In the News

Here I am all packed up and ready to go for my recent trip to France. This was my traveling outfit and all my luggage for my 10-day trip. How I planned my wardrobe and managed my bags will be the subject of an upcoming post, but today I wanted to talk about the news.

During the last week, what is probably the biggest scientific breakthrough of our lifetime was announced and predictably, 99.9% of the world hardly took any notice. The concept of the Higgs boson has been kicking around in the physics world for 40 or 50 years now, but was finally proven this week. Now don't ask me to explain to you what it is or what exactly it means; despite what my best friend might think, I'm neither physicist, M.D., geologist, or anything other than a biologist with an emphasis in immunology. Physicists are a whole other breed of scientist and I am certainly not talented in that area, but even to a layperson like me, this is exciting stuff. For me this is huge because as a life scientist, I was used to thinking of physics and chemistry as the study of "inanimate" things, but it's hard to classify something that can impart mass to other particles as inanimate. Even if that was the only amazing thing about it, that in itself sort of rocks my world. Do yourself a favor and find out more about this nifty little particle; it has huge implications for all of our lives, which few among us can probably even begin to fathom yet.

Also in the headlines this week, an aging, egotistical and quite possibly insane actor and his too-young starlet wife have announced that they're splitting; something which also probably could've been accurately predicted 40 or 50 years ago. This will change your life precisely not at all.