Earlier this month, research teams from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) gathered to present the newest data from the Large Hadron Collider. Before a rapt audience of viewers from around the globe, they made the historic announcement that a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson had been discovered. The Higgs Boson (part of the greater Higgs field) is the mechanism that endows fundamental particles with mass, a key element to our understanding of the Universe. Read on...

In a lively essay published today in The New York Times, theoretical physicist and WSF participant Lawrence Krauss heralds the recent confirmation of the Higgs boson as a triumph of modern science and "proof that the universe of our senses is just the tip of a vast, largely hidden cosmic iceberg."
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By Raphael Rosen

In case you haven’t heard, on the 4th of July there was a momentous announcement at CERN, the huge physics facility on the border of France and Switzerland. Physicists believe that they have found a new boson, a kind of subatomic particle. However, the news is more significant than that. This new mote might be the legendary Higgs boson, the particle hypothesized to bestow mass on quarks and leptons, two other kinds of subatomic particles that together build up matter. Read on...

By Raphael Rosen

The Internet is buzzing with news about an upcoming announcement this week, and, incredibly, it has nothing to do with celebrities. On July 4th, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will make an announcement about its search for the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle long thought to exist but never definitely proven. CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an enormous circular machine buried on the border between France and Switzerland that was devised in part to find the Higgs by smashing together protons at close to light speed and analyzing the resulting debris. The announcement will be made at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, in Melbourne, Australia. Read on...

By Lena Josephs

Last week, a five-member team of scientists traveled to the Solomon Islands to investigate one of nature's shining achievements: luminescent and fluorescent coral. The Solomon Islands are located east of Papua New Guinea and are part of the Coral Triangle, an ecologically diverse area of the ocean often referred to as the “Amazon of the Seas.” These 5.7 million kilometers of underwater terrain have the highest diversity of coral in the world. Read on...

By James Fallon

I'm a serotonin train wreck, and I love it. I don't feel as if I suffer from a mental disorder, but am rather blessed by it. While this may appear to be a bit of denial, a bit of eccentric goofiness, which all may be true too, the crazy quilt of genetic gifts I received from my parents, and more the enlightened way they and my family treated me, provided a powerful fulcrum to succeed, and fully enjoy it all, in spite of sloshing in some funky dark groundwater along the way. Read on...

By Mario Livio

When mathematicians talk about symmetry, they mean immunity to possible change. In the words of the great mathematician Hermann Weyl: “A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.” For instance, the phrase: “Madam I’m Adam” reads the same backward or forward. In this case, we say that the sentence is symmetric under the operation of back-to-front reading. One of the most familiar of all symmetric patterns is that of a repeating, recurring motif. Read on...

On June 2, the World Science Festival set up shop in the Polytechnic Institute of NYU's Metrotech Plaza for the first-ever Innovation Square. Just off the beaten path, the square was turned into a futuristic carnival, complete with feats of scientific wizardry, a mechanical bird that dipped and dived overhead, and dancers whose movements explained fairly sophisticated machine learning processes. Nick Deel from the International Business Times was touring the grounds, and he spoke to a few of the demonstrators. Read on...

By Alex Wright

The conventional history of the Internet usually emphasizes its roots in computer science: from networking pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn to hypertext visionaries like Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee. While these inventors certainly deserve their due for developing technologies that have transformed the way many of us create and consume information, the roots of the modern information age stretch further back than many of us may think. Read on...

By Tricia Kieran

Congratulations to Ben Ames, winner of Alan Alda's Flame Challenge! Ames, 31, combined his musical talents with his scientific expertise (he's working on his PhD in quantum optics) to create this awesome music video that explains with toe-tapping clarity exactly how a flame works. Read on...

By Kathleen Wisneski

Taking a cue from author and Internet historian Alex Wright, who spoke at the World Science Festival program, Internet Everywhere: The Future of History's Most Disruptive Technology, consider a story from the history of information technology and its implications for the future of the Internet. Read on...

By Jeff Miranda

"Hey I just met you. And this is crazy. Here's my number. So call me maybe?" If you've turned on the radio, walked through a supermarket or surfed the Internet within the last few weeks, it's fairly likely you'll be able to hum the melody that supports those lyrics. Even maybe - and there's no judgement here - you might be able to sing those lyrics loudly on your own. Read on...