Interesting case from #CERN where #Russia team leaving the project sabotaged continued operations of the module they delivered by refusing to supply documentation on its operations, thus threatening continuity of the project:

When CERN definitively ended its cooperation with Russia, engineers were left with Russian equipment for which complete documentation was lacking. Shutting down the equipment threatened to paralyse the key ALICE experiment. That’s when the Poles stepped in, figured out how the Russian equipment worked, reverse engineered it, and not only saved the project, but became key players in the Large Hadron Collider. Krystian Rosłon from the Warsaw University of Technology revealed the details of this incredible operation to the PAP Nauka news agency.

Source: https://spidersweb.pl/2026/02/rosjanie-cern-odejscie-polacy-zlamali.html (in Polish)

Released #LHAPDF 6.5.6 today -- https://gitlab.com/hepcedar/lhapdf/-/releases/lhapdf-6.5.6

Since a colleague had a Claude Code sub, we asked them out of curiosity to get it to run a code review. This was actually pretty useful, and an indication of where #AI tools can help with stuff humans hate to do -- but using its solutions to help us think, _definitely_ not using its proposed solutions which would have definitely damaged quality and hidden (minor) issues.

...

Cool. An observation on iNaturalist lead to the rediscovery of this plant.

"We report the rediscovery of Ptilotus senarius A.R.Bean (Amaranthaceae) in northern Queensland, Australia, through the citizen science platform iNaturalist, 58 years after the last collection, and present photographs of the species. We discuss the strengths of iNaturalist that assist rediscoveries of extinct and long-lost plant species"

https://connectsci.au/bt/article/74/1/BT25063/268212/Rediscovery-of-a-presumed-extinct-plant-species

#iNaturalist #Species #Plants #Observations

Parallelism is one source of speed, but not the only one! In this article I demonstrate using it with NumPy, and how additional speedups are possible in other ways.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/numpy-parallelism/

#python

We unit test code's correctness—so why not unit test performance as well?

Having thought about the problem a little, here's my suggestion for a first step: testing big-O scalability.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/big-o-tests/

#python