At the LHCP conference this year, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented new results relating to a physics process called vector boson scattering plus the first observation of the so-called “massive triboson production." During proton collisions at the LHC, many particles, including the carriers of the electroweak force – photons and W and Z bosons – are produced. These bosons are often referred to simply as vector bosons, in the Standard Model, and one of the processes that leads to their pair production is called vector boson scattering. In a vector boson scattering process, a vector…

Activity means different things to men and women in Finland, but there is one thing they share in common; television has little impact.  A recent longitudinal study with a ten-year follow-up examined how the television viewing time of Finnish adults was associated with their physical activity level during leisure-time. It found that active men spend more time watching television than less active men do, while the opposite is true for women. What accounts for that? A more traditional country, where education is done by rote and teachers are the best people rather than having their place…

Sustainability has become a popular buzzword since the turn of the century, and with it came tools to classify and measure urban performance (rankings, indexes, etc.) across public and private institutions. Those tools were used to create the policies implemented by authorities and are used to assess their success. Yet the tools themselves suffer from a lack of transparency, the very transparency that sustainability advocates claim is vital. There is a lack of knowledge about the actual methodological base underpinning them and which is supposed to legitimize their use. Lucía Sáez-Vegas, Ph.D…

Mutagenesis is a process where new strains of food and products are created using chemicals and radiation in the lab. It is much faster than the natural mutation process while being more targeted than old techniques like hybrids and grafts. In the 1970s, its successor, transgene science and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), began to be studied and by the early 1980s products began to appear. In the 1990s, the American state of Hawaiʻi approved a papaya that had been devastated by a natural virus after breeding techniques and chemicals failed to stop it. Other foods followed. When…

When Charles Dickens died, he had spectacular fame, great wealth and an adoring public. But his personal life was complicated. Separated from his wife and living in a huge country mansion in Kent, the novelist was in the thrall of his young mistress, Ellen Ternan. This is the untold story of Charles Dickens’s final hours and the furore that followed, as the great writer’s family and friends fought over his final wishes. My new research has uncovered the never-before-explored areas of the great author’s sudden death, and his subsequent burial. While details such as the presence of Ternan at…

More than two years have passed since the detection of what is arguably the most damaging tree pest ever to arrive in South Africa: the polyphagous shot hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus). The beetle kills trees and there are no proven remedies. The beetle is now present in nearly all parts of the country and in more than 100 tree species. An invasion of this magnitude should have elicited a rapid response and the development of a strategic action plan. But that hasn’t happened. South Africa has never had to deal with a tree-killing pest of this importance before. In addition, the country has…