Re: Are *you* real, Katyanna?
I'm real, and I've been working at El Reg for over three years :')
Posts by Katyanna Quach
4 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2017
Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none
What are we more likely to see? A smooth Windows 10 May release... or a xenon-124 decay? Oh dear, bad news, IT folks
Friday 26th April 2019 19:48 GMT
Re: Interesting story, but...
Yes - a xenon-124 atom does decay every couple of days or so. But it's not trivial to detect.
I was told that the detector can measure radiation events once every second. There are 112,320 seconds in ~1.3 days, so Xenon-1T has to detect that 1 xenon-124 decay event from all the 112,320 events every 1.3 days.
The detector has to be very sensitive and the researchers need to work out what background events to abandon to find that elusive xenon-124 decay. The Xenon experiment has been upgraded multiple times to make it more sensitive since it was first installed in 2006, so that explains why it's taken them so long to finally detect the decay.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
