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Reconstruction of a collision inside the CMS detector. (credit: Brookhaven National Lab)

Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics.

This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise.

The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.

With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, aka Windows 10 version 1607, released earlier this week, it's time to look forward to what's next.

Windows 10 has multiple release tracks to address the needs of its various customer types. The mainstream consumer release, the one that received the Anniversary Update on Tuesday, is dubbed the Current Branch (CB). The Current Branch for Business (CBB) trails the CB by several months, giving it greater time to bed in and receive another few rounds of bug fixing. Currently the CBB is using last year's November Update, version 1511. In about four months, Microsoft plans to bump CBB up to version 1607, putting both CB and CBB on the same major version.

The Long Term Servicing Branch, an Enterprise-only version that will receive security and critical issue support for 10 years, will also be updated. Currently, Windows 10 LTSB is essentially the Windows 10 RTM release with certain features such as the Edge browser and Windows Store permanently removed. On October 1, a new Windows 10 LTSB build will be released, starting another 10-year support window.

The opening screen. It's real. (credit: Hello Games)

Update, 10:40 p.m. EDT: Sony has responded to today's influx of No Man's Sky gameplay videos by essentially describing the on-disc version of the game as unfinished. The company's statement confirms that "a significant pre-release patch" will go live on Monday, August 8, and it will represent "a culmination of the studio’s day-1 aspirations."

"Sending out early copies of the game prior to the patch would not be a fair depiction of the game as it’s intended for consumers," the statement noted. Sony confirmed that any progress in the current version will be erased for players who patch the game—and that the review embargo will lift at midnight EDT of Tuesday morning.

Original report: Anticipation has been building around the space-exploration video game No Man's Sky for years. The game will finally launch on PlayStation 4 consoles this Tuesday and Windows PCs a few days later. But game-review outlets complained about the issue, and one report on those complaints, posted by review-aggregation site OpenCritic, alleged that review copies would not arrive until the game's launch date of August 9.

Ancient Chinese legends tell of a catastrophic flood along the Yellow River that led to the founding of the Xia dynasty, roughly 4,000 years ago. A legendary hero named Yu is said to have established the Xia dynasty after figuring out how to stop the flood waters by dredging, thus marking the dawn of Chinese civilization with a feat of landscape engineering. Now, a group of geoscientists and archaeologists in China has discovered that this flood actually happened.

The group's recently published findings in Science magazine explain how they found traces of this historic deluge. For more than a century, archaeologists have looked for evidence that could shed light on historical accounts of early Chinese civilization, such as those in first century BCE book Shiji (史記, traditionally translated as Records of the Grand Historian). Many accounts in the Shiji have turned out to be fairly accurate, especially when it came to the Shang dynasty that followed the Xia. Because the Shang dynasty civilization had writing, scientists have been able to verify the Shiji's accuracy from written records as well as material remains.

Reconstructing a flood

Much about the Xia dynasty, however, remains mysterious. Although this Bronze Age civilization was highly sophisticated, it did not use writing, and the only accounts we have of it come from stories of the great flood that Yu controlled. Now, scientists are certain there was a megaflood on the Yellow River in roughly 1900 BCE. Ancient Chinese historiographers placed the rise of the Xia dynasty during the 2200s BCE, so their dates were about 300 years off. But whenever it happened, the flood was so devastating and enormous that the archaeologists who discovered it have no doubt that it would have left a lasting impression on any civilization that experienced it.

It has now been nearly a decade since the HiRISE camera arrived in orbit around Mars and began taking high-resolution images of the Red Planet. Tucked aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE has a telescope aperture of 0.5 meter, making it the most powerful camera ever sent into deep space, with a maximum resolution of about 0.3 meter/pixel. This has allowed NASA to spy on its Curiosity and Opportunity rovers from space.

The camera was sent to Mars to help scientists identify regions of the Red Planet that would be good candidates for sample return missions (which NASA hopes to fly sometime in the 2020s), as well as possible landing sites for humans on Mars (no earlier than the late 2030s, for NASA). The instrument has also allowed scientists to characterize the surface of Mars and better understand its evolution over billions of years. Finally, the high-resolution images also helped dispel pareidolia such as the "face on Mars."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now completed about 50,000 orbits around Mars, taken nearly 250,000 images, and returned nearly 300 terabits of data about the planet to Earth. It has survived well past its original 5.5-year mission, which was supposed to end in late 2010.

(credit: California Stem Cell Agency)

On Thursday, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was revising the rules that govern its funding of stem cell research. The rules focus on cases where human stem cells are introduced into embryonic animals, creating an embryo that's a mixture of human and animal tissues. While the rules would lift a blanket moratorium on funding for this research, they'd also tighten the regulations that were in place prior to the moratorium.

An animal that's a mixture of two different organisms is called a chimaera. While they're named after mythological beasts, creating them is rather run-of-the-mill in modern research, where chimaeras between different mouse strains are an essential part of knocking out genes to study the effects. Human-mouse chimaeras are also quite common, as we inject human tumor cells into mice to study cancer and replace the mouse immune system with a human one in order to study diseases like AIDS.

Some stem cell research would be similar in nature. For example, if you wanted to determine if it is safe and effective to use stem cells to repair cardiac injury in humans, a reasonable first step would be to see what happens when you inject human stem cells into an adult mouse that has a damaged heart.