Creating a Differentiated Mathematics Classroom

Recognizing different mathematical learning styles and adapting differentiated teaching strategies can facilitate student learning

Using CMS Open Data in research – challenges and directions

The CMS experiment at CERN has released research-quality data from particle collisions at the LHC since 2014. Almost all data from the first LHC run in 2010–2012 with the corresponding simulated samples are now in the public domain, and several scientific studies have been performed using these data. This paper summarizes the available data and tools, reviews the challenges in using them in research, and discusses measures to improve their usability.Peer reviewe

Spatial scale mediates the effects of biodiversity on marine primary producers

Most studies evaluating the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning are conducted at a single location, limiting our understanding of how diversity-function relationships may change when measured across different spatial scales. We conducted a species-removal experiment at three sites nested in each of three regions along the rocky intertidal coastline of the Gulf of Maine, USA, to evaluate the potential for scale-dependent effects of species loss on the biomass of intertidal seaweed assemblages. We randomly assigned 50 plots in the mid-intertidal zone at each site to one of five treatments (n = 10 plots each): an unmanipulated control, a polyculture plot that contained our three target seaweed species, and three monoculture plots. We manipulated diversity by removing all non-target species from monoculture and polyculture plots, then removing additional biomass from polyculture plots, proportionate to species' relative abundances, so that the average amount removed from monoculture and polyculture plots was equivalent at each site. At the largest spatial scale, all sites considered together, after accounting for region and site nested within region seaweed diversity had consistent, positive effects on seaweed cover. Diverse polyculture plots always had higher cover than was predicted by the average performance of the component seaweed species and usually had higher cover than even the best-performing component species. Diversity effects weakened and became less consistent at smaller spatial scales, so that at the scale of individual sites, diverse polycultures only performed better than the average of monocultures ~40% of the time. Hence, our results indicate that weak and/or inconsistent biodiversity effects at the level of individual sites may scale up to stronger, more consistent effects at larger spatial scales. Quantitative summaries of biodiversity experiments conducted at the scale of individual sites do not capture this spatial aspect of biodiversity effects and may therefore underestimate the functional consequences of biodiversity loss

Unveiling hidden physics at the LHC

The field of particle physics is at the crossroads. The discovery of a Higgs-like boson completed the Standard Model (SM), but the lacking observation of convincing resonances Beyond the SM (BSM) offers no guidance for the future of particle physics. On the other hand, the motivation for New Physics has not diminished and is, in fact, reinforced by several striking anomalous results in many experiments. Here we summarise the status of the most significant anomalies, including the most recent results for the flavour anomalies, the multi-lepton anomalies at the LHC, the Higgs-like excess at around 96 GeV, and anomalies in neutrino physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and cosmic rays. While the LHC promises up to 4 ab of integrated luminosity and far-reaching physics programmes to unveil BSM physics, we consider the possibility that the latter could be tested with present data, but that systemic shortcomings of the experiments and their search strategies may preclude their discovery for several reasons, including: final states consisting in soft particles only, associated production processes, QCD-like final states, close-by SM resonances, and SUSY scenarios where no missing energy is produced. New search strategies could help to unveil the hidden BSM signatures, devised by making use of the CERN open data as a new testing ground. We discuss the CERN open data with its policies, challenges, and potential usefulness for the community. We showcase the example of the CMS collaboration, which is the only collaboration regularly releasing some of its data. We find it important to stress that individuals using public data for their own research does not imply competition with experimental efforts, but rather provides unique opportunities to give guidance for further BSM searches by the collaborations. Wide access to open data is paramount to fully exploit the LHCs potential.Acknowledgements We thank S. Kraml for useful comments. SK is supported by the Austrian Science Fund Elise-Richter grant project number V592-N27. ND acknowledges the support of Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India via the Ramanujan Fellowship SB/S2/RJN-070/2018. BB is supported by the ERC research grant NEO-NAT no. 669668. ZB is supported in part by the MIUR grant PRIN 2017X7X85K and in part by the SRNSF grant DI- 18-335. TH is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant No. DE-FG02-95ER40896. KC is supported in part by Taiwan Ministry of Sciences and Technology with grant number MoST- 110-2112-M-007-017-MY3. JT is supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement PHY-2019786 (The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, http://iaifi.org/), and by the U.S. DOE Office of High Energy Physics under grant number DE-SC0012567. A.C. and C.A.M. acknowledge financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Project No. PP00P2_176884. M.H. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Project No. PCEFP2_181117. MB is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under grant 396021762 – TRR 257. B.C. is supported by the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR) under the Grant No. PRIN 20172LNEEZ. A.P. is supported by the SpanishGovernment and ERDF funds from the EU Commission [grant FPA2017-84445-P] and by the Generalitat Valenciana [grant Prometeo/2017/053]. BM and XR are grateful for support from the South African Department of Science and Innovation through the SA-CERN programme and the National Research Foundation for various forms of support. MK was supported by MIUR (Italy) under a contract PRIN 2015P5SBHT and by INFN Sezione di Roma La Sapienza and partially supported by the ERC- 2010 DaMESyFla Grant Agreement Number: 267985. Contribution by MB is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1913923. DM acknowledges support by MIUR grant PRIN 2017L5W2PT and the INFN grant SESAMO. The work of BD is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-SC0017987. GB acknowledges the support of the National Research Foundation of South Africa via Thuthuka grant no. 117969

Unveiling hidden physics at the LHC

The field of particle physics is at the crossroads. The discovery of a Higgs-like boson completed the Standard Model (SM), but the lacking observation of convincing resonances Beyond the SM (BSM) offers no guidance for the future of particle physics. On the other hand, the motivation for New Physics has not diminished and is, in fact, reinforced by several striking anomalous results in many experiments. Here we summarise the status of the most significant anomalies, including the most recent results for the flavour anomalies, the multi-lepton anomalies at the LHC, the Higgs-like excess at around 96 GeV, and anomalies in neutrino physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and cosmic rays. While the LHC promises up to 4 ab−1 of integrated luminosity and far-reaching physics programmes to unveil BSM physics, we consider the possibility that the latter could be tested with present data, but that systemic shortcomings of the experiments and their search strategies may preclude their discovery for several reasons, including: final states consisting in soft particles only, associated production processes, QCD-like final states, close-by SM resonances, and SUSY scenarios where no missing energy is produced. New search strategies could help to unveil the hidden BSM signatures, devised by making use of the CERN open data as a new testing ground. We discuss the CERN open data with its policies, challenges, and potential usefulness for the community. We showcase the example of the CMS collaboration, which is the only collaboration regularly releasing some of its data. We find it important to stress that individuals using public data for their own research does not imply competition with experimental efforts, but rather provides unique opportunities to give guidance for further BSM searches by the collaborations. Wide access to open data is paramount to fully exploit the LHCs potential

Unveiling hidden physics at the LHC

The field of particle physics is at the crossroads. The discovery of a Higgs-like boson completed the Standard Model (SM), but the lacking observation of convincing resonances Beyond the SM (BSM) offers no guidance for the future of particle physics. On the other hand, the motivation for New Physics has not diminished and is, in fact, reinforced by several striking anomalous results in many experiments. Here we summarise the status of the most significant anomalies, including the most recent results for the flavour anomalies, the multi-lepton anomalies at the LHC, the Higgs-like excess at around 96 GeV, and anomalies in neutrino physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and cosmic rays. While the LHC promises up to 4 ab(-1) of integrated luminosity and far-reaching physics programmes to unveil BSM physics, we consider the possibility that the latter could be tested with present data, but that systemic shortcomings of the experiments and their search strategies may preclude their discovery for several reasons, including: final states consisting in soft particles only, associated production processes, QCD-like final states, close-by SM resonances, and SUSY scenarios where no missing energy is produced. New search strategies could help to unveil the hidden BSM signatures, devised by making use of the CERN open data as a new testing ground. We discuss the CERN open data with its policies, challenges, and potential usefulness for the community. We showcase the example of the CMS collaboration, which is the only collaboration regularly releasing some of its data. We find it important to stress that individuals using public data for their own research does not imply competition with experimental efforts, but rather provides unique opportunities to give guidance for further BSM searches by the collaborations. Wide access to open data is paramount to fully exploit the LHCs potential.Peer reviewe

Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics

The long noncoding RNA lncNB1 promotes tumorigenesis by interacting with ribosomal protein RPL35

The majority of patients with neuroblastoma due to MYCN oncogene amplification and consequent N-Myc oncoprotein over-expression die of the disease. Here our analyses of RNA sequencing data identify the long noncoding RNA lncNB1 as one of the transcripts most over-expressed in MYCN-amplified, compared with MYCN-non-amplified, human neuroblastoma cells and also the most over-expressed in neuroblastoma compared with all other cancers. lncNB1 binds to the ribosomal protein RPL35 to enhance E2F1 protein synthesis, leading to DEPDC1B gene transcription. The GTPase-activating protein DEPDC1B induces ERK protein phosphorylation and N-Myc protein stabilization. Importantly, lncNB1 knockdown abolishes neuroblastoma cell clonogenic capacity in vitro and leads to neuroblastoma tumor regression in mice, while high levels of lncNB1 and RPL35 in human neuroblastoma tissues predict poor patient prognosis. This study therefore identifies lncNB1 and its binding protein RPL35 as key factors for promoting E2F1 protein synthesis, N-Myc protein stability and N-Myc-driven oncogenesis, and as therapeutic targets

Reinterpretation of LHC Results for New Physics: Status and recommendations after Run 2

We report on the status of efforts to improve the reinterpretation of searches and measurements at the LHC in terms of models for new physics, in the context of the LHC Reinterpretation Forum. We detail current experimental offerings in direct searches for new particles, measurements, technical implementations and Open Data, and provide a set of recommendations for further improving the presentation of LHC results in order to better enable reinterpretation in the future. We also provide a brief description of existing software reinterpretation frameworks and recent global analyses of new physics that make use of the current data