Much awaited, the results of searches for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider have been released by the ATLAS collaboration, and are being shown at the Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbay, India. I will provide here just the main results, with little commentary - I wish to let the cake cool down a bit before discussing the subject in detail, examining the various inputs.

'Forgiveness is not something you do for others, nor does forgiving mean the offending behaviour is acceptable. It is something you do for yourself! By forgiving, you choose not to carry the burden of hate'

Paul Bretherton

 

Other Suns, Other Colors

    It seems to be a law of universal application that if a task is boring and low paid, it should be given to a woman.  Many of the women given such tasks in the past performed them with such skill and dedication that their work has become part of the strong foundations of modern science.  It seems to me to be a matter of great shame that many people today do not know the names of these women.

In my latest instantiation of the "Guess the plot" series I offered a clipped part of a graph showing branching fractions of the Higgs boson. One of the readers made a comment which I was proud to read, since it showed that interested readers of this blog with no specialized education in particle physics can get to know quite a lot about the matter. I answered there more extensively than I do on average, and then I thought that the answer could be of some use to others to whom the thread had fallen out of the horizon. So I am recycling it here.

Warning: Snark Attack Ahead

The fossils of 3.4-billion-year-old microbes that used sulfur compounds for energy have been found in rocks from Western Australia, reports a paper published in Nature Geoscience. 

David Wacey, Martin Brasier and colleagues analyzed microstructures present in rocks from the Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia, and determined that they were the fossils of ancient microbes. The fossils were associated with tiny crystals of pyrite, a mineral composed of iron and sulfur. The isotopic composition of the sulfur suggests that the pyrite was formed as a by-product of cellular metabolism based on sulphate and sulfur.

At Science 2.0 we are not big fans of being clever just for the sake of being clever - we were smart kids and there are smart kids today and the belief by government funding agencies that STEM outreach needs to be cartoons and video games and mascots is a little patronizing to intelligent young people.

So young people do not need to be talked down to but some things are just cool and everyone likes cool - magic goggles and interactive maps are just that.

Gaetano Ling, an Imperial College London postgraduate, has developed interactive tools to make museums and galleries a little less 'dry' for children, including magic goggles, a Harry Potter style map and brushes that make sounds.

A new study, published in Science, analyzed regulatory elements in the vertebrate genome and found three waves of evolutionary innovation in the evolution of vertebrates. Many important evolutionary changes have their roots in changes in regulatory elements, not necessarily in the occurrence of new protein-coding genes. So, it’s not the change in genes, but rather the change in gene regulation that spurred many events in vertebrate evolution.

Like it or not, the Tevatron is going to shut down for good next month. This machine has provided us with tremendous new investigation power in the high-energy frontier of particle physics, and has led the research of hadronic collisions for over two decades. But all good things come to an end.

Use your browser's back button and stop reading when you can't handle speculations out of a hammock.

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Ok, I have warned you. Brace yourself. I am going to argue against what many believe to be the most fundamental law of physics. A sacrosanct law. A law that you experience everyday and that is so obviously true that no one should meddle with it. You all know this law. It's the law referred to as 'the second'. The second law of thermodynamics.