Today's public seminar at CERN, where the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented the preliminary results of their searches for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson with the full dataset collected during 2011, is a landmark for high-energy physics!

The Higgs boson is a still-hypothetical particle postulated in the mid-1960s to complete what is considered the SM of particle interactions. Its role within the SM is to provide other particles with mass. Specifically, the mass of elementary particles is the result of their interaction with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson's properties are defined in the SM, apart from its mass, which is a free parameter of the theory.

Scientists are looking for signs of the Higgs boson by searching for the products of its decay. Two of the most prominent decay channels, or ways the Higgs can decay, are to form two photons or to form a pair of Z bosons, each of which subsequently decays to a pair of leptons (electrons or muons). Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has played and continues to play a key role in the design, construction, and operation of the detectors of the ATLAS experiment that are used to observe electrons and photons (the liquid argon electromagnetic calorimeter) and muons (the muon spectrometer). Major contributions are also made in the data analysis, where Brookhaven scientists have leading roles. BNL also significantly contributes to the trigger -- deciding which events to analyze in detail -- and to computing.

This is not a story about the latest mega cruise ship, with five swimming pools, 10 restaurants, a rock-climbing wall, and a casino. The vessel we're talking about, the Horizon Spirit, will be outfitted instead with radars, aerosol sampling devices, and other high-tech tools. But even without the fancy umbrella drinks, Ernie Lewis, an atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, can't wait to set sail.

Last month, he and several colleagues traveled to California to visit the Spirit, a cargo carrier owned by Horizon Lines that makes regular runs to and from Hawaii. In January, they'll embark on a round-trip voyage to investigate how to get the ship ready for a yearlong mission gathering data to improve climate models, a project funded by DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility.

The quest to authenticate an unknown Rembrandt painting, titled "Old Man with a Beard," hit a dramatic high at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Using an advanced x-ray detector developed at NSLS, scientists found compelling evidence that the famous Dutch master did indeed have his own hand on the painting.

"After doing the experiments at NSLS, I felt that the painting I held in my hands was a genuine Rembrandt," said D. Peter Siddons, physicist with the Photon Sciences Directorate. "We had identified hidden paint layers, which the art historians considered critical to determining attribution."

Siddons explained that art historian Ernst van de Wetering and his colleagues -- University of Delft materials scientist Joris Dik, art restorer Martin Bijl, and University of Antwerp chemist Koen Janssens -- had all been working closely together to answer questions about the painting's attribution and to probe beneath the surface for what they believed was a second image. The Europeans were eager to see what more they could learn using a specialized detector at the New York facility an ocean away.

The detector, named Maia, produced high-definition maps of the spatial distribution of different chemical elements in the painting, at speeds up to 100 times faster than previously achievable. Those results gave scientific support to the declaration of authentication just announced by van de Wetering at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. Van de Wetering is chair of the Rembrandt Research Project and considered a preeminent authority on Rembrandt.

If the sun is shining over Long Island, NY, as you read this article, the Long Island Solar Farm (LISF) is generating enough clean solar energy to power as many as 4,500 homes for the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA).

Construction of the LISF at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) began in the fall of 2010 and officially concluded this month when the array began commercial operation. LIPA hosted a formal commissioning ceremony today, November 18.

LISF is the largest solar power plant in the eastern United States. It sits atop nearly 200 acres at the southeast end of the Laboratory site and consists of 164,000 solar panels that provide LIPA with up to 32 megawatts of alternating current electricity.

Some of the 164,000 solar panels that make up the Long Island Solar Farm.

The LISF was developed by BP Solar and is privately owned, however, BNL will have access to data from the array as a condition of the easement agreement granted by DOE for use of the land. So as the solar panels at LISF are now collecting energy from the sun, researchers at Brookhaven are busy installing sensors and imagers to collect large amounts of data from LISF systems. The data will be used by researchers at the Lab and across the country to address the key issues facing deployment of large-scale solar power plants.

I'm about to enter the well-worn, vegetation-free (read: tick-free) pathway that cuts through the forest near my dorm. I'm about two steps down the trail when I hear a screech from somewhere in the canopy overhead. It's not the full-out war cry of a red-tailed hawk -- the sound we've been trained by television to expect from the beak of every bird of prey -- but it definitely sounds like a raptor. On my honor as a naturalist, I must investigate.

I can't spot the bird, but it continues making furtive, rasping calls, as though taunting me to step off the trail to find it. It's moving further into the woods. I look at the edge of the forest. White-tailed deer have eliminated most of the undergrowth, but there's still enough low vegetation to make a haven for ticks. I shouldn't.

Still, I think, I'll be careful -- just a few steps, and I'll check myself for any unwanted hangers-on in just a moment.

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed just such a technique: They've fabricated a transparent chemical reactor vessel that allows x-rays to pass through and capture the chemical changes as they take place.

They recently used this real-time reaction monitoring setup to study the synthesis of lithium iron phosphate and pinpoint the best conditions for producing a defect-free material for rechargeable batteries.

Jason Graetz, a materials scientist and leader of Brookhaven's energy storage group, explains the benefits this way:

Generally we make battery materials in a stainless steel reactor. There's no window, no way to see the reaction -- we just see what goes in and what comes out. So we designed a reactor made out of a glass capillary and, using synchrotron x-ray diffraction, we can not only probe the precursors -- the initial parts of the reaction -- but we can also track what happens as the reaction takes place.

With gasoline prices still hovering near $4 per gallon, scientists at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) are helping to develop electric vehicles capable of driving hundreds of miles on a single charge. A new compound of five tin atoms and one iron atom (FeSn5) created at the CFN is another development along the road to higher capacity lithium-ion batteries for those vehicles of the future.

Compared to other types of rechargeable batteries, lithium-ion batteries weigh less, can store more electricity for longer periods of time, and can handle more cycles of use and recharging. They are used in some electric cars today, but are not yet powerful enough to compete with cars that can travel 300-400 miles on a single tank of gasoline.

Lithium-ion batteries provide energy as electricity flows from an anode to the device being powered and then back to the battery's cathode. One way researchers compare batteries with different components is by examining theoretical capacities -- how much charge a battery can store theoretically in ideal conditions, and practical capacities -- how much charge a battery can store in real-world conditions that are more similar to everyday use.

Our team found that the practical capacity for anodes of FeSn5 was 100 percent higher than the ideal capacity for anodes used in conventional lithium-ion batteries.

On Saturday, September 10, I rode into Brookhaven National Laboratory for the first time. Within two hours, I was watching a handful of white-tailed deer on a strip of grass near the Princeton Avenue gate.

I'm a new intern in the Lab's Media & Communications Office, fresh from MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, here to report on all of the fascinating physics, chemistry, and energy research taking place on the Lab's 5,300-acre site.

Since that first day, I've seen groundhogs (also known as woodchucks), gray squirrels, turkeys, more deer, blue jays, robins, geese (so many geese), and a mouse. I've heard a handful of birds singing that I don't recognize off-hand. Not to mention the many insects and other invertebrates which defy quick and easy identification.

I'd heard from my friend and colleague (and former intern) Emily Ruppel that BNL is chock-a-block full of wildlife. One time I asked her if I would enjoy living at Brookhaven. "There are turkeys outside my window," was her response. Yet I am still impressed by how many animals there are wandering around campus.

Neutrinos are downright weird!

Produced in prodigious numbers in the sun, supernovae, nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, neutrinos are extremely hard to detect because they hardly interact with other material at all.

If we think about photons from the sun hitting blacktop during the summer, it is quite obvious that they interact and that their energy is absorbed by the blacktop (making it hot to the touch).

But even though 10s of billions of neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of that blacktop per second, most of them do not interact. In fact most pass through the Earth and through much of the universe without interacting with anything.

In order to study these mysterious particles, we need large detectors, and we have to reduce backgrounds from cosmic rays by placing those detectors deep underground.

Under a mountain in southern China, a new experiment is trying to answer key questions about neutrinos and their impact on the world around us. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment started taking data this month, recording interactions of antineutrinos, a neutrino's counterpart with the same mass and opposite spin, as they travel away from powerful reactors of the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group.

But before I explain Daya Bay in more detail, let me first provide a little background.

The video shows a technique called acoustic drop ejection (ADE) - an idea based on sending ultrasonic waves near the surface of a liquid to eject very small droplets. First demonstrated in the early 1920s, ADE is now being used by researchers to help them study extremely small biological molecules - like proteins and viruses - with x-rays at machines like Brookhaven's future National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II).

NSLS-II's bright x-ray beams will enable scientists to reveal the atomic arrangement of increasingly smaller biological crystals - structures comprised of many copies of a particular molecule. But as a crystal's size decreases, it becomes harder for scientists to position it in the line of x-ray fire. To address this technological gap, scientists from Brookhaven and Labcyte, Inc. used ADE to launch very small droplets (2.5 nanoliters) containing even smaller biological crystals through the air and to a mounting mesh.

They found that the fragile microcrystals, which are nearly impossible to see even with powerful microscopes, were unharmed by the technique, paving the way for more studies of this kind. Their results were recently published in the journal, Biochemistry.

You can read more here.

With intense beams of x-rays at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), a team of researchers is using hair samples collected from the decomposed bodies of two 15th century Italian royalty to determine how they really died.

The subjects: Ferdinand II (1467-1496)* and Isabella (1470-1524) of Aragon, a medieval kingdom of what is now modern Spain.

Ferdinand was once the king of Naples. His death followed a spat with recurrent fever, malaise, fatigue, and bloody diarrhea.

Isabella, the Princess of Naples and Duchess of Milan is thought by some to be the subject of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. She suffered from recurrent fevers, malaise, and died with dropsy, a general swelling of the body.

There's a common link between the Aragonese's late lives: both were treated with mercury, a cure-all skin disease remedy of the 15th century used to care for everything from itch to ulcers. It's also a neurotoxin that's especially harmful to the nervous system.

Historical accounts suggest that Ferdinand was using the heavy metal to treat syphilis. And based on Isabella's blackened teeth, researchers can tell that she also received mercury treatment.

But were they exposed to enough mercury to kill them?

After studying clouds and climate in Oklahoma during tornado season and storms atop Colorado mountaintops, a group of atmospheric scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory will soon be helping to sample the skies over India.

We've been asked to share our expertise on conducting ground and aircraft field campaigns, and have outfitted two mobile laboratories with equipment to be deployed during the Ganges Valley Aerosol eXperiment (GVAX), a nine-month field study aimed at researching how aerosols -- small particles like dust and soot in the air -- affect the formation of clouds and amounts of rainfall. Findings from the study, conducted by the Department of Energy's (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, will be used to improve computer models that simulate Earth's climate.

Peter Daum, chair of Brookhaven's environmental sciences department, has been advising the lead program scientist, Rao Kotamarthi, of Argonne National Laboratory, on aircraft operations for the study. Daum will also be visiting sites in India later this week to talk with our counterparts there about strategies for deploying the Indian research aircraft.

Then, this summer, during the peak time of aerosol formation in the Northeast, we'll get a chance to test out and fine-tune the mobile research units here at Brookhaven before they are deployed to India later in the fall.

Just about six months after site preparation work began in November, the farm is now more than halfway complete. To date, workers have mounted nearly 90,000 of the 164,000 solar panels that will make up the array and have installed 4,600 of the 6,800 racks that hold the panels in place and tilt them toward the sun.

In addition to providing power for Long Island and New York State, the solar farm will help researchers address many of the challenges facing large-scale, grid-connected solar plants. Brookhaven scientists will use data from the farm to study the effect of northeastern weather - not always the sunniest - on power output. In addition, a small plot of the array also will be used by Brookhaven scientists to test new solar technologies.

These crystal structures -- produced at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven Lab and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France -- unravel a complex choreography of protein-protein interactions that will aid in the design of new antibacterial drugs. Finding ways to interfere with pili formation could help thwart urinary tract infections, which affect millions of women and men around the world each year.

Two teams of scientists -- one at Brookhaven and Stony Brook University, and another at Washington University School of Medicine and University College London -- used a range of imaging techniques and computer modeling to produce the most complete picture yet of the pore-like transporter protein complex in the act of secreting sticky-ended pili. The research reveals two binding sites for pili subunits on this transporter protein, and details of how these sites work together to recruit, assemble, and transport pili components from the microbe cell's interior to its outer surface.

As earthwork takes place on the NSLS-II construction site, which housed part of the U.S. Army's Camp Upton in the World War I and II era, artifacts ranging from rusted horseshoes to nearly 100-year-old pieces of newspaper are being dug up.

One of the most recent finds is a large piece of painted concrete rock thought to have been part of a floor in a warehouse used in the army base in the 1940s. The rock, which has a hand-drawn emblem of a bugle, the notation "Company G," and the words "Baptized by Fire," was linked with the 14th regiment, known as the "Fighting Fourteenth" and the "Red-legged Devils" from Brooklyn. The second wave of American troops sent to France in WWI, including soldiers from Camp Upton, received their last bit of training just behind allied lines and were subject to enemy fire. This may be why the regiment adopted "Baptized by Fire" as their motto.

Construction workers also recently discovered a WWII dog tag that belonged to a soldier who likely passed through Camp Upton on his way to England after his basic training concluded at Fort Oglethorpe, GA, in 1943. By 1945, WWII had ended and Camp Upton was officially declared surplus. Two years later, Brookhaven National Laboratory was born.