Japanese researchers showing that embryonic stem cells from mice could be coaxed into becoming viable egg cells was hailed as another breakthrough. Nine other pioneering achievements from 2012 which made it to the list included sequencing of the DNA blueprint of the Denisovans, an extinct species of human that lived alongside Neanderthals and the ancestors of people living today. That's where the Higgs comes in," Science news journalist Adrian Cho, who wrote about the discovery in the journal's latest issue, said. "Mass must somehow emerge from interactions of the otherwise mass-less particles themselves. Finding the Higgs topped the list of most important discoveries of 2012 released by Science, a prestigious scientific journal, the 'Daily Mail' reported. Scientists used the world's biggest atom smashing machine, the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, to track down the missing particle. Without the property of mass, the universe we live in could not exist. The boson is believed to give matter mass via an associated 'Higgs field' that permeates space. In July the team from the European nuclear research facility at Cern in Geneva announced the detection of a particle that fitted the description of the elusive Higgs. Scientists had been chasing the Higgs boson, nicknamed the ' God particle' for more than four decades. "What we are trying to do is establish whether this particle is really consistent with the Higgs boson, the particle we predict in our Standard Model, and not one of many Higgs bosons, or an impostor that looks like it but has a different origin," he said.LONDON: The capture of the most wanted sub-atomic particle in physics - Higgs boson - has topped the chart of the year's ten biggest scientific breakthroughs. Researchers wanted to clarify whether there was a single Higgs or many different Higgs particles, as predicted by various extensions of the Standard Model, Klute said. Preliminary studies showed the new particle's properties were consistent with those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model, but much more work was needed to confirm. READ ALSO: CERN offers prizes to develop algorithms to study Higgs boson In July 2012 researchers from the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), said they had observed a new particle in the mass region of 125 to 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). "Now we know that particles like electrons get their mass by coupling to the Higgs field, which is really exciting," Klute said. "This is an enormous breakthrough," said Markus Klute, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The findings confirm that the bosons decay to fermions - a group of particles that includes all leptons and quarks - as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. WASHINGTON: In a breakthrough, researchers at CERN have found the first evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions - a strong indication that the particle discovered in 2012 is the Higgs boson.
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