4 | NewScientist | 30 July 2011

FIRST the good news: the Large Hadron Collider has found hints of the much-ballyhooed Higgs particle. Now the bad: the hints are tentative and may vanish with further data. Also, the collider has glimpsed no sign of supersymmetry, the leading theory to explain dark matter.

In the wreckage of colliding protons, the ATLAS detector at the LHC, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, has found an unexpected abundance of pairs of particles called W bosons with energies between about 120 and 140 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

That could be due to the decay of a Higgs particle with a mass in that range. If it is, it would be

a coup – the Higgs is the last undiscovered particle in physics’s standard model and is thought to give all particles mass.

Kyle Cranmer of New York

LHC highs and lows University reported the excess last week at the Europhysics Conference in Grenoble, France. The ATLAS team also saw smaller excesses in pairs of photons and Z bosons, which could be due to Higgs decays too. But each effect is seen in only a small number of collisions, and their statistical significance is a far cry from that required to declare a “discovery”.

The LHC’s other main detector, CMS, has also found an excess in a similar range, the conference heard, but that result rests on similarly shaky statistical ground.

More data will settle the matter. “We will have answered the Higgs’s Shakespeare question – to be or not to be – by the end of next year,” predicts Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director general.

Meanwhile, the LHC has found no signs of supersymmetry, a theory intended to take physics beyond the standard model – which cannot explain dark matter, among other things. Heuer says the theory is still in the running, as the LHC has taken only 0.1 per cent of the data it will eventually collect. “We just have to be patient,” he says.

Short-lived studyPREDICTING how long you will live turns out to be as difficult as first thought. A paper published in Science last year that claimed a gene test could predict your odds of reaching 100 has been retracted following quality control measures by an independent lab.

According to an accompanying statement released by Science: “Although the authors remain confident about their findings, Science has concluded on the basis of peer-review that a paper built

on the corrected data would not meet the journal’s standards for genome-wide association studies.” The study’s authors now plan to find a home in another journal for a revised version of their paper.

Geneticists contacted by New Scientist expressed little surprise at the news; the study first began attracting criticism within days of publication. “What happened at Science? Who peer-reviewed this?” asks Gurdeep Sagoo of the Public Health Genomics Foundation in Cambridge, UK.

–Looking for water–

Divining rod for JupiterJUPITER is, quite literally, the biggest mystery in the solar system. But that will hopefully change after the launch of NASA’s Juno mission on 5 August.

A decade or so ago, NASA’s Galileo mission revealed curious inconsistencies in the planet’s atmosphere. Models of the solar system suggest Jupiter formed near its current location, just outside the solar system’s “frost line”, a boundary beyond which water vapour condenses. Yet when Galileo launched a probe into the planet’s atmosphere in 1995, the probe found surprisingly little water.

Did the probe hit a rare dry spot on Jupiter? Or is all of Jupiter depleted in water? Juno will try to find out by looking for water’s signature at six different microwave frequencies,

which will reveal the molecule’s concentration from the top of the atmosphere to pressures of about 100 Earth-atmospheres. If the whole planet is dry, our very understanding of how and where objects came together in the solar system may need a rethink.

“Water is the key question that got this mission started,” says mission member Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Not knowing where the water is in the solar system is a big deal. It puts a spanner in the works for solar system formation.”

After its launch, Juno will travel for five years before slipping into orbit around Jupiter, where it will also probe the planet’s magnetic field, gravity, and auroras.

“We will have answered the Higgs’s Shakespeare question – to be or not to be – by the end of next year”

IT’S a dirty job, but something’s got to do it. NASA’s Curiosity rover is set to explore a 5-kilometre-high mountain of muck inside a giant Martian crater called Gale.

Curiosity is set to launch in November, its mission to probe the history of the Red Planet’s climate and look for signs of life. In the centre of the 150-km-wide crater is a giant mound of layered sediment rising 5 km above the crater floor. The sediment contains clays, a sure sign

A mountain of Martian slurryNASA

/JPL

that it was exposed to liquid water at some point.

“If you start at the bottom of the pile of layers and you go to the top, it’s like reading a novel,” said John Grotzinger, project scientist at Caltech. “We think Gale crater is going to be a great novel about the early environmental evolution of Mars.”

The sediment and the clays in the mountain may have been habitable and may hold organic molecules – possible signatures of life.

UPFRONT

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