Dept News

Coronavirus diagnostics currently require centralised facilities and collection/distribution of swabs and results are ‘next day’. A new diagnostic tool being developed by the University of Warwick and its partner Iceni Diagnostics may allow on-the-spot detection of Coronavirus infection, without facilities using a simple disposal device.

A Higgs boson matching that predicted in the Standard Model was found in 2012. However, many theories such as string theory, which attempts to unite quantum mechanics and gravity, tells us there should be at least four more. ATLAS has just published a search for a second Higgs boson, with a mass between 2 and 20 times that of the first, decaying to pairs of tau leptons. In many models this search is the most sensitive yet - but still no evidence for another Higgs boson is found.

X-ray analysis of artefacts from Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, sheds new light on their construction and conservation. The team included Emeritus Prof Mark Dowsett, his partners in Ghent and used XRD facilities in the Warwick RTP as well as the XMaS beamline. The paper is published in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, DOI: /10.1107/S1600577520001812

On April 24th, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched onboard the space shuttle Discovery, and was deployed a day later into an orbit that takes it around the Earth once every 96 minutes. Located above the Earth's blurred atmosphere, Hubble has been taking countless stunningly beautiful pictures of planets, stars and galaxies that have kept us breathlessly admiring the beauty of space for the past three decades. Warwick is among Europe's most active Hubble users, and is celebrating this birthday.