The world’s largest particle accelerator is back in business. Today, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometer ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV), marking the conclusion of a three year hiatus for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work.

The work was done so that it can operate at an even higher energy and deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments but high-energy collisions still months away. The beams circulated today were a test at injection energy and contained a small number of protons.

 Solar power has potential but a crippling weakness that has meant despite trillions of dollars in subsidies and continuing mandates, it has not made a dent in use of conventional energy; it is not on demand and batteries are expensive and going to do more harm to the future than natural gas.

The solar energy system MOST – Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage Systems - is starting small but the concept of a specially designed molecule that changes shape when it comes into contact with sunlight scaled to operational sizes might mean real solar farms in remote places that provide electricity as well as conventional energy.

Water has varied in temperature for as long as water has existed and it seems evolution has provided coral reefs a recovery mechanism after variation results in 'bleaching' - when corals expel algae and turn white. It can have some impact beyond algae because about 275 million people live near a coral reef and they can be tourist attractions and help support fishing industries.

In 2018, two years after the government protected Chagos Archipelago underwent bleaching, the reef coral cover and carbonate production were down by more than 70 percent. Yet by last year, they were found to have rebounded nicely. 

South-East Asia is a substantial consumer of rice but also accounts for about 40 percent of international rice exports. Before population plateaus some time after 2050, and as globalization makes the world more prosperous, there will likely be 18 percent higher demand for rice in the region.

Bad dietary habits start young, as do most bad habits, from smoking to drug use. Good habits tend to be the same. It is known that movement on a regular basis keeps kids healthy but a new study found that physical fitness is also linked to concentration and health-related quality of life for primary school pupils.

Though activists will highlight mass shootings as a gun problem rather than a criminal act, as in a Sacramento, California shooting a few days ago, legal California gun ownership has had an inverse relationship to crime and deaths. More guns than ever are owned but there are fewer gun deaths per capita.