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4 | NewScientist | 25 August 2012 PHILLIP SPEARS/GETTY FULFILLING expectations is normally a good thing. But the fact that the newly discovered Higgs boson is behaving exactly as expected is cutting its chances of lighting a path to new physics. The world rejoiced in July when physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced a new particle with some, but not all, of the properties predicted for the Higgs. It was the final member of the standard model of particle physics left to be discovered. Questions quickly followed the confetti. The particle was not observed directly but through the particles it should decay into, not all of which were seen. This raised hopes that the Higgs might have different properties to those prescribed by the standard model. Because the model is known to be lacking – it offers no explanations for gravity or dark Higgspectations matter – such deviations might provide clues to these mysterious entities. Now results from Fermilab’s Tevatron collider in Batavia, Illinois, which shut down last year, show the Higgs decaying into one of the missing particle sets, a pair of bottom quarks. This boosts its standard model status (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/h62). The Tevatron signal is relatively weak, and the Higgs still has not been glimpsed decaying into tau particles, as prescribed by the model, but the wiggle room for an exotic Higgs is shrinking fast. Aim, set, zap A NUCLEAR invader has opened fire on Mars, and Earthlings couldn’t be happier. On 19 August the plutonium- powered Mars rover, Curiosity, shot its first laser beam at a fist- sized rock nicknamed Coronation. The laser is part of the rover’s ChemCam instrument, which will work out the composition of rocks by zapping them to produce a small puff of plasma and analysing that using a telescopic camera and spectrometers. Coronation was selected largely as target practice for ChemCam, but project scientists will analyse the data to find out more about the differences between Martian dust and the underlying rock. Once Curiosity starts driving across Mars, ChemCam will take aim at bedrock exposed in a burn scar scoured by the rover’s landing gear. Then, the rover will go to a site dubbed Glenelg, where three rock types appear to meet. “Glenelg simply looks distinctive and interesting,” project scientist John Grotzinger said in a press conference last week. “Mostly it just looks cool.” US emissions slump IT SOUNDS like good news, but it’s not. The US has recorded a sharp fall in greenhouse gas emissions from its power stations. In the first quarter of 2012, emissions reached their lowest level since 1992. The catch: they have simply been exported. The US Energy Information Administration says that a rise in gas-fired power generation, and a corresponding decline in the use of coal, contributed to the low. Per –They got the message– –Gas is greener (slightly)– Mass texting sows panic “MADAM, do not get out of your house. There is a lot of trouble. People from your caste are being beaten. Seven women have been killed in Yelahanka [a suburb of Bangalore].” This was one of the text messages that migrant Indians from north- eastern states, including Assam, received last week. They sparked a mass exodus of Assamese from Mumbai, Chennai and other cities. Thousands fled Bangalore alone, prompting comparisons to the mass migration at partition in 1947. The ubiquity of cellphones in India allows rumours to be spread easily. “There is a long history in India of the relationship between riots and rumours, and this precedes the emergence of electronic media,” says Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. “What electronic media does is add velocity to this.” The texts alluding to violence began arriving on 15 August. They warned of attacks by Muslims, ostensibly in retaliation for recent violence in Assam against settlers from Bangladesh. Muslim leaders denied that their community was planning any such attacks. The Indian government responded by imposing a temporary ban on bulk text messages and shutting down some 250 websites it saw as encouraging people to flee. Electronic traffic billboards in Bangalore were used to counter the rumours and reassure the Assamese that they were safe. The authorities are still trying to pin down the source of the texts. “Hopes were raised that the Higgs boson might have different properties to those long predicted” REUTERS UPFRONT
