The Show Place

The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson has been announced by physicists from the Large Hadron Collider's CMS and ATLAS detectors.

The discovery was detailed at a major conference to update the world on the continuing efforts by CERN scientists to find the last remaining piece of the Standard Model that underpins the foundations of our Universe. The Higgs boson mediates the "Higgs field" that ultimately endows all matter with mass -- finding the Higgs is therefore imperative for physicists to understand what gives the Universe substance.

July 17, 2012
The unexpected slowing of NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft - the so-called "Pioneer Anomaly" - turns out to be due to the slight, but detectable effect of heat pushing back on the spacecraft, according to a recent paper. The heat emanates from electrical current flowing through instruments and the thermoelectric power supply. The results were published on June 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Researchers in Canada's western Arctic have found evidence of a crater that formed when a huge meteorite slammed into Earth millions of years ago.

Measuring about 15 miles (25 kilometers) across, the formation was named the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where it was discovered. Researchers don't know exactly when it was created, but evidence suggests the crater is between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to a statement from the University of Saskatchewan.