In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles.

For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton can form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a “normal matter” hydrogen atom.

Furthermore, mixing matter and antimatter can lead to the annihilation of both, in the same way that mixing antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs.

The result of antimatter meeting matter is an explosion.

There is considerable speculation as to why the observable universe is apparently composed almost entirely of matter (as opposed to a mixture of matter and antimatter), whether there exist other places that are almost entirely composed of antimatter instead, and what sorts of technology might be possible if antimatter could be harnessed. At this time, the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

An international collaboration of scientists has reported in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The research used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to expand on a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment. […] “This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,” says Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, a co-author of the paper.

{ DailyGalaxy | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Kwang-Ho }

Bem made his mark as a psychologist four decades ago by proposing the then radical idea that people adjust their emotions after observing their own behavior–that we sometimes develop our attitudes about our actions only after the fact. The proposition challenged the prevailing wisdom of the 1960s that things worked the other way around, that attitude was the engine from which behavior emerged. Though counterintuitive, Bem’s theory has held up to scientific scrutiny in dozens of studies and is now enshrined in psychology textbooks.

Over the years, Bem cemented his reputation as a rebel by floating other controversial theories on topics such as personality and sexual orientation. His own personal life was also decidedly unconventional. Despite being married to a woman, Bem never hid from his family the fact that he is gay. A few years ago, he explained this conjugal conundrum in an Internet posting distinguishing between romantic love and sexual attraction, arguing that many individuals—like himself—fall in love with a person of the “wrong” gender.

Even in the context of a career of irreverence, there was little to suggest that Bem would end up defending the possibility of extrasensory perception, or ESP, which most mainstream scientists consider unworthy of serious inquiry. […]

By the end of the 1990s, Bem had changed his focus from clairvoyance to precognition, the most mind-
boggling of psi phenomena. “It has the biggest wow factor,” he says. Although telepathy, or straightforward mind reading, is hard to believe, at least it seems remotely scientifically possible. Electromagnetic waves travel over vast distances, so perhaps there is some way the electrical impulses that generate thoughts could be transmitted from one person to another. Precognition is different. Sensing events that have not yet occurred requires that information move backward in time. “I thought, my god, that is fascinating,” Bem says, “because it means that our classical view of the physical world is wrong.”

{ Discover | Continue reading }

A single-celled organism in Norway has been called “mankind’s furthest relative.” It is so far removed from the organisms we know that researchers claim it belongs to a new base group, called a kingdom, on the tree of life. (…)

The organism, a type of protozoan, was found by researchers in a lake near Oslo. (…) They found it doesn’t genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It’s an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn’t an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

{ New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week. }

The discovery [of the Higgs boson], if confirmed, will mark the culmination of a hunt that has taken years and cost billions of dollars, and will shape the field for years to come. (…) What fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill? We put the question to experts in various fields. (…)

Is there life elsewhere? (…)

Is there foreign life on earth? (…) Some have postulated the existence of a ’shadow biosphere’ on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered because scientists simply don’t know where to look. It could contain life that relies on a fundamentally different biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing inherited information that do not rely on DNA or proteins. (…)

How did life start…? (…) Joyce says that there will come a point at which researchers learn how to synthesize an evolving, replicating system from scratch. (…) Several labs have already made headway. (…) In 2009, a paper from Joyce’s lab reported the development of a system of RNA molecules that undergo self-sustaining Darwinian evolution5. But enzymes and a human hand were needed to create the RNA sequences to start off the reaction, Joyce says, and so far his lab has not found conditions that would allow the system to form spontaneously. “We’re still a bit challenged,” he says. “But the system is running more and more efficiently all the time.” (…)

… and can we delay its end? (…) Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that mutations in a single gene allowed the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to live more than twice as long as usual. Three years later, a group led by Andrzej Bartke, who studies ageing at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, reported that mice bearing a single mutation that causes hormonal deficiencies live up to 68% longer than mice without the mutation. Both papers, and a slew of work since, have suggested that it might be possible to significantly slow human ageing and its associated diseases.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

image { Trevor Brown }

One of the great challenges in cosmology is understanding the nature of the universe’s so-called missing mass.

Astronomers have long known that galaxies are held together by gravity, a force that depends on the amount of mass a galaxy contains. Galaxies also spin, generating a force that tends to cause this mass to fly apart.

The galaxies astronomers can see are not being torn apart as they rotate, presumably because they are generating enough gravity to prevent this.

But that raises a conundrum. Astronomers can see how much visible mass there is in a galaxy and when they add it all up, there isn’t anywhere enough for the required amount of gravity.  So something else must be generating this force. 

One idea is that gravity is stronger on the galactic scale and so naturally provides the extra force to glue galaxies together.

Another is that the galaxies must be filled with matter that astronomers can’t see, the so-called dark matter.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Bela Borsodi }

What would we do if we encountered an alien race? As it turns out, the question has garnered considerable academic thought since the first reported flying saucer sighting in 1947, not just as an inquiry in human psychology, but also as a way of contemplating what aliens might do if they ever found us. From astronomers to ufologists to anthropologists, scholars who have contemplated the various “contact scenarios” believe our course of action would strongly depend on the relative intelligence level of the newfound beings. Here, we outline what would happen if we encountered primitive, humanlike, and godlike aliens. (…)

In 1950 the U.S. military developed a procedure called “Seven Steps to Contact,” laying out the logical steps we would take upon discovering creatures with roughly human-level sentience. According to the steps, we would begin with remote surveillance and data gathering, and would eventually move on to covert visitations with the goal of gauging the performance characteristics of the aliens’ vehicles and weaponry.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

related { Alien Abductions May Be Vivid Dreams, Study Shows }

photo { Laerke Posselt }

Who made and launched Stuxnet in the first place? Richard Clarke tells me he knows the answer.

Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, now operates a cybersecurity consultancy called Good Harbor. (…) We have virtually no defense against the cyberattacks that he says are targeting us now, and will be in the future. (…)

“I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,” he said calmly.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

previously, Stuxnet { The out-of-controller | I don’t sleep. I wait. }

illustration { Jonathan Koshi }

Spontaneous Human Combustion occurs when a human body bursts into flame and is reduced to ashes without any apparent external source of ignition. Moreover, while the body is almost completely incinerated, which requires temperatures of about 3,000 degrees, the rest of the room, the furniture remain almost undamaged by the fire. SHC takes place in Charles Dickens’ novels but also in contemporary police investigations. A few months ago, the badly burned body of a pensioner was found in his living room in Galway, Ireland. Apart from his body, investigators could only find minor damage on the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him. “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,” said the coroner.

{ We Make Money Not Art | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

photo { Mark Thiessen }

Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered. Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.

“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.

Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long. The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater - behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below. On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.

Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck. (…)

The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether. (…)

Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find. Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.

“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

Of the 110 sword swallowers queried, 46 responded and agreed to have their results reported. (…)

The most common medical complaint: a sore throat, or “sword throat” as it’s known in the business, which typically occurred while they were still learning, after frequent performances or from stunts involving multiple or odd-shaped swords. Some experienced lower chest pains, often lasting for days, which could be relieved by not swallowing any swords for a few days. Sixteen mentioned intestinal bleeding and one was told a sword had “brushed” his heart. (…)

The study also revealed how swallowers learned their craft. Often practicing daily for months or years, many desensitized their gag reflexes by gradually increasing the size of objects they shoved down their throats, beginning with their finger, then spoons, paint brushes and knitting needles before moving on to the commonly used bent wire coat hanger.

Performers must learn how to align a sword with their upper esophageal sphincter, a muscular ring at the upper end of the esophagus, and how to relax muscles in the pharynx and esophagus, which usually are not under voluntary control.

Tricks used to coax a blade down the throat varied: Many performers lubricated their swords first with saliva; one performer used butter and another had to retire because of a dry mouth condition. Some performed “the drop,” in which the sword falls abruptly down the throat; some invited audience members to move the sword.

{ LiveScience | Scientific American | more }

Thousands of characters — letters and obscure symbols — filled the more than 100 pages of a centuries-old text that had been located in East Berlin after the end of the Cold War. No one knew what the text meant, or even what language it was in. It was a mystery that USC computer scientist Kevin Knight and two Swedish researchers sought to solve. (…)

After months of painstaking work and a few trips down the wrong path, the moment finally came when the team knew it was on to something. Out of what had been gibberish emerged one word: ceremonie — a variation of the German word for ceremony. Knight said they figured out the rest from there.

Breaking the code on the document known as the Copiale Cipher revealed the rituals and political observations of an 18th century secret German society, as well as the group’s unusual fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.

But the larger significance of the team’s work wasn’t necessarily the discovery, it was how they arrived at it. (…)

“You start to see patterns, then you reach the magic point where a word appears,” he said. It was then, he said, “you no longer even care what the document’s about.”

The team ran statistical analyses of 80 languages, initially believing that the code lay in the Roman letters between the symbols that dotted the pages. Using a combination of brain power and computer wizardry, they broke the code by figuring out the symbols.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Darren Almond }

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society’s conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets. (…)

Confirmed planets outside our solar system — called exoplanets — now number well over 700, still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? }

Brooke Greenberg (born January 8, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition Syndrome X.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Say “placebo effect” and most people think of the boost they may get from a sugar pill simply because they believe it will work. But more and more research suggests there is more than a fleeting boost to be gained from placebos.

A particular mind-set or belief about one’s body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision, several recent studies have found, highlighting how fundamentally the mind and body are connected.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a “real” treatment. One study demonstrated a strong placebo effect in subjects who were told they were getting a sugar pill with no active ingredient.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.

“Descartes said that if there’s something you can be certain of in this world, it’s that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson. Yet Ehrsson’s illusions have shown that such certainties, built on a lifetime of experience, can be disrupted with just ten seconds of visual and tactile deception. This surprising malleability suggests that the brain continuously constructs its feeling of body ownership using information from the senses — a finding that has earned Ehrsson publications in Science and other top journals, along with the attention of other neuroscientists.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

photo { Jesse Marlow }

“Did you know that 95% the universe is dark matter?” (…) “What about dark energy?” (…)

It is true that most of the universe is made up of things that can’t be seen, and whose presence is inferred by its effects on the things that can be seen. But what effects do we see? And how does that translate to a percentage of the universe that remains a mystery?

Galaxies rotate, and when we use gravitational laws to predict what that rotation should look like, we find that they should behave like the solar system–the farther away something is from the central mass (in the case of the solar system, the sun, and in the case of a galaxy, the supermassive black hole at the center), the slower it should orbit; the gravitational force on Pluto, for instance, is much smaller than the gravitational force on Mercury, because it’s much farther away from the sun. A star at the fingertip of an arm of the galaxy should orbit more slowly than we do. However, that’s not really what happens: galaxies have flat rotation curves, meaning that objects farther away from the supermassive black hole don’t really orbit more slowly than things closer to it.

What this implies is that there is lots of mass spread throughout the galaxy–that most of the mass isn’t just at the center–and that the spread-out mass has a large gravitational effect on the galaxy’s rotation.

{ Smaller Questions | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Pearly | 2. Natalia Arias }

related { Computer simulations suggest that a giant planet was kicked out of our solar system billions of years ago, saving Earth in the process. But how solid are those simulations? }

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. (…)

In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. (…)

How many Number 1 hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands? The answers were all between 1 and 10. As expected, participants gave smaller estimations when leaning left than when either leaning right or standing upright. There was no difference in their estimates between right-leaning and upright postures.

The researchers point out that body posture won’t make you answer incorrectly if you know the answer.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Bento de Spinoza was born on November 24, 1632, to a promi­ nent merchant family among Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews. This Sephardic community was founded by former New Christians, or conversos—Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centu­ ries—and their descendants. After fleeing harassment by the Iberian Inquisitions, which doubted the sincerity of the conversions, many New Christians eventually settled in Amsterdam and a few other northern cities by the early seventeenth century. With its generally tolerant environment and greater concern for economic prosperity than religious uniformity, the newly independent Dutch Republic (and especially Holland, its largest province) offered these refugees an opportunity to return to the religion of their ancestors and re­ establish themselves in Jewish life. There were always conservative sectors of Dutch society clamoring for the expulsion of the “Por­tuguese merchants” in their midst.8 But the more liberal regents of Amsterdam, not to mention the more enlightened elements in Dutch society at large, were unwilling to make the same mistake that Spain had made a century earlier and drive out an economi­ cally important part of its population, one whose productivity and mercantile network would make a substantial contribution to the flourishing of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Spinoza family was not among the wealthiest of the city’s Sephardim, whose wealth was in turn dwarfed by the fortunes of the wealthiest Dutch. They were, however, comfortably well-off. Spinoza’s father, Miguel, was an importer of dried fruit and nuts, mainly from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. (…)

mainly from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. To judge both by his accounts and by the respect he earned from his peers, he seems for a time to have been a fairly successful businessman. (…)

Spinoza may have excelled in school, but, contrary to the story long told, he did not study to be a rabbi. In fact, he never made it into the upper levels of the educational program, which involved advanced work in Talmud. In 1649, his older brother Isaac, who had been helping his father run the family business, died, and Spinoza had to cease his formal studies to take his place. When Miguel died in 1654, Spinoza found himself, along with his other brother, Gabriel, a full-time merchant, running the firm Bento y Gabriel de Spinoza. He seems not to have been a very shrewd merchant, however, and the company, burdened by the debts left behind by his father, floundered under their direction. Spinoza did not have much of a taste for the life of commerce anyway. Financial success, which led to status and respect within the Portuguese Jewish community, held very little attraction for him. (…)

By the early to mid-1650s, Spinoza had decided that his future lay in philosophy, the search for knowledge and true happiness, not in the importing of dried fruit.

Around the time of his disenchantment with the mercantile life, Spinoza began studies in Latin and the classics. (…) Although distracted from business affairs by his studies and undoubtedly experiencing a serious weakening of his Jewish faith as he delved ever more deeply into the world of pagan and gentile letters, Spinoza kept up appearances and continued to be a mem­ ber in good standing of the Talmud Torah congregation through­ out the early 1650s. He paid his dues and communal taxes, and even made the contributions to the charitable funds that were ex­ pected of congregants.

And then, on July 27, 1656, the following proclamation was read in Hebrew before the ark of the Torah in the crowded syna­gogue on the Houtgracht: “The gentlemen of the ma’amad [the congregation’s lay governing board] hereby proclaim that they have long known of the evil opin­ ions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza. (…) Spinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and damn Baruch de Espinoza. (…) No one is to com­municate with him, orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four cubits of his vicinity, or read any treatise composed or written by him.”

We do not know for certain why Spinoza was punished with such extreme prejudice. That the punishment came from his own community—from the congregation that had nurtured and edu­ cated him, and that held his family in high esteem—only adds to the enigma. Neither the herem itself nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his “evil opinions and acts” were sup­ posed to have been, or what “abominable heresies” or “monstrous deeds” he is alleged to have practiced and taught. He had not yet published anything, or even composed any treatise. Spinoza never refers to this period of his life in his extant letters and thus does not offer his correspondents (or us) any clues as to why he was expelled.

{ Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Chapter 1 | Continue reading }

painting { Baruch Spinoza by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1670 }

It’s weird to think that tens of thousands of years ago, humans were mating with different species—but they were. That’s what DNA analyses tell us. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, it showed that as much as 1 to 4 percent of the DNA of non-Africans might have been inherited from Neanderthals.

Scientists also announced last year that our ancestors had mated with another extinct species, and this week, more evidence is showing how widespread that interbreeding was.

We know little about this extinct species. In fact, we don’t even have a scientific name for it; for now, the group is simply known as the Denisovans.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }