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11 August 2012 | NewScientist | 5 acknowledges that it failed to act on information that the ebony may have violated the Lacey Act. This forbids imports of wood that are in violation of the laws of the exporting country. Gibson, of Nashville, Tennessee, is now required to pay a penalty of $300,000 as well as $50,000 to the US National Fish and Wildlife Service to promote conservation of protected trees. It will also forfeit some wood seized in the investigation, worth $261,844. Gibson says it was “inappropriately targeted” but reached agreement in order to avoid an expensive court case. Higgs signal boost THE Higgs boson is now even more of a sure thing. ATLAS, one of two experiments behind last month’s discovery of the elusive particle, has carried out a more complete analysis of its original result. This boosts the statistical significance of ATLAS’s observed Higgs signal from 5 sigma to nearly 6 sigma, meaning the chance of it being due to background processes has sunk to 2 in a billion. The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider didn’t see the Higgs directly; it decays so quickly that they can detect only the resulting sets of particles, known as decay channels. While the other experiment, CMS, presented results for all five possible sets, ATLAS was initially only confident enough to present evidence in two channels: the photons and the Z bosons. But a paper posted online by the ATLAS team on 31 July now includes the rates for the W boson channel too, and this improves the team’s overall confidence level (arxiv.org/abs/1207.7214v1). With strong Higgs results in hand, an international team is proposing a new collider called LEP3 to study the particle in detail. The machine could be built within the next 10 years in the tunnel that houses the LHC, say its backers. Historic ice loss EVEN in the Arctic circle, history repeats itself. The dramatic ice loss from Greenland between 2005 and 2010 drove up sea levels around the world – but it was not unprecedented. A similar retreat happened in the late 1980s. Greenland’s ice sheet has been monitored by satellites for just 20 years, so researchers didn’t know whether the recent acceleration in ice loss was a new phenomenon or not. Using aerial photographs from the 1980s, Kurt Kjær of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and colleagues, found that the ice sheet melted as rapidly between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010 (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1220614). Kjær has already done a preliminary analysis of even earlier aerial photos, and thinks that Greenland also lost a lot of ice in the 1930s. He says surges of ice loss may be a regular occurrence, although they may become more common as the world warms. “Records show that the ice sheet melted as rapidly between 1985 and 1993 as between 2005 and 2010” SOME of the gorillas caught in the midst of fighting within the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been located. Dozens more remain missing. Virunga National Park is home to around 200 of the estimated 790 mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) remaining in the wild. The primates are tracked daily under normal circumstances, but the park’s rangers have been unable to monitor them for almost three months due to heavy fighting between a rebel militia called the M23 and government forces. At the end of July, park authorities were given permission to search for the missing animals by the M23, now in control of Africa’s oldest national park. A census has located several missing families. “It was truly amazing to see the gorillas again after so long and so much fighting,” says Innocent Mburanumwe, warden of the park’s gorilla sector. “They had not seen us for a very long time and seemed calm and curious.” There is no evidence that the gorillas have been targeted in the fighting, although they have been in the past, but they are still under threat. Gorillas and humans are genetically close, which makes them vulnerable to many of the same diseases. That ups the chances that the gorillas could pick up an infection from the militia in the area – or vice versa. Missing gorillas spotted –Found at last– BRUCE DAVIDSON/NATUREPL.COM 60 SECONDS Astronaut defects Syria’s first man in space, Mohammad Ahmad Faris, is among the latest in a string of high-profile defectors from President Bashar Assad’s regime. According to Turkish state media, the astronaut declared his support for the opposition and crossed into Turkey over the weekend. Faris, 61, visited the Soviet space station Mir in 1987. Name that bat All major European bat species can now be identified from their echolocation calls. An online tool called iBatsID finds the best match for a call from a library of 34 species (Journal of Applied Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365- 2664.2012.02182.x). More early humans Three new human fossils from northern Kenya provide the best evidence yet that at least two species of Homo shared the African plains 2 million years ago. The face and two lower jaws may bolster previous claims that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are distinct species (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature11322). Huntingdon’s hope Methylene blue, a drug approved to treat malaria, might slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. The drug reduced the accumulation of misfolded proteins in brain cells, which underlie the disease, and improved behaviour in mice engineered to have the condition (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0895-12.2012). Shuttle showdown NASA has charged three firms with creating replacements for its space shuttle, which retired last year. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, Boeing of Chicago, Illinois, and Sierra Nevada Corporation of Louisville, Colorado, all won contracts, but Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, did not. For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
