You’re going to hear it a lot now: The God Particle has been found. That’s deliciously close to saying God has been found and you better believe some people are going to run with that. I suppose, technically, they’re all God particles, if you believe in a prime mover anyway. But why this one? Why is it the God particle? [Read more…]
On the heels of the healthcare ruling, and perhaps wary of the fury and screams of betrayal that followed, Chief Justice John Roberts will be spending some time abroadin an island fortress: [Read more…]
10:40 am Sean Carroll: Personal editorializing by me: we’ve found the Higgs, or at least a Higgs. Still can’t be sure that it’s just the vanilla Standard Model Higgs. The discrepancies aren’t quite strong enough to be sure that they really represent beyond-Standard-Model physics… but it’s a strong possibility. … Peter Higgs is visibly moved.
Up before sunrise watching physics fireworks streaming across the net. What a fun and crazy world. Right now the Higgs announcement makes the SCOTUS decision look like a one word verdict. It’s complicated. But so far the gists is … they seem to have found something and it looks like a Higgses! But it’s not exactly what many physcists expected in subtle ways and first impressions are it could be measuring and analytical idiosyncracies … or it could signal the dawn of a new physics after all. Cosmic Variance is streaming superb coverage: [Read more…]
Andy Griffith has made his last curtain call. Playing the perfect, quiet country straight man to his brilliant side kick deputy, Andy and Barney kept me entertained on many otherwise boring days and nights, from college to middle-age. The duo provided fodder for backwater cable TV, the Comedy Channel, and even racy adult-esque music videos (WARNING) like the one below that will live on forever. He was 86 years old. [Read more…]
Another dino fossil, more evidence for feathers. Only this one is unique: it’s a megalosaur. A big non-avian therapod, and now we know it had feathers!
Hindustan Times— Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rexand birds.Sciurumimus—identified as a megalosaur,nota coelurosaur— is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics.
“All of the feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far represent close relatives of birds,” said palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut, of the Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie. Sciurumimus is much more basal within the dinosaur family tree and thus indicates that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers,” Rauhut stated.
Up to now feathered dinos had all been from the raptor family. But Mega is different. This Cretaceous lady was a two-legged meat-eater lacking the more obvious anatomical characteristics associated with feathers and birds. If she had feathers, almost any dinosaur could have had them. Which suggests that dinos evolved feathers long before birds and bird-like dinos diverged from other genera.
Cue the religious nutters and unconscionable conservatives whining that the mean old commie liberal secular — bin Laden killing — progressives haven’t cleaned up their charred debris fast enough. Which is somehow used as rationale for enacting more of the religious nutter policies that burned the economy to the ground: [Read more…]
Prof. Sean Carroll will be live blogging the “Higgses announcement,” expected early July 4th, US time. But the news is likely to be … a little more certainty that the elusive mass lending weirdo particle exists and lives at 125 GeV. Whether the findings will go beyond that is unclear. But it’s still a BFD, because the Higgs Boson is almost as elusive as God (As Embertime notes in comments, it’s probably down the back of the soda) and it’s the most important goddamn particle in physics. What is the Higgs you ask? In layman’s terms: [Read more…]
Via TPM, Republicans are now running around frantically saying the ACA is The Biggest Tax in History. Naturally, it’s a whopper and it’s a doozy. But, it’s nowhere near the biggest whopper ever told this year by the usual liars for Jesus, or even the biggest lie about healthcare.
In the wake of the divorce announcement between Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, and leaks that Cruise’s strange religion played a role in the breakup, there have been reports of strange vehicles and other people tailing Holmes around: [Read more…]
You’ve heard of spray on solar cells, scientists at Rice University have developed paint on batteries:
BBC — The new work, from Rice University in Texas, US, opens up completely new avenues for putting batteries on nearly any surface in a simple and robust way.
Pulickel Ajayan and his colleagues chemically optimised the recipe for each of their five layers, using blends of chemicals common in lithium-ion batteries as well as novel materials including carbon nanotubes – tiny “straws” of carbon with incredible electronic properties.
But for the process to result in a working battery, all five layers must stick together and work in synchrony, and the tricky step was finding a separator material that kept the whole stack in one piece.
When the team hit on using a chemical called poly-methylmethacrylate, they had a structure that would stick even to curved surfaces.