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CONTENT Oktober 22/2012

4 | All about the Higgs Boson

6 | The Crystal Cave

8 | Long-dead cane toads continue to haunt Australian Wildlife

12 | Red Bull Stratos Jump

16 | Volcano Surfing

18 | Corpse Flower is Dead Rotten

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The Higgs Bosson explained.

The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, who—along with R. Brout and F. Englert, and with G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble—proposed the mech-anism that suggested such a particle in 1964 and was the only one to explicitly predict the massive particle and identify some of its theoretical prop-erties.In mainstream

media it is often re-ferred to as the “God particle”, after the title of Leon Lederman’s book on the topic (1993). However, the epithet is strongly disliked by many phys-icists, who regard it as inappropriate sensa-tionalism.

In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson, a type of particle that allows

multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, elec-tric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. Some extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of more than one kind of Higgs boson._________________-Higgboson,Wikipedia

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When the whole Higgs boson thing happened, I was like ‘That’s my jam!‘‘

- Paper Magazine 2012-09-27 19:35:00

Peter Higgs

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The Naica, Mexico

September 3, 2012 By David Rosengren.

It was hard to knock back the op-portunity to join 60 Minutes Australia for a trip into The Crystal Cave in northern Mexico. After 2 years of (no doubt costly) nego-tiation, producer Danny Keens was given permission to take a crew into the the tightly guarded

cave located a mile beneath the surface within the Peno-la lead mine in the desert mountains of Naica in northern Mexico.

Discovered in 2000 by two brothers doing mine blast-ing, the cave has formed along a volcanic fault line

where, filled with volcanic heated water in a closed environment for centuries, gypsom minerals have con-solidated to produce massive selenite crystaline structures at a scale up to 10 times greater than previously discov-ered.The crystals are

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The Naica, Mexico

extraordinary. The raw size and beauty of the cave assaults the senses in much the same way as the oppressive conditions. It is not until we had been into the cave multiple times that we were able to control our senses and emotions to really appreciate the extraordinary opportunity we had been given.There are very few places on the planet that are not accessible to the general pop-

ulation and this is one of those such places. I am extraordinarily grateful to have been given the opportunity. To get everyone out safe and sound was an added bonus.

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LONG-DEAD CANE TOADS CONTINUE TO HAUNT - Australian Wildlife

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LONG-DEAD CANE TOADS CONTINUE TO HAUNT - Australian Wildlife

I n their relentless invasion of Austra-lia, poisonous cane toads often hop along roads, where their flattened, desiccated husks are a familiar sight during the long dry season.

Nobody gave much thought to the fate of the little mummies’ toxic compounds—months baking in the sun should render them harm-less, researchers assumed. Not so, according to a new study, which shows that, like murderous ghouls, road kill cane toads can haunt

the wilderness long after death.

Cane toads were introduced in Aus-tralia from South America in 1935 to control bee-tles destructive to sugar cane crops. Today, the prolific toads have invad-ed more than a million square ki-lometers of north-western Australia, where they’ve caused widespread population de-clines among na-tive reptiles and marsupials that try to eat them.

The notion that cane toads can even poison water

has been kicking around anecdotally for years but was recently dismissed by one research team as a “myth” because the toads’ principal toxic compounds, bufa-dienolides, aren’t water soluble. Indeed, the only relevant research showed that wa-ter with live cane toads sitting in it posed no problem to chickens. The new work revives the old water-poi-soning idea.

Ecologist Richard Shine of the Uni-versity of Sydney in Australia, a co-author of the

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chicken study, has been study-ing how cane toads affect native fauna since 2004, when the in-vaders arrived at his long-term research site east of Darwin. Wondering just how harmless the thousands of sun-dried road toads they’d driven by over the years really were, Shine and postdoctoral researchers Mi

chael Crossland and Gregory Brown collected 27 toad car-casses that had been lingering on local roadsides for at least 2 months and soaked fragments of their tissue in water. Surprising-ly, the poison-producing parotid

gland swelled right back up and took on a somewhat lifelike ap-pearance, the team will report in a forthcoming issue of Bio-logical Invasions.

When the researchers put cane toad tadpoles, native frog tad-poles, fish, and leeches in water containing scraps of cane toad tissue, they found that most of the native animals died with-in about a day (and sometimes much faster)—even when they couldn’t touch the tissue di-rectly. Native tadpoles and fish gave the toad tissue a wide berth. Predictably, the cane toad tadpoles were unperturbed by the poison-laced water; and in control experiments with un-contaminated freshwater, all the animals survived just fine.

Temperature-logging devic-es implanted near the parotid glands of toad carcasses put back out on the road for 6 days showed that the toxins with-stood temperatures as high as 49˚C. The deadly bufadieno-lides are known to be heat sta-ble, but because they aren’t water soluble, the new research

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shows that other tough but as yet unidentified toxins in the cane toads’ arsenal must also be involved.

Shine recalls that a friend once slapped a stamp on a paper-thin road-killed cane toad and sent it to him as a postcard. “The fact that the toxin could still be active, I think, is just extraordi-nary,” he says. “It’s like a hor-ror movie.”

The researchers chose experi-mental species that live or breed in puddles and ponds that form during the wet season, and they say washed-in cane toad car-casses could poison the water for native fauna. (Live toads may still be unlikely to taint water because they typically release their toxins only under duress.) The team also warns that government agencies and citizen groups that routinely kill thousands of cane toads and leave them in the wild need to rethink their disposal strategy.

Calling the extreme stability of the cane toad toxins “fasci-

nating,” Michael Tyler, a her-petologist at the University of Adelaide, North Terrace, in Australia who has been study-ing the invaders intermittently for over 50 years, notes that a number of other frog-skin com-pounds have similar durability. “Previously you thought, ‘Well, okay, a dead cane toad is an ex-toad. It’s no longer any prob-lem,’ “ Tyler says. “What these guys have done is to demon-strate that it remains a very se-rious conservation problem.”

by Rebecca Kessler on 1 July 2011, 2:34 PM

- http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/origi-nal/28873260.jpg

Felix’s entire trip back to earth lasted 9:09 minutes, with 4:22 of that time in freefall (without drogue). Countless millions of peo-ple around the world watched his ascent and jump live on television broadcasts and live stream on the Internet. At one point during his freefall Baumgartner appeared to spin rapidly, but he quickly re-gained control and moments later opened his parachute as members of the ground crew cheered and viewers around the world heaved a sigh of relief.

Red Bull Stratos Jump

‘‘

Felix’s entire trip back to earth lasted 9:09 minutes, with 4:22 of that time in freefall (without drogue). Countless millions of peo-ple around the world watched his ascent and jump live on television broadcasts and live stream on the Internet. At one point during his freefall Baumgartner appeared to spin rapidly, but he quickly re-gained control and moments later opened his parachute as members of the ground crew cheered and viewers around the world heaved a sigh of relief.

‘‘The most violent element in

society isignorance.” -Emma Goldman

‘‘The most violent element in

society isignorance.” -Emma Goldman

V o l c a n o S u r f i n g

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The World is your adventure

V o l c a n o S u r f i n gBy GFExplorer 9 August 2012

Volc ano Surf-ing, Nic aragua

Surf ing the ‘r ing of f ire’ in western Nica-ragua involves strapping your feet into a spe-cial ly-adapt-ed snowboard and r iding st i l l-warm vol-canic ash to the bottom of

Cerro Negro. There’s noth-ing quite l ike the feel ing of the wind in your hair as you navi-gate the black slopes with some of the most spectac-ular scener y in Nicaragua in the distance.

FANCY GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL FOR A BIT? TRY VOLCANO SURFING IN NICARAGUA OR PERHAPS SOME NICE RELAXING TEC-TONIC DIVING IN ICELAND.

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CORPSE FLOWER IS DEAD ROTTENby David Whitehouse

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IT LOOKS GOOD AND SMELLS TERRIBLE. SMELLING LIKE A DECOMPOSING CARCASS IS JUST ONE OF THE RAFFLESIA’S CHARMS.

D i d y o u k n o w ?

“‘Every year about 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced.’’

N a m e d a f -te r S i r T h o m a s S t a m f o r d R a f -f l e s , t h e l e a d e r o f t h e e x p e d i -t i o n t h at f i r s t d i s c o v e r e d i t i n t h e In d o n e s i a n r a i n f o r e s t i n 1 8 1 8 , t h e R a f -f l e s i a i s a p a r-a s i te – i t h a s n o s te m , l e av e s o r t r u e r o o t s – a n d t h e f l o w e r, t h e o n l y p a r t o f i t t h at c a n a c -

t u a l l y b e s e e n , e m e r g e s f r o m t h e v i n e s o f o t h -e r p l a n t s f r o m w h i c h i t s te a l s v i t a l n u t r i e n t s a n d w ate r.

The f lower i s a v iv id pin k ish orange , w hich p erhaps wou ld b e b e aut i f u l were i t not s o s t rong ly l in ke d to t he smel l and name of de at h . It s f ive

p e t a l s unf ur l to re ach more t han a met re in d iameter and can weig h up to 11kg . Thes e f lowers can t a ke mont hs , s ome-t imes ye ars , to b lo om, w hich t he y do for a we ek at t he most . Af ter t hat t he y wit her and d ie , b e coming a s t in k ing b lack mush .