They were chanting "Science! Science! Science!" and "NASA! NASA! NASA!" in Times Square last night, as the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars at about 1:30 am Eastern time.

The best parts are yet to come. As chemistry professor and blogger Matthew Hartings pointed out this morning, Curiosity is, fundamentally, a chemistry project. Curiosity will search for the chemical building blocks of life, it will study the make-up of the soil and atmosphere, it will look at planetary water cycles and the effects of cosmic radiation. The long-range goal, as you've probably picked up by now, is to put human beings on Mars—maybe by as soon as the 2030s. Curiosity is the chemistry that will help make that very ambitious sort of awesome possible.

We'll be staying tuned for cool stuff coming in from Curiosity. In the meantime, I wanted to point you toward some swell videos, photos, jokes, and essays that have turned up in the last nine hours.

First off, if you slept through the event or just want to relive the excitement, the video above captures the five minutes before and five minutes after Curiosity made landing. The actual touchdown happens about at about mark 5:30, and the first images come through at 7:30.

And, speaking of images ...

This teeny shot shows Curiosity and its trusty parachute landing on the Martian surface.

The Curiosity rover Twitter account posted this photo of the Martian surface (plus a wheel) last night.

Time magazine's Keith Wagstaff was in Times Square, reporting as the small, jaded, underwhelmed crowd slowly grew in both size and enthusiasm.

At 11:30pm EDT, when NASA started broadcasting coverage of the event, the crowd was thin and slightly underwhelmed. Many complained to me that the Toshiba Vision screen, dwarfed by a blinding Dunkin’ Donuts advertisement below it, was hard to see and that the only audio provided was through a smartphone app that seemed to be running a minute behind the visuals.

“NASA is a passing thing,” said Ben Brittain, an otherwise enthusiastic 19-year-old computer science student from the Rochester Institute for Technology. “I’m pretty sure this is going to be the last big thing NASA does.”

As the night, cool and wet thanks to a passing thunderstorm, went on, people began trickling in from every direction. ... Finally, 1:30am hit. Times Square was packed. People looked up intently with buds in their ears, listening to the back-and-forth chatter of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.

A cheer erupted. The rover’s first picture — a 256-pixel-by-256-pixel image of its own shadow against the Gale crater — was greeted with the hoots and applause normally reserved for winning touchdowns.

Philip Bump has a lovely essay over at Grist this morning, talking about the Olympics, Curiosity, human endeavor, and how very, very difficult it is to build something and have it work as perfectly as Curiosity did last night.

Jettisoning the carrier that moved it through open space, dropping its heat shield, then deploying a “sky crane” that would lay the car-sized rover on the surface of the planet before flying away. All of this had to happen in a seven minute window — without any contact with Earth.

It’s impossible to believe that it could work. That we could plan and build this nesting-doll piece of technology, launch it into space, land it in the spot we picked, and have it all still be working at the end. Fifty years ago, the idea of hitting Mars with anything, anywhere was pretty optimistic. One hundred years ago, leaving the atmosphere was an impossibility. But this was what we decided to do. Do the math, build it, throw it up there.

Meanwhile, on Earth, other bots were working less well as Scripps News Service managed to temporarily take down NASA's YouTube Curiosity footage via a spurious claim of copyright infringement. It's fixed now. But Motherboard's Alex Pasternack recorded the takedown notice for posterity.

YouTube’s system is also heavily biased in favor of claimants, and a system that is increasingly controlling of content that has serious educational or scientific value, or arguably falls under “fair use” provisions. Claims of fair use of video content are immaterial to the Content ID or DMCA takedown system. Creative remixes are easy targets, as are videos of teenagers singing Christmas songs. As I discovered last year, many of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s speeches are no longer available on YouTube thanks to automatic and manual copyright claims by the owner of King’s speeches, the British music giant EMI Publishing. This despite the fact that YouTube is still a haven for illegal and uncontested uploads of millions of hours of Hollywood and music material.

And because anyone can claim a YouTube video belongs to them, YouTube’s system allows cheaters to direct traffic (and ad revenue) to their uploads. (Some preferred companies, like Universal Music Group, can even block videos immediately, without filing a claim.)

In less serious news, NASA's Mission Activity lead on the Curiosity landing, Bobak Ferdowsi, has literally become an overnight Internet celebrity thanks to his multi-colored mohawk. You can see fan art of Ferdowsi at The Atlantic, or buzz over to the Tumblr that has already been created in his honor.

Personally, I think Ferdowsi needs to tour America's schools, promoting the awesomeness of space alongside Space-X's rocket scientist/1970s vice cop Kevin Brogan.

And speaking of awesome scientists: Check out this profile of the guy who will be driving Curiosity around. CNN's Elizabeth Landau interviews Scott Maxwell, who also drove Spirit and Opportunity:

The baby, of course, is the SUV-sized Curiosity, coming to Mars after years of planning and preparation. It's been more than eight months since it left Earth, and no one can be sure exactly how it will behave, says Maxwell.

Over dinner in Old Pasadena this week, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Kim Lichtenberg—a planetary scientist also working on the rover mission—playfully compared it to having a child, though neither has had children.

"We're all going to be kind of like new parents," Lichtenberg says.

"Watch it take its first steps," Maxwell adds.

Finally, a few links:
See more of the first images sent back by Curiosity at Wired
Check out NASA's official Curiosity page
Watch all the pre-landing videos on NASA JPL's UStream site
Xeni was at JPL last night, live tweeting on the official BoingBoing feed

Back in December, I told you that physicists at CERN thought that by this summer they might be able to say, once and for all, whether the Higgs Boson particle exists. As a quick reminder, here's how I described that particle in a post from last year:

You know that reality is like a Lego model, it's made up of smaller parts. We are pieced together out of atoms. Atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. (Quarks and electrons, as far as we know, are elementary particles, with nothing smaller inside.) When you're talking about the Higgs Boson, you're talking about the mass of these particles. Here's an imperfect analogy: A top quark, the most massive particle we know of, is like an elephant. An electron, on the other hand, is more like a mouse. And nobody knows for certain why those differences exist.

There is a theory, though. Back in the 1960s, a guy named Peter Higgs came up with the idea that all these particles exist in a field, and their mass is a reflection of how much they interact with that field. Heavy particles have a lot of interaction. Lighter particles are relatively standoffish. If this field exists, the Higgs Boson is the tiny thing it's made of.

So that's the Higgs Boson—what it (theoretically) is and why that matters. And now, scientists at CERN are saying that they might have found it. What's that mean? Basically, they found a new sub-atomic particle that seems to fit the theoretical description of what a Higgs Boson should be like. The New York Times reports that scientists are calling it the "Higgslike" particle for now.

Meanwhile, all across the Internet, science journalists and bloggers are alternately celebrating the discovery, skepticizing the details, and cringing at the overuse of the obnoxious moniker "God particle". Want to know more? Here are some great places to start:

• "We've observed a new particle. ... We have quite strong evidence that there's something there," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC's CMS experiment, said in the video, which was discovered by Science News on CERN's website. "So, to ascertain its properties is still going to take us a little bit of time." — Yesterday, MSNBC's Cosmic Blog wrote about a leaked video from CERN that presaged the announcement today.

• "The Higgs has long been a mixed blessing for particle physics. In the early 1990s, when physicists were pleading—ultimately in vain–with Congress not to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider, which was sucking up tax dollars faster than a black hole, the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman christened the Higgs “the God particle.” This is scientific hype at its most outrageous. If the Higgs is the “God Particle,” what should we call an even more fundamental particle, like a string? The Godhead Particle? The Mother of God Particle?" — At Scientific American blogs, John Horgan explains how the Higgs could screw physics funding. It's been spun as THE fundamental particle, but it's not really. And now, how do we convince governments to keep research going?

• "Is it the Higgs boson? That’s a surprisingly complicated question! The difficulty lies with our theories of fundamental particles: the Standard Model and its modifications (including supersymmetry). None of these theories provides a clear, precise prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson, and the mass ranges may overlap between different models. Some models predict the existence of more than one Higgs particle, so if any of those are true, then we have at best found a Higgs boson. And that doesn’t rule out the (slim) possibility that this discovery is a Higgs-mimic, a particle that acts kind of like the Higgs, but doesn’t play the same role. In other words, the work isn’t done." — Physicist and blogger Matthew Francis talks about whether this discovery is a big deal, how big a deal it might be, and why Higgs Bosons are so damn confusing.

• "Physicists said that they would probably be studying the new Higgs particle for years. Any deviations from the simplest version of the boson — and there are hints of some already — could open a gateway to new phenomena and deeper theories that answer questions left hanging by the Standard Model: What, for example, is the dark matter that provides the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies? And why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter?" — The New York Times covers the basics and what happens next.

• "...Other physicists are preparing for disappointment. That’s because scientists have been secretly hoping all along that, when they finally found the Higgs, it would be an interesting particle with unexpected behaviors — even somewhat unruly. A perfectly well-behaved Higgs leaves less room for new, exciting physics — the kind that theorists have been wishing would show up at the LHC." — Wired Science explains why finding a Higgs Boson isn't the end of the story.

• "Seminars proper start at 9am Geneva time (3am Eastern time, midnight Pacific time, 5pm Melbourne time). One from ATLAS, by Fabiola Giannoti, and one from CMS, by Joe Incandela. Then a press conference after. Remember what we’re looking for: how significant is the signal, do the two experiments agree with each other, does the rate agree with the Standard Model prediction, are different channels mutually consistent with each other." — Way early this morning, while most of us slept, physicist and blogger Sean Carroll was live-blogging the Higgs Boson announcement from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. His live-blog offers a lot of great analysis and research detail.

• "For many of us, the most shocking revelation to come out of CERN's Higgs boson announcement today was quite unrelated to the science itself. Rather, we were blown away by the fact that a team made up of some of the most undoubtedly brilliant people in the world believe that Comic Sans is an appropriate font for such a historic occasion." — The Verge on CERN's ongoing love affair with the much-reviled font Comic Sans. (They used the same font back in December.)

• "But for cosmologists, one of the most exciting things about the Higgs is that it seems to exist at all. The Higgs is a boson, which means that you can pack many of them into a single state, and therefore can be thought of as a field pervading all of space — photons, which make up the electromagnetic field, are also bosons. (This is in contrast to fermions, which cannot be brought into the same state and are thus more usefully thought of as individual particles of matter.) An even more precise categorisation of particles is via their spin: bosons can take on integer values (0, 1, 2, …) , and fermions half-integer values (1/2, 3/2, …). The known bosons, like the photons, have spin 1 and are known as vector particles. The Higgs, however, has spin 0, and is called a scalar." — Astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe talks about what a real-life Higgs Boson might mean for other branches of physics.

• Finally, Ph.D. Comics explains the Higgs Boson for those of you who are already too drunk on 4th of July beer to read a long article.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Got more Higgs Boson links you think people should be reading? Share 'em in the comments!