St. Patrick's Day Google Doodle Features Animated Dancers

Google is celebrating St. Patrick's Day with an animated homepage doodle that features six Irish dancers.
The dancers are outfitted in traditional Irish step dance costumes, each of which feature one letter from the Google logo. They are dancing in unison, including a high-flying jump.

Last year's St. Patrick's Day doodle channeled the Book of Kells, a 9th-century gospel manuscript. The Book of Kells, currently housed in the Old Library at Dublin's Trinity College, is believed to have been created around the year 800 in the monastery at Kells, County Meath after a Viking raid forced the Columban monks to abandon a monastery on the island of Iona, just off the west coast of Scotland.

Today's holiday, meanwhile, celebrates St. Patrick, who lived during the fifth century and is the patron saint and national apostle of Ireland. As noted by History.com, he is known for bringing Christianity to the people of Ireland, and his legend has taken on mythic proportions.

"Perhaps the most well known legend is that he explained the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) using the three leaves of a native Irish clover, the shamrock," History.com said.

Interestingly, however, the first St. Patrick's Day parade was actually held in the U.S. in 1762 in New York City, a tradition that continues today. This year's parade was held on Saturday, and featured Grand Marshal John E. Smith, the great-grandson of Al Smith, former New York governor

Higgs boson find may spell doom for universe

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.

The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said Monday, Feb. 18, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on one of the LHC's experiments.

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a new particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

To confirm the particle's identity for sure, more data are needed. But many scientists say they're betting it's the Higgs.

"This discovery to me was personally astounding," said I. Joseph Kroll, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who also works at the LHC. "To me, the Higgs was sort of, it might be there, it might not. The fact that it's there is really a tremendous accomplishment.



And finding the Higgs, if it's truly been found, not only confirms the theory about how particles get mass, but it allows scientists to make new calculations that weren't possible before the particle's properties were known.

For example, the mass of the new particle is about 126 billion electron volts, or about 126 times the mass of the proton. If that particle really is the Higgs, its mass turns out to be just about what's needed to make the universe fundamentally unstable, in a way that would cause it to end catastrophically in the far future.
That's because the Higgs field is thought to be everywhere, so it affects the vacuum of empty space-time in the universe.

"The mass of the Higgs is related to how stable the vacuum is," explained Christopher Hill, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It's right along the critical line. That could either be a cosmic coincidence, or it could be that there's some physics that's causing that. That's something new, which we didn't know before."

Google Animated Doodle Celebrates Copernicus' Birthday

Google may be at the center of the search universe, but today's Google Doodle celebrates a man who taught the world, "You're not at the center of the universe."

Born Feb. 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was a mathematician and astronomer, best known for his heliocentric model which placed the Sun, and not the earth, at the center of our cosmos.
Copernicus' book "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) is considered to be one of the most important works in the history of science, sparking the Copernican revolution and changing our view of the universe.

Today's Google Doodle is an animated view of the Copernican model of the universe, with the Sun at its center and other planets orbiting around it.

How do you like today's Doodle? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of Google

NASA: Alarming Water Loss in Middle East

An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study.

The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest loss of groundwater storage loss after India.

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About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water, including 1,000 wells in Iraq, and another fifth was due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs and soil drying up. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the decline, the study found.

"This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents," the authors wrote in the study, noting the declines were most obvious after a drought.

The study is the latest evidence of a worsening water crisis in the Middle East, where demands from growing populations, war and the worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come. Some like impoverished Yemen blame their water woes on the semi-arid conditions and the grinding poverty while the oil-rich Gulf faces water shortages mostly due to the economic boom that has created glistening cities out of the desert.

Russian meteor likely unconnected to asteroid flyby

A Russian meteor blast that has reportedly injured more than 500 people appears unconnected to the flyby Friday of an asteroid passing close to Earth, according to astronomers.

The 13-story-size asteroid, 2012 DA14, passes within 17,100 miles of Earth around 2:24 p.m. ET on Friday before heading off into space. The Russian meteor, likely about the size of a sports utility vehicle and weighing perhaps 11 tons, struck Russia's Chelyabinsk region, about 900 miles east of Moscow late Thursday, according to news reports.

"The Earth travels about a million miles in a day and these are two events separated by almost 24 hours, so it is unlikely they are connected," says asteroid expert Richard Binzel of MIT. Meteors the size of the Russian one hit Earth every few years, Binzel says, but land near inhabited places much less often. "We just have the incredible coincidence of this happening just before the asteroid flies by," Binzel says.

Further, the Russian meteor landed in the Northern hemisphere while Asteroid 2012 DA14 is approaching from the direction of the South Pole, arguing against a connection. The damage in Chelyabinsk, reportedly broken windows, was caused by the air pressure wave created when the meteor zoomed into the Earth's atmosphere at perhaps 33,000 mph.

"It's nice of Nature to give us the full spectrum of possibilities," Binzel says. Astronomers will want to recover whatever pieces of the Russian meteor remain for study in the lab. The space rocks are thought to be leftovers from the era of the Earth's formation.