By Jove! The most detailed ever peek at Jupiter, the largest planet in our neck of the cosmic woods, gets underway in August with the launch of Juno. The solar-powered spacecraft, which is part of Nasa’s New Frontiers program, will fly over the planet’s poles, search for evidence of water or ice, and look at the Jovian aurora. The gas giant, which has no solid surface but is instead an ungraspable soufflé of hydrogen and helium clouds, excites space scholars because it has more mass than all the other planets put together and was probably the first to form. But patience, please: Juno will not arrive until 2016.
Climategate—the leaked email exchange between climate scientists suggesting a conspiracy to suppress criticism—highlighted a critical question: is science a public enterprise? Should raw data be available for scrutiny by, say, citizen scientists? The Royal Society is consulting on the matter, and the deadline for submission of evidence falls on 5th August (royalsociety.org/policy/sape/call-for-evidence). Starting from the presumption that science is indeed a public activity, a working group that includes the Wellcome Trust’s Mark Walport and philosopher Onora O’Neill will address such issues as whether data should be routinely released and how to permit public questioning without distorting the debate.
Higgs might fly… rumours abound that the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva might have spotted a Higgs, the so-called God particle upon whose existence modern physics relies. So, despite the rebuttals, eyes will be trained on a Cern update scheduled for 2nd August. Cern has a long, fierce rivalry with the Illinois-based Tevatron, an atom-smasher that has outsmarted it several times in the quest to spot new subatomic particles. The Tevatron closes this September due to budget cuts—and the Chicago mob is desperate to go out with a (big) bang.
Climategate—the leaked email exchange between climate scientists suggesting a conspiracy to suppress criticism—highlighted a critical question: is science a public enterprise? Should raw data be available for scrutiny by, say, citizen scientists? The Royal Society is consulting on the matter, and the deadline for submission of evidence falls on 5th August (royalsociety.org/policy/sape/call-for-evidence). Starting from the presumption that science is indeed a public activity, a working group that includes the Wellcome Trust’s Mark Walport and philosopher Onora O’Neill will address such issues as whether data should be routinely released and how to permit public questioning without distorting the debate.
Higgs might fly… rumours abound that the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva might have spotted a Higgs, the so-called God particle upon whose existence modern physics relies. So, despite the rebuttals, eyes will be trained on a Cern update scheduled for 2nd August. Cern has a long, fierce rivalry with the Illinois-based Tevatron, an atom-smasher that has outsmarted it several times in the quest to spot new subatomic particles. The Tevatron closes this September due to budget cuts—and the Chicago mob is desperate to go out with a (big) bang.
