Archivo: The Conversation
Number-crunching Higgs boson: meet the world’s largest distributed computer grid
The world’s largest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, has potentially delivered one of physics’ “Holy Grails” in the form of the Higgs boson. Much of the science came down to one number – 126, the Higgs boson’s mass as measured in gigaelectronvolts. But this three-digit number rested upon something very much larger and more complicated: the more than 60,000 trillion bytes (60 petabytes) of data produced by colliding subatomic particles in four years of experiments, and the enormous computer power needed to make sense of it all.
There’s no evidence human pheromones exist – no matter what you find for sale online
The idea of human pheromones is intuitively appealing, conjuring up the idea of secret signals that make us irresistible to potential partners. But this connection of pheromones with sex may be the wrong way to look at the issue – because despite 45 years of study and various claims over the years there’s still not a lot of evidence that human pheromones exist at all.
We’re all mammals – so why do we look so different?
It is easy to distinguish a mouse from a cow. But for members of the same class of mammal, where do such differences begin? In 2011, scientists discovered there were differences in cow and mice blastocysts, the tiny hollow spheres of cells which precede the development of the embryo.
On the origin of 4-4-2: evolution, animals and football
Natural selection has shaped many different animal groups, from V-like formations of bird flocks to circular mills of schooling fish. These shapes are the result of millions of years of evolution. Animals that hold their formation survive and those that don’t follow the group die out, either left behind or picked off by predators.
After Kepler, what is next for the planet hunters?
The Kepler telescope is limping. Since 2013, it has not been able to point with sufficient accuracy to planet hunt in its original field, which caused a temporary halt to data collection. Although a fresh “K2” mission is underway to utilise Kepler’s substantial remaining capabilities, eyes are turning to the next big planet finding mission.
That mission is TESS: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Selected by NASA to launch in 2017 for a two year mission, TESS’s targets are the smaller planets in our own neighbourhood.
Found: the missing part of brain’s ‘internal compass’
If you have taken a walk and would like to return home you need to have an idea of where you are in relation to your destination. To do this, you need to know which way you are facing and also in which direction home lies. This all seems fairly instinctive to humans and other animals, so how do we manage it?
Revealed: the unparalled scale of big data analysis behind Santa’s naughty or nice list
After a year in which further details of national intelligence agencies’ shadowy surveillance networks were laid bare, a fresh leak of documents reveals the obsessive surveillance that extends as far north as Lapland…
We’re simply having an analogue Christmas time
We’ve found that despite the torrent of phones, tablets, laptops and other gizmos that might be given as gifts, the Christmas holiday has not yet been thoroughly infiltrated by technology – in fact, the households we studied are more likely to switch off. On the whole, the use of technology at Christmas is interesting in that it stops being used.
Milk bottle-raiding birds pass on thieving ways to their flock
Great tits are opportunistic copycats. Entire populations can be found performing the same arbitrary behaviour simply because birds copy one another, following a fashion. And it’s this behaviour, reported in a paper published in Nature, that explains the great milk bottle raids that baffled milk drinkers in Britain almost a century ago.
Where’s the proof in science? There is none
What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Those people looking for proof to come from any research in science will be sadly disappointed.