4 | NewScientist | 28 March 2009

IT SEEMS the gloves are off in the race to find the Higgs boson.

Teams at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have recently issued a spate of bold announcements about their search for the Higgs, which is thought to give other particles mass. For example, they claim that the Tevatron has a 50:50 chance of finding the particle .

Some researchers at the Large Hadron Collider, due to power up later this year , have apparently had enough. In a talk at CERN last week, Michael Dittmar of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich accused Tevatron teams of exaggerating their prospects, arguing that the sensitivity of

their machine has yet to match predictions. Tevatron’s search for the Higgs “was, is and remains hopeless”, Dittmar says.

CERN’s spokesman James Gillies

Hostile Higgs stresses that the rivalry between the Tevatron and LHC is good-natured. “They’ve got press release friendly recently, but they’ve had some good stuff to report,” he says. Dittmar’s presentation was his personal view, he adds.

Some researchers at the Tevatron have angrily disputed Dittmar’s claims. Tommaso Dorigo at the University of Padua, Italy, was in the audience during the talk. “I felt I was wasting my time listening to him,” he wrote on his blog A Quantum Diaries Survivor .

NORTH KOREA

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Trajectory of

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Trajectory of

second stage

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Trajectory of

final stage

and satellite

North Korea has warned shipping to avoid two

danger zones during its rocket launch window “Danger zones”

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Texas creation vote

TENSION is rising prior to this Friday’s crucial vote on whether Texan children should learn about creationism in science lessons. In the run-up to the vote, which will decide the state’s school curriculum, it has emerged that Don McLeroy , chair of the Texas Science Board of Education, recently endorsed a book criticising the US National Academy of Sciences statement on evolution, and recommended it to his fellow board members.

In Sowing Atheism, Robert Bowie Johnson describes those of the

Christian clergy who support evolution as “morons”. McLeroy says he does not support calling anyone a moron, but agrees with Bowie Johnson’s arguments. The US National Academy of Sciences statement, he says, is a “theft of true science” and neglects “other valid scientific possibilities”.

The vote itself will likely go to the wire, with eight pro-evolution members and seven creationists on the board. Although evolutionists prevailed in an earlier meeting , the creationists slipped in last-minute amendments to the curriculum.

Rocket speculation

JUST how sophisticated is the rocket that North Korea has announced it will launch in April?

The nation has warned shipping away from two “dangerous zones” in the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean between 4 and 8 April, which probably mark the expected splashdown sites of the rocket’s stages (see map, left).

David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists in

–Plenty of water, for now–

When the wells run dryTHE age-old trek of African women to

collect water from distant rivers and

dirty ponds is once more a feature of

the continent. Millions of women must

take the old paths through the bush

because an estimated 50,000 recent

boreholes, pumps and wells installed

with foreign aid are lying derelict for

want of basic maintenance.

So claims a new report presented

last week at the World Water Forum ,

a triennial summit, in Istanbul, Turkey.

“It is not enough to drill a well and

walk away,” says report author Jamie

Skinner of the London-based

International Institute for Environment

and Development. “You can rarely

declare ‘job done’ with any confidence.”

He estimates $300 million of

investment has been wasted,

undermining the UN Millennium

Development Goal of bringing clean

water to half of the world’s estimated

billion people still without it.

“In the Menaka region of Mali,

80 per cent of wells are dysfunctional,”

Skinner reports. “In northern Ghana,

58 per cent require repair.”

Key problems, he says, are bad

design and poor construction. Aid

agencies like to use local contractors,

because it provides work and helps

local economies. But Skinner says

many are slipshod, corrupt or

incompetent. Agencies also like

to give “ownership” of the water

sources to villages, encouraging

local people to set up committees to

collect fees and pay for maintenance.

While fine in theory, this often

doesn’t work and when repairs

are needed the kitty is empty.

“The rivalry between researchers at the Tevatronand LHC over the Higgs boson is good-natured”

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