Scientists from Europe's CERN research center presented evidence last week for a particle that is likely the Higgs boson,¹ the last remaining elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

"With the laws of physics, you can get universes," said Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, during a panel discussion at the June 23 SETICon 2 science and science fiction conference in Santa Clara, California.¹ He argued that the universe could have begun as a result of a random "quantum mechanical fluctuation."¹

In 2002, the Biblical Archaeological Society and the Discovery Channel announced in Washington, D.C. that an ancient inscription on a 2,000-year-old ossuary with the inscribed Aramaic words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" was genuine. However, controversy and a lawsuit over the veracity of the inscription followed. That's all over now, and the verdicts are in.

by Jake Hebert, Ph.D., & Jason Lisle, Ph.D., *

The popular press recently announced the completed bonobo genome sequence. Bonobos are close relatives to chimpanzees. Unfortunately, much of the popular reporting misrepresented the data in the original Nature journal paper.¹