The University of Minnesota is launching an peer-reviewed open textbook catalog. It contains basic courses for math and physics many originating from the Rice University Openbooks initiative, but one also finds rare gems like the Introduction to Physical Oceanography, which makes for an excellent weekend read involving all the physics of our oceans. Plus it is available in pdf for any screen reader without costs.

After even Havards library wants to leave costy bundled subscriptions, the Royal society maximizes access and the very successful campaign of the cost of knownledge, where > 11.000 scientists signed to no longer work with Elsevier, due to it's excessive marketing policies one ought to be very curious about the push for open research by the UK governement happening under the advise of the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Decisions concerning the upcoming CERN LHC plans are traditionally announced at the annual Winter LHC Chamonix Workshops. There is already quite some coverage by the CERN bulletin: day 1 with the 2011 LHC critical review, day 2 focussed on 2012 LHC possibilities, day 3 evolved to LHC shutdown plans, day 4 went on to the LHC powering up again, day 5 is centered on hi-lumi LHC future. The 2012 4 TeV beam energy with the goal of 15 inverse femtobarn of data got announced as well as the November p-Pb and Pb-p run on the second day.

The interesting slides are directly available from the conference site: Chamonix 2012 Timetable.

The espresso machines at CERN indicate the time it takes to make the café in tenth of a second showing off swiss precision and funny language mix:

The resulting short café - chosen Ristretto - is tasty:

After lunch there is a quite long queue behind the one filled with braselian aribica:

Impressive winning Famelab talk on the importance of nothing:

The Alice experiment completes during shutdown the electromagnetic calorimeter on the outer arc: Alice researcher Peter Jacobs explains the installation on youtube.

CERN: EMCal supermodule is guided into ALICE.

You might also be interested in the Alice 2011-2012 shutdown summary report detailing the various ongoing work.

After last year decision that the Royal society opens journal archive. It has now been decided: Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access.

Professor Uta Frith FRS, Chair of the Royal Society library committee, said: 'I'm delighted that the Royal Society is continuing to increase access to its wonderful resources by opening up its publishing archives.'

Gravitational detection of a low-mass dark satellite galaxy at cosmological distance shows observations from the Keck telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope:

A dark-matter-dominated satellite galaxy in the gravitational lens system

Also the biggest scale map of dark matter has been realised by CFHTLens showing a network of gigantic dense and empty dark matter regions.

Anton Rebhan and Dominik Steineder found a way to violate the holographic viscocity bound in a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma: Out of bounds publication - "Is there a limit on how viscous fluids can be?"

Transverse and longitudinal shear viscosities over s=4 as a function of the anisotropy parameter a=T.

Remember the ground breaking work Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics stating the universal value of 1/(4pi).

The first observation of chi_b quarkonium state composed by bottom and anti-bottom has been published by Atlas shortly before Christmas. The observed mass peak is indeed narrow:

    m_3 = 10.539 ± 0.004 (stat.) ± 0.008 (syst.) GeV.

In the meantime exotic quarks - non-standard hadrons, containing at least four quarks - have been observed at Belle. These new particles, termed Z_b, contain both one bottom and one anti-bottom quark.