Physics News Update: http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2002/split/589-1.html
Meeting abstract: http://www.aps.org/meet/DAMOP02/baps/abs/S380016.html

6) How fit are the surviving fittest?
E. M. Rauch, H. Sayama, and Y. Bar-Yam
Physical Review Letters (Print issue: June 3, 2002)

Darwins great idea of survival of the fittest is well accepted in evolutionary circles but how do you define fittest? A common way is in terms of the number of surviving offspring per organism. However, models have shown that it is possible for a species with high reproduction rates to dominate in the short term but die out over a longer timescale (~200 generations) due to depletion of resources. This paper looks at a new definition of long-term fitness by taking into account that descendents may have different reproductive success than their ancestors. One conclusion is that different species are adapted to survive over different time scales and that this leads to a different range of surviving species than if selection worked only at one time scale.

Journal article: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v88/e228101

7) Evaporating black holes to pin down the Higgs boson
Y. Uehara
arXiv preprint server

A number of authors have suggested that microscopic black holes may be produced in the next generation of particle colliders currently being planned and built. Now one physicist has claimed that among the residues as the microscopic black holes evaporate should be Higgs bosons and that only one month of running time of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should be sufficient to determine one property, the spin, of the Higgs boson.

Preprint:

Contact: David Harris
harris@aps.org
301-209-3238
American Physical Society
15-May-2002