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KentuckyFC writes 'One of the many curious properties of Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. Now, a group of Israeli physicists have exploited this idea to create an acoustic black hole in a BEC. The team created a supersonic flow of atoms within the BEC, a flow that prevents any phonon caught in it from making headway. The region where the flow changes from subsonic to supersonic is an event horizon, because any phonon unlucky enough to stray into the supersonic region can never escape. The real prize is not the acoustic black hole itself but what it makes possible: the first observation of Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of phonons with opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in a BEC. Were one of the pair to stray across the event horizon into the supersonic region, it could never escape. However,

Jeff Moss, former hacker and founder of the DefCon and Black Hat security conferences, was sworn in on Friday to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, an expert group that advises the government on security issues. Moss worked at the Information System Security division of Earnst and Young early in his career but is more famously known by [...]

. Slump in social democratic vote boosts centre-right. Crisis, what crisis? says assembly socialist chiefThe morning after the night before, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was either defiant or in denial. The veteran Danish centre-leftist and former prime minister heads the PES, or Party of European Socialists, that groups all the mainstream social democratic movements of the EU.'To those who announce a profound crisis in European socialism', he declared yesterday, 'I say no.'To EU-watchers, political scientists, and pollsters, Rasmussen is inhabiting a ­parallel world. The heartlands of ­traditional fidelity to the centre-left - northern Britain, the cities of the Netherlands, the factory towns of western Germany - have just fallen to a variety of rivals: the far right, the Greens, the Christian democrats and the liberals.The wretched performances of such champions of mass political progress over the past century as the German Social Democratic party, the Dutch Labour party, and the British Lab

The US Supreme Court grants a request to delay the sale of carmaker Chrysler to a group led by Italian carmaker Fiat.

Victims of a deadly bombing in Northern Ireland by the breakaway terrorist group the Real IRA have won a landmark civil compensation case against.

WASHINGTON/DETROIT (Reuters) - The sale of bankrupt automaker Chrysler LLC to a group led by Italian carmaker Fiat SpA was temporarily blocked by a U.S. Supreme Court justice on Monday, with no indication how long the delay would last.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An advocacy group for online poker says the federal government has frozen the accounts of payment processors that handle the winnings of thousands of online poker players....

The European Parliament's centreright grouping has declared war on David Cameron and said a new Conservative government must not be allowed to derail the Lisbon Treaty.

This weekend, Democrats kicked off what promises to be a massive grass-roots campaign for their health-reform plans. They are organizing community meetings with the millions of e-mail addresses they got during last year's campaign. Republicans are also mobilizing, some with big-dollar ad campaigns like former hospital CEO Rick Scott.

Militant group Hezbollah accepts defeat as the pro-Western 14 March coalition is confirmed Lebanon's election winner.