Month: August 2018

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What happens to Higgs bosons? Here’s a clue

Higgs boson decay
A diagram shows a proton-proton collision in the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector that produced a Higgs boson, which quickly decayed into two bottom quarks (bb, shown as blue cones). The collision also produced a W boson that decayed into a muon (μ) and a neutrino (ν). (ATLAS / CERN Graphic)

It’s been six years since physicists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, but they’re just now confirming what most of the mysterious subatomic particles do when they decay.

They’re transformed into bottom quarks, they announced today.

That’s not exactly a surprise: The mainstream theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, suggests that’s the most common course followed by the Higgs, which exists in the particle collider for only an instant before breaking down. About 60 percent of the Higgs bosons created in high-energy are thought to turn into a pair of bottom quarks, which is No. 2 on the mass scale for six “flavors” of quarks.

It took several years for researchers to nail down the evidence to a standard significance of 5-sigma — the same standard that applied to the Higgs boson’s discovery in 2012.

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The Riveter’s CEO and Elon Musk weigh in on stress

Elon Musk and Amy Nelson
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s emotional interview struck a chord with Amy Nelson, the CEO and co-founder of The Riveter, a venture that created women-centric coworking spaces in Seattle and other locales. (Photos: TED via Youtube; The Riveter)

After Tesla CEO Elon Musk got emotional during a market-moving interview this month, Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, says she can understand the kind of stress he’s under.

“You’ve got a few more years of running a company under your belt, but trust me: I feel your pain,” Nelson, one of the leaders in Seattle’s community of female business founders, wrote last week in an essay posted on Forbes’ website.

The essay addressed a follow-up question sparked by Musk’s candor about the stresses of running a company: Can women CEOs afford to be as candid as Musk was? Nelson’s take: They can’t.

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Another giant leap for diversity in computer science

A year ago, the College Board saw the numbers of female students and underrepresented minority students taking the Advanced Placement exam for computer science more than double — but what about this year?

As Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi puts it, “the momentum continues.”

The statistics don’t quite match last year’s triple-digit percentage increases. But they do show a narrower gap between female students as well as black and Latino students on one side, and male students as well as white and Asian students on the other.

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For first time in 50 years, astronaut exits training

NASA says Alaskan astronaut candidate Robb Kulin is leaving his training program at the end of this month, one year after his selection for the Class of 2017. NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean confirmed that Kulin was resigning for personal reasons, marking the first time since 1968 that an astronaut candidate has left the program before qualifying for spaceflight.

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Scientists discover mysterious human brain cell

Rosehip neuron
This is a digital reconstruction of a rosehip neuron from a human brain. (Tamás Lab, University of Szeged)

A gene-by-gene, neuron-by-neuron search has turned up a new breed of brain cell that may serve as a fine-scale “volume control” for neural activity in humans.

The novel type of brain cell, known as a rosehip neuron, is described in a study published today by Nature Neuroscience.

“It’s very rare, and you only see it, so far, in a human,” study co-author Ed Lein, an investigator at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, told GeekWire.

Lein’s group at the Allen Institute and a Hungarian research team at the University of Szeged, headed by Gábor Tamás, narrowed in on the neurons using two different lines of inquiry.

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Elon Musk says Tesla will remain a public company

Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had second thoughts about a “go-private” plan for the company. (BTV via YouTube)

After more than two weeks of discussions, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says feedback from shareholders and experts has convinced him that “the better path is for Tesla to remain public” rather than becoming privately held.

Musk stirred up the financial world on Aug. 7 when he said he was considering a plan to buy up the electric car company’s publicly traded shares at a premium price of $420 a share. A major source of controversy was Musk’s claim that funding had already been secured for what could have been a multibillion-dollar stock purchase program.

The “funding secured” tweet drew skepticism from stock analysts and heightened scrutiny from federal regulators.

In tonight’s update to Tesla’s website, Musk said that most of Tesla’s existing shareholders wanted the company to remain public, and that going private could have forced some institutional investors to divest their stakes. Retail investors might have been forced to sell their stock due to limits on the number of shareholders allowed for a privately held company.

“The sentiment, in a nutshell, was ‘please don’t do this,’ ” Musk wrote.

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VP Mike Pence revs up lunar gateway’s schedule

Mike Pence at JSC
Vice President Mike Pence is flanked by portraits of NASA’s Orion space capsule and a space station in lunar orbit as he speaks at Johnson Space Center in Texas. (NASA via YouTube)

During a pep talk to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, Vice President Mike Pence today highlighted what he saw as the mistakes of past space policy and touted an ambitious plan to put American astronauts on a new space station in lunar orbit by the end of 2024.

Pence said the Trump administration was working with Congress on a $500 million initiative to move NASA’s Lunar Orbital Platform – Gateway “from proposal to production.” The first element of the outpost, known as the Power and Propulsion Element, is due for launch in 2022.

NASA’s first crewed launch of its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket is currently scheduled for 2023. That mission would send astronauts around the moon and back in an Orion deep-space capsule. Pence suggested that a follow-up SLS launch would send astronauts to dock with the Gateway sometime during the following year.

“Our administration is working tirelessly to put an American crew aboard the Lunar Orbital Platform before the end of 2024. … It’s not a question of if. It’s just a question of when,” Pence told the audience at Johnson Space Center.

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Imagine intelligent aliens on water worlds

Undersea exploration
A future mission to Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter, could send a probe through the ice to explore what’s thought to be an ocean beneath. (NASA / JPL Illustration)

Instead of cave dwellers gathered around a campfire, roasting mastodon meat, imagine an octopus tribe floating around a hydrothermal vent at the seafloor, boiling lobsters.

That’s the scenario sketched out by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Germany’s Technical Institute Berlin who’s also an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University.

In an essay published today on Smithsonian Air and Space magazine’s website, Schulze-Makuch notes that a fair number of potentially habitable planets could have surfaces completely covered by oceans. Could life arise on such planets? And if so, how technologically advanced could such species become?

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Quantum computer simulates superconductors

Quantum simulation
A 2,048-qubit D-Wave 2000Q processor, shown in the lower half of this image, was used to simulate the behavior of a quantum magnetic system depicted in the upper half. (D-Wave Systems Illustration)

One of the prime applications for quantum computers is to simulate natural quantum phenomena, and in a newly published study, researchers from Canada’s D-Wave Systems have demonstrated how to do it.

The phenomenon that they simulated involves a topological phase transition associated with thin-film superconductivity and superfluidity. It’s called the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, and figuring out how the transition could be done earned Brown University’s Michael Kosterlitz and the University of Washington’s David Thouless shares of the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics.

Today Kosterlitz hailed the quantum computer simulation, which is described in a paper published by Nature.

“This paper represents a breakthrough in the simulation of physical systems which are otherwise essentially impossible,” Kosterlitz said in a D-Wave news release. “The test reproduces most of the expected results, which is a remarkable achievement.”

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As smoke clears, what’s ahead for Seattle’s skies?

Smoke distribution
A color-coded map shows how smoke is expected to be distributed across Western Washington on the morning of Aug. 23. (NWS Seattle via Twitter)

After enduring days of record-setting, eye-watering levels of smoke in the air, the Seattle area is in for relief, thanks to a shift in wind patterns. But the debate over whether this is the “new normal,” the old normal or the abnormal is likely to play out for months and years to come.

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