Three science stories

* There's been a bit of media attention given to hints from data from the LHC that it might have found the Higgs boson. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong has a good summary of what the LHC has achieved, and it appears to be quite a lot in a very short time. (Wouldn't it be kind of embarrassing if it makes all of its discoveries in the first couple of years, though?) Anyway, here's PW's summary:

The bottom line is much stronger results ruling out supersymmetry, extra dimensions, black holes and other exotica, restriction of the possible mass range of the Higgs to about 114-150 GeV, and a tantalizingly small and not yet statistically significant excess of possible Higgs events in the mass range 120-145 GeV.

The big surprise here is that the experiments have done a fantastic job of getting these analyses of the data done at record speed. Before the LHC turn-on, estimates based on experience at the Tevatron tended to be that it would be 2012 before we saw completed analyses of a significant amount of the 2011 data. A lot of people have been working long hours and going without a summer vacation… The bottom line though is not a surprise, but rather pretty much what many people (including myself) expected. The unconvincing popular theoretical models of the last few decades have finally been confronted with experiment, which is falsifying them, to the extent that they can be falsified. It’s an inspiring example of the scientific method working as it should. The remaining mass range for the Higgs is the expected one, and, as expected, this is the hardest place to separate the Higgs from the background. If it’s really there, the data collected during the rest of this year should be enough to give a statistically significant signal. So, within a few months we should finally have an answer to the question that has been plaguing the subject for decades: “Higgs or something else?”. This is very exciting.

Interesting.

* Was the Universe born spinning? From Physics World:

The universe was born spinning and continues to do so around a preferred axis – that is the bold conclusion of physicists in the US who have studied the rotation of more than 15,000 galaxies. While most cosmological theories have suggested that – on a large scale – the universe is the same in every direction, these recent findings suggest that the early universe was born spinning about a specific axis. If correct, this also means that the universe does not possess mirror symmetry, but rather has a preferred right or left "handedness". ...

Longo and a team of five undergraduate students catalogued the rotation direction of 15,158 spiral galaxies with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They found that galaxies have a preferred direction of rotation – there was an excess of left-handed, or counter-clockwise, rotating spiral galaxies in the part of the sky toward the north pole of the Milky Way. The effect extended beyond 600 million light-years away.

The excess is small, about 7%, and Longo says that the chance that it could be a cosmic accident is something like one in a million.

I don't quite get the next bit, though, in that I didn't think it made sense to talk of subatomic spin as if it were, well, actual spin:

What impact would this have on the Big Bang and how the universe was born? Observers in our universe could never see outside of it, so we cannot directly tell if the universe is spinning, in principle, explains Longo. "But if we could show that our universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our universe exists within some larger space and it was born spinning relative to other universes," he told physicsworld.com. "I picture the Big Bang as being born with spin, just like a proton or electron has spin. As the universe expanded, the initial angular momentum would be spread the bits of matter that we call galaxies, so that the galaxies now tend to spin in a preferred direction," he explained.

Others are not convinced he's got a valid conclusion on his hands. Still...interesting.

* Andy Revkin, in a column about underwater volcanoes, notes an incident I don't recall hearing about before:

Substantial gaps persist in basic oceanographic knowledge. One such gap was closed in January, 2005, when an American nuclear submarine making 33 knots 500 feet beneath the surface crashed headlong into an uncharted seamount 360 miles southeast of Guam.

Here's Andy's link to the New York Times 2005 story of the accident, and it makes for fascinating reading. It opens with this:

Blood was everywhere. Sailors lay sprawled across the deck, several of them unconscious, others simply dazed.

Even the captain was asking, "What just happened?" All anyone knew for sure was that the nuclear-powered attack submarine had slammed into something solid and very large, and that it had to get to the surface, fast.

Did I read something about it before, and have forgotten? I don't think so.

Anyway, no wonder the Navy has trouble getting personnel for its submarines.