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GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter. Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit. If they are right,...

The largest physics experiment ever built is now testing the nature of reality. String theory, supersymmetry and other theories beyond the Standard Model are under scrutiny. More than 10,000 people have been involved. Total cost is nearing $10 billion. This, of course, is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which helped discover the Higgs Boson. Simultaneously, the ACME experiment, run by a team of less than 50, built for a few million dollars (and much, much smaller), has created a more precise test of these advanced theoeries. This experiment hinges on an extremely painstaking and precise method to picture the shape...

A new exotic particle has been hiding out amidst the gobs of data collected by the world's largest atom smasher, physicists have discovered. The new particle, called Ds3*, is a meson — a type of unstable particle made of one quark and one antiquark. Quarks are subatomic particles and are the most basic building blocks of matter that make up protons and neutrons. They're held together by the strong interaction, or strong force, that is one of the four fundamental forces in nature. (Electromagnetism, weak interaction and gravity are the other three.) No stable form of matter would exist without...

New research from the University of Western Australia reveals that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way is half as much as previously thought. Australian astronomers used a method developed almost 100 years ago to discover that the weight of dark matter in our own galaxy is 800,000,000,000 (or 8 x 1011) times the mass of the Sun. They probed the edge of the Milky Way, looking closely, for the first time, at the fringes of the galaxy about 5 million billion kilometers from Earth. Astrophysicist Dr Prajwal Kafle, from The University of Western Australia node of the...

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ model). What came next, said Rutherford, was ‘the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life’. Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as...

I home school a young girl. In years past, we have gone to the local air show and done such things as measure the tops and bottom of wings and rotos and figure the ratio or difference between the area of the top of the wing versus the bottom and estimated which wings had more lift than others. We measure how much area the wheels occupied on the ground and consulted with the crew chief what the tire pressure was and calculated the weight of the plane. In years past we were able to see F18s form a vapor cone...

Schrödinger's cat is the poster child for quantum weirdness. Now it has been immortalised in a portrait created by one of the theory's strangest consequences: quantum entanglement. These images were generated using a cat stencil and entangled photons. The really spooky part is that the photons used to generate the image never interacted with the stencil, while the photons that illuminated the stencil were never seen by the camera.

The Quantum Cheshire Cat: Can neutrons be located at a different place than their own spin? Jul 29, 2014 Enlarge The basic idea of the Quantum Cheshire Cat: In an interferometer, an object is separated from one if its properties -- like a cat, moving on a different path than its own grin. Credit: TU Vienna / Leon Filter The Cheshire Cat featured in Lewis Caroll's novel "Alice in Wonderland" is a remarkable creature: it disappears, leaving its grin behind. Can an object be separated from its properties? It is possible in the quantum world. In an experiment, neutrons travel...

Until yesterday, every physicist was laughing at this engine and its inventor, Roger Shawyer. It's called the EmDrive and everyone said it was impossible because it goes against classical mechanics. But the fact is that the quantum vacuum plasma thruster works and scientists can't explain why. Shawyer's engine is extremely light and simple. It provides a thrust by "bouncing microwaves around in a closed container." The microwaves are generated using electricity that can be provided by solar energy. No propellant is necessary, which means that this thrusters can work forever unless a hardware failure occurs. If real, this would be...

American Antigravity interviewed Eugene Podkletnov to discuss recent (2004 to 2013) experimental antigravity research in gravity modification and superconductors. For nearly two decades Dr. Podkletnov has been researching the link between gravitation and high-temperature superconductors, and just recently published the peer-review results of new experiments he’s conducted to measure the speed of a force-beam projected by a stationary superconducting apparatus he’s developed. Podkletnov is well-known for his experiments involving YBCO superconductors, which produced a gravity-shielding effect that was investigated by NASA and has been the subject of many peer-review papers. He describes continuing his experiments in this area, and indicates...

A hush-hush nuclear fusion project that's received $12 million from the U.S. Navy is now sharing what it calls encouraging results — and looking for private investment. For years, EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. has had to conduct its research into what's known as Polywell fusion outside public view because the Navy wanted it that way. Now the Navy is phasing out its funding, and EMC2 Fusion is planning a three-year, $30 million commercial research program to see if its unorthodox approach can provide a fast track to cheap nuclear fusion power. "The goal is, we want to get a set...

Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of...

Graphene trilayers can be stacked in two different configurations, which can occur naturally in the same flake. They are separated by a sharp boundary. (Image: Pablo San-Jose ICMM-CSI) A team of researchers has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, a finding that could lead to smaller and faster microprocessors.A University of Arizona-led team of physicists has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, more commonly known as pencil lead, with an electric field, an important step toward the possible use of graphene in microprocessors that would be smaller and faster than current, silicon-based technology.Graphene consists...

Nearly 90 years after Werner Heisenberg pioneered his uncertainty principle, a group of researchers from three countries has provided substantial new insight into this fundamental tenet of quantum physics with the first rigorous formulation supporting the uncertainty principle as Heisenberg envisioned it. In the Journal of Mathematical Physics, the researchers reports a new way of defining measurement errors that is applicable in the quantum domain and enables a precise characterization of the fundamental limits of the information accessible in quantum experiments. Quantum mechanics requires that we devise approximate joint measurements because the theory itself prohibits simultaneous ideal measurements of position...

Scientists at CERN have confirmed the existence of a new 'exotic' particle International team used the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) detector The particle was first detected in 2007 but it has only now been confirmed Dubbed Z(4430), the discovery challenges existing models of physics It may also indicate that a new type of neutron star, a quark star, existsIn the early 1930s, scientists were fairly confident they understood subatomic physics. That was until dozens of new elementary particles were discovered in the 1950s, forcing scientists to rewrite their models. Now a new particle, first detected in 2007 but not...

"It has an accuracy that's equivalent to about one second in 300 million years." - "If we've learned anything in the last 60 years of building atomic clocks, we've learned that every time we build a better clock, somebody comes up with a use for it that you couldn't have foreseen."

NOAH’S Ark would have floated — even with two of every animal on board, physicists have determined based on the weight of the beasts and the buoyancy of the boat. The students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester who came to this conclusion used the dimensions for the boat that were given in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, Noah is commanded to build an ark which is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high to house himself, his family and two of every species of animal. For the study,...

The American Physical Society (APS) has signalled a dramatic turnabout in its position on "climate change" by appointing three notorious climate skeptics to its panel on public affairs (POPA). If that list looks impressive, perhaps it's worth reminding ourselves of Hal Lewis's theory as to why so many scientific institutions have fallen for the scam. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if...

Imagine that something is happening before your eyes, but you can’t see it — not because you have eye trouble or because it’s a microscopic event, but because of something like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Two years ago, researchers from Cornell University made that fantasy come true, on a tiny scale. They not only hid the existence of a brief event — the movement of a light ray from one point to another — but also the fact that it had been hidden. One of the lead researchers on that study, Moti Friedman, is now setting up his own physics...

Astronomers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality -- a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based not on the textbook laws of classical physics, but on the less-tangible probabilities of quantum mechanics. Such a quantum view would allow for seemingly counterintuitive phenomena such as entanglement, in which the measurement of one particle instantly affects another, even if those entangled particles are at opposite ends of the universe. Among other things, entanglement -- a quantum feature Albert Einstein skeptically referred to as "spooky action at a distance"...