..." Soon enough, the ads are back (in some form or other), and we're now paying for the content twice. (We've seen this happen many times before; e.g. subscription cable-TV was supposed to be ad-free. More recently I've noticed that digital downloads from iTunes or Google Play have ads for other shows added to the beginning.) Moreover, oftentimes 'ad-free' really just means the ads are less obvious but more insidious (product placement, 'trusted' reviewers being bribed to give positive reviews, etc.).

The simple fact is that we cannot ever trust companies to actually honor the social contract of subscription models. Since they cannot stick to the rules, the only option is for end-users endure the constant ads, since at least in this case we don't have to pay subscription costs.

You're of course correct. (As are the many other replies that amount to: "Just don't use the phone while driving, dummy!")

However, it's worth keeping in mind how the human mind works; in particular its limitations. Our minds and behaviours are inherently flawed. Part of being a smart and responsible person is not just modulating your behaviour, but also designing your life so as to elicit the right kinds of outcomes. A simple example is putting an item that you want to bring with you tomorrow by the door. You could "Just remember to grab it when you leave tomorrow morning!", but you're accounting for your own fallible memory by putting it by the door while you're thinking of it. Another example would be a person who puts a tempting snack on an inaccessible shelf: they buy the snack because they want to have a treat sometimes, but they purposefully make it slightly inconvenient for themselves to eat the snack, so that they don't just reflexively eat it all the time. It's part of a strategy to invoke more rational thinking, rather than just let your immediate impulses win.

There are many more examples of such behaviour. Obviously it's "better" to simply have infinite willpower and rationality; but for people who do not (and if we're being honest, this describes all of us; though our individual temptations and biases are different), it can be useful to design your life to account for your fallibility.

So, in principle a cellphone app that disables the phone while driving can be useful. It's for people who recognize that it's a really bad idea to use your phone while driving, and yet are so addicted to their phone that they cannot avoid answering it when it rings. (Or are so addicted to status updates that they will absentmindedly check when bored, even if they are driving!) These people may also not have the discipline (or memory) to (for instance) always put the phone in the trunk before getting behind the wheel. For those people, such an app can be useful.

Having said all that, I think it's unrealistic to expect an app to properly differentiate between the situations where you would want the phone disabled (while driving) and those where you don't (parked, passenger in a car, etc.). So I think the question-poster should instead investigate other ways to modulate their own behaviour (e.g. put a holder in the car, in a very visible location, that says "PHONE BATTERY GOES HERE", and always pull out the battery before turning on the car).

Same for the Toyota Prius: unless you press the brake, regenerative braking is not engaged. So with neither pedal depressed, the car is just coasting. In fact, because the Prius is so aerodynamic, it coasts 'faster' (by which I mean it slows down due to air friction more slowly) than most other cars, so you can coast for quite awhile before needing to touch the gas again. In fact, I've actually been in situations where I was over-taking other cars while coasting...

Indeed, the best talks will use both for what they are good at: a pre-arranged slidedeck for images and complex graphs that cannot be hand-drawn; and a chalkboard/whiteboard for developing an idea, skething a graph, deriving an equation, or discussing back-and-forth.

I will note that many conference rooms are poorly designed in this regard. They have the screen for the projector on a slow motor, and when the screen is down it entirely or subtantially covers the chalkboards/whiteboards. This makes it cumbersome to jump back and forth between them. If you want to encourage people to use both (and we should), then the screen should be offset and there should be a large whiteboard always unobstructured and available for the presenter to draw on. (Another pet peeve is that the whiteboard markers in the room will often be dry, or the chalk missing; which makes the whiteboard/chalkboard useless.)

SoylentNews is a new site (based on SlashCode, in fact) that is complementary to Slashdot in that it seems to be targetting sci/tech discussions.

Parenthetically, (geek alert) the controls on TOS Enterprise, with their distinctive shapes, seemed a LOT more practical to me for an environment with lots of tipping and juddering in combat, as opposed to the all-touch-screen controls in later generations, which required that you keep your hands in contact with the control surface in a potentially hostile environment and watch your hands manipulate virtual buttons and switches, when you should probably be looking at something else.

The "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual", on page 33, when describing the touch-panels, says: "Also incorporated into this layer is a transducer matrix that provides tactile and auditory feedback to the operator..." They don't elaborate on what this 'tactile feedback' might be like. At a minimum it would presumably indicate (e.g. via a vibration) that a button was pressed. Some fans have hypothesized that the panels perhaps incorporate miniature versions of the force-field technology used throughout the ship: so that even though the panel looks flat, you can actually 'feel' the buttons/layouts as you move your hands around; and of course this tactile response updates as the layout does. (This is supported by the fact that in Voyager, when Tuvok is blinded he is able to activate a "Tactile mode" on his workstation, implying that all panels have the ability to generate tactile feedback.) Thus, the TNG-era touchscreens could have had substantial amount of tactile control.

The reason I point this out is that the creators of a sci-fi show in 1991 could easily imagine that a flat-panel interface would benefit substantially from tactile feedback. The fact that modern vehicle UI designers can't understand this is thus rather ridiculous.

You are correct that using graphene or carbon nanotubes (which are close cousins) only for the wiring wouldn't gain you much; especially since large resistances can arise from the junctions between two conductors/materials.

People are certainly investigating how to turn graphene and nanotubes into transistors. There have been demonstrations of using an applied voltage to mechanically 'kink' a nanotube so that its resistance changes. Thus it can be used as a non-volatile memory element. (The kinking is reversible and fast.) Others have looked into ways to 'dope' graphene by controlling what material it is sitting on top of (which changes its electrical properties, similar to doping atoms into silicon). Things like this can be used to make transistors out of these carbon nanomaterials; and in principle to do it in a way where the conducting carbon network is unbroken.

Of course, the devil is in the details. We've seen demonstrations of many pieces of the puzzle, but turning it all into a technology (where you can build it all easily on a single substrate, in a scalable way, etc.) is still a ways off. But there is at least a chance these materials will pan out.

P.S.: Don't let this comment distract from the legitimate outcry against Slashdot Beta.

Yeah the Slashdot comment-box has some longstanding issues, like support for displaying source-code/html properly, or unicode support in general.

The devs should really consider coding an improvement to Slashdot that addresses these concerns. Some kind of 'Slashdot beta'. I'm sure it would turn out great...

What really scares me is the thought that the editors haven't really even noticed.

One of the things that has always surprised me (even bothered me a bit) about Slashdot is that the people running the site do not appear to actually use the site. The editors don't routinely participate in discussions. We occasionally see a comment from an editor, but they are certainly not among the top commenters. (Even CmdrTaco's comment history was surprisingly thin...) These are people who are paid to be involved with the site. I know they have other duties, and perhaps being an employee makes participating in the community less fun. But on the other hand, if your job is to manage an online community, I would expect to see more involvement.

I sometimes wonder whether the editors actually read through Slashdot comments at all, or whether they just queue up some stories and then work on something else.

I'm guessing that by now they've noticed the firestorm of hate, since it's being injected into the comments, firehose/story-submissions, polls, via email, etc. But even so, I feel that ultimately the disconnect between what the Slashdot community wants, and what the powers-that-be are planning to provide, is that the people running Slashdot are not Slashdot users (much less contributors). So they do not even realize why we hate the beta so much. To an outsider, one commenting system and another might seem pretty much the same. It might seem like we're complaining over minutia. But to someone who is trying to participate in the fast-paced and highly technical discussions that erupt on Slashdot, the commenting system is paramount. Ruin it, and you've killed the site.

I agree that the owners of Slashdot are free to take it in another direction if they want. Presumably what they desire is more money, and they believe the redesign is a way to increase ad revenue. So far so good.

In this case, however, I believe their strategy is not a good one. If you alienate the commenters, then they will leave, and all that will be left is a stream of story digests with links to other sites. The bulk of their readership (all those people who come to Slashdot but don't comment on stories) will go to other sites (there are plenty that do a better job of finding and organizing links to interesting stories). The only differentiator that Slashdot has is its vibrant and intellectual community, which leads to interesting discussions, which in turn justifies actually visiting the site. Once the commenters leave, your revenue stream (ad impressions) will go away.

The problem is, most slashdot contributors I don't think click on the ads. So frankly as a community, you're not that valuable.

There is some truth to this. Slashdot users are probably less likely to click on ads than the average person. We are probably more aware of advertising tactics, and may thus avoid being influenced (to the extent one can). Slashdot users are probably more likely than most people to use ad-blockers. On the other hand, Slashdot users occupy a huge number of key decision-making posts in all the major tech companies. Even 'lowly' employees can have a huge impact on what their employer spends money on. I would also note that an ad is not necessarily a failure if no one clicks on it. One of the main purposes of advertising is awareness and branding. If you see ads for a given company on Slashdot, you will subconsciously become aware of them, making it more likely that you will consider them when making your next purchase. No clicking required.

I fully admit that it is difficult to quantify the 'value added' of advertising to the unique Slashdot community. I would hope that Dice has made this case to their ad partners; I guess it wasn't enough?

And what's wrong with that? They have ongoing costs in terms of servers, IT support, and the moderators. Word is for the most part the Slashdot revenue stream has been shrinking for Dice, which means they'd be bleeding money.

Actually it's not clear to me that's the case. The things I've read indicate that revenue coming from Slashdot is decreasing with time. But this isn't the same thing as saying that Slashdot doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for operating Slashdot. From what I can gather, Slashdot is a net money-maker... it's just not making enough money, and the owners want to make more. (If someone has better info, please share!)