This is the second post of a series of blogs that I am writing this morning, July 4th, to describe the ongoing happenings at CERN, where at 9AM the Higgs boson Observation will be announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Please reload this page at 10 minute intervals if you want to hear the latest news, or see the previous entries.

Entry 1 - Where's the queue ?

5.30 AM. Getting in at CERN through the B entrance I see no living soul. "Ha" -I tell myself- "I have been worrying too much".

5.36 AM. But the people is all here since last night ! There is a huge queue of 180 people already, extending from the doors of the Main Auditorium all the way up the aisle and back down on the other side. Most of the higgs enthusiasts have camped since last night here, and there is even a couple of guys with wide shoulders (but a polite smile) that direct newcomers to the end of the line.

Here are a couple of pictures of the queue as of now: the head of the queue close to the doors of the auditorium,

The so called “Free Thought Blogs” (FTB) has kicked out blogger Greg Laden and some other godless chap: “Thunderfoot”. Ed Brayton, the FTB high priest, writes that:

it was intended to be very “loosy-goosy,” where we would all make decisions together like a commune; it turns out that doesn’t work very well …

V1647 Ori resides 1300 light-years away in McNeil’s Nebula. It is a young Sun-like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super-hot plasma and astronomers have now been able to deduce what might be happening behind the dusty disc cloaking the star. 

Three telescopes, XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Suzaku, have kept their eyes on it during two multi-year outbursts. The first lasted from 2003 to 2006; the second has been under way since 2008.  During these extended outbursts the star displays faster growth in mass, a surge in X-ray emission and a dramatic increase in temperature to 50 million degrees celsius.

What causes obesity?  Obviously ingesting more calories than a person burns leads to weight gain but what really causes obesity?

Will banning Big Gulps, Happy Meals and Trans fats make people thin? (1)

While a modern 'ban, legislate and micromanage' mentality about food has taken hold on the coasts of the US, obesity researchers in the middle, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, contend handing over even more control of choice to social authoritarians won't work; we instead have to show people that just because you can eat a lot of junk food doesn't mean you should. And go for a walk once in a while.

By now it's been written on so many newspapers and magazines -including Nature (the magazine, not the bitch)- that if a colleague of mine tries to reproach me for writing about the impending seminar at CERN, where ATLAS and CMS are vented to be showing observation-level signals of a new particle which smells like the Higgs and quacks like the Higgs, I will publically send him or her to hell.

Besides, I have been cited as a "tease" in a nice summary which appeared in the Atlantic Wire site today. The line describing me (next to a picture that is N years old but which is dear to me for some reason) is the following:

If you use off-the-shelf electronics parts instead of expensive, hard-to-find space-rated gear, will your satellite work?  The process of 'derating' will let you do this.  Engineer Amanda Shields contributes today's guest column.

I'm becoming very familiar with derating and the joys of it.   Electrical components for spacecraft have to be derated. Basically, that means that you take the electrical component and you look at the data sheet for that piece and you have to say "Well, according to the datasheet it can have a maximum input power of XX, but NASA says that it has to be derated to 80% of that, so we can actually only have an input power of YY".

Older honey bees halt and even reverse the effects of brain aging when they are given roles typically handled by younger bees. This has led researchers to suggest that that social interventions may be as valuable as drugs for dealing with age-related dementia in humans.

Mundipharma today announced the positive European Commission (EC) decision for flutiform(R) (fluticasone propionate/formoterol fumarate), a new combination therapy for the maintenance treatment of asthma, in Europe. This decision is binding on all 21 Concerned Member States involved in the decentralized procedure (DCP) and the first national approvals of flutiform are expected across a number of countries by the end of 2012.