US physicists call for underground neutrino facility

US physicists call for underground neutrino facility

When the US National Science Board nixed US plans for an underground lab in 2010, multiple potential experiments were left homeless and the US physics community in a kerfuffle. Now forty leading theoretical physicists, including three Nobel Prize winners, have written to the US Department of Energy (DOE) urging it build an underground facility to study subatomic neutrinos that would compensate to some degree for the lab’s absence.  Read more

CERN manages expectations around Higgs rumours

CERN manages expectations around Higgs rumours

CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, is taking a cautious approach on persistent rumours (see, for example, the ViXra blog) that two experiments at its Large Hadron Collider — ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS — have independently found evidence for the Higgs particle with a mass of 125 giga­electronvolts (GeV) — right in the ballpark predicted by the standard model of particle physics.  Read more

US ‘Materials Genome Initiative’ takes shape

US 'Materials Genome Initiative' takes shape

More details have emerged about the intriguingly named Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a US$100-million materials-research programme under which a variety of US science-funding agencies are working to halve the time it takes for newly discovered materials to reach the market.