New Kinda matter - "Color-Glass Condensate"

The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquid like wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons (hence they are like "glue").

Scientists didn't expect this kind of matter would result from the type of particle collisions going on at the Large Hadron Collider at the time. However, it may explain some odd behavior seen inside the machine, which is a giant loop where particles race around underneath Switzerland and France.

Typical LHC particle tracks:

When scientists sped up protons (one of the building blocks of atoms) and lead ions (lead atoms, which contain 82 protons each, stripped of their electrons), and crashed them into each other, the resulting explosions liquefied those particles and gave rise to new particles in their wake. Most of these new particles, as expected, fly off in all directions at close to the speed of light.

The color-glass condensate's dense swarm of gluons may also sweep particles off in the same direction, suggested Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist Raju Venugopalan, who first predicted the substance, which may also be seen after proton-proton collisions.Entangled gluons in the color-glass condensate could explain how particles flying away from the collision point might share information about their flight direction with each other, Venugopalan said. Courtesy: Yahoo.com, CERN

ENCODE - Encyclopedia of DNA Elements released

A long-term effort to catalogue all the bits of the human genome that do something has released its results. The consortium that created this—442 members in 32 institutes around the world—has used the increasingly impressive tools available for sequencing genomes to mount a systematic analysis of 147 different types of human cell, attempting to say just what each part of the genome is doing in them. Their results confirm on a grand scale what has become clear over the decade since the Human Genome Project first produced a sequence of the three billion “letters” of which the genome is made: there is a great deal more to genomes than their genes. Impressive as it is, ENCODE is far from the last word. For one thing, its expertise and carefully calibrated techniques need to be spread far and wide—to be adopted and made useful by people doing clinical research. And there is more basic research to do. Only six of the 147 cell types looked at in ENCODE were studied in the amount of detail now possible. The others still await their close-up. So far ENCODE has looked only at cells from one person for each of the cell types studied. That is a reasonable simplification; in terms of how the genome works, the difference between what’s turned on and off in a liver cell and a skin cell is far greater than the difference between how one person’s skin cells work and those of their neighbour, however genetically different the neighbour. But it will be helpful to get a sense of differences between your liver cells and your neighbour’s—especially if you are ill and he is healthy. But ... ENCODE has definitely surpassed the original genome-sequencing efforts !!! Courtesy: The Economist

New Tree Ring Study ---> Global Chilling ?

The tree rings "prove [the] climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now," the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported last week, "and [the] world has been cooling for 2,000 years.". That and other articles suggest the current global warming trend is a mere blip when viewed in the context of natural temperature oscillations etched into tree rings over the past two millennia.

The tree rings do help fill in a piece of Earth's complicated climate puzzle. However, it is climate change deniers who seem to have misconstrued the bigger picture. Instead of using the width of trees' rings as a gauge of annual temperatures, as most past analyses of tree rings have done, Wilson (, a paleoclimatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a co-author of the study) and his fellow researchers tracked the density of northern Scandinavian trees' rings marking each year back to 138 B.C. They showed that density measurements give a slightly different reading of historic temperature fluctuations than ring width measurements, and according to their way of reckoning, the Roman and medieval warm periods reached higher temperatures than previously estimated.

Sources:
Yahoo
Incompetent people too ignorant to know about it
What Are Climate Change Skeptics Still Skeptical About?

Discovery of Higgs Boson-like subatomic particle

On American Independence Day, July 4, physicists working in Geneva at CERN, the world’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, announced that they had found the Higgs boson. Like the uncovering of DNA’s structure by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953, the discovery of the Higgs makes sense of what would otherwise be incomprehensible. Its significance is massive. Literally. Without the Higgs there would be no mass. And without mass, there would be no stars, no planets and no atoms. And certainly no human beings. Indeed, there would be no history. Massless particles are doomed by Einstein’s theory of relativity to travel at the speed of light. That means, for them, that the past, the present and the future are the same thing.

BOSON was named after an Indian Scientist !!!
The 'boson' in the Higgsboson particle, whose search and ultimate detection was one of the longest and most expensive in the history of science, owes its name to Satyendra Nath Bose who was an Indian Scientist. In 1924, the city-based physicist had sent a paper to Albert Einstein, describing a statistical model that led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. The paper laid the basis for describing the two classes of subatomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
Info on Satyendra Nath Bose
Info on Bose-Einstein condensate

Finding the Higgs, though, made looking for needles in haystacks seem simple. The discovery eventually came about using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a machine at CERN that sends bunches of protons round a ring 27km in circumference, in opposite directions, at close to the speed of light, so that they collide head on. The faster the protons are moving, the more energy they have. When they collide, this energy is converted into other particles (Einstein’s E=mc2), which then decay into yet more particles. What these decay particles are depends on what was created in the original collision, but unfortunately there is no unique pattern that shouts “Higgs!” The search, therefore, has been for small deviations from what would be seen if there were no Higgs. That is one reason it took so long. The LHC, sustained by a consortium that was originally European but is now global, cost about $10 billion to build.

The discovery puts the finishing flourish on the Standard Model, the best explanation to date for how the universe works—except in the domain of gravity, which is governed by the general theory of relativity. The model comprises 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions such as quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei) and electrons (which whizz around those nuclei). They make up matter. A further four particles, known as gauge bosons, transmit forces and so allow fermions to interact: photons convey electromagnetism, which holds electrons in orbit around atoms; gluons link quarks into protons and neutrons via the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. And then there is the Higgs.

The Higgs, though a boson (meaning it has a particular sort of value of a quantum-mechanical property known as spin), is not a gauge boson. Physicists need it not to transmit a force but to give mass to other particles. Two of the 16 others, the photon and the gluon, are massless. But without the Higgs, or something like it, there is no explanation of where the mass of the other particles comes from.

For fermions this is no big deal. The Standard Model’s rules would let mass be ascribed to them without further explanation. But the same trick does not work with bosons. In the absence of a Higgs, the rules of the Standard Model demand that bosons be massless. The W and Z are not. They are very heavy indeed, weighing almost as much as 100 protons. This makes the Higgs the keystone of the Standard Model. Slot it in and the structure stands. Take it out and it topples. Little wonder that physicists were getting impatient.

How is Higgs particle created ? (Click to view larger image)

Courtesy: NyTimes Economist