Guardian: On 4 July scientists working at CERN plan to announce the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. In the meantime, the news media are speculating whether they have discovered the Higgs boson, or another, more exotic type of particle. Because the Higgs boson decays almost immediately upon being created, researchers cannot detect it directly. Rather, they look for spikes in the numbers of subatomic particles, such as photons and quarks, into which the Higgs would decay. The discovery of the Higgs “would prove there is an invisible energy field that fills the vacuum throughout the observable universe,” writes Alok Jha for the Guardian. Without that field, “we would not be here.”
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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