decay

PARIS: Six years after tracking down the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that confers mass on matter, physicists said Tuesday they have "at long last" witnessed it decaying into tiny bits called "bottom quarks". The predicted decay was observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) famous for the Nobel-capped discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012, Europe's CERN physics lab announced. "During the early preparations of the LHC, there were doubts on whether this observation could be achieved," the ATLAS scientific…

MEDELLÍN, Colombia: Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50 million people by 2050 -- as many as 700 million unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resource, more than 100 scientists warned Monday. Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the well-being of some 3.2 billion people -- 40 percent of the global population, they said in the first comprehensive assessment of land health. Land depletion threatens food security for all…