Japanese particle physicist Toshihide Maskawa dies aged 81

The Japanese Nobel-prize-winning physicist Toshihide Maskawa has died aged 81. He shared the 2008 Nobel prize for work that led to the prediction of a new family of quarks.

Bracketing Paradoxes resolved

Bracketing Paradoxes (BPs) have been the subject of many different analyses since the 1970s. Each of these analyses have included BP-specific machinery to account for the apparent mismatch between the syntactico-semantic and morpho-phonological structures argued to be necessary for a complete analysis of this phenomenon. This article proposes that independently necessary operations and structures in the morpho-syntactic and phonological modules allow for an analysis of BPs that avoids postulating ad-hoc tools. Specifically, a system that includes cyclic (phasal) interpretation of the morpho-syntax in combination with a flat (CVCV) phonological framework avoids the emergence of paradoxical structures altogether. The discussion therefore includes both current morpho-syntactic and phonological analyses of each construction proposed to give rise to a BP; comparatives (unhappier), Level-ordering BPs (ungrammaticality), Phrasal BPs (modular grammarian), Compound BPs (particle physicist), Particle-verbs (podžëg ‘set fire’ [Russian]), and Reduplicated BPs (kwíita-kwíita ‘to pour a bit’ [Kihehe]). The proposal that a flat phonological framework is key in avoiding the paradoxical nature of BPs has implications for the correct structure of phonological representations generally.

Il linguaggio della scienza e la creazione della terminologia

This paper aims to present an historical point of view and precisely exposes the reasons why the need for terminology has developed and gradually increased, without it nullifying the ability of scientists to invent words with freedom and imagination, sometimes even taking inspiration from literature, such as particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel laureate 1969), who, for “quark”, was inspired by a passage from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Jean O’Brien Dickey (1945–2018)

This pioneer in space geodesy started as a particle physicist and went on to unravel relationships between Earth’s rotation and climate processes.

B-Meson Decay

Particle physicist Joaquim Matias analyzes recent results from the Large Hadron Collider—in particular, rare decays of B-mesons that suggest the violation of leptonic universality—for evidence of New Physics.