Picture the scene: you glance out of your kitchen window to see your neighbour making his way towards his shed. He opens the door, turns on a light and instantly a rudimentary laboratory is revealed. On a table, a jumble of wires, powders and liquids lie in anticipation and even from this distance, the ominous icon of a biohazard symbol shimmers in the fluorescent light. He returns into view, clutching a timer; its display casts a green pall across his features.
Should you call the police?
For something so hard to find, the Higgs boson has been absolutely everywhere for the last few years. But despite it trending on Twitter, and even having its own iPhone app, most people still ask, “What exactly is it?”
When Bill Wegerle came home to find his wife murdered in their bed, his world fell apart. To make it worse, he became the prime suspect in her murder and, without an alibi, no one would believe his innocence. In a bid to clear his name, he agreed to a police polygraph test, but failed. Twice. By the time he was finally exonerated, in light of new evidence, it was too late – Bill and his children had spent twenty years living as social outcasts, damned by the very machine that should have saved them.
Astronomers have identified a micro-quasar in our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy, making it the first to be found outside the Milky Way.
The discovery should shed new light on how these objects shaped the first galaxies, billions of years ago.
Continue reading “Greedy Black Hole Gives Clues to Early Universe”
It’s not often that the world gets excited about transmission electron microscopy (TEM), so when it does, there must be a good reason. Last week, this image from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa began making waves on the internet, with people claiming that it showed the double helix of a single strand of DNA.
Eight months and 352 million miles (567 million km) since it launched from Cape Canaveral, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed successfully in Gale Crater, marking the beginning of its 98-week mission to discover if Mars could have ever hosted life.
Continue reading “Touchdown Confirmed! Curiosity lands on Mars”
Pluto’s fifth moon discovered
A new moon has been found orbiting Pluto, bringing the number of satellites known around the former planet to five. P5 – the moon’s temporary designation – is between 10 to 25 km across (less than the diameter of London’s North Circular Road), and was discovered by scientists at SETI studying images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The photos show the moon as a speck, even compared to Pluto’s other moons – not surprising, given that Pluto is over 4.5 billion km away.
Continue reading “News Round-Up: New Moon, Solar Windows and ‘Green’ Algae”
