[en] The conventional view among scientists is that man-made global warming is real and potentially devastating. Climate physicist Richard Lindzen tells Edwin Cartlidge why he disagrees. Lindzen believes that even if man were indeed responsible for the vast majority of the warming observed in the last 100 years, he thinks there is still no cause for alarm. He claims the climate models used by the IPCC are far too sensitive to changes in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and estimates that the Earth will in fact warm up by perhaps just a few tenths of a degree over the next century. Needless to say, this is a conclusion that other climate researchers strongly disagree with. Certainly in public, Richard Lindzen is in the minority when it comes to his belief that man is not seriously heating up the Earth. (U.K.)

[en] It is possible that the Large Hadron Collider will not discover the Higgs boson. As Edwin Cartlidge finds out, this may be no bad thing. Over the next two to three years the physicists who have spent much of their careers designing and building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN expect to start seeing the fruits of their labour. They believe that the machine's enormously energetic -14 TeV - proton-proton collisions may generate the Higgs boson, a previously unobserved particle that is thought to endow all particles with mass. Discovering the Higgs would be the crowning achievement of the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that describes the fundamental particles of matter and their interactions. Such is the iconic status of the Higgs that it is often portrayed, particularly by the media, as the overriding objective of the LHC. But for many physicists this is not the case. While finding the Higgs would further confirm the immense predictive power of the Standard Model and would certainly justify the SwFr10bn (USD6.3bn) being spent on the LHC, it would not represent a new frontier in particle physics. What would really get researchers' pulses racing is the discovery of more exotic, and possibly completely unexpected, new particles. It is these particles that would point to new physics beyond the standard model - physics that might require the existence of the Higgs or might not. 'Not seeing a Higgs particle at the LHC would not be a disaster,' says Andrew Cohen, a particle physicist at Boston University in the US. 'In fact it might even be more interesting if we didn't see it.' Most physicists would guess that the LHC will discover the Higgs, but there are plenty who would be excited if it didn't turn up. (U.K.)

[en] What does the public think of radioactive waste? In this article the author reports on a recent event that gave members of the public the chance to have their say on this controversial issue. (UK)

[en] The discovery of the elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 was announced on december 30. 2015 by the UICPA (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry). This announcement was based on the conclusions of an expert group the Joint Working Party (JWP) and became soon polemical as some scientists began questioning the quality of the assessment and the fact that the UIPPA (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) had not been informed before the announcement. In order to avoid some future misunderstandings, the UICPA and the UIPPA have agreed on a procedure to implement officially any new element. In the new procedure, published in may 2018, the chairmen of UICPA and UIPPA have the possibility of examining the conclusions of the JWP before any announcement, they can also lead their own peer assessment and draw their own conclusions. (A.C.)

[en] Most particle physicists agree on the scientific case for a next-generation linear collider. It is just a question of persuading the politicians to foot the bill. (UK)

[en] Physicists are firing neutrinos hundreds of kilometres through the Earth's crust and then measuring their properties using enormous underground detectors. (U.K.)