Hey there science fans! It is the July, and that means it is Summer, which means I get to see nice sunny days out the window of my lonesome garret, which is always nice. I love sunshine, despite the fact that it inevitably comes with heat, which makes me ill and in pain.

But still, like a lot of people, sunshine and blue skies just seem to perk me up a little. So as long as I stay well hydrated, I am going to enjoy the summer views.

It is a big big week in science, what with the Higgs Boson spotted at last, which means the Standard Model survives, and a lot of news types have to do their best to look like they understand what the hell the whole thing is all about.

I don’t claimed to really get it. Theoretical physics left me behind a long time ago. But what the hell, we will talk about it anyhow.

But first, a fun little scientific curiosity courtesy YouTube.

Pretty weird huh? The big egg is the size of a medium potato, and has a normal sized egg inside! I love the kids going “weeeeeeeird!”. And I am with the mother. That poor bird. Passing that thing must have been an all day cluck.

I figure an egg got stuck inside, and the only thing Miss Hen’s body could do to get rid of it was form another egg around it.

And just think, in more ignorant times, people would have been freaking out about this monster egg and possibly burning people at the stake over it.

Now, we just put it up on YouTube and go “Wow. Weird. ”

Next comes a story that I knew I had to share simply from the idea alone : a dark matter detector made of DNA.

I mean, how marvelously Lovecraftian is that? Dark matter! Living matter! The two shall combine and bring about the End of Days! And lots of goopy tentacle stuff will squish about! Mua ha ha!

The actual science is a tad beyond me, but the idea is that if this dark energy/matter stuff is all around us, then the Earth moving through it must push it forward like a ship creating a bow wave in front of it, and if they hang growing strands of DNA from nice dense gold atoms, when the dark matter hits the gold atom, the DNA will fall off, and they will be able to then sequence the DNA and figure out when it got knocked off.

All very clever, if you ask me. I love the fact that we have come to the point when we realize that we know, definitively, mathematically, that we have no idea whatsoever what the majority of the universe is made out of, or even what it is.

That sort of thing just makes me giddy with joy. Such a marvelous mystery! And what a marvelous humbling of our scientific hubris.

And speaking of scientific humility, a rather humbling and embarrassing story has emerged from Japan, where it has been revealed that a Japanese anesthesiologist completely faked 172 papers.

And not just for fun, either. On the strength of these completely bogus papers, he got a professorship, public funds, speaking engagements, and even had the gall to apply for a Japan Science Prize based on his entirely fictional work.

He made up patients. He forged the signatures of other scientists. He created entire case histories out of thin air. And he got away with it one hundred and seventy two times.

That is the real scandal. It is not as bad as it sounds, because he was smart enough to fake really boring, marginal research that has no real impact on the field, which is how he got away with it for so long. The world of scientific academia works on the “publish or perish” rule, and so every professor is trying to get their studies published, but there are only so many journals (and judges) to go around, so only the really important seeming research gets the thorough scrutiny that, in theory, all of it should.

This creates the inefficiency that someone like the person in question, Yoshitaka Fujii, can exploit in order to build a fairly mediocre academic career based on bogus science.

It is more embarrassing than damaging, and I have to admit that, while the scientist in me wants to box Yoshitaka Fujii’s ears soundly for muddying the waters with his garbage, the humorist in me finds the whole thing pretty funny.

Sad, but funny.

Well, I have put it off for long enough. Let’s talk Higgs Boson, shall we?

The news story is that they have found it, or at least, what is probably it, or something like it.

See, it is already a hard story to tell.

Anyhow, the idea is that the Higgs Boson would be the elementary particle of mass. Without it, nothing would have mass, everything would be moving at the speed of light all the time, there would be no matter, and basically the Big Bang would have changed nothing.

So far so good. And the reason finding the good old HB is such a big deal is that it was the last elementary particle which had been predicted by what is known as the Standard Model of physics but not actually observed.

The tricky bit was that it took building the Large Hadron Collider (which took fifteen years and billions of dollars) and doing millions of collisions a second for months and months just to get enough data to draw some kind of conclusion.

So, now we have it. The Higg Boson, found. The Standard Model works, and a lot of fanciful and attractive (but silly) alternate theories bite the dust.

What does this mean for the future? heck if I know. But if we know what gives things mass now, who knows. Maybe we could block it, create a massless space ship, and be able to travel at light speed without acquiring infinite mass?

Or maybe it will just lead to a better dishwasher soap. Who knows?

And that is the news this week, folks.