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A federal death-row inmate scheduled to be executed days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration has tested positive for the coronavirus, his attorney said Thursday. Dustin John Higgs is one of several people on federal death row set to be executed during the presidential transition, which has drawn condemnation from attorneys and critics who argue against carrying out their sentenced before President Trump, who supports capital punishment, is replaced by Biden, who opposes it. “Today, we were informed by the Bureau of Prisons that Dustin Higgs has tested positive for COVID-19,” Shawn Nolan, Higgs’s attorney, said in a statement. “This is...

The Higgs field is like an endless ocean through which all matter swims. Some particles are like sponges and sop up mass as they lumber along, while others are as sprightly as tiny minnows and dart right through. … "We know that the Higgs interacts with massive force-carrying particles, like the W boson, because that's how we originally discovered it," said scientist Patty McBride ... "Now we're trying to understand its relationship with fermions." Fermions are particles that click together to form the invisible scaffolding inside atoms. Bosons, on the other hand, are the physical manifestation of forces and perform...

[Physics] has a reputation for being extremely complicated, but sometimes the simplest questions that lead to truly profound and obvious insights. When Einstein asked himself, “What would happen if you could ride on a beam of light?” for example, the answer led him to the Special Theory of Relativity.  He concluded that the speed of light was constant. Taylor Momsen was touring with her band The Pretty Reckless and they stopped on the side of the road so some of the band members could relieve themselves.  One of the band members, the drummer Jonathan Burger, was the nephew of  physicist...

ATLAS and CMS experiments shed light on Higgs properties 01 Sep 2015 Results of the analyses by individual experiments (coloured) and both experiments together (black), showing the improvement in precision resulting from the combination of results. Geneva/Saint Petersburg, 1st September 2015. Three years after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS...

Based on data obtained from the Large Hadron Collider, the CMS Collaboration at CERN provided evidence for the first time that the particle assumed to be the Higgs Boson decays into fermions, a broad class of particles that includes many atoms and nuclei. "We made this big discovery back in 2012—we confirmed the particle, its [lack of] spin, everything was consistent," says Marcus Klute, a professor of physics at MIT a coauthor on the study. "What was missing were the fermions."

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The Higgs Boson and the Big Bang by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * Scientists from Europe’s CERN research center presented evidence on July 4, 2012, for a particle that is likely the Higgs boson, the last remaining elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.1 Does this discovery have relevance for the creation-evolution controversy? Particles can generally be classified into two categories, according to the quantum mechanical rules that they obey: fermions and bosons. The Higgs particle is called a boson because it falls into the second category. Evidence for the Higgs boson was obtained from data collected at...

A progress report from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has declared that the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle,” has been found. The discovery of the new particle is a major step toward confirming the Standard Model used in modern physics. Professor John Womersley said, “They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson… That is confirmed...."

Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed. Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.

The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle which scientists believe gives mass to everything in the universe, and is a key component of the Standard Model of physics. While finding it in its expected form would confirm common theories on how atoms are put together, identifying a number of Higgs bosons with different masses or disproving the particle entirely would overturn many assumptions of modern physics.

One of the world's most powerful "atom smashers", at the leading edge of scientific discovery for a quarter of a century, is about to shut down. The Tevatron facility near Chicago will fire its last particle beams on Friday after federal funding ran out. Housed in a 6km-long circular tunnel under the Illinois prairie, the Tevatron leaves behind a rich scientific legacy. This includes finding nature's heaviest elementary particle: the top quark. Since 1985, engineers have been accelerating bunches of proton and antiproton particles around the Tevatron's main ring at close to the speed of light, then smashing them together...

The Universe wouldn’t be the same without the Higgs boson. This legendary particle plays a role in cosmology and reveals the possible existence of another closely related particle. The race to identify the Higgs boson is on at CERN. This Holy Grail of particle physics would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. The mysterious particle would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth, according to a group of EPFL physicists. If their theory is verified with data from the Planck satellite, it would clear up several questions about...

Could the elusive Higgs boson finally be in sight? Earlier this summer, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua wrote about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result," wrote Dorigo. The blog post was low on detail but...

Physicists Say Can Find No Sign of 'God Particle' LONDON (Reuters) - After years of searching and months of sifting through data, scientists have still not found the elusive sub-atomic particle that could help to unravel the secrets of the universe, a science magazine said on Wednesday.The Higgs boson, the missing link which could explain why matter has mass and other fundamental laws of particle physics, is still missing -- and physicists fear it may not exist.``It's more likely than not that there is no Higgs,'' John Swain, of Northeastern University in Boston, told New Scientist magazine.Scientists have been searching ...

Particle physics is in the doldrums. Since 1974 it has not made any major advance except to add to the particle zoo and to tweak the Standard Model. String theory has claimed the attention many young physicists, eager for both fresh challenges and new intellectual adventures. But save for a daunting set of equations, string theory to this day is devoid of even a scintilla of direct observational evidence. For these reasons, a lot is riding on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that was completed last year and will begin full operation this year... It’s the world’s biggest particle accelerator...

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations. The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation. It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national...

Correct calculation strengthens theory of quark-gluon interactions in nuclear particles When it comes to weighty matters, quarks and gluons rule the universe, a new study confirms. One of the largest computational efforts to calculate the masses of protons and neutrons shows that the standard model of particle physics predicts those masses with an uncertainty of less than 4 percent. Christian Hoelbling, affiliated with the Bergische Universtät Wuppertal in Germany, the Eötvös University in Budapest and the CNRS in Marseille, France, and his colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 21 Science. Nearly all the mass of ordinary matter consists of...

Rumours are emerging from the rival to the Large Hadron Collider that the Higgs boson, or so-called "God particle", has been found. Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua, has said in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that the Higgs has been discovered. The Tevatron, the huge particle accelerator at Fermi - the most powerful in the world after the LHC - is expected to be retired when the CERN accelerator becomes fully operational, but may have struck a final blow before it becomes obsolete....

Rumours that the Higgs boson - sometimes called the 'God particle' - has been detected by the Tevatron particle accelerator have been denied. A spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory told the Telegraph: "The rumour of evidence for the Higgs boson is just that: a rumour, with no factual basis. "Beyond that, we don't comment on rumours."

I was the guest on C-SPAN’s “In Depth” program on Sunday, April 5. Afterward, the volume of my e-mail messages rose substantially as people wrote to me to express their opinion of my performance or to ask me questions. Although many of these messages sent approbation, for which I am grateful, others, like most of the people who called in during the program, were less than complimentary. I had a foreboding that one of these messages might contain, shall we say, a bit of denunciation when I saw that its subject line read “You’re a fucking STUPID and VAPID.” In...