Every two weeks, I will group and give a brief comment about the news that I think are most relevant in science, so that you don't need to hunt for them or you won't feel ashamed the next time your geek friend will tell you "oh, have you heard...".
The past two weeks have been quite full of good exciting news and I've struggled to keep it short, but here we go:
Venus transit has happened: it was all over the news the past week, so it was difficult to miss, but on the 6-7th of June, the Sun, Venus and Earth were in conjunction, which means that the Sun was "eclipsed" by Venus. Since the eclipse would be tiny, we call that transit, but we can still see the shadow of Venus passing in front of the Sun, creating the opportunity for fantastic shots. Unfortunately, if you want to see it again, you would have to wait until 2117, so this was a one-chance in a lifetime event. The strange periodicity of the transit is given by a simple recipe: Venus year being about 3/5 of Earth year and the Venus ecliptic being 3.4° tilted to the Earth ecliptic.
A peculiar event related to the transit puts some light on the thick Venus atmosphere (literally). A few days before the transit astronomer Daniele Gasparri took a shot of Venus, showing something we are not used to see: instead of seen one side of Venus illuminated by the Sun (like crescent Moon) there is a ring surrounding Venus. This is caused by refracted light.
And if you want to know more about the history behind the event.
Speeding neutrinos are not speeding: you might remember the other big news from OPERA in Gran Sasso laboratory claiming the speed of neutrinos being faster than the speed of light according to measurements. This has shaken the scientific community, as Einstein's theory of relativity is solid and now scientifically accepted, because it explains many phenomena which are otherwise unexplained.
On the 8th of June, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to later measurements, the speed of neutrinos is almost the same as the speed of light (but not faster for sure). This is good news, even if kind of expected for two reasons: the precision of the experiment being ridiculously high for such speeds and Einstein's theory being rock solid. Case closed, now OPERA can focus on its real objective: finding tau neutrinos.
Higgs hunt is coming close to an end: CERN is accumulating enough luminosity to be close to the statistical significance of a discovery for the Higgs boson. After the announcement of the past December there was lots of excitement about a peak building up in both ATLAS and CMS detectors around the masses of 124-126 GeV. It was a blinded experiment, meaning that ATLAS and CMS did not share any data in order to eliminate bias on the measurements.
Data collected over this months will be analysed in the summer and a major scientific achievement could be made this year: the discovery (or not) of the Higgs boson. Both outcomes are exciting and provide more research in both directions.
Even if I have personally worked in a group at ATLAS about W and Z bosons, and consequently the Higgs, my hope is that the Higgs boson will not be found and the peak will disappear into the background with enough statistics. My reasons for that is that the Higgs mechanism is a contrived theory in many ways and the theory being true, I think, would be a miracle itself, as it was developed as desperate theoretical model to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons.
Still, any news on the topic will be really exciting and the discovery of the most hideous particle would surely be something to celebrate and many people say, a sure Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs.
Fusion research funding restored in the US: fusion research has been a dubious field for decades now. Since its advent, which predicted unlimited amount of energy, there has been only predictions of unlimited postponements. It is known, as a joke, that fusion has always been 20 years ahead. That is true, but it is also true that a success in fusion energy production would seriously solve the world's energy problem once and for all.
Two days ago, US Reps. Rush Holt visited the Princeton Plasma laboratory to announce that the $76 million funding has been restored for fusion energy research.
This is excellent news, as I think that even if fusion is not possible in reality, we need to get a clear answer, very soon, about its feasibility. A negative answer would be sad, but at least we could be able to move on and focus on alternatives. Holt said: “Fusion research is key to America’s energy future, and we are proud to have this important work in New Jersey”. I would replace America with World and I would agree on that. I hope that big news in the clean energies field will come soon.
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