Short Science, June 2, 2013

A Russian spaceship took a shortcut to the International Space Station this past week, delivering a veteran cosmonaut, a rookie Italian astronaut and an American mother on her second flight to the outpost in less than six hours. The capsule slipped into its berthing port about 402 kilometres above the south Pacific Ocean. Typically the journey takes two days, but engineers have developed new flight procedures. Reuters

A British physicist and his Belgian colleague, who all but identified the mysterious "God particle" that holds the universe together, have won a prestigious Spanish prize. Peter Higgs, 84, who gave his name to the Higgs Boson, an elusive subatomic particle, and Francois Englert, 80, won the Prince of Asturias science prize. They won it jointly with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the huge underground particle-smashing chamber in Switzerland where experiments to track down the boson take place. The two scientists separately developed theories of the particle's existence in the 1960s. Higgs, a physics professor at Edinburgh University, theorised that the boson was what gave mass to matter as the universe cooled after the big bang. In July 2012, CERN announced that a particle likely to be the Higgs had been found. AFP