conceptCONCEPT OF THE WEEK
The effects of diffraction can be readily seen in everyday life. The most colorful examples of diffraction are those involving light; for example, the closely spaced tracks on a CD or DVD act as a diffraction grating to form the familiar rainbow pattern we see when looking at a disk. This principle can be extended to engineer a grating with a structure such that it will produce any diffraction pattern desired; the hologram on a credit card is an example. Diffraction in the atmosphere by small particles can cause a bright ring to be visible around a bright light source like the sun or the moon. A shadow of a solid object, using light from a compact source, shows small fringes near its edges. All these effects are a consequence of the fact that light is a wave.
userUSER OF THE DAY

Profile kret..
Well, let's see.. ;) I'm 24 years old student from Poland, and at the moment I'm in the middle of my degree work, so I'm kinda busy working my ass out...
newsNEWS

July 22, 2008 New CAMB, work generation, increased credit, and old WUs.
The new CAMB is now up and work generation has commenced; in addition, credit for the new WUs has been increased, since lensing is now re-enabled.

Although we let the old WUs drain as much as possible, there may yet still be some in the queue, which may cause some problems with the new CAMB. TTherefore, if you get work that is dated before the 22nd, you may want to play it safe and abort the WU.

July 22, 2008 New CAMB version and work generation later on today
We are nearly done with the new CAMB app with lensing, so it should be up later on today along with the new parameter generator.

July 14, 2008 WU validation and fixed CAMB application
The number of WUs awaiting validation is now under 2000, so we should be back in business soon. We've also fixed the lensing problem with CAMB, so we'll be releasing a new app version soon. Before that, however, we have to let the work queue drain a bit, so we'll be keeping the WU generator offline until the queue goes back to normal.

July 12, 2008 Server back up after thunderstorms
The server is back up after being shut down during some thunderstorms in Champaign-Urbana this afternoon.

July 10, 2008 Letting the validator catch up
We're going to shut down the scheduler for a couple of hours so that the validator can deal with the significant increase in traffic.

...more

News is available as an RSS feed XML.

http://www.cosmologyathome.org/cosmohome_cgi/cgi