Time Crystals?

Oh, by the way, did you hear about this mind-boggling scientific discovery? It sounds like something form an episode of "Dr. Who."

For the First Time Ever, Scientists Caught Time Crystals Interacting

That's huge news for the most mysterious phase of matter—and maybe physics as we know it.

BY CAROLINE DELBERT OCT 1, 2020

For the first time, scientists have observed an interaction of a rare and baffling form of matter called time crystals. The crystals look at a glance like “regular” crystals, but they have a relationship to time that both intrigues and puzzles scientists because of its unpredictability. Now, experts say they could have applications in quantum computing.

Scientists only theorized the existence of time crystals starting in the 2010s, making this the state-of-matter equivalent of so-called ruby chocolate—is it really a new thing or just a special case of something else? (Sorry, ruby chocolate, we’re not convinced.)

By 2015, researchers were outlining ways time crystals could exist, generalized as a “non-equilibrium form of matter”:

“The team was investigating what happens when certain isolated quantum systems, made of a potpourri of interacting particles, are frequently prodded by shining a laser on them. Counterintuitive to conventional physics, which maintained that mayhem would ensue once the systems would heat up, the Princeton team’s calculations showed that under certain conditions, the particles would glue together to form a phase of matter with properties previously unseen.”

Now, researchers say, they’ve collided two time crystals to see what happens next. “Our results demonstrate that time crystals obey the general dynamics of quantum mechanics and offer a basis to further investigate the fundamental properties of these phases, opening pathways for possible applications in developing fields, such as quantum information processing,” they explain in a new paper.

In their experiments, they placed two time crystals in superfluid and mixed magnons between them. Magnons are a magnetic quasiparticle that, in this case, led to “opposite-phase oscillations,” while the crystals themselves stayed phase stable. What’s cool (and, literally, supercooled) is how the matter acts within predictable quantum mechanical ways despite the central quality of wild oscillation patterns over time.

“Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact,” lead author Samuli Autti, of Lancaster University, said in a statement. “Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing.”

Without this key finding, people could likely not entertain even the notion that a time crystal could be part of a designed system at all.

What is the odd oscillation that sets these crystals apart? There’s an interior motion that seems to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics, which is that the moving particles continue to move and seem never to lose any energy. Where is the initial energy coming from, and why doesn’t it ever dissipate?

In a way, studying how the crystals interact makes the question more puzzling, because it narrows down some parameters. The crystals act normal in these certain other ways, and that means whatever the energy source or phenomenon is remains at large.

Link to original article:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33648414/scientists-catch-time-crystals-interacting/

Proven: Black Holes and Gravitational Waves!

This is fantastic news. Just think: if we could come to an understanding of dark matter, there's no telling what we could accomplish and create.

Gravitational waves from black holes detected
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.

They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.

It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.

Being able to detect gravitational waves enables astronomers finally to probe what they call "dark Universe" - the majority part of the cosmos that is invisible to the light telescopes in use today.

Not only will they be able to investigate black holes and strange objects known as neutron stars (giant suns that have collapsed to the size of cities), they should also be able to "look" much deeper into the Universe - and thus farther back in time. It may even be possible eventually to sense the moment of the Big Bang.


Read the full article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35524440

The Large Hadron Collider Discovered a NEW PARTICLE!

A diagram of one possible layout of the five quarks that compose the newly discovered pentaquark

The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered yet another new particle! This one is called a pentaquark and has been postulated and searched for over the last 50 years. The discovery of this new form of matter further enables our understanding of how the universe is put together, and could eventually lead to our complete understanding of the workings of reality. This is quite exciting!

An alternate layout of a pentaquark showing it composed of a meson particle (one quark and one antiquark) and a baryon (three quarks).

LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson commented: "The pentaquark is not just any new particle… It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."

The original findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414

Dark Matter: Now Even Stranger Than Before!

Fascinating, important science news from BBC:

Dark matter 'ghosts' through galactic smash-ups
By Jonathan Webb
Science reporter, BBC News

By observing multiple collisions between huge clusters of galaxies, scientists have witnessed dark matter coasting straight through the turmoil.

Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85% of the matter in the cosmos - and these results rule out several theoretical models put forward to explain it.

This is because it barely interacts with anything at all, including the dark matter in the oncoming galaxies.

The work appears in Science magazine.

To conduct their study, astrophysicists looked at 72 smash-ups between galactic clusters, using two space telescopes: visible light was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope, and X-rays by the Chandra Observatory.

Scouring multiple views of the collisions, the researchers tracked the movement of the three main components of galaxies: stars, clouds of gas, and dark matter.
The violently swirling clouds of gas are hot enough to glow with X-rays, which Chandra detects. And stars can be seen in regular, visible-light images from Hubble.
Dark matter is more difficult to "see" - but not impossible. Although it does not emit or absorb light, it does have gravity, and so it bends the path of light passing nearby. This warps our view of anything on the other side of it, in an effect called "gravitational lensing".

"Looking through dark matter is like looking through a bathroom window," said Dr Richard Massey from Durham University, one of the study's authors. "All the objects that you can see in the distance appear slightly distorted and warped."

Using this distortion allowed Dr Massey, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to "map" the dark matter in the clusters as they collided.

Galaxy clusters are vast and contain huge amounts of dark matter, so when they collide - over billions of years - it offers a unique glimpse of how the stuff behaves.
"We like these collisions because it's exactly what we'd do in the lab," Dr Massey told BBC News.

"If you want to figure out what something is made out of, you knock it, or you throw it across the room and see where the bits go."
In this case, the bits went straight through each other.

Unlike the gas clouds, which grind to a turbulent halt, and the stars, which mostly glide past each other, the ubiquitous dark matter passes through everything and emerges unscathed, like a ghost.

"It seems not to interact with anything at all," Dr Massey said.

Earlier observations of the "Bullet Cluster" - a bust-up between two particularly big groups of galaxies, now in its final stages - had already demonstrated dark matter's weird lack of interactions, including with itself.

But this new, major survey was able to deliver much more precision, concluding that there was even less interaction than the previous work allowed for.
"If you bang your head against the wall, the electrostatic force between the molecules in your head and the ones in the wall cause a collision. This is what dark matter doesn't seem to feel," Dr Massey explained.

Dark matter does "feel" gravity; those interactions are the reason we know it is there, and the reason it is bound up in the galactic collisions to begin with. But the lack of almost any other interaction makes it even more mysterious than before.

Link to the original BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32066013

The original article in Science Magazine:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6229/1462

Antibiotic Breakthrough

Oh, by the way, did you see this story about a new breakthrough in antibiotics? For a while now, we have been hearing from the scientific community about how antibiotics were abused over these last many decades and as a result, many classes of the drug no longer work on new, resistant bacteria. This very important discovery could change everything and it is great news!

From BBC:

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine
By James Gallagher
Health editor, BBC News website

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

Their novel method for growing bacteria has yielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising". The last new class of antibiotics to make it to clinic was discovered nearly three decades ago.

The study, in the journal Nature, has been described as a "game-changer" and experts believe the antibiotic haul is just the "tip of the iceberg".

The heyday of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing found since 1987 has made it into doctor's hands. Since then microbes have become incredibly resistant. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis ignores nearly everything medicine can throw at it.

The researchers, at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, turned to the source of nearly all antibiotics - soil. This is teeming with microbes, but only 1% can be grown in the laboratory. The team created a "subterranean hotel" for bacteria. One bacterium was placed in each "room" and the whole device was buried in soil. It allowed the unique chemistry of soil to permeate the room, but kept the bacteria in place for study.

The scientists involved believe they can grow nearly half of all soil bacteria. Chemicals produced by the microbes, dug up from one researcher's back yard, were then tested for antimicrobial properties.

The lead scientist, Prof Kim Lewis, said: "So far 25 new antibiotics have been discovered using this method and teixobactin is the latest and most promising one.

"[The study shows] uncultured bacteria do harbour novel chemistry that we have not seen before. That is a promising source of new antimicrobials and will hopefully help revive the field of antibiotic discovery."

Tests on teixobactin showed it was toxic to bacteria, but not mammalian tissues, and could clear a deadly dose of MRSA in tests on mice.

The researchers also believe that bacteria are unlikely to develop resistance to teixobactin. It targets fats which are essential for building the bacterial cell wall, and the scientists argue it would be difficult to evolve resistance. "Here is an antibiotic that essentially evolved to be free of resistance," said Prof Lewis. "We haven't seen that before. "It has several independent different tricks that minimise resistance development."

There are limits to the discovery of the antibiotic teixobactin, which has yet to be tested in people. It works on only Gram-positive bacteria; this includes MRSA and mycobacterium tuberculosis. It cannot penetrate the extra layer of protection in Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli. But even if their method does mark a new era of antibiotic discovery there are big questions. Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned of the dangers of resistance back in his Nobel prize speech in 1945. Yet even now prescriptions in England are rising, with half deemed "inappropriate" and contributing to the problem.

But can we be trusted with new antibiotics? Or will we make the same mistakes again?

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30657486

Laniakea

This is amazing scientific news. In a recent study for Nature, scientists R. Brent Tully, Hélène Courtois, Yehuda Hoffman, and Daniel Pomarède at the University of Hawaii mapped thousands of galaxies in the immediate vicinity of our own Milky Way, and discovered that we are part of a truly massive "supercluster" of galaxies that they named Laniakea (which means "immeasurable heavens" in Hawaiian).

They also mapped galaxies expanding outward and galaxies which are being pulled toward each other. After mapping their trajectories, they discovered these galaxies, including our own, are being pulled toward a mysterious, super-dense area called "The Great Attractor."

And in another mind-boggling leap, our supercluster structure Laniakea borders another supercluster structure called Perseus-Pisces! I think it is astounding how the structures almost mirror each other, as though a supercluster of galaxies naturally take a certain shape...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html#videos

The Universal Web

I was very excited to see this story in the news today about how astronomers have, for the first time ever, obtained actual photographic proof of dark matter and have presented their findings in Nature.com, an international weekly journal of science. They have seen, thanks to the intense glow of a quasar, the underlying structure of the universe itself! And that structure is, of course, a web. The photographic evidence looks like neurons in the human brain. We are all part of a web, a net. This could end up explaining a lot, and perhaps proving some ideas that are considered "metaphysical." They even have proof of "dark galaxies!" Th implications are staggering.

Cosmic 'web' seen for first time
By Simon Redfern Reporter, BBC News

The hidden tendrils of dark matter that underlie the visible Universe may have been traced out for the first time.

Cosmology theory predicts that galaxies are embedded in a cosmic web of "stuff", most of which is dark matter.

Astronomers obtained the first direct images of a part of this network, by exploiting the fact that a luminous object called a quasar can act as a natural "cosmic flashlight".

Details of the work appear in the journal Nature.

The quasar illuminates a nearby gas cloud measuring two million light-years across.

And the glowing gas appears to trace out filaments of underlying dark matter.

The quasar, which lies 10 billion light-years away, shines light in just the right direction to reveal the cold gas cloud.

For some years, cosmologists have been running computer simulations of the structure of the universe to build the "standard model of cosmology".

They use the cosmic microwave background, corresponding to observations of the very earliest Universe that can be seen, and recorded by instruments such as the Planck space observatory, as a starting point.

Their calculations suggest that as the Universe grows and forms, matter becomes clustered in filaments and nodes under the force of gravity, like a giant cosmic web.

The new results from the 10-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii, are reported by scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

They are the first direct observations of cold gas decorating such cosmic web filaments.

The cosmic web suggested by the standard model is mainly made up of mysterious "dark matter". Invisible in itself, dark matter still exerts gravitational forces on visible light and ordinary matter nearby.

Massive clumps of dark matter bend light that passes close by through a process called gravitational lensing, and this had allowed previous measurements of its distribution.

But it is difficult to use this method to see very distant dark matter, and cold ordinary matter remains tricky to detect as well.

The glowing hydrogen illuminated by the distant quasar in these new observations traces out an underlying filament of dark matter that it is attracted to it by gravity, according to the researchers' analysis.

BBC News/ Science article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25809967

Original article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12898.html

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Olinguito!

From an AP story by Seth Borenstein:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Imagine a raccoon with a teddy bear face that is so cute it's hard to resist, let alone overlook. But somehow science did — until now.

Researchers announced Thursday a rare discovery of a new species of mammal called the olinguito. It belongs to a grouping of large creatures that include dogs, cats and bears.

The raccoon-sized critter leaps through the trees of mountainous forests of Ecuador and Colombia at night, according to a Smithsonian researcher who has spent the past decade tracking them.

But the adorable olinguito (oh-lihn-GEE'-toe) shouldn't have been too hard to find. One of them lived in the Smithsonian-run National Zoo in the Washington for a year in a case of mistaken identity.

"It's been kind of hiding in plain sight for a long time" despite its extraordinary beauty, said Kristofer Helgen, the Smithsonian's curator of mammals.

The zoo's little critter, named Ringerl, was mistaken for a sister species, the olingo. Ringerl was shipped from zoo to zoo from 1967 to 1976: Louisville, Ky., Tucson, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Washington and New York City to try to get it to breed with other olingos.

It wouldn't.

"It turns out she wasn't fussy," Helgen said. "She wasn't the right species."

The discovery is described in a study in the journal ZooKey.

Helgen first figured olinguitos were different from olingos when he was looking at pelts and skeletons in a museum. He later led a team to South America in 2006.

"When we went to the field we found it in the very first night," said study co-author Roland Kays of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "It was almost like it was waiting for us."

It's hard to figure how olingos and onlinguitos were confused for each other.

"How is it different? In almost every way that you can look at it," Helgen said.

Olinguitos are smaller, have shorter tails, a rounder face, tinier ears and darker bushier fur, he said.

"It looks kind of like a fuzzball ... kind of like a cross between a teddy bear and a house cat," Helgen said.

It eats fruit, weighs about 2 pounds and has one baby at a time. Helgen figures there are thousands of olinguitos in the mountainous forest, traveling through the trees at night so they are hard to see.

Original AP story here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Lesula

A new species of monkey, the Cercopithecus Lomamiensis, or Lesula, has been discovered in the Congo. It is heartening in this day and age when we feel every inch of the planet has been dominated, exploited, or at least cataloged, that there are still new species to be discovered. And the Lesula is adorable. Look at those soulful eyes.

From a CNN article today.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/africa/dr-congo-new-monkey/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

Proof Of Dark Matter!

This has been an amazing week for science! A new particle was announced, and now we have proof of dark matter!

Reported by Rachel Bayliss at COSMOS on-line:

LONDON: The fundamental ‘cosmic web’ of dark matter throughout the universe has finally been observed from Earth, confirming theories of how the universe was shaped.

“This result is a resounding confirmation of a key prediction of structure formation in the universe,” said Jörg Dietrich from University Observatory Munich, Germany, and lead author of the study published in Nature today.

“Not only did we for the first time see a dark matter filament directly, we also confirmed that it’s total mass [dark matter plus normal matter] and the amount of hot gas are in agreement with predictions.”

Galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223 connected by dark matter filament.

Yellow contours and blue shading are indicative of matter density.

Credit: Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich

DARK MATTER
Large cosmic structures, such as galaxies, exhibit gravitational affects that cannot be justified by the amount of normal matter present in the universe. A principle exists to describe this behavior and is known as the cold-dark-matter model, and it is the foundation of modern cosmology.

Within the model, vast quantities of dark matter, moving much slower than the speed of light (cold), must exist to explain the gravitational affects seen on normal matter.

As the name implies, dark matter cannot be observed in the traditional sense as it does not emit or absorb light at any significant level. However, its presence can be detected.

GRAVITATIONAL LENSING
“The technique we used is gravitational lensing,” said Dietrich. This is where light from, for example, a distant galaxy, is deflected and bent by huge gravitational fields generated by other similarly large objects. “It was widely believed that with current telescopes we would not be able to image dark matter filament with gravitational lensing.”

Dietrich and his team devised a method to boost the lensing signal sufficiently so that the dark matter filament between two clusters of galaxies could be observed with an 8m ground-based telescope.
“The key ingredient that made this result possible, is that we decided to study a very peculiar system of two massive galaxy clusters,” he said. These are called Abell 222 and Abell 223.

“Gravitational lensing is now allowing us to see parts of the universe that were previously invisible,” said astrophysicist Joanna Dunkley, from the University of Oxford, England, who was not involved in the study. “We already have plenty of indirect evidence that galaxy clusters trace a cosmic web of dark matter, but seeing this directly is an important step forward.”

THE COSMIC WEB
She added: “Our standard picture of cosmology tells us that filaments of invisible matter thread through the universe, and this bridge of dark matter connecting two clusters is exactly what we would expect.”

The research confirms that galaxy clusters form at the intersections of these vast filaments of dark matter.

Keen to develop this ground-breaking research further, Dietrich said, “We now want to study the interplay of dark matter density and galaxy population to get a better understanding of the mechanism that transforms galaxies from blue, star-forming spiral galaxies – which are the most common galaxies in filament – to red elliptical galaxies, which are the majority of galaxies in galaxy clusters.”

“The dark matter web makes up about a quarter of the universe,” Dunkley explained. “Being able to measure its morphology should help tell us more about how galaxies and clusters were formed, and may even give us a clue about what the dark matter itself is.” This in itself is a question that has been fascinating scientists for decades.

This research states that the underlying dark matter structure of the universe could comprise over half of all matter in existence. So developing it further is a must if scientists are to understand the elementary nature of the universe.

“We need to observe the lensing signal of more filaments to understand how special the one we found is,” Dietrich said. This will involve both in-depth statistical analysis of thousands of galaxy clusters, and a satellite mission to increase the possibilities of directly observing dark matter filaments.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5765/scientists-shine-light-dark-matter

Congratulations! It's A Boson!

By Chris Wickham and Robert Evans
GENEVA | Wed Jul 4, 2012 4:40pm EDT
From REUTERS

Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.

"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world's media near Geneva on Wednesday.

The British physicist Peter Higgs arrived at CERN's headquarters on Wednesday. Photo by Denis Balibousse

"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."
Two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle.

It is unclear that it is exactly the boson Higgs foresaw, which by bestowing mass on other matter helps explain the way the universe was ordered after the chaos of Big Bang.

But addressing scientists assembled in the CERN auditorium, Heuer posed them a question: "As a layman, I would say I think we have it. Would you agree?" A roar of applause said they did.

For some, there was no doubt the Higgs boson is found: "It's the Higgs," said Jim Al-Khalili of Surrey University, a British physicist and popular broadcaster. "The announcement from CERN is even more definitive and clear-cut than most of us expected.

"Nobel prizes all round."

Higgs, now 83, from Edinburgh University was among six theorists who in the early 1960s proposed the existence of a mechanism by which matter in the universe gained mass. Higgs himself argued that if there were an invisible field responsible for the process, it must be made up of particles.

He and some of the others were at CERN to welcome news of what, to the embarrassment of many scientists, some commentators have labelled the "God particle", for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered universe. Clearly overwhelmed, his eyes welling up, Higgs told the symposium of fellow researchers: "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime."

Scientists see confirmation of his theory as accelerating investigations into the still unexplained "dark matter" they believe pervades the universe and into the possibility of a fourth or more dimensions, or of parallel universes. It may help in resolving contradictions between their model of how the world works at the subatomic level and Einstein's theory of gravity.

Read the entire Reuters article here.