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Forty years on from Chernobyl, the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident, wildlife is thriving in the exclusion zone. Wolves, foxes, lynx and elk have all increased in number without people around.
It illustrates how ecosystems can respond and still flourish when the usual rules do not apply.
In the 1970s, physicists drew up an elegant blueprint to explain our existence. The Standard Model classifies the tiny building blocks everything is made of and three of nature’s four fundamental forces. Despite its success, there are things the theory can’t explain: gravity, dark matter and dark energy. This meant the Standard Model must be incomplete.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built to find cracks in the Standard Model, but it has remained remarkably solid. Now, physicists seem to be on the verge of an amazing discovery. An experiment at the LHC appears to show particles behaving in a way that disagrees with the Standard Model. If the results stand up to scrutiny, it could lead researchers to a deeper understanding of the universe.
The idea that eating fruit could be driving lung cancer in young people sounds bizarre. A cancer researcher looks into this recent suggestion and recommends that we don’t change our eating habits.
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