Higgs Boson collider closes for revamp

GENEVA (AFP) - The particle collider that gave scientists a glimpse of what may be the Higgs Boson shut down Thursday for a two-year revamp that will allow it to pursue the quest with renewed vigour.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), straddling the border between France and Switzerland, has been working non-stop for three years to find the elusive "God Particle". The boson is theorised to explain the mysteries of mass.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the collider, said its crew began winding down the vast facility just after 7:00 am (0600 GMT) on Thursday. It is due to go completely offline on Saturday. "We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC's first three years," CERN's director general, Rolf Heuer, said in a statement.

"The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket." The LHC smashes invisible particles together to better understand the micro-moment after the creation of our Universe some 14 billion years ago.

British physicist Peter Higgs theorised in 1964 that the boson could be what gave mass to matter as the Universe cooled after the Big Bang.

Located in a 26.6-kilometre (16.5-mile) circular tunnel, the LHC was the scene of an extraordinary discovery announced in July 2012.

CERN's scientists said they were 99.9 percent certain they had found the Higgs Boson, an invisible particle without which, theorists say, humans and all the other joined-up atoms in the Universe would not exist.

At a cost of up to 50 million Swiss francs (40 million euros/$54 million), the upgrade will boost the level of energy at which the LHC smashes protons together. This is necessary to confirm definitively that its particle is the elusive Higgs, and allow the LHC to probe new dimensions such as supersymmetry and dark matter.

The LHC is due to be back online by 2015, but CERN will not be idle during the shutdown.

Its scientists have to sift through a vast mountain of data, equivalent to 700 years of full HD-quality movies.  

New owl species discovered in Indonesia (F14d)

JAKARTA (AFP) - Researchers in Indonesia unwittingly identified a new species of owl believed to be unique to the country, raising hopes of further new bird discoveries, a scientist said Thursday.

The brown-and-white Rinjani Scops owl was first spotted in 2003 on the island of Lombok, while researchers were looking for another nocturnal bird. It was formally identified by four scientists Wednesday in the online "Plos One" journal.

Prior to that, the bird had been mistaken for the related Moluccan Scops owl, found in the Maluku islands in central Indonesia. "Ornithologists have long patted themselves on the back, believing that the taxonomy of birds was almost complete," researcher George Sangster from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, told AFP.

"Our study shows that even after more than 250 years of taxonomic research, we can still find new species, even of birds."

Sangster discovered the bird days before another researcher, Ben King made the same discovery independently when both were on the island to collect sounds of large-tailed Nightjars.

They noticed the owl's songs were "completely different" from the Moluccan Scops owl.

He said further research should be carried out on the nearby island of Sumbawa to verify if the bird was unique to Lombok. Ornithologists have often overlooked Lombok during field work in the region, believing there were no endemic bird species there, Sangster said.

Sangster has called for more research on birds in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of around 17,000 islands that he calls "a treasure trove for taxonomists".