That gorgeous image is an artist’s rendering of the discovery of a Higgs boson particle. The illustration is by Moonrunner Design Ltd. for National Geographic.
Geneva - Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning…CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson…or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.
Munich - For the first time ever, researchers “directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.”
London - Bob Diamond, former head of Barclays international investment bank, says that banks across the world were fixing interest rates in run-up to the financial crisis.
London - For participating in the same market manipulation schemes, the Royal Bank of Scotland prepares to be fined $233 million. As Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone points out, RBS is 82% owned by taxpayers. The market manipulation fraud that RBS bankers cooked up, was used to rob cities and municipalities by artificially keeping interest rates low, thereby returning less money to them. Now the fine will be paid largely by shareholders, in the RBS case, those are taxpayers. To put it more succinctly, government regulators are fining taxpayers for the time that bankers stole from the taxpayers.
Tsukuba - For the first time, a person lying in an fMRI machine has controlled a robot hundreds of kilometers away using thought alone. (Video beneath the article.)
Ithaca - Researchers in Cornell’s Personal Robotics Lab have trained a robot to survey a room, identify all the objects, figure out where they belong and put them away. (Finally!)
