Image: Loring Loding

Have you ever noticed that almost every barn you have ever seen is red? There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the chemistry of dying stars. Seriously.

Yonatan Zunger is a Google employee who decided to explain this phenomenon on Google+ recently. The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part.

Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s really plentiful. And it’s really plentiful because of nuclear fusion in dying stars. Zunger explains:

The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.

As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart. It doesn’t make anything heavier than 56. What does this have to do with red paint? Because the star stops at 56, it winds up making a ton of things with 56 neucleons. It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse).

The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint.

And that, Zunger explains, is how the death of a star determines what color barns are painted.

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Photo: S-Ky photography

You would think that we’d know how thunder and lightning work by now. But researchers still puzzle over what, exactly, causes those bright flashes of electrostatic discharge. Lightning electrifies the sky about 100 times per second in various locations around the world, yet the electric fields within thunderclouds seem to have only about a tenth of the strength required for producing a lightning bolt, LiveScience reports.

As it turns out, lightning may have extraterrestrial origins.  This idea is not new:

More than 20 years ago, physicist Alex Gurevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow suggested lightning might be initiated by cosmic rays from outer space. These particles strike Earth with gargantuan amounts of energy surpassing anything the most powerful atom smashers on the planet are capable of.

Cosmic rays slamming into air molecules may split those molecules into many electrons, which collide in turn with additional molecules, snowballing into more and more electrons zipping around. Gurevich called this “a runaway breakdown,” LiveScience writes.

In a new paper, Gurevich and colleagues analyzed radio pulses from around 3,800 lightning strikes. They hypothesize that thunderclouds’ highly electrically charged water droplets and ice nuggets allow even the most un-energetic cosmic rays to spark a bolt of lightning if it comes into contact with such a cloud. Researchers know that cosmic rays hit the planet about as frequently as lightning strikes, LiveScience writes, so the theory at least makes sense.

Unfortunately, Gurevich and a number of other scientific groups are still in the process of taking simultaneous measurements of cosmic ray’s energetic particles and the radio pulses lightning produces, which should help determine whether or not the two phenomenon are indeed linked. At least for now, Gurevich’s idea—long ignored by science—is at least being given the attention needed to prove once and for all whether lightning does have extraterrestrial origins.

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When a huge star collapses in a supernova, it can produce a gamma-ray burst, spires of tightly-concentrated energy shooting from the dying star. Photo: NASA

A star being ripped to shreds in a violent supernova is one of the most powerful explosions in the universe. The largest supernovae can produce gamma-ray bursts: a tightly concentrated lance of light that streams out into space. Gamma-ray bursts, says NASA, “are the most luminous and mysterious explosions in the universe.”

The blasts emit surges of gamma rays — the most powerful form of light — as well as X-rays, and they produce afterglows that can be observed at optical and radio energies.

Two weeks ago, says NASA, astronomers saw the longest and brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected. It was the biggest shot of energy we’ve ever seen, streaming from the universe’s most powerful class of explosions. NASA:

“We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright,” said Julie McEnery, project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“The event, labeled GRB 130427A, was the most energetic gamma-ray burst yet seen, and also had the longest duration,” says Matthew Francis for Ars Technica. “The output from GRB 130427A was visible in gamma ray light for nearly half a day, while typical GRBs fade within a matter of minutes or hours.”

The gamma-ray burst was a stunningly bright spot against the background gamma ray radiation. Photo: NASA

There are a few different of classes of gamma-ray bursts in the world. Astrophysicists think that some—short gamma-ray bursts—form when two neutron stars merge and emit a pulse of energy. Huge ones like the one just detected are known as long gamma-ray bursts, and they form when huge stars collapse, often leading to the formation of a black hole.

Gamma-ray bursts focus their energy in a tightly-concentrated spire of energy. A few years ago, says Wired, researchers calculated what would happen if a gamma-ray burst went off nearby, and was pointed at the Earth.

Steve Thorsett of Princeton University has calculated the consequences if such a merger were to take place within 3,500 light-years of Earth, with its energy aimed at the solar system. The blast would bathe Earth in the equivalent of 300,000 megatons of TNT, 30 times the world’s nuclear weaponry, with the gamma-ray and X-ray radiation stripping Earth of its ozone layer.

While scientists cannot yet predict with any precision which nearby stars will go supernova, the merger of neutron star binaries is as predictable as any solar eclipse. Three such binary systems have been discovered, and one, PSR B1534+12, presently sits about 3,500 light-years away and will coalesce in a billion years.

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In November 1999, Don Eigler proved that man had truly mastered the atom: not by way of a devastating explosion or constrained reaction, but with art. The physicist, working for IBM, spelled out the company’s name using 35 individual atoms of the element xenon using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Now, scientists use scanning tunneling microscopes “for more than just imaging surfaces. Physicists and chemists are able to use the probe to move molecules, and even individual atoms, around in a controlled way,” says physicist Jim Al-Khalili in a 2004 book. Fourteen years ago, Don Eigler was the first person to do so, an achievement that helped to open the door on the then-nascent field of nanotechnology.

Don Eigler spelled out IBM’s logo using xenon atoms in 1999 Photo: IBM

Now IBM is back, and with fourteen more years playing with these techniques, scientists have moved from precisely positioning individual atoms to making them dance. In a new short stop-motion film, A Boy and His Atom, scientists manipulated thousands of individual atoms to make the “world’s smallest movie.” The movie exists on a plane 100,000,000 times smaller than the world as we know and experience it. The boy and his ball are made from molecules of carbon monoxide, and yet gives an image reminiscent of the video games of the early 1980s.

“Though the technology that the team discusses isn’t new,” says the Verge, “they were able to use it in a new way: the black-and-white images and playful music form a strong artistic style that’s reminiscent of early film, but at an entirely different scale.”

For more information about how the movie was made, IBM has released a behind-the-scenes video to accompany their animation.

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Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus skeleton, Field Museum. Image: Field Museum Dinosaurs

We generally think of dinosaurs as green, lizard-like creatures. But the actual color of dinosaur skin is still very much up for debate. During fossilization the dinosaur’s skin rarely survives, and there are just a few tiny pieces of fossilized skin in existence. Physicists are about to shoot a bunch of extremely bright lights at one of them, in order to try and identify the color of the duck-billed dinosaur to which this small piece of skin belonged.

Those extremely bright lights will come from a synchrotron, which will let physicists at the Canadian Light Source research facility examine the fossils more closely. The synchrotron will shoot a beam of infrared light at the fossil. Some of that light will be reflected. By analyzing that reflection, scientists can try to figure out what the skin was made of. That’s because the chemical bonds in some compounds create different light frequencies than others. So if there’s protein, that will look different than sugar or fat.

Physicist Mauricio Barbi told the press, “If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur. We have no real idea what the skin looks like. Is it green, blue, orange…There has been research that proved the colour of some dinosaur feathers, but never skin.”

The scientists are also curious about why this particular fossil has skin. What happened to this dinosaur, unlike nearly all the others, that allowed for its skin to be preserved?

Answering these questions will not only provide more accurate pictures of dinosaurs, but also might hint at where they can find more samples of preserved skin.

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Photo: gabrielsaldana

Baby sea turtles are an impressive example of nature’s engineering prowess. (Also, they are adorable.) The beaches on which they are born are plagued with predators looking to snatch up a quick turtle snack, and when the tiny turtles scramble out of their underground nests, their ability to hustle across the sand to the relative safety of the ocean determines if they live or die.

But anyone who has ever tried jogging through sand knows that moving on the shifting ground can be challenging. To make their way, sea turtles evolved a flexible flipper wrist that allows them to skim along without displacing too much sand. Not all of the turtles are expert crawlers, however. Some get stuck in ruts or tracks made by turtles before them.

Inspired by this ability and curious about why some turtles perform better than others, researchers from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University have built the FlipperBot, a bio-inspired robot that can navigate through granular surfaces like sand. ScienceNOW details the robot:

Based on footage of hatchlings collected on the Georgia coast, FBot reveals how the creatures exert a force that will propel them forward, without simply causing their limbs to sink into the sand. The flexible “wrist” of a turtle helps reduce such slipping, and prevents the creature from winding up with a snootful of sand.

Here, you can see the robot in action:

The researchers hope the robot may lend hints about beach restoration and conservation efforts. Discover details this idea from physicist Paul Umbanhowar:

Umbanhowar said understanding beach surfaces and how turtles move is important because many beaches in the United States are often subject to beach nourishment programs, where sand is dredged and dumped to prevent erosion.

“If you are restoring a beach, it might be the wrong kind of sand or deposited in a way that is unnatural,” Umbanhoward said. “In order for this turtle to advance, it has to generate these kind of thrust forces and it may be unable to get their flippers into it. We could say something about that given our models.”

Plus, the robot help explain how our distant ancestors managed to crawl out of the ocean and onto the land. The researchers hope to expand upon the FlipperBot to build a new robot that resembles our distant ancestor, the fish-amphibian hybrid Ichthyostega, ScienceNow reports.

“To understand the mechanics of how the first terrestrial animals moved, you have to understand how their flipper-like limbs interacted with complex, yielding substrates like mud flats,” the researchers said in a statement. “We don’t have solid results on the evolutionary questions yet, but this certainly points to a way that we could address these issues.”

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Peter Higgs with the CMS detecter at CERN. Image: Marc Buehler

Peter Higgs didn’t ask anyone to call the subatomic particle that gives all other particles mass the Higgs Boson.

This particle has a big deal recently—mostly because scientists are pretty sure they found it. Many thought that the discoverers would get the Nobel Prize last year, just a few months after announcing their findings. They almost certainly will get one eventually, assuming the data holds up. But who is the “they” here? Higgs didn’t discover the elusive speck on his own, and now some are wondering whether it should be renamed to honor some of the other scientists involved.

There were five other key physicists who the particle’s name might have honored: Francois Engelert, Gerard Guralnik, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout, and Carl Hagen. But at the press release announcing their findings, the only one who received a huge round of applause from the room was Higgs. And the co-finders noticed.

“Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised by most of the audience. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because of the fact his name has become associated with the boson,” Hagen told the BBC.

Now, the research team had come up with a name for their discovery—SM Scalar Boson—and tried to convince everyone to use it in March. But, of course, no one did.

The physicists are looking for ways to rename the particle that honors all of them or, at least, doesn’t just honor one person. The Engelert-Guralnik-Kibble-Brout-Hagen-Higgs Boson isn’t exactly practical. One suggestion would be to use initials like BEHGHK, which would apparently be pronounced “berg.” Others have suggested renaming the particle the H Boson. Hagen has suggested the Standard Model Scalar Meson. But even he knows that no one would ever bother with that full name, so he suggested the abbreviation SM Squared.

Peter Higgs has been quite classy about the whole thing, saying that’s he’s open to changing the name to H Boson. But the name “Higgs boson” has been in use for decades now, so chances are that, even if the physicists convince other physicists to change the name, most people will forever call it the Higgs. Which, to be fair, is far better than its other nickname—The God Particle.

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The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer aboard the ISS. Photo: NASA

First off: No. Scientists did not just find dark matter.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the good bits.

The first results are in from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a super-expensive detector that is currently hurtling overhead at a brisk 17,500 miles per hour from its perch aboard the International Space Station. That detector, designed to measure high-energy particles such as cosmic rays and the antimatter particle positrons, was designed to finally pin down the elusive dark matter.

What Is Dark Matter?

“Dark matter,” says the Associated Press, “is thought to make up about a quarter of all the matter in the universe.” Yet we can’t see it. Physicists have long suspected the existence of dark matter, and it is possible to sort of see that it is exists by looking at the effect of its gravity on regular matter around it. Without dark matter, the thinking goes, galaxies like our own Milky Way wouldn’t be able to hold their shapes.

No dark matter, no universe as we know it.

So What Did They Find?

Using the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, scientists “collected some 25 billion cosmic-ray particles, including 6.8 million electrons and positrons,” says John Matson for Scientific American. Positrons are the antimatter equivalent of an electron—essentially, an electron with a positive charge rather than a negative electrical charge. Some physicists think that when two dark matter particles crash into one another they can make positrons.

According to Matson, the big find was that “the fraction of positrons in the particle mix exceeds what would be naively expected in the absence of dark matter or other unaccounted sources.” In other words, there were more positrons than there should have been—unless we consider the fact that some other force is making all these bonus positrons.

The scientists could also see how much energy the positrons that hit their detector had. Positrons made by dark matter should mostly have high energies, but after a certain point, the number of positrons should drop off again, fairly dramatically. But the scientists didn’t find this drop-off, which means they can’t specifically ascribe the positrons they observed to dark matter.

What Does It Mean?

According to Wired‘s Adam Mann, the extra positrons “might be the best direct evidence of dark matter to date.” The Associated Press calls the observations “tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.”

The results are, however, not quite so conclusive. The AP: “The evidence isn’t enough to declare the case closed. The footprints could have come from another, more conventional suspect: a pulsar, or a rotating, radiation-emitting star.”

So, as it’s commonly being talked about, the new study is amazing evidence of dark matter. Or, you know, maybe not.

What Does It Really Mean?

“The experiment’s principal investigator, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, says the evidence collected so far “supports the existence of dark matter but cannot rule out pulsars.” He could quite easily have said that sentence round the other way,” says the Guardian‘s Stuart Clark.

“The results so far have nothing new to say about the source of the antimatter,” and hence can’t really say much one way or another about dark matter.

The experiment will continue to collect some 16bn cosmic rays per year for as long as the International Space Station remains operational. So, really the message is that this work is just the beginning.

“Dark matter,” writes Clark, “remains as elusive as ever.”

So What’s Next?

First off, the AMS detector will keep running, looking for the drop off in positron energies that would indicate they were being made by dark matter.

“To definitively expose dark matter,” writes Space.com, will likely require a different approach altogether.

Physicists must look deep beneath the Earth to directly detect particles that make up dark matter, called WIMPs (or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), several experts said. Finding direct evidence of dark matter on Earth would help reinforce the space-station experiment’s discovery by showing independent evidence that dark matter particles exist.

Why Is It Cool Anyway?

If nothing else the research is a reminder that while we most often talk about the International Space Station in terms of the beautiful photos and sandwich-making How Tos that astronauts stream back, the station is also a platform for world-leading scientific research and an indispensable asset.

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In a type Ia supernova, and the new Iax mini-supernova, a white dwarf star (the one with the disk) eats a nearby star. When it grows big enough, it explodes. Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Supernovae are the parents of the universe, the scatterers of the star stuff that make us all (as Carl Sagan so famously described). But now, new research led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Ryan Foley describes the discovery of a new kind of miniature supernova, one that leaves the exploding star “battered and bruised, but it might live to see another day,” said Foley to Charles Choi for Space.com.

“We’re not quite sure why only part of the star might get destroyed. That’s a tough problem we’re working on right now.”

The new type of partial supernova happens in much the same way as one class of regular, full-blown supernovae. A white dwarf star in a two-star system, says Choi, sucks material off of its partner. When the white dwarf consumes too much of its partner’s mass, it explodes (this is called a Ia supernova). In the new type of mini-supernova (a Iax supernova), the white dwarf’s partner star is missing its outer layer. The white dwarf star still steadily consumes its stellar neighbor, but something is different (and scientists aren’t quite sure why, exactly, this matters.)

The end result: a small supernova, some shining just 1% as bright as their full-sized brethren.

“Type Iax supernovas aren’t rare, they’re just faint,” Foley said. “For more than a thousand years, humans have been observing supernovas. This whole time, this new class has been hiding in the shadows.”

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Photo: West Point Public Affairs

In offices around the country, hopeful sports fans are wagering on who will win of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Physicists are no exception. In a lab at the University of Maryland, five groups of physicists filled in the brackets to make their predictions, NBC News reports. Except instead of sports knowledge, they used quantum physics to make their bets.

This isn’t the first time the lab has engaged in such scientific tomfoolery. Last year, a graduate student in the lab sparked upon the idea and nearly won the money pot.

Normally, the team investigates quantum interactions between submicroscopic objects, using ions from the metallic element ytterbium. NBC explains how that has anything to do with making sports predictions:

When used to assist in picking basketball games, the team uses a phenomenon called superposition. They coax the ytterbium ion to act a bit like a coin. In the same way that flipping a fair coin yields a random result of heads or tails, superposition allows the physicists to prepare the ion to have a 50-50 chance of ending up in state A or state B. It’s possible that, based on the way a coin is flipped, the result isn’t always truly random. But by using quantum phenomena, in which the location or state of an object is based on probability, the result is truly random.

But there’s one problem with this method, NBC points out. Unlike coins or ion states, basketball teams are not equally likely to win a game. Quantum physics is just as likely to suggest picking a team suffering from a losing streak this season as one predicted to dominate.

The physicists might be able to simulate this. Clark said they could weight the ion’s choice by creating an “unequal superposition,” which would allow them to create a probability unequal to 50-50. In this way, they might be able to account for the type of basketball knowledge Bergen referred to, and reduce the odds of the ion producing a perfect bracket.

Of course, even knowledgable basketball fans aren’t great at predicting the results of March Madness, so wagering bets on a weighted ion’s predictions may be the surest way to cash in on the tradition.

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Photo: woodleywonderworks

Women remain underrepresented in the sciences, but why? One team publishing in Psychological Science claims that it’s simply because women have more career choices these days. 

To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers examined national survey data from 1,490 students, both male and female, bound for college. The partipants were interviewed in the 12th grade, then again when they were 33 years old. They answered questions about their SAT scores, their motivations and beliefs and, later, their occupations.

Those who had the highest verbal abilities—a group already dominated by women—they found, were most likely to avoid a career in science, technology or engineering. Given that women are more likely to have high verbal abilities, the researchers then assumed that women with high math abilities are more likely than men with high math abilities to also excel at verbal skills. With two skills sets, women, the researchers said, had a broader range of career possibilities open to them.

Not surprisingly, students who originally reported feeling confident about their math abilities and only moderate about their verbal abilities were more likely to go on to a career in science or a related field. The researchers say this means that mathematics may play a more integral role in those persons’ identity, leading them to a career in science.

The researchers think that, in light of their findings, educators should stop worrying about boosting girls’ abilities in math and focus instead on emphasizing how cool careers in science are to the girls who excel at both math and liberal arts.

The researchers do not explore why women may be choosing a career as English teachers over a principle investigator in a physics lab. Whether or not other factors come into play—such as sexism, difference in mentoring styles, or false expectations that a career in science will automatically equate with giving up on having a family—are not mentioned in their statement. But MSN reports on another possible explanation—inequality in science fields:

Another study from this month said that while female scientists have made gains in the field, they face “persistent career challenges.”

The study, published in the journal Nature, said that U.S. universities and colleges tend to employ many more male than female scientists, and that men in the field earn significantly more than women.

“One of the most persistent problems,” the study says, “is that a disproportionate fraction of qualified women drop out of science careers in the very early stages.”

The study suggests the reason for this could be a lack of role models, resulting in females in the field feeling like they don’t belong.

The idea that women are simply choosing other careers isn’t entirely new. The Boston Globe‘s Ideas section wrote about two studies that drew similar conclusions in 2008:

When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women – highly qualified for the work – stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else….The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don’t play a role, and they don’t yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.

This research all points to one clear confusion: more women could be entering science fields than do right now. Why they don’t is a more complicated question.

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Pew pew. Photo: Roxanne Ready

Imran Mahboob just made an entire generation of Trekkies happy. In a new study, Mahboob and colleagues lay out their production of a real working phaser, a device that can produce a concentrated pulse of high frequency sound waves. Basically, the scientists made a laser that used sound instead of light. Wired:

In traditional lasers, a bunch of electrons in a gas or crystal are excited all at the same time. When they relax back to their lower energy state, they release a specific wavelength of light, which is then directed with mirrors to produce a beam.

Sound lasers work on a similar principle. For Mahboob and his team’s phaser, a mechanical oscillator jiggles and excites a bunch of phonons, which relax and release their energy back into the device. The confined energy causes the phaser to vibrate at its fundamental frequency but with at a very narrow wavelength. The sound laser produces phonons at 170 kilohertz, far above human hearing range, which peters out around 20 kilohertz.

The thing that makes the phaser so special is not that the sound waves are particularly strong or high energy, but that they’re super pure in their emitted frequencies, which produces a “spectrally pure” sound emission, says Physical Review Letters. Also, though a phaser has been built before, back in 2010, that one used a laser to make the sound waves. This new phaser skips the laser step and produces to pure tone with a nanoscale drum, says Wired.

For now, says Wired‘s Adam Mann, the phaser’s usefulness is limited, because as soon as the phaser beam leaves the device it also loses its purity. How the phaser evolves is to be determined, but the researchers see it mostly being useful for such boring things as medical imaging and computing, says Wired. Elsewhere, however, engineers are still hard at working turning sound into a weapon.

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Space suits might not be this sexy, but sex is space is bound to happen. Image: Timothy Wells

If reality television has taught anybody anything, it’s that if you put a bunch of people together in a small space for a period of time, they’re going to have sex. Space exploration is really no exception to that. So as technology progresses and people start to talk seriously about trips to Mars or other planets, the questions of love and sex in space become more pressing. But would it actually be a terrible idea to have a child in space?

Before astronauts go into space, they have to do a lot of physically strenuous tasks. Science knows quite a bit about what the adult (mostly male) body does in space, how its muscles and bones react and how microgravity effects the body. But no one really knows anything about how the female reproductive system changes or is impacted. Live Science writes about some new plant research that might provide clues:

The news that University of Montreal researchers found that reproductive processes in plants were affected by changes in gravity is very important because it gives us a clue as to how the human reproductive system might react to micro- or hyper-gravity. That study only increases my concern that there could be trouble ahead for babies conceived in space, as well as for the mothers.

If a baby was conceived in space and it did manage to grow into a fetus, no one really knows the impacts that growing up in zero gravity might have on the development of a tiny human. Would neurons and blood vessels and muscles grow and develop the same way? MSNBC reported a few years ago on just a few of the concerns:

For example, Russian studies with pregnant rats showed a 13 to 17 percent arrest in the development of nearly every area of the fetal skeleton in zero-G, he said. [NASA physician Jim] Logan also noted that the proper formation of neural connections — a process that continues even after birth — requires movement under gravity loading. Immune functions are also compromised in microgravity.

At Wired, they argue that NASA and the rest of the space agencies need to be ready to address this question, because, like we all learned from television, it’s bound to come up. They write:

We need to acknowledge that humans will bring our sexuality with us into space and that includes all the complexities of relationships as well as the relatively simple matter of bodies. NASA cannot avoid confronting those complexities, especially now that the public knows even astronauts sometimes confuse obsession with love.

“How long can humans go without sex?” is not the right question.

I don’t care if you have a same-sex crew of great-grandparents who have never had a flicker of sexual desire in their entire lives. Lock a group of humans into a ship, sail them through space and time, and it won’t take long for that deep, ancient need for touch and intimacy to surface.

Back at Live Science, author Laura Woodmansee thinks we’re just not ready to have women having babies in space:

The research that has come out today on plant sex and conception in space highlights the fact that we simply don’t know the impact space conditions would have on human conception and pregnancy. Right now, it would be unethical to conceive a baby in orbit, or even risk conception. That’s my bottom line.

But, if reality television has taught us one other thing, it’s that just because something is a bad idea doesn’t mean people won’t try it.

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A simulation of a particle collision as seen by the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS experiment. Photo: CERN

It was more than eight months and a week ago when Joe Incandela, the spokesperson for one of the research teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider stood up and announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle. “This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” he said.

That announcement set the physics world abuzz with claims that the long-elusive Higgs Boson—the particle thought to give all the other known subatomic particles mass—had been found. But, just because the new particle looked like the Higgs and smelled like the Higgs, no one in a real position to say so actually wanted to call it the Higgs. But now, after a bunch of follow-up work, says the Associated Press, physicists at CERN are ready to confirm what everyone wanted to hear. New Scientist:

The spokespeople of the two major Higgs-hunting detectors have now confirmed that the particle discovered in July is a Higgs boson. “The preliminary results with the full 2012 dataset are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson,” says CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.

So, with the Higgs found we can shut down the LHC and all go home now, right?

New Scientist:

“It is legitimate to call this beastie ‘a’ Higgs boson,” says Raymond Volkas, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, but not “the Higgs”.

The AP:

Joe Incandela, who heads one of the two main teams at CERN that each involve several thousand scientists, said in a statement that “it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.”

Never content, those physicists, are they?

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Finally, For Real, We (May Have) Found the God Particle

Image: dr_zoidberg

Moshers might have more to offer society than you once thought. It turns out that mosh pits behave a lot like a container of gas, with each individual acting as an atom. Researchers at Cornell University built a model of these metal heads and realized that they could use it not just to understand the behavior of fans but also, perhaps, the behavior of individuals in emergencies.

The whole thing started when a graduate student, Jesse Silverberg, took his girlfriend to a metal concert. He told New Scientist:

“I didn’t want to put her in harm’s way, so we stood off to the side,” he says. “I’m usually in the mosh pit, but for the first time I was off to the side and watching. I was amazed at what I saw.”

From the sidelines, he realized that the mosh pit looked a lot like a mass of atoms. Individuals bash into one another, bounce off and fly around in a seemingly random pattern. Then they took videos of mosh pits off YouTube and built a model of the behavior. Here it is:

New Scientist explains what we’re seeing here:

They found that by tweaking their model parameters – decreasing noise or increasing the tendency to flock, for instance – they could make the pit shift between the random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a circle pit, which is exactly what they saw in the YouTube videos of real mosh pits.

Which is interesting for connoisseurs of mosh pits, but perhaps more useful in situations where crowds need help, like earthquakes or fires. Scientists can’t really study how people behave in those situations without raising ethical questions. But perhaps, Stromberg told New Scientist, you could use this model to see how people behave and use that information to better design emergency exits or aid.

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