Thursday 31 March 2016

Paperlike battery electrode made with glass-ceramic

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A mechanical engineer has developed a paperlike battery electrode that may improve tools for space exploration or unmanned aerial vehicles.
via Science Daily

Flat boron is a superconductor

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Scientists have determined that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. It may be the only 2-D material with such potential.
via Science Daily

Mile-high Mars mounds built by wind and climate change

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New research has found that wind carved massive mounds of more than a mile high on Mars over billions of years. Their location helps pin down when water on the Red Planet dried up during a global climate change event.
via Science Daily
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Planet formation in Earth-like orbit around a young star

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New images reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.
via Science Daily
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Laser cloaking device could help us hide from aliens

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Two astronomers suggest humanity could use lasers to conceal the Earth from searches by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
via Science Daily
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Hubble's journey to the center of our galaxy

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Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, this Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue, foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy.
via Science Daily
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Hubble's Journey to the Center of Our Galaxy


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Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. Except for a few blue, foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest stellar cluster in our galaxy. Located 27,000 light-years away, this region is so packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed into the volume of space between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

To learn even more about the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster and Hubble, join astronomers and scientists during a live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3pm EDT on Thurs., March 31 at http://hbbl.us/y6k.


via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/11/

Found: Andromeda’s first spinning neutron star

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Decades of searching in the Milky Way’s nearby ‘twin’ galaxy Andromeda have finally paid off, with the discovery of an elusive breed of stellar corpse, a neutron star, by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Found_Andromeda_s_first_spinning_neutron_star

Big Dipper to Southern Cross

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Welcome to an equatorial night. This remarkable 24 frame night skyscape was captured from Maba Beach on the Indonesian island of Halmahera during the evening of March 4. Seen from a mere 0.7 degrees northern latitude, both famous northern and southern asterisms and navigational aids lie within the panoramic view. The Big Dipper is on the far left and Southern Cross at the far right. Beyond the fading campfire on that night a yellow-orange celestial triangle is set by Mars, Antares, and Saturn. It stands above the rising central Milky Way, or "Miett" in the local Maba language. Of course, you can follow the pole pointing stars in the cup of the Big Dipper or body of the Southern Cross to the north and south celestial poles. Both lie just at the horizon in the view from the island's equatorial beach.

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Three thousand drawings to fly into space on Cheops

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Thousands of children across Europe have taken part in a competition to submit drawings that will be miniaturised and sent into space onboard ESA’s Cheops astronomy satellite.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Three_thousand_drawings_to_fly_into_space_on_Cheops

Tracking deer by NASA satellite

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Mule deer mothers are in sync with their environment, with reproduction patterns that closely match the cycles of plant growth in their habitat. And new research using NASA satellite data shows that tracking vegetation from space can help wildlife managers predict when does will give birth to fawns.
via Science Daily
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Technology to enable unzipping of the graphene plane

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A research team has developed a technique, which enables unzipping of the graphene plane without uncontrollable damage.
via Science Daily

'Smoothed' light will help search for Earth's twins

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Physicists have developed optical technology for the 'correction' of light coming from distant stars, which will significantly improve the 'seeing' of telescopes and therefore will enable us to directly observe exoplanets as Earth-twins.
via Science Daily
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Wednesday 30 March 2016

Trigger for Milky Way's youngest supernova identified

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Scientists have determined the likely trigger for the most recent supernova in the Milky Way. They applied a new technique that could have implications for understanding other Type Ia supernovas, a class of stellar explosions that scientists use to determine the expansion rate of the Universe.
via Science Daily
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How supermassive black holes and galaxies formed from collapsing gas clouds in the early universe

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Simulations have revealed for the first time exactly how these black holes formed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
via Science Daily
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Titan's tallest peaks: Towering mountain discovered on Saturn's largest moon

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In a nod to extraterrestrial mountaineers of the future, scientists have identified the highest point on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
via Science Daily
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Map of rocky exoplanet reveals a lava world

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The most detailed map of a small, rocky 'super Earth' to date reveals a planet almost completely covered by lava, with a molten 'hot' side and solid 'cool' side.
via Science Daily
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Integral sets limits on gamma rays from merging black holes

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Following the discovery of gravitational waves from the merging of two black holes, ESA’s Integral satellite has revealed no simultaneous gamma rays, just as models predict.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Integral_sets_limits_on_gamma_rays_from_merging_black_holes

NGC 6188 and NGC 6164

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Graphene wrinkles weakest point

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Graphene is hailed as a top material for technology due to its electrical, optical, and mechanical properties. Its high carrier mobility, optical transparency and tensile strength yield an unprecedented combination of properties favorable for applications ranging from high-speed electronics to construction. However, even with its high durability and flexibility, graphene can break when pulled at large forces, or due to friction when rubbed against. It is important to know the limits of wear resistivity when considering applications of this material. Now researchers from Graphenea and the Institute of Physics in Belgrade have shown that wear and breaking of graphene always start from wrinkles formed naturally during fabrication. The results were published in the journal Carbon.

Using atomic force microscopy (AFM), researchers scanned a very sharp needle probe across the surface of graphene. By gradually increasing the contact force that the probe exerts on graphene, effectively increasing friction until the surface ripped, the scientists observed that tears always start from the wrinkles. Wrinkles are out-of-plane deformations of graphene that probably occur during the transfer of graphene from its growth substrate to a practical substrate such as SiO2. The experiments were performed with CVD graphene.

Aside from wrinkles, CVD graphene contains naturally occurring terraces, which form because graphene conforms to the terraces of the copper substrate during CVD growth. It was shown that terraces have no effect on wear resistance.

Image: Graphene topography and local current flow. Current is reduced at the position of wrinkles.

Electric measurements with nanometer-scale resolution, using the same AFM method, further showed that no current is conducted through wrinkles, and that islands enclosed by wrinkles have different electrical potential compared to the surrounding area, indicating that wrinkles impede electrical conductance in graphene. This is an important finding, because technological applications in electronics require efficient transport of carriers across graphene devices.

This careful study of electrical and mechanical effects of wrinkles in graphene is expected to lead to new experiments on improving graphene uniformity and flatness, helping to speed up the adoption of graphene technology.


via Graphenea

Return of the LHC – season 2 continues

Tuesday 29 March 2016

Earth-space telescope produces hot surprise

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Combining an orbiting radio telescope with telescopes on Earth made a system capable of the highest resolution of any observation ever made in astronomy. The super sharp radio 'vision' produced a pair of surprises.
via Science Daily
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Effective graphene doping depends on substrate material

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Physicists have discovered unexpected effects in doped graphene. They investigated samples of the carbon compound enriched with the foreign atom nitrogen on various substrate materials. Unwanted interactions with these substrates can influence the electric properties of graphene. The researchers have now shown that effective doping depends on the choice of substrate material.
via Science Daily

Computer model explains sustained eruptions on icy moon of Saturn

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The Cassini spacecraft has observed geysers erupting on Saturn's moon Enceladus since 2005, but the process that drives and sustains these eruptions has remained a mystery. Now, scientists have pinpointed a mechanism by which cyclical tidal stresses exerted by Saturn can drive Enceladus's long-lived eruptions.
via Science Daily
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NASA's Curiosity Rover at Namib Dune (360 View)

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Star-forming ribbon

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Space science image of the week: A super-cold filament of dust contains 800 times as much matter as our Sun
via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/03/Herschel_reveals_a_ribbon_of_future_stars

Monday 28 March 2016

Oddball planet raises questions about origins of 'hot Jupiters'

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Scientists have observed an exoplanet by the name of HD 80606 b. This planet is about the size of Jupiter, though four times as massive, and resides in a system 190 light years from Earth, in the constellation Ursa Major.
via Science Daily
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Moons of Saturn may be younger than the dinosaurs

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New research suggests that some of Saturn's icy moons, as well as its famous rings, might be modern adornments. Their dramatic birth may have taken place a mere hundred million years ago, more recent than the reign of many dinosaurs.
via Science Daily
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Novel water-removal technique boosts performance of carbon nanomaterials

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New research illuminating water’s critical role in forming catalysts for oxygen reduction in materials has revealed the key to designing next-generation carbon nanomaterials with enhanced performance for fuel cells and batteries.
via Science Daily

Searching for life beyond earth: First scientific roadmap for European astrobiology

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The first scientific Roadmap for European Astrobiology was published on 21 March 2016. The AstRoMap European Astrobiology Roadmap considers astrobiology in a wide context: it is understood as the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the context of cosmic evolution; this includes habitability in the Solar System and beyond. This makes this roadmap a transdisciplinary document of relevance for many communities, from astronomers to planetary scientists and from atmospheric physicists to life scientists.
via Science Daily
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Orion's Belt and Sword over Teide's Peak

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In human development research, big data could mean better results

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While there is no Hubble telescope gathering data about the universe of human development, projects to make large amounts of information -- big data -- more accessible to developmental researchers could bring behavioral science's biggest questions into focus, according to a psychologist.
via Science Daily
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Saturday 26 March 2016

Solstice to Equinox Cubed

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This 3 month long exposure packed the days from December 22, 2015 through March 20 into a box. Dubbed a solargraph, the unconventional, unfolded picture was recorded with a pinhole camera made from a cube-shaped container, its sides lined with photographic paper. Fixed to a single spot for the entire exposure, the simple camera recorded the Sun's path through Hungarian skies. Each day a glowing trail was burned into the photosensitive paper. From short and low, to long and high, the trails follow the progression from winter solstice to spring equinox. Of course, dark gaps in the daily sun trails are caused by cloud cover. Sunny days produce the more continuous bright tracks.

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Friday 25 March 2016

NASA and STScI Select Hubble Fellows for 2016


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NASA has selected 36 fellows for its prestigious Einstein, Hubble, and Sagan Fellowships. Each postdoctoral fellowship provides three years of support to awardees to pursue independent research in astronomy and astrophysics. The new fellows will begin their programs in the fall of 2016 at a host university or research center of their choosing in the United States.


via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/09/

Close Comet and the Milky Way

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Comet 252P/Linear's lovely greenish coma is easy to spot in this expansive southern skyscape. Visible to the naked eye from the dark site near Flinders, Victoria, Australia, the comet appears tailless. Still, its surprisingly bright coma spans about 1 degree, posed here below the nebulae, stars, and dark rifts of the Milky Way. The five panels used in the wide-field mosaic were captured after moonset and before morning twilight on March 21. That was less than 24 hours from the comet's closest approach, a mere 5.3 million kilometers from our fair planet. Sweeping quickly across the sky because it is so close to Earth, the comet should be spotted in the coming days by northern hemisphere comet watchers. In predawn but moonlit skies it will move through Sagittarius and Scorpius seen toward the southern horizon. That's near the triangle formed by bright, yellowish, Mars, Saturn, and Antares at the upper left of this frame.

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Thursday 24 March 2016

New view of the X-ray sky

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The 2RXS catalogue is the second publicly released ROSAT catalogue of point-like sources obtained from the ROSAT all-sky survey observations performed between June 1990 and August 1991, and is an extended and revised version of the 1RXS catalogue.
via Science Daily
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Graphene nanoribbons: It's all about the edges

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As electronic components are becoming ever smaller, the industry is gradually approaching the limits of what is achievable using the traditional approach with silicon as a semiconductor material. Graphene, the material with a number of "miraculous" properties, is considered a possible replacement. The one atom thin carbon film is ultra-light, extremely flexible and highly conductive.
via Science Daily

Magnetar could have boosted explosion of extremely bright supernova

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Calculations by scientists have found highly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars called magnetars could explain the energy source behind two extremely unusual stellar explosions.
via Science Daily
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Deadly stars: Our sun could also be superflare star

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Every now and then large sun storms strike the Earth where they cause aurora and in rare cases power cuts. These events are, however, nothing compared to the apocalyptic destruction we would experience if the Earth is struck by a superflare. An international research team has now shown that this is a scenario we may have to consider a real possibility.
via Science Daily
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Hickson 91 in Piscis Austrinus

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Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). This sharp telescopic image captures one such galaxy group, HCG 91, in beautiful detail. The group's three colorful spiral galaxies at the center of the field of view are locked in a gravitational tug of war, their interactions producing faint but visible tidal tails over 100,000 light-years long. Their close encounters trigger furious star formation. On a cosmic timescale the result will be a merger into a large single galaxy, a process now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. HCG 91 lies about 320 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. But the impressively deep image also catches evidence of fainter tidal tails and galaxy interactions close to 2 billion light-years distant.

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Frosty martian valleys

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Nestled within the fractured rim of a vast impact basin on Mars are valley floors dusted in frost.


via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Frosty_martian_valleys

Wednesday 23 March 2016

Earth's moon wandered off axis billions of years ago

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A new study reports Earth's moon wandered off its original axis roughly 3 billion years ago. Ancient lunar ice indicates the moon's axis slowly shifted by 125 miles, or 6 degrees, over 1 billion years. Earth's moon now a member of solar system's exclusive 'true polar wander' club, which includes just a handful of other planetary bodies.
via Science Daily
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Tracing star formation rates in distant galaxies

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Researchers have observed 17 bright distant galaxies with the MOSFIRE high-resolution near-infrared spectrometer at the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes. Then, they combined the spectra with infrared images of the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory, and optical images of the Hubble Space Telescope, to create a complete multi-wavelength picture of their galaxies: from rest-frame ultraviolet to rest-frame far-infrared.
via Science Daily
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Quasars slowed star formation, new research shows

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Research has found new persuasive evidence that could help solve a longstanding mystery in astrophysics: why did the pace of star formation in the universe slow down some 11 billion years ago?
via Science Daily
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New way to determine the age of stars?

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Researchers have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding how stars similar to our Sun evolve. Their framework helps explain how the rotation of stars, their emission of x-rays, and the intensity of their stellar winds vary with time. According to the first author, the work could also 'ultimately help to determine the age of stars more precisely than is currently possible.'
via Science Daily
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In the wilds of the Local Group, a lonely galaxy stays set apart

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This scene, captured by ESO's OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope, shows a lonely galaxy known as Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, or WLM for short. Although considered part of our Local Group of dozens of galaxies, WLM stands alone at the group's outer edges as one of its most remote members. In fact, the galaxy is so small and secluded that it may never have interacted with any other Local Group galaxy -- or perhaps even any other galaxy in the history of the Universe.
via Science Daily
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Solar storms trigger Jupiter's 'northern lights'

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Solar storms trigger Jupiter's intense 'Northern Lights' by generating a new X-ray aurora that is eight times brighter than normal and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth's aurora borealis, finds new research.
via Science Daily
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The Great Nebula in Carina

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In Theory: Why are theoreticians filled with wanderlust?

Tuesday 22 March 2016

Astronomers report most 'outrageously' luminous galaxies ever observed

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Astronomers report that they have observed the most luminous galaxies ever seen in the Universe, objects so bright that established descriptors such as 'ultra-' and 'hyper-luminous' used to describe previously brightest known galaxies don't even come close. The lead author says, 'We've taken to calling them 'outrageously luminous' among ourselves, because there is no scientific term to apply.'
via Science Daily
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More(iond) data needed

A diphoton event display from the CMS collaboration (Image: CERN)

The Rencontres de Moriond in La Thuile Italy, are traditionally the most important meeting place for particle physicists in winter. After last year’s restart of the Large Hadron Collider at unprecedented energy, and as Rencontres de Moriond celebrate their 50th anniversary, physicists gathered last week with much interest for the electroweak session, to look at the latest results from the LHC experiments. Analyses presented during the week included measurements of the Higgs boson using last year’s LHC 13 TeV data, an eagerly anticipated update on diphoton resonances search, precision measurements of Standard Model processes, and new searches for supersymmetric particles and dark matter.

The week started with many results in the heavy flavours area, where one of the main highlights came from the LHCb experiment. Looking at their data, physicists of the LHCb collaboration could not spot any evidence for the existence of X(5568)– a tetraquark particle candidate recently reported by Fermilab’s DZero collaboration. LHCb and DZero collaborations will work together to investigate further, following this interesting outcome.

ATLAS also presented their full Run 1 result of a search for the extremely rare decay of a Bs meson to a muon pair.

The decay was observed by CMS and LHCb in 2014 from a combination of their datasets. The ATLAS analysis resulted in a signal that is smaller than expected, but still compatible with the Standard Model.

After a lot of hard work to calibrate and characterize the data collected, both ATLAS and CMS provided an update on an intriguing result first presented last December: a small excess above background in the diphoton channel near a mass of 750 GeV, which could mean, if confirmed, the existence of a new unexpected particle.

With refined analysis, the “bump” in the data is still there, but the statistical significance of the result still remains too low to be conclusive. Physicists must wait for the imminent restart of data collection before they can investigate further, as the LHC has been in its winter pause over the last weeks. Physicists will have to wait for summer conferences, such as ICHEP 2016 in Chicago, to possibly get excited again.

For more highlights from Moriond, see the latest from the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments and from Symmetry Magazine.

 


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2016/03/moreiond-data-needed

Single bacteria grows 60 percent better on the International Space Station than on Earth

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Researchers grew microbes collected from sports teams, historical monuments, museums, spacecraft, and schools and sent them to the International Space Station (ISS) for growth in space. While most of the microbes looked similar on Earth and in space, one type of bacteria actually grew much better in space.
via Science Daily
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