Wednesday, July 14, 2010

God particle may have been found

Illustration of the God particle, Higgs boson (dailygalaxy.com)

(TOI) Has the Holy Grail of physics finally been found? The internet is abuzz with rumors that the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, US, has found the Higgs boson — nicknamed the "God particle" — after Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy wrote in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Illinois laboratory that the Higgs has been discovered.

The Higgs boson, believed to give all other particles in the universe their mass, is called the "God particle," because scientists believe finding it — or even proving that it exists — can help explain how the universe came into being.

In ‘‘Rumors about a light Higgs,’’ a post on Science20.com, Dorigo says: ‘‘It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.’’ More>>
  • US scientists create cloth that can listen
    (AFP) This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a cloth that can hear and emit noise. The team, led by MIT professor Yoel Fink, has reached "a new milestone on the path to functional fibers..." MIT said in a statement.
  • The "Science of Resilience"
    (NYT) Is the loss of language and culture connected to the extinction of plant and animal species in a globalized “epidemic of sameness”? Welcome to the “science of resilience” — an interdisciplinary study of the value of diversity in complex systems. In Seed magazine, Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin report on a growing effort to study the feedback loops of “linguistic, cultural, and biological extinction.”

Asteroid pictures: Battered world found in Lutetia
National Geographic) Asteroid 21 Lutetia is exposed, craters and all, in a picture captured Saturday by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta's close encounter with Lutetia revealed a battered world—a possible remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say. To snap the above image, Rosetta swooped about 1,965 miles (3,162 kilometers) above Lutetia's surface. The image is the highest-resolution photo taken of the space rock, located more than 270 million miles (440 million kilometers) away from Earth, between Mars and Jupiter. (Watch a video of Rosetta's flyby.) More>>

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