Science & Environment
Peter Higgs: Physicist who theorised the Higgs boson has died aged 94
Physicist Peter Higgs in Italy in 1996
Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Groundbreaking theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died at age 94. Higgs’s work explaining how elementary particles get their mass won him the Nobel prize in 2013 and formed a key ingredient in the standard model of particle physics. He died in his home in Edinburgh, UK, on 8 April after a short illness.
In 1964, while working as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Higgs made a prediction that would prove to have a huge impact on the world of physics: he postulated the existence of a field suffusing the universe that gave mass to particles moments after the big bang. This field would be associated with a particle of its own, which was later named the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson went on to become a foundational prediction of the standard model of particle physics, nicknamed the “god particle” – a moniker that Higgs himself called “an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology” in a 2017 interview with New Scientist.
After years of searching for proof of the Higgs boson, it was finally discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland in 2012. A year later, Higgs was awarded the Nobel prize, one of many prizes and honours he received for his work.
The discovery of the Higgs boson is commonly cited as the most consequential work of the Large Hadron Collider, but it also marked the beginning of a strange time in particle physics – with all of the particles predicted by the standard model found, what is next? Higgs himself hoped that we would be able to use colliders to connect particle physics with cosmology and the search for dark matter, but those questions remain open.
Even after his retirement in 1996, Higgs continued to attend physics conferences and to collaborate with colleagues and students. He spoke often about supersymmetry, a framework for physics in which each known particle has a corresponding partner with a different spin. If we do live in a supersymmetric universe, there should be many more particles out there to discover.
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Viewing the Taurids may be affected by the illumination of the Moon, which could obscure some of the fainter meteors. The Moon will be in a waxing gibbous phase – going from half moon to full moon.
Plus, as we have seen recently, it is hard to see anything in the sky if there is a blanket of low cloud. However, there could be some timely changes in cloud amounts at the time of peak viewing.
A weather front crossing the UK on Sunday will bring a change in air mass. Even though an area of high pressure will build again, it may not contain as much cloud.
It is possible that the clouds will part on Monday night and give us a better chance of seeing some spectacular meteor displays.
Keep across your local forecast on the BBC Weather website or app.
Chris Comparato, CEO, the Toast, Inc. IPO at the New York Stock Exchange, on September 22, 2021.
Source: NYSE
Upstart, which uses artificial intelligence to inform online lending decisions, soared 46% on Friday, its best day in over three years. Toast, which sells payments technology to restaurants, jumped 14%, closing at its highest since 2021.
Both companies reported better-than-expected results, sparking the rallies.
Upstart’s revenue jumped 20% in the third quarter to $162 million, easily beating analyst estimates. CEO David Girouard said on the company’s earnings call that, “we’re in growth mode.”
Toast is still well off its pandemic highs of 2021, but the stock has now more than doubled this year. The company’s adjusted earnings forecast of $90 million to $100 million for the current quarter sailed past estimates.
The two stocks were part of a huge rally on Wall Street this week that followed Donald Trump’s election victory on Tuesday night. All three major indexes closed at records, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq finishing the week up 5.7%, its second-best week of the year.
Within fintech, companies tied to crypto were some of the top performers, after candidates funded by the crypto industry won races up and down the ballot.
Coinbase shares jumped 48% for the week, their strongest performance since January 2023. Coinbase was one of the top corporate donors in the election cycle, giving more than $75 million to Fairshake and its affiliate PACs, including a fresh pledge of $25 million to support the pro-crypto super PAC in the 2026 midterms.
Trump has vowed to oust SEC Chair Gary Gensler, which potentially bodes well for companies like Coinbase fighting the regulator in court over alleged securities offenses.
Robinhood, which allows users to buy and sell a number of digital currencies, rose 27% for the week. The online brokerage received a Wells Notice from the SEC in May, a move that often precedes formal charges.
Bitcoin hit a new intraday high above $77,300, ending the week 11% higher. Ether, solana, and dogecoin outpaced bitcoin’s gains.
Not all fintechs rallied.
Block, the parent company of Square, reported third-quarter revenue on Thursday that trailed Wall Street’s expectations, leading to a slight drop in the stock on Friday. Shares of Jack Dorsey’s company underperformed the boarder tech market for the week, rising 3.3%.
Affirm, the provider of buy now, pay later loans, beat on the top and bottom line, but the stock still dropped 4.7% on Friday, leaving it slightly ahead of the Nasdaq for the week.
WATCH: Robinhood Crypto general manager reacts to bitcoin rally
Science & Environment
Why did the UK’s first satellite end up thousands of miles from where it should have been?
BBC/Gerry FletcherSomeone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.
Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces.
When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.
But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas.
Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location.
Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?
It’s intriguing that key information about a once vital national security asset can just evaporate. But, fascination aside, you might also reasonably ask why it still matters. After all, we’re talking about some discarded space junk from 50 years ago.
“It’s still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours,” says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves.
“It’s now in what we call a ‘gravity well’ at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.
“Because it’s dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it’s ‘our’ satellite we’re still responsible for it,” he explains.
BBC/Gerry FletcherDr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain’s oldest spacecraft.
It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it’s hard to hear the name “Skynet” without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise.
But there’s no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.
What we do know is that Skynet-1A was manufactured in the US by the now defunct Philco Ford aerospace company and put in space by a US Air Force Delta rocket.
“The first Skynet satellite revolutionised UK telecommunications capacity, permitting London to securely communicate with British forces as far away as Singapore. However, from a technological standpoint, Skynet-1A was more American than British since the United States both built and launched it,” remarked Dr Aaron Bateman in a recent paper on the history of the Skynet programme, which is now on its fifth generation.
This view is confirmed by Graham Davison who flew Skynet-1A in the early 70s from its UK operations centre at RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire.
“The Americans originally controlled the satellite in orbit. They tested all of our software against theirs, before then eventually handing over control to the RAF,” the long-retired engineer told me.
“In essence, there was dual control, but when or why Skynet-1A might have been handed back to the Americans, which seems likely – I’m afraid I can’t remember,” says Mr Davison, who is now in his 80s.
Sunnyvale Heritage Park MuseumRachel Hill, a PhD student from University College London, has also been scouring the National Archives.
Her readings have led her to one very reasonable possibility.
“A Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF satellite facility in Sunnyvale (colloquially known as the Blue Cube) and operate Skynet during ‘Oakout’. This was when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhanger was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then?” Ms Hill speculated.
The official, though incomplete, logs of Skynet-1A’s status suggest final commanding was left in the hands of the Americans when Oakhanger lost sight of the satellite in June 1977.
But however Skynet-1A then got shifted to its present position, it was ultimately allowed to die in an awkward place when really it should have been put in an “orbital graveyard”.
This refers to a region even higher in the sky where old space junk runs zero risk of running into active telecommunications satellites.
Graveyarding is now standard practice, but back in the 1970s no-one gave much thought to space sustainability.
AstroscaleAttitudes have since changed because the space domain is getting congested.
At 105 degrees West longitude, an active satellite might see a piece of junk come within 50km of its position up to four times a day.
That might sound like they’re nowhere near each other, but at the velocities these defunct objects move it’s starting to get a little too close for comfort.
The Ministry of Defence said Skynet-1A was constantly monitored by the UK’s National Space Operations Centre. Other satellite operators are informed if there’s likely to be a particularly close conjunction, in case they need to take evasive action.
Northrop GrummanUltimately, though, the British government may have to think about removing the old satellite to a safer location.
Technologies are being developed to grab junk left in space.
Already, the UK Space Agency is funding efforts to do this at lower altitudes, and the Americans and the Chinese have shown it’s possible to snare ageing hardware even in the kind of high orbit occupied by Skynet-1A.
“Pieces of space junk are like ticking time bombs,” observed Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When these things explode or something collides with them, it generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard to something else that we care about.”
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter Inc., speaks during the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Friday, June 4, 2021.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
During the crypto-crazed summer of 2021, when memecoins like dogecoin and Shiba Inu were rocketing alongside bitcoin and ethereum, Square founder Jack Dorsey announced that his payments company was starting a new business unit, with the goal of “making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.”
“Our primary focus is #Bitcoin,” Dorsey proclaimed on Twitter. The name of the business unit would be TBD.
In December of that year, Dorsey went a step further, changing the name of Square Inc. to Block, a reference, he said, to a number of things, including blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin. The Square Crypto business became known as Spiral.
Three years later, Dorsey is in retreat.
On Block‘s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, CFO Amrita Ahuja said Block has “made some recent decisions with respect to some of our emerging initiatives” and is “winding down our TBD efforts.”
Block continues to own a hefty amount of bitcoin on its balance sheet, with the current value of its holdings swelling to $630 million. And the company said it will be investing in a bitcoin mining initiative as well as Bitkey, its bitcoin wallet, while continuing to allow users to buy bitcoin through Cash App.
It’s a notable change of tune.
TBD was designed to be Block’s platform for developers. Block called it Web5 and said the mission was to create a more decentralized, secure and private internet. Dorsey said in a tweet in mid-2022 that Web5 “will likely be our most important contribution to the internet.”
Square’s five-year stock chart
But Wall Street’s view on crypto was starting to sour dramatically. With inflation soaring in 2022 and interest rates on the rise, shareholders demanded quicker returns on their investments. After peaking in 2021, Block shares lost more than 80% of their value before bottoming in October of last year.
Block said in late 2023 that it would cut its headcount — then about 13,000 staffers — by as much as 1,000 by the end of 2024. Fortune reported that Block laid off employees at TBD in recent weeks. And in the third-quarter shareholder letter, Block said it was “scaling back” its investment in Tidal, the music-streaming service founded by Jay-Z, after spending about $300 million on a majority stake in the business in 2021. Tidal was part of TBD.
Dorsey was asked by an analyst on Thursday’s call about the company’s current bitcoin strategy.
“What we’re focused on in terms of our strategy overall on bitcoin is making it more accessible, making sure that more people can access bitcoin, buy, sell it, obviously, but also send it peer-to-peer,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey added that he wants “the internet to have a native currency,” because that would allow Block to move money faster and offer Cash App and other products in more markets.
A Block spokesperson reiterated the company’s public statement and pointed to Dorsey’s comments from the earnings call.
What’s become clear is that Dorsey can only do so much with crypto while trying to appease a more discerning Wall Street. Shares of Block were down about 1% at market close on Friday, after the company reported revenue that trailed estimates and issued weaker gross profit guidance than some analysts were expecting.
In his 1,400-word letter to shareholders, Dorsey focused entirely on the company’s lending offerings for small businesses. A significant chunk of that is the buy now, pay later product from Afterpay, which Block acquired for $29 billion in 2021.
Dorsey didn’t mention crypto or bitcoin once.
Science & Environment
Tesla was the top ‘Trump Trade’ of the week, along with some energy and financial stocks
Science & Environment
The Impossible Man review: What is the price of genius, asks biography of Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose, at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria
APA-PictureDesk/Alamy
The Impossible Man
Patchen Barss (Atlantic Books (UK, 14 November); Basic Books (US, 12 November))
Many people still believe (and many scientists tell themselves) that genius is a solitary affair, that what they do is so important it merits exemption from everyday life and the obligations of intimate relationships.
As his subtitle suggests, Patchen Barss doesn’t endorse this notion in The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the cost of genius, as he charts the life of one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. The biography…
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