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. Different dangers, different calls One of the biggest advantages to living in groups is that more eyes means heightened vigilance. But this ability, called referential or representational signaling, is a relatively advanced cognitive task. In many ways, elephants are likely candidates for representational signaling. New research in PLoS presents strong evidence that African elephants refer to different threats with specific alarm calls. It’s all in the voice
Hydrophobe.org 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. Best explanation of Higgs boson? Scientists' best theory for why different things have mass is the "Higgs field" - where mass can be seen as a measure of the resistance to movement. A well-known scientist walks into the room and causes a bit of a stir - attracting admirers with each step and interacting strongly with them - signing autographs and stopping to chat. LHCb The Standard Model and the Higgs boson
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. 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. It's believed that a GRB caused the Ordovician-Silurian extinction billions of years ago.