Today, scientists at CERN in Geneva announced their results for their search for the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that, if it exists, is thought to be responsible for giving other particles mass. It’s no exaggeration to call it a keystone in quantum mechanics, and finding it for sure will be a huge accomplishment for particle physicists.

So, did they find it?

Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Um, what? OK, this’ll take a wee bit of explaining.

Last things first

I said Higgs, Magnum. HIGGS.

First, the conclusion, so at least you have that in mind as you read the rest. There are two experiments running at CERN looking for the Higgs particle. They don’t smash particles together, look around with magnifying glasses and tweezers, and then yell “AHA!” when they find one. Instead, they build up a picture of it after doing gazillions of particle collisions. After a year of runs, both experiments see something that might be Higgs, but they’re not 100% sure. One sees something at about the 94% confidence level, the other at 98%. That’s pretty good, but it’s not enough to be completely sure. It seems likely they’ve found something, but it’s like a fuzzy picture: it looks like Higgs, but it still might be something else.

So why can’t they be sure one way or another?

CSI: Geneva

Basically, what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN does is whip protons around at nearly the speed of light, then smashes them into each other. At that speed they have huge energies, and when they collide that energy gets converted into matter: other particles. Like shrapnel, these new particles explode away from the collision site. Many of these new particles aren’t stable; they decay into yet lower energy particles after incredibly short time intervals. For example, electron and protons are almost certainly stable over long times (like the lifetime of the Universe), but neutrons decay after only a few minutes, turning into a proton, and electron, and a particle called an antineutrino.

So these daughter particles from the proton collisions in LHC decay, and they have daughter particles, and some of those decay, and so on. At the LHC there are two ginormous detectors called ATLAS and CMS. Both of these, in essence, measure the energy of the particles that hit them; like forensics team, they look at the aftermath of the collision and try to work backwards to figure out what happened.

We know to some extent how much energy is expected from these collisions due to all the particles that are currently known, so those can be accounted for. But if there’s some excess of energy, that could very well indicate a new particle. And we have theories as to how much energy the Higgs particle should have. So the energies are measured, calibrated for known particles, and the excesses are examined.

What both experiments found is an excess of energy — a bump in the graph — indicating a particle that has an energy^* about 125 times that of a proton — right in the expected range for the Higgs particle. That’s exciting! But what they’re doing is counting up things statistically, so they can’t be 100% sure. The bump in the graph is still fuzzy.

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When the Sun belches out an eructation of subatomic particles, they can travel across the solar system and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. This can make our field ring like a bell, shaking the particles trapped within, and generating electromagnetic noise and signals across the radio spectrum. The CARISMA radio array can detect these emissions and learn about how the Sun’s and Earth’s fields interact.

That’s the science. But there’s art here, too: the Lighthouse agency commissioned artists to create digital artwork based on science, and one group, Semiconductor, used the CARISMA data to do so. Based on the data, they translated the radio waves (which are like the light we see, but less energetic) and converted them to sound. This has been done many times before, but what’s cool is that they then created an animation based on the converted sounds, an astonishing and odd and mesmerizing animation. Watch:

How wild is that? It reminds me of the movie "Forbidden Planet". The vibrating patterns are wonderful, and while I’m not sure how much scientific insight can be gained from them, the aesthetics are riveting. And I can hope the underlying purpose of this will be seen: to show that science is beauty, science is art, and that if this gets someone who might not otherwise be interested to poke a little further into it, then mission accomplished.

I am very pleased to announce the grand opening of Science Getaways, where you can take a vacation with your brain!

Science Getaways is a new travel company, started by my wife Marcella and me, for science enthusiasts who want to do more than just take a vacation: they want to feed their brain, too. Over the years I’ve been to a lot of cool places, but I’ve always found my experience is enhanced a lot by learning about the science of the region: the geology, the biology, the connection to other sciences. Heck, when we visited the Galapagos Islands a few years back the whole thing was nothing but science — and it was the vacation of a lifetime (as you can read here, and here, and here). Trips like this are becoming popular enough to get written up by the New York Times.

So we decided we wanted to do this too. Voila! Science Getaways, where we do all the work for you: find cool places to take a vacation, then bring along fun, outgoing scientists eager to show you the natural wonders of the region^*.

Our first getaway is Science Ranch 2012, September 16 – 20, 2012, at the C Lazy U Ranch in Granby, Colorado. This is an authentic western ranch where you can ride horseback, fish, hike, mountain bike, and eat gourmet food (trust me on this; we sampled the food there and it was fantastic). We visited a lot of Colorado ranches, but C Lazy U was clearly the place that fits our needs best.

And we made it better: we added SCIENCE to it! We’ve invited Holly Brunkal, a geologist, and Dave Armstrong, a biologist and ecologist, to come along (we have their bios online). Both scientists are experts in the Colorado version of their fields, and have experience with tours. They’ll be taking us on hikes in the valley where the ranch is located, so you can peruse the local rocks and biota, and they’ll give talks beforehand to familiarize you with everything.

I’ll be the third scientist; I’ll give a couple of short talks and run a stargazing session every evening it’s clear — the skies in that part of Colorado are dark dark dark. When we stayed overnight at a ranch a couple of months ago, we went outside at around 10:00 p.m. and Marcella was stunned at how many stars she could see. It was magnificent.

If you read my blog — and I see you there, admit it! — then I suspect you love science and nature as much as I do. Science Getaways is a new way for me to bring the fun and wonder of the Universe to folks, and have a really great time while doing it. I hope to see you in September at C Lazy U!

^* Just to be clear, this is something I’ll be doing as well as writing this blog and everything else. I’m having way too much fun writing to stop now!

A collaboration between space- and ground-based telescopes has added a new world to the growing list of exoplanets: Kepler-21b, a planet bigger and more massive than Earth. It’s far smaller than Jupiter, though, putting it firmly in the "small, rocky planet" category. Not that it’s Earth-like: it orbits its star in just under 3 days, making it hot enough to have pools of molten iron on its surface!

Now, I don’t generally write about every new alien planet discovered — with over a thousand of them and counting, it would be all I ever do! — but this one interested me. For one thing, it’s not all that much bigger than Earth; it’s about 1.6 times our diameter. The size was able to be found because the planet transits its star: it passes directly between the star and us, blocking the star’s light a wee bit. The amount of light blocked depends on the size of the planet itself, so by carefully measuring that dip in brightness the planet’s size can be determined.

And did I say a wee bit? I mean a really wee bit! Here is a graph showing the planet’s effect on the starlight:

The vertical axis is the amount of light we see from the star, and the horizontal axis is time. You can see how the light drops a bit when the planet blocks the star. But look at the scale! The planet blocks a mere 0.005% of the star’s light! That’s an incredibly sensitive detection, and incredibly difficult to detect. Stars have all sorts of ways of varying their light output, from sunspots to intrinsic pulsing. All those effects had to be removed from the observations to find this weak leftover signal.

But that’s the power of multiple observatories. The star was observed by the orbiting Kepler observatory, designed to look for such planets transiting their stars. It was followed up by the ground-based Mayall and WIYN telescopes at Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory for confirmation, and in total the planet was watched for over 15 months to determine its characteristics.

Even better, these combined observations tell us the mass of the planet itself. As it circles its star every 2.8 days, its gravity pulls on the star, subtly changing the spectrum of the star’s light. The more mass a planet has, the more gravity, and so the more it pulls on the star, and the bigger the effect on the spectrum.

In this case, the planet has a mass of no more than 10 times that of Earth, and is probably less. (more…)

Teaching kids about science is one of the best things we can do. Children are naturally inquisitive and curious; and the methods of science, if taught correctly, can be used to engender a lifelong love of these traits.

So I’m happy when science is encouraged for kids. Still, there are times when I see examples of science education that make me cringe, and shake my head, wondering "What were they thinking?"

Enter WILD! Science. This is an apparently successful Australian company that sells science kits for kids. That’s great, and some of the kits look pretty good.

The problem is, they split some of the kits into ones for boys, and ones for girls. And that split is exactly what you think.

For example, for boys: Hyperlauncher, Joke Soap, Perils of the Deep, Weird Slime Lab.

For girls: Mystic Crystals, Beauty Spa Lab, Luxury Soap Lab, Perfect Perfume Lab.

Oh: I’ll add that the boys’ kits are marketed in blue; the girls’ in pink.

Um. Yeah.

Now, I am not a sociologist or a psychologist who studies gender roles and the differences between the sexes. It strikes me that there may be no need to separate the way we teach between boys and girls — my friend and geologist Evelyn Mervine discusses this point further — but I’ll also readily admit that there may very well be differences between the ways boys and girls see the world. If that’s the case, I have no problem with a company, teacher, or parent accepting that and using it to help the child learn. In other words, science is the same for everyone, but how we get people interested in it and learning about may vary from demographic to demographic.

But I don’t think that’s really the issue here. The problem here is these girls’ kits all are almost entirely marketed on the idea that girls should be pretty, or should try to make themselves pretty.

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Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another. If you haven’t had it yourself, the odds are extremely high you know someone who has, and who has died from it. I’ve lost loved ones to cancer, and it’s awful; it can take years filled with tests, hope, lack of hope, expensive therapy… and in the end the odds are what they are. It all makes for desperate times for those involved, with an emotional distress level that is beyond my ability to describe.

There are people out there who claim they can cure cancer, or have therapies that can mediate it. Some of these people are simply con artists, ready to swoop in as soon as they smell blood in the water, vermin that they are. Others are honest but wrong, thinking they have stumbled on some therapy that no one else has found. However, time and again, when these alternative methods are tested rigorously using controlled, properly done studies, they are shown not to work. In general this does not stop people from making the claims, however.

In Houston, Texas, is a man named Stanislaw Burzynski. He claims he has a method for treating cancer. He calls it antineoplaston therapy. However, according to the National Cancer Institute, “No randomized, controlled trials showing the effectiveness of antineoplastons have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.” That’s a bad sign. Furthermore, the FDA has not approved of antineoplaston therapy for use. Also telling is that “… other investigators have not been able to obtain the same results reported by Dr. Burzynski and his team”. Yet, despite this, Burzynski charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to get his therapy — though he has to say they’re participating in research trials, since the FDA won’t allow him to use his ideas as an actual treatment.

Those are red flags, to be sure.

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This is not a joke: if you attend the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2012, you could win a seat on an XCOR suborbital rocket flight to space!

I’ll note this conference is a technical meeting for suborbital researchers, so it’s not like Comic Con. Still, I know a lot of scientist-types read this blog, so it’s worth promoting. I attended the meeting here in Boulder in 2010, and it was a fascinating look into a new field of research: science done on crewed suborbital rocket flights, where microgravity (free fall) conditions last for as long as four minutes. That’s long enough to do a lot of interesting work, including astronomy, physics, engineering, and biology.

The meeting is being sponsored by the Southwest Research Institute and many other groups, including XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a reusable suborbital spaceplane that can carry people above the 100 km (62 mile) demarcation line of space. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is: one paid registrant to NSRC 2012 will win a seat on XCOR’s Lynx suborbital vehicle, where they can perform their research. This is a $95,000 value!

How cool is that?

If you want to attend the conference and present a paper, the deadline for submitting abstracts is December 2.

And no, I’m not submitting. I get sick on a kid’s swing set. I’ll let astronauts and people with more solid stomachs take to space. I’m happy to wave at them from the ground.