www.physorg.com January 28th … One goal of the Large Hadron Collider is to find the Higgs boson, the only particle in the standard model that has not yet been discovered. Now, some physicists are suggesting, because it has not as yet been found, the Higgs is not actually a particle but an unparticle called the Unhiggs. At the present, the authors say, it is hard to say whether the idea is useful – or true, or whether it will solve problems troubling particle physicists.
Daily Galaxy (newsletter) (www.galaxy.com ) December 28th … did extraterrestrial rain seed the building blocks of life? The notion may also explain another mystery – how did the rocky crust come to have hydrogen, carbon and phosphorous, the essential components of life which is thought would have been lost during the earth’s violent beginnings. Geologists from Toronto have speculated that minerals and metals in rocks may be extraterrestrial in origin simply because the temperatures at which the core of the Earth formed could have completely stripped away precious metals from the crust and drawn them down towards the core. The fact that metals such as platinum and rhodium are in the crust raises the possibility they were formed after the Earth itself, possibly even brought by comets or meteorites (or some other cosmic event). Of course it is possible the scientists have got it all wrong and the Earth did not form in the way they suppose, but experiments have been made and extreme temperatures and pressure were recreated in the laboratory. A mix of minerals was heated above 2000 degrees Celsius and then measured afterwards. This is why they know rock and iron become void in the process.