ABC News. July 25, 2012 16:02:54
So far this month, 27.8 millimetres of rain has fallen in the metropolitan area.
The average for July is 169.6 millimetres.
The previous low was when recording first began in 1876 and the city received 61.5 millimetres. Continue reading
On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.
Sydney Morning Herald, Opinion, July 15 2012.
EVERY so often a discovery is made which piques the public’s interest in science once more. A single proof captures the imagination by the significance and the scale of the advance. This week’s news that physicists had proved with near certainty the existence of the Higgs boson is such a point in the history of science.
The scale of the experiment matches the scale of the intellectual leap achieved. A huge apparatus, 27 kilometres in circumference, buried 100 metres below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, accelerated particles in a near-perfect vacuum to speeds just below that of light and measured the effect of their collisions. Minute variations in energy released prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which had been postulated in theory by Peter Higgs in 1964 to explain the mass of elementary particles. Continue reading