I'm admittedly somewhat late to the party here, and nowhere on this list will you find "taking a break for a few months because we broke it", but for all I know this is a nice rundown of the sorts of things we might expect to be discovered or confirmed by the LHC.
Scientists are studying what makes it possible for the extremely hard squid beak to be safely attached to a head and body with roughly the consistency of jello. Also in the comments we learn about bee spit.
Water bears can survive under the very very harshest of conditions. Also they are sort of cute and terrifying at the same time. And now they have made and survived (mostly) an unprotected near-earth orbit.
"Even human beings, Hugenholtz said, are subconsciously eavesdropping on chemical conversations between the inhabitants of our guts; this leads us to crave, say, potato chips when our microbes want salt. His eyes fell warily on his coffee. 'Do you think our stomach bacteria have trained us?'"
Full-resolution photo taken by the Hubble of a teeny-tiny segment of the sky, which is also of course huge beyond imagining. 11.3 days of exposure, et voila. Just over 100mb of space.
Best part? It's called the Argus II. Argus is the name of several mythic figures, including Argus Panoptes (the hundred-eyed giant), Odysseus' faithful dog, and both the shipwright of the Argo and also a shipwrecked traveller rescued by Jason.
Feature in the current issue of Seed tracing the curious effect of small amounts of Hydrogen Sulfide on a number of different living species to one of the 5 only partially explainable mass extinctions in the fossil record.
"SSPL represents over a million images from the Science Museum, the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television and the National Railway Museum."
"Additionally, sounds may be very faint. The amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animal voices and not overcharging the system by nearby calving icebergs. So please beware of sudden extreamely loud events."
"The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered."
Apparently Pluto is sort of a planet again - along with Ceres and Eris. A discussion of the possible criteria for planetary classification, with a summary of the implications of each approach.
A big cylinder launched into space as a platform for experimentation. Experiments happened on its surface, but it itself did not constitute an experiment.
