The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Britain’s Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium have won the Nobel Prize for physics for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson. Five members of Brown University’s Department of Physics are involved in the search for evidence of subatomic particles and are available for comment: Gerald Guralnik, a theorist who predicted in 1964 what became known as the Higgs Boson; and David Cutts, Ulrich Heintz, Greg Landsberg, and Meenakshi Narain, four experimentalists who work on research projects at Fermilab’s Tevatron Collider or at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Nearly 50 years of experiments and billions of dollars in equipment followed the prediction of the Higgs mechanism by theoretical physicists in 1964. Ulrich Heintz and Meenakshi Narain, two of the particle physicists at Brown University who worked on experiments at Fermilab and at CERN, note that the successful search for the Higgs was caried on by thousands of researchers.
Last week, Apollo 15 commander David R. Scott, a visiting professor at Brown and one of 12 men to walk on the Moon, addressed Professor Jim Head’s introductory geology classes. He discussed the scientific returns of the Apollo missions and encouraged students to look to Apollo as a template for future human exploration of planetary bodies.
Telephones work. Skype may be more immediate. But virtually walking down the hall, greeting colleagues, stepping into a lab, chatting with students, gazing around a room, and joining the action as a group moves from place to place — that's an immediacy robotic telepresence can offer.
“I think mathematics is the only language we really know that quantifies phenomena,” says L. Mahadevan, professor of applied mathematics, physics, and biology at Harvard. Mahadevan will deliver a public lecture on the mathematics of the natural world — part of a celebratory worldwide lecture series — at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2013, in the Salomon Center for Teaching at Brown University.
It’s counterintuitive but true: Some microorganisms that use flagella for locomotion are able to swim faster in gel-like fluids such as mucus. Research engineers at Brown University have figured out why. It's the angle of the coil that matters. Findings are reported in Physical Review Letters.
Brown planetary geologists have an explanation for the formation of more than 600 “double-layer ejecta” (DLE) craters on Mars. The Martian surface was covered with a thick sheet of ice at impact. Ejected material would later slide down steep crater sides and across the ice, forming a second layer.
Researchers at Brown University have shown that some Martian valleys appear to have been caused by runoff from orographic precipitation — moisture carried part of the way up a mountain and deposited on the slopes.
New research into the origins of — and structural differences between —
wrinkles, creases, and folds could have applications in many fields,
from flexible electronic devices to dermatology to flexible sheets that
become sticky when stretched. Findings from a Brown University research group appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
A collaboration of biologists, engineers, and material scientists at Brown University has found that jagged edges of graphene can easily pierce cell membranes, allowing graphene to enter the cell and disrupt normal function. Understanding the mechanical forces of nanotoxicity should help engineers design safer materials at the nanoscale.
