News Currents: Bosons, Camouflage and Orangutans
To learn about orangutan behaviour, researchers used human parkour athletes as models for orangutans.
SRL Coward and LG Halsey
(Inside Science) -- This was a big week for science. At a conference in Australia, physicists announced observations of a new particle resembling the Higgs boson, which would provide the last piece of the standard model, the bulwark theory that describes subatomic particles and the forces that govern them.
But first, at a meeting in Austria, scientists announced that they discovered new information about the climbing abilities of orangutans by studying the physiological response of athletes performing parkour , a mixture of jumping, running and creative movement, which might seem familiar to those who watched the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace.”
Once the elation over finding the Higgs boson (or at least something like it) evaporates, will scientists feel sad? At least one prominent physicist thinks so, as described in this article from The Atlantic.
This fun Slate article discusses the strange science of military camouflage.
And one final story: the home HIV test that our news service covered earlier this year has been approved for US use by the FDA.
