London: The capture of the most wanted sub-atomic particle in physics - Higgs boson - has topped the chart of the year's ten biggest scientific breakthroughs. Scientists had been chasing the Higgs boson, nicknamed the 'God particle' for more than four decades.
In July the team from the European nuclear research facility at CERN in Geneva announced the detection of a particle that fitted the description of the elusive Higgs.
The boson is believed to give matter mass via an associated 'Higgs field' that permeates space. Without the property of mass, the universe we live in could not exist. Scientists used the world's biggest atom smashing machine, the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, to track down the missing particle.
Finding the Higgs topped the list of most important discoveries of 2012 released by Science, a prestigious scientific journal, the 'Daily Mail' reported. "Mass must somehow emerge from interactions of the otherwise mass-less particles themselves. That's where the Higgs comes in," Science news journalist Adrian Cho, who wrote about the discovery in the journal's latest issue, said....
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01:39 PM, Dec 21, 2012
New York: Scientists have recovered the DNA code of a human relative recently discovered in Siberia, and it delivered a surprise: This relative roamed far from the cave that holds its only known remains. By comparing the DNA to that of modern populations, scientists found evidence that these "Denisovans" from more than 30,000 years ago ranged all across Asia. They apparently interbred with the ancestors of people now living in...
01:28 PM, Dec 23, 2010
