With all the talk of the hunt for the increasingly elusive Higgs Boson, I ran across a great info graphic that makes some sense of the Standard Model. Click the image to make it much bigger and save it for future reference. It was produced by the Contemporary Physics Education Project and would make a great wall poster in classrooms. I’ve mentioned courses by the Teaching Company before and they have one on particle physics that is outstanding.

The graphic also mentions a website that is just superb for those who get their Leptons confused with their Baryons-ParticleAdventure.org is highly recommended! How a neutrino can be so small and so non interactive that it can pass through a light year thick slab of lead, (and likely hit nothing!) is still to me just an amazing fact of our Universe. If that doesn’t intrigue you to learn more, then you have no imagination!

VESTA FLYBY

NASA/JPL released this incredible video of the flyby of the Vesta asteroid on Friday. Really worth a view:

I did a little research on Vesta, and standing on the surface you would only weigh 2% of your weight on Earth! My 152 pounds would come in at 3.34 pounds on Vesta and if there were an atmosphere, you could reach escape velocity (350 meters/second) in a fast jet!