Best Of MetaFilter

The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN by Image Editor (cc by)

Without the Higgs boson, electrons (and quarks) would be massless. MeFi member physicsmatt helps explain it for the layman.

Life on a Grain of Sand 4 by adonofrio (cc by)

MeFi member Osrinith drops some science (ha!) on a recent study that looked at mutations to change bird flu into something humans could contract didn't work out in the way we thought it might, and how ultimately transmission likely happened through natural means:

What this paper shows is something that's been known for a long time in term of organism adaptation: we can't out-science Nature (yet). So if you were a bio-terrorist, and all you cared about was making the virus deadly, and didn't care anything about how it works, then all you'd have to do is buy some ferrets and a sick chicken.