Added 1 new A* page:How about a BBC science news roundup of nifty articles I didn't mention during the week?
- Higgs boson scientists win Nobel prize in physics - Peter Higgs doesn't have a cell phone and it took an old neighbor running across him as he walked along the street to tell him he (and Francois Englert, who worked separately) had won the Nobel for his 1964 hypothesis of what would come to be known as the Higgs boson, the thing that gives mass to matter--it wasn't until last year that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was able to generate particle collisions powerful enough to knock some Higgs particles free to be detected. The article also has an interesting discussion of how the Higgs field that permeates the universe works, comparing it to people in a room (representing bosons of the Higgs field) who glom on to a popular person (representing a massive particle) as it moves through the room, slowing its progress.
- Planck telescope set for switch-off - This orbiting ESA telescope sent up to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation has run out of helium coolant for its main instrument and is due to boost away from Earth, expel the rest of its coolant, and shut down. One tantalizing result that could still emerge from its recent data is detection of a certain type of polarization in CMB light: "B-Mode" polarization would in theory be the result of distortion by massive gravitational waves generated during the theorized rapid inflation of the newly born universe almost directly after the Big Bang, and would be a long-awaited substantiation of the widely accepted but never proven inflationary model.
- Russia replaces space agency chief Popovkin - Rumor has it this shakeup is due to setbacks the Russian space program experienced during its several years under Popovkin, including that videotaped massive rocket crash I mentioned back in July. We can hope that the unfortunate Popovkin will not, at least, be sent to Siberia.
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The pencils for today's page ^ were of the loose expressive type I used to struggle with trying to convert to ink, but it actually went pretty darn smoothly today; I tried a few new ways of handling the brush: instead of trying to follow the swooping pencil lines of the hair with a quick, long single stroke or two of the brush, in imitation of how I'd moved the pencil, I used more carefully considered, individual strokes to capture it in curved sections, which seemed to allow greater fidelity to the original sketch in terms of my aim, and prevented the brush from running dry mid-stroke and giving a broken line; and then I used the side of the brush to get a blockier stroke for sections like the lower left background and some of the black fill around the neck and shoulders, which gave a stronger look than making a lot of thin lines with the point of the brush would have. So some progress made there, I think.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out that the white ink spatters here were made with two different white inks: the yellow-colored spatters on her shoulder on the right are Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleed Proof White, a non-waterproof ink that tends to break apart into tiny droplets when flicked--good for stars and dust--and dries powdery; the purple-colored spatter to the left of her mouth is Deleter White 2, a thick, waterproof, latex-like ink that tends to whip out in strands--good for spittle and other stickier effects.
And no, Selenis will not be this foul-mouthed very frequently. : o
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