Weekly Round-Up 21st April 2014

It may be a bank holiday, but its still a Monday, so its time for a bank holiday round-up of things that have caught my eye over the past week.

1. Europe's Sentinel Satellite Has Begun to Produce Images
   
   The European Space Agency's first satellite of the Sentinel project has beamed its first pictures back to earth. This marks the start of the project to provide detailed Earth observation of things as diverse as sea ice, oil spills and forests across the world. It's extremely exciting to see the ESA heading up this project and I hope it is a huge success.
2. Stem Cell Misconduct
   On a less inspiring note it has been reported that Haruko Obokata, the author of a seemingly ground breaking paper showing an easy method to make adult stem cells behave more like 'true' stem cells, has been found guilty of misconduct by her home institution. Obokata maintains that the underlying science of the paper is still sound, but at time of writing no external researcher has replicated the results of the paper.
3. The LHC Finds a New Form of Matter
   On a more positive note on 9th April CERN announced that the LHCb experiment had found a new form of matter, the Z(4430) particle. Z(4430), which has been predicted, observed and disputed, has been measured by the LHC in a paper available on the archive here (warning, not for the faint hearted!). The race is now on to determine is Z(4430) is the previously predicted tetraquark, a postulated particle formed of 4 quarks (where quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons).
4. Kepler Finds New Earth-like Planet
   Finally, we have some great news! NASAs space telescope Kepler has spied a new planet around the size of Earth orbiting a star in the Goldilocks region, described as an earth cousin. This means the planet is not too hot or not too cold, so it could have water present on the surface. While the orbit of the planet doesn't automatically mean that we will find life there it's the first recorded Earth cousin and hopefully we'll find an earth twin sometime soon.

And finally, as a follow up to floppy disc drives playing Tainted Love, I give you The Doctor Who Theme on 8 Floppy Drives. Enjoy!