How a Gamma Ray Burst Could Cause Mass Extinction From Billions of Miles Away. When the poet Robert Frost once contemplated if the world would end in fire or ice, he forgot a third option: a gamma radiation burst (GRB) explosion. PBS Space Time took a look at the cosmic event and how it would destroy life on Earth, slowly yet surely. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below A GRB is a short-lived burst of gamma-ray light, the most energetic type of light. A GRB shines at levels brightness impossible to comprehend with the human eye, a million trillion times as bright as our Sun. They come from collapsing supernovas, although not every dying star sends one out. GRBs appear seemingly at random in the Universe and rarely last less than a minute, making them hard to study. Our layers of ozone and atmosphere would be study enough to weather the initial blast, but the long-term effects would be disastrous. Nitric oxide jumpstarts the destruction of ozone molecules, eating away at that layer like humanity used to before the Montreal Protocols.
Hydrophobe.org. Elephants use their smarts to cope with human threats. Next to lions, we are elephants’ biggest predators. Ivory poaching looms large in the public consciousness, but many elephants are also killed during clashes with humans over water sources, grazing land, and family farms. As the human population grows and continues to encroach on elephant habitats, these skirmishes will only increase in number and intensity. Because human-elephant conflicts are on the rise, researchers are putting new emphasis on studies of how elephants respond and react to threats. We already know that elephants are relatively street-smart when it comes to humans: they prefer to raid crops on dark nights when they can't be seen and also tend to hustle when travelling through unprotected areas.
But recent research is finding that elephants’ cognitive skills are even more sophisticated and flexible than scientists previously thought, raising questions about how successfully they can co-exist and potentially co-evolve with humans. Different dangers, different calls. Cosmic Quandaries with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. In The World Of Science (10 Facts) Einstein's 23 Biggest Mistakes | Einstein. Q&A: The Higgs boson. 4 July 2012Last updated at 04:16 ET Six theoreticians, including the English physicist Peter Higgs, first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964 Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have discovered a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.
The particle's confirmation would stand out as one of the great scientific achievements of the 21st Century so far. But what exactly is the Higgs boson, and why have particle physicists spent more than 40 years searching for it? The Higgs so far definitively exists only in the minds of theoretical physicists. There is a sturdy theory for how much of the Universe works - all of the particles that make up atoms and molecules and all the matter we see, most of the forces that direct them, and a small zoo of more exotic particles. This is called the Standard Model.
Best explanation of Higgs boson? If a less popular scientist enters the room, only a small crowd gathers, with no-one clamouring for attention. LHCb.