A new experiment may have found the first direct evidence of dark matter particles, a discovery that could begin to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Theorists believe that dark matter, made up of of weakly-interacting massive particles, composes 23 percent of the universe, but no one has ever directly detected one of these WIMPs.

Now, physicists have announced they’ve spotted electrons with just about the amount of energy they would have expected to be made by a particular kind of WIMP entering the visible world.

John Wefel of Louisiana State University and colleagues report in Nature Wednesday that they could have detected “Kaluza-Klein” electron-positron pairs resulting from the annihilation of these WIMPS.

The KK particles are predicted by multiple-dimension theories of the universe and have long-been a leading candidate as the substance of dark matter. The new discovery then, if confirmed, would provide evidence that the fabric of space-time has many “compact” dimensions beyond the four that humans perceive.

Full Story: Wired

[Read more →]

Late-night viewing of some “morphing UFO” footage has brought me back to a concept that’s always fascinated me: a Universe swarming with nano-scale ET intelligence.  This could mean anything from tiny spaceships, to Earth itself being a high-tech, alien-scripted “stage” where what we perceive as dead matter is anything but.

“The tiny probes I’m talking about will be so inconspicuous that it’s no surprise that we haven’t come across one. It’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices.”

That’s Paul Davies, thinking out loud along the same lines. (For more excellent brainfood from Davies, check out his recent 2007 Scientific American article, Are Aliens Among Us? — which is focused on microbial and nanoscale lifeforms, not shapeshifters posing as human.)

Although it remains mostly experimental and speculative, humans have worked out the mechnics of nanoscale engineering to a remarkable degree.  Decades ago, the concept of matter being able to change it’s fundamental properties instantly could only be attributed to magic and sorcery, but now it’s downright normal.  From the visionary Wil McCarthy’s classic article, Ultimate Alchemy:

“Electrons that are part of an atom will arrange themselves into orbitals, which constrain and define their positions around the positively charged nucleus. These orbitals, and the electrons that partially or completely fill them, are what determine the chemical properties of an atom - such as what other sorts of atoms it can react with, and how strongly.

This point bears repeating: The electrons trapped in a quantum dot will arrange themselves as though they were part of an atom, even though there’s no atomic nucleus for them to surround. Which atom they resemble depends on the number of excess electrons trapped inside. What’s more, the electrons in two adjacent quantum dots will interact just as they would in two real atoms placed at the equivalent distance, meaning the two dots can share electrons between them - they can form connections equivalent to chemical bonds. Not virtual or simulated bonds, but real ones.

Now we’ll take it a step further: Quantum dots needn’t be formed by etching blocks out of a quantum well. Instead, the electrons can be confined electrostatically by electrodes whose voltage can be varied on demand, like a miniature electric fence around a corral. In fact, this is the preferred method, since it permits the dots’ characteristics to be adjusted without any physical modification of the underlying material. We can pump electrons in and out simply by varying the voltage on the fence.

This type of nanostructure is called an artificial or designer atom, because it can be manipulated to resemble any atom on the periodic table. It’s not a science-fictional device, but a routine piece of experimental hardware used in laboratories throughout the world.“

Also check out the “free multimedia edition” of Wil McCarthy’s book-length (and excellent) expansion on this topic, Hacking Matter.

[Read more →]

On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple of days later, the estimate had stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done.
Now the outlook is even more bleak for eager physicists, who have already waited decades for the giant collider to come to fruition, after only a week of tantilizingly successful beam operations.

Full Story: Wired

[Read more →]

The world’s largest atom smasher’s first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.

The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.

Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.

“Oh, we made it through!” one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.

One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully-bringing raucous applause.

“First of all, I didn’t believe it,” said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.

“I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!”

“Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly,” said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.

Full Story: National Geographic

[Read more →]

The fact that I’m sitting here writing this and you’re sitting there reading it means that fears regarding the Large Hadron Colider (LHC) and the end of the world were a bit overblown. At 10:33 AM CET this morning, the first proton beam successfully completed a circuit of the entire LHC.

The LHC is the latest example of ‘Big Science,’ a multinational collaboration involving thousands of scientists from over 60 different nations. The largest particle accelerator ever built, scientists hope that data gathered from the LHC will nail down the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is theorized to be responsible the existence of mass.

Full Story: Ars Technica

If you’re still worried, you can keep tabs on the LHC with the Large Hadron Collider webcams at CERN.

Or, if that’s too much trouble, just keep checking hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

(Thanks to Bill Whitcomb for that last one)

[Read more →]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years. (27 photos total)

Full Story: Boston.com

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

[Read more →]

he year is 1908, and it’s just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.

That’s how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.

Today, June 30, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia–and after 100 years, scientists are still talking about it.

“If you want to start a conversation with anyone in the asteroid business all you have to say is Tunguska,” says Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It is the only entry of a large meteoroid we have in the modern era with first-hand accounts.”

Full Story: NASA

(via Hit and Run)

See also: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event and Tunguska event in fiction. The latter notes that the Tunguska Event was mentioned in Ghostbusters.

[Read more →]

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is - though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.
Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe.
A lot is at stake, and the matter distribution has become a source of impassioned debate between those who say the distribution is smooth and homogeneous and those who say it is hierarchically structured and clumpy, like a fractal.

Full Story: New Scientist

(via Kurzweil)

[Read more →]

Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.

Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.

But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”.

Full Story: BBC

[Read more →]

Cold fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first “discovered” the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which-if the results are real-could revolutionise the way we gather energy.

Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

Full Story: Gizmodo

[Read more →]

Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Full Story: Science Daily.

(Thanks Jasper!)

See also:

Does the Earth’s magnetic field cause suicides?

[Read more →]

“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It’s expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe’s existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven’t yet detected?

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?”

(via Cosmic Log- MSNBC)

(Related: Virtual tour of LHC via Popular Science Blog)

[Read more →]

A new study is challenging the long-standing notion that the whole solar system formed from the same raw materials.

Until now most scientists had believed that the inner solar system bodies-Mercury, Venus, Earth, its moon, and Mars-had the same composition as primitive meteorites called chondrites.

But, problematically, Earth’s chemistry doesn’t quite match.

Now, French researcher Guillaume Caro, from Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques in France, and his colleagues say that the makeup of Mars and the moon don’t correspond either.

It turns out the three bodies may be more similar to each other than the chondrite-rich asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter.

Full Story: National Geographic

[Read more →]

“It sounds like a headline from the spoof newspaper The Onion, but for physicists, this is actually an achievement: Two teams have stored nothing in a puff of gas and then retrieved it a split second later. Storing a strange form of vacuum builds on previous efforts in which researchers stopped light in its tracks (ScienceNOW, 22 January 2001) and may mark a significant step toward new quantum information and telecommunication technologies.

To stop light, researchers first shine an intense and continuous beam of laser light into a gas of atoms. That “control beam” tickles the atoms to allow a pulse of laser light of another wavelength to enter the gas. To trap the pulse, researchers turn off the control beam, which causes the pulse to imprint itself on the atoms. To release it again, they turn on the control laser.

So storing a vacuum might sound ridiculously simple: Follow the same procedure but leave out the pulse, and you store nothing. However, Alexander Lvovsky of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues and Mikio Kozuma of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his group have stored a very peculiar type of nothingness called a “squeezed vacuum.”

(via Science Now)

[Read more →]

More from TED, but considerably less grim:

Wired: Your entire career has been focused, in essence, on your rejection of string theory. What do you have against strings and extra dimensions?

Garrett Lisi: It’s more accurate to say my career (or, often, lack of one) has been focused on doing what I wanted. There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it’s great that some people want to work on it. But, to me, it seemed too disconnected from real particle physics and gravitation. It seemed unlikely that many of these string constructions could ever be experimentally tested, or connected up with the real world. So I set off to follow my own interests.

Full Story: Wired.

[Read more →]

I got this email from my good friend Jason this morning regarding a series of literary fantasy novels I posted about a short time ago, The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker:

You got read this on the Three Seas Forum, this cat Deadshade, is a phd physicist with a specialty in QM, his synopsis/interpretation is eloquent, elaborate, and utterly breathtaking. it essentially toches ground on alot of our dicussions on the subject/s, but his training and education enables him to elucidate in a way we were not!! check it out homes, if the link doesnt work just go to the forum and look for the topic “Inchoroi motivations & Quantum Mechanics”. I got so excited after reading it i had to print it off….

http://forum.three-seas.com/viewtopic.php?t=1287

For fans of the books, the post on the Three Seas forum will be of interest.

PS — SPOILER. While it doesn’t ruin the overall story, it’s a spoiler nonetheless.

[Read more →]

“Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that the puzzling dark matter and its counterpart dark energy may be more closely linked than was previously thought. Only 4% of the universe is made of known material - the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy. A British astrophysicist and Advanced Fellow of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, Dr Zhao points out, ‘Both dark matter and dark energy could be two faces of the same coin.

‘As astronomers gain understanding of the subtle effects of dark energy in galaxies in the future, we will solve the mystery of astronomical dark matter at the same time. Astronomers believe that both the universe and galaxies are held together by the gravitational attraction of a huge amount of unseen material, first noted by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, and now commonly referred to as dark matter. Dr Zhao reports that, “Dark energy has already revealed its presence by masking as dark matter 60 years ago if we accept that dark matter and dark energy are linked phenomena that share a common origin.’

(via PhysOrg)

(Related: virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider via Popular Science Blog)

[Read more →]

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

Full Story: New York Times

(via Hit and Run, who point out the similarities to Hindu cosmology).

If I read this correctly, this theory is seen more as a problem in the same vein as Schrodinger’s Cat - ie, not a “proof” that this is the way the universe is, but as evidence that current theories are insufficient. None the less, I’m sure it, like Schrodinger’s Cat, will be used “scientific evidence” of all sorts of nonsense.

[Read more →]

Received a link from Mr. Zaitsev’s comment on the “Who Speaks For Earth” post. Since it’s no longer on this page I thought I’d post the link to his earlier paper for those who would like to read it.

“There is a close interrelation between Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). For example, the answers to the questions “Where to search” and “Where to send” are equivalent, in that both require an identical selection from the same target star lists. Similar considerations lead to a strategy of time synchronization between sending and searching. Both SETI and METI use large reflectors. The concept of “magic frequencies” may be applicable to both SETI and METI. Efforts to understand an alien civilization’s Interstellar Messages (IMs), and efforts to compose our own IMs so they will be easily understood by unfamiliar Extraterrestrials, are mutually complementary. Furthermore, the METI-question: “How can we benefit from sending IMs, if a response may come only thousands of years later?” begs an equivalent SETI-question: “How can we benefit from searching, if it is impossible now to perceive the motivations and feelings of those who may have sent messages in the distant past?” A joint consideration of the theoretical and the practical aspects of both sending and searching for IMs, in the framework of a unified, disciplined scientific approach, can be quite fruitful. We seek to resolve the cultural disconnect between those who advocate sending interstellar messages, and others who anathematize those who would transmit.”

(Sending and Searching for Interstellar Messages)

(Link to other papers written by Alexander Zaitsev)

(Thanks to Alexander Zaitsev!)

[Read more →]

US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday.

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place.

[…]

Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.

Mr Kohler says: “One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.”

Full Story: Guardian.

(via Robot Wisdom)

[Read more →]

Luboš Motl, co-founder of matrix string theory, thinks Lisi is a hack.

String theory critic Peter Woit is skeptical but not dismissive, as is Ars Technica writer Chris Lee.

[Read more →]

See: Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.

(via Robot Wisdom).

[Read more →]

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. “Being poor sucks,” Lisi says. “It’s hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you’re trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.”

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Full Story: The Telegraph.

(via The Agitator).

[Read more →]

I usually roll my eyes when I read something about quantum theory and consciousness because, as this Telegraph article says:

The use of quantum mechanics this way has been controversial for two reasons: first, this highly mathematical theory is routinely abused by charlatans attempting to explain spooky paranormal phenomena; and, second, scientists cannot even agree on a definition of consciousness, undermining any quest to explain it.

But now, supposedly, someone’s come up with a non-bullshit theory:

Prof Manousakis has now laid out a theory of how a quantum effect could influence image flips in binocular rivalry studies and then, as good science demands, made some predictions.

His predictions are based on the rate that nerve cells fired in the brain. It turns out that the hallucinogenic drug LSD can slow the firing rate of brain cells and, when he factored this effect into his quantum model, he predicted the flip rates would change too.

This is precisely what subjects who took LSD reported in experiments conducted by another group. “My theory simply explains their findings in a simple way,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Prof Manousakis has now made more predictions that can be tested, based on what happens when subjects glance at the cube from time to time.

This, he believes, could shed light on how our awareness of the passage of time changes, depending on how busy we are, since his theory suggests that when a stimulus such as vision freezes, the perceived time slows to a standstill.

I don’t get it. I suppose I’ll have to either read the paper or find another article on it.

Full Story: The Telegraph.

(via Telarus).

[Read more →]

If there are oth­er un­iverses out there-as some sci­en­tists pro­pose-then one or more of them might be de­tect­a­ble, a new study sug­gests.

Such a find­ing, ‘while cur­rently spec­u­la­tive even in prin­ci­ple, and probably far-off in prac­tice, would surely con­sti­tute an ep­och­al dis­cov­ery,’ re­search­ers wrote in a pa­per de­tail­ing their stu­dy. The work ap­pears in the Sep­tem­ber is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Phys­i­cal Re­view D.

Cos­mol­o­gists gen­er­ally hold that even if oth­er un­iverses ex­ist, a con­tro­ver­sial idea it­self, they would­n’t be vis­i­ble, and that test­ing for their ex­istence would be hard at best.

A half-sky map of slight tem­per­a­ture vari­a­tions in the cos­mic mi­cro­wave back­ground ra­di­a­tion, thought to map struc­tures in the very ear­ly uni­verse. Blue stands for colder ar­eas; red for hot­ter re­gions, where it’s be­lieved mat­ter was dens­er. These dense re­gions are thought to have lat­er be­come ga­laxy-rich zones. The boxed ar­ea marks an un­u­su­al “cold spot” re­search­ers rec­og­nize in the da­ta. An un­ex­plained gi­ant cos­mic void has also been found in the di­rec­tion of that spot. In a new stu­dy, the­o­ret­i­cal phys­i­cists ar­gue that some sort of ir­reg­u­lar­ity in the mi­cro­wave back­ground, and in mat­ter dis­tri­bu­tion, might in­di­cate where our uni­verse once knocked in­to an­oth­er one. But the re­search­ers take no po­si­tion on wheth­er this cold spot could be the anom­a­ly they’re look­ing for. Much more work is needed, they say.

But the new stu­dy, by three sci­en­tists at the Un­ivers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz, pro­poses that neigh­bor­ing un­iverses might leave a vis­i­ble mark on our own-if, per­chance, they have knocked in­to it. For such a scar to be de­tect­a­ble, they add, the col­li­sion might have had to take place when our un­iverse was very young. Just how the bruise might look re­mains to be clar­i­fied, they say.

Full Story: World of Science.

(Thanks James!)

[Read more →]