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From Liz Mermin's documentary in progress: “On 7 March, the journal Nature published the latest results from the ALPHA experiment at CERN. The findings were called “historic.” ALPHA first made science history in 2010, when they created atoms of anti-hydrogen; in 2011 they succeeded in trapping and holding these atoms for an astonishing 1000 seconds. In these three short films, members of the ALPHA collaboration explain their latest triumph, revealing the excitement behind this extroardinary scientific process.”

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Daniela Hernandez in Wired:

Using videogame controllers, an Android phone and custom-built wings, a Dutch engineer named Jarno Smeets has achieved birdlike flight.

Smeets flew like an albatross, the bird that inspired his winged-man invention, on March 18 at a park in The Hague.

“I have always dreamed about this. But after 8 months of hard work, research and testing it all payed off,” Smeets said on his YouTube page.

Smeets got the idea from sketches of a futuristic flying bicycle drawn by his grandfather, who spent much of his life designing the contraption but never actually built it.

When Smeets began studying engineering at Coventry University in England, he realized the physics of a flying bicycle just didn’t pan out. Instead, he drew inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s wing drawings to build his flying machine. Along with neuromechanics expert Bert Otten, Smeets brought his design into reality

The design is based on mechanics used in robotic prosthetics. The idea is to give his muscles extra strength so they can carry his body weight during the flight.

Smeets (and his arms) did just that today with the help of a pair of 37-ounce wings made out of fabric, according to a press release.

More here.

Tom Feilden over at the BBC:

Physicists at CERN are powering up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) again, ready for a final push to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson – the final piece of the jigsaw known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

So what then? Such a fuss has been made about finally nailing down the Higgs you could be forgiven for thinking that – once the champagne had been quaffed and the Nobel Prizes handed out – we could all pack up and go home.

Not a bit of it. Only two of the four main experimental detectors straddling the 27km ring of the LHC are even looking for the Higgs and both are interested in much, much more.

The mission statement for the Atlas experiment – titled Mapping the Secrets of the Universe – makes no mention of the Higgs, preferring to focus on the forces that have shaped our universe, extra dimensions of space, the unification of fundamental forces and evidence for dark matter candidates.

“We're all very excited about finally sorting out the Higgs hypothesis one way or the other,” says Professor Andy Parker, head of high energy physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and a senior member of the Atlas team.

“But that is just one part of a great process, and we have a huge number of other things we're also looking for. There's no pause in the march of science in this case.”

If you haven't seen this video yet, you might as well join the 75 million+ people who have:

Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker:

There are two things the chef David Chang works very hard at and gets very, very anxious about, and in both cases the hard work and extreme anxiety have paid off. One is, obviously, his food, and the other is not becoming a pretentious idiot. Considering how much deserved acclaim has come his way—for his Momofuku restaurants, for his cookbook, and, most recently, for his magazine, Lucky Peach—it’s amazing that he has not permitted even a scrap of pretentious idiocy to stick to him. He’s not quite as neurotic as he was a few years ago, which is good, but he is still excellent company. If you’ve never seen him talk, you should, and here’s your chance: an interview on Paul Holdengraber’s new TV show (on YouTube’s The Intelligent Channel), in which Chang talks about failure, Thoreau, religion, and the honesty of cooking. Holdengraber is the impresario of the “Live” events at the New York Public Library, and when he thinks someone is worth interviewing, he’s always right.

Bina Shah, H. M. Naqvi, Maniza Naqvi, and Mohammed Hanif:

Pervez Hoodbhoy explains the background of these videos in an email thus:

Tzortzis (Greek, lives in London) converted to Islam and is now hugely popular among young people brimming with faith…The man is a real entertainer. I had no idea who he was…some students at LUMS [Paksitan's Lahore University of Management Sciences] asked me to debate him. I agreed. The Islamic society here flew him in at a few hours notice.

Unfortunately, the debate ended badly. This was the only challenge Tzortzis received at a Pakistani university.

The second video is Pervez commenting on what happens at the end of the first video.