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Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on EarthWashington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms. Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain — like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners — a pipe dream. The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad...

« Irradiate a millimeter-thick gold target with the right kind of laser and you might get a surprise in the form of 100 billion positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. Researchers had been studying the process at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they used thin targets that produced far fewer positrons. The new laser method came about through simulations that showed a thicker target was more effective.And suddenly lasers and antimatter are again making news. Hui Chen is the Livermore scientist behind this work: “We’ve detected far more anti-matter than anyone else has ever measured in a laser experiment....

GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world. "If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

Obama makes Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon seem like George "I Cannot Tell a Lie" Washington and Honest Abe Lincoln. What this video and then email it to everyone you know. Truly disturbing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y7OFLl3asg&feature=related

What's the matter with antimatter? New data may hold the answer.Nature may have handed scientists a new clue in a longstanding mystery: how matter beat out antimatter for dominance of the universe. Early data from twin experiments at the Tevatron, the world's reigning particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., suggest an unexpected chink in the hugely successful standard model of particle physics. The twist comes from odd behavior in a particle called the BS (pronounced "B-sub-S"), which flips back and forth between its matter and antimatter forms three trillions times per second. Researchers believe that...

IT IS one the biggest mysteries in physics - where did all the antimatter go? Now a team of physicists claims to have found the first ever hint of an answer in experimental data. The findings could signal a major crack in the standard model, the theoretical edifice that describes nature's fundamental particles and forces. In its early days, the cosmos was a cauldron of radiation and equal amounts of matter and antimatter. As it cooled, all the antimatter annihilated in collisions with matter - but for some reason the proportions ended up lopsided, leaving some of the matter intact....

[...snip...] But on to antimatter, a cloud of which has been known to exist around the galactic center since the 1970s, when balloon-based gamma-ray detectors first located it. Gamma rays are significant in terms of antimatter because electrons encountering positrons (their antimatter equivalent) annihilate each other, with their mass converted into high energy gamma rays. So the cloud’s presence is well established. The question since its detection is what could have caused it. Now a new paper in Nature may offer an answer, noting the asymmetric distribution of the antimatter cloud, which extends further on one side of galactic center...

A star that survived a massive explosion – only to be destroyed in a second blast just two years later – has piqued the curiosity of astronomers. Its bizarre death might be due to the production of antimatter in its core towards the end of its life. The star that exploded appears to have been a massive type called a Wolf-Rayet star, which begin their lives with more than 40 times the mass of the Sun. It exploded in a galaxy 77 million light years from Earth, with the first blast occurring on 20 October 2004. It was so bright...

Antimatter and matter combine in chemical reaction 19:47 13 October 2006 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby Mixing antimatter and matter usually has predictably violent consequences – the two annihilate one another in a fierce burst of energy. But physicists in Geneva have found a new way to make the two combine, at least briefly, into a single substance. This exceptionally unstable stuff, made of protons and antiprotons, is called protonium. The feat of "antichemistry" actually took place back in 2002, but nobody had realised it until now. It happened in an experiment at the CERN particle physics lab, when both...

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy). However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to...

Florida Physicist Says Dark Matter, Extra Dimensions Related And Possibly Detectable the universe is the "twilight zone" Gainesville -May 19, 2003 A team of scientists that includes a University of Florida physicist has suggested that two of the biggest mysteries in particle physics and astrophysics -- the existence of extra time and space dimensions and the composition of an invisible cosmic substance called dark matter -- may be connected. "For the most part, these two questions have been treated separately in the past, and for the first time we're making a direct link," said Konstantin Matchev, a UF assistant...

Government officials are evaluating and revising disaster plans around the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, just as they did after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. While war and automobiles kill more people than nature, find out what natural disasters top scientists’ worry lists. #10 Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake Geologists know it’s just a matter of time before another 9.0 or larger earthquake strikes somewhere between Northern California and Canada. The shaking would be locally catastrophic, but the biggest threat is the tsunami that would ensue from a fault line that’s seismically identical to the one that...

EARTH'S natural radioactivity has been measured for the first time. The measurement will help geologists find out to what extent nuclear decay is responsible for the immense quantity of heat generated by Earth. Our planet's heat output drives the convection currents that churn liquid iron in the outer core, giving rise to Earth's magnetic field. Just where this heat comes from is a big question. Measurements of the temperature gradients across rocks in mines and boreholes have led geologists to estimate that the planet is internally generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat. Some of this heat comes from...

No way. "The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie 'mirror' of ordinary matter -- in future weapons," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Beyond the pointed-ear cool factor, antimatter would make a powerful weapon -- at least in theory. "If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs," the Chron explains. The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times ... that of high...

No way. "The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie 'mirror' of ordinary matter -- in future weapons," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Beyond the pointed-ear cool factor, antimatter would make a powerful weapon -- at least in theory. "If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs," the Chron explains:

The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons. The most powerful potential energy source presently thought to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-fiction films and TV shows, whose heroes fly "antimatter-powered spaceships" and do battle with "antimatter guns." But antimatter itself isn't fiction; it actually exists and has been intensively studied by physicists since the 1930s. In a sense, matter and antimatter are the yin and yang of reality: Every type of...

Physicists discover dramatic difference in behavior of matter versus antimatter EDITORS:Photographs of the BaBar detector are available at: http://www.interactions.org/slaccp/Relevant Web URLs: Charge Parity Violation: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/tip/special/cp.htmObservation of Direct CP Violation in B0 -> K+pi- Decays: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0407057 Today, physicists conducting the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), a Department of Energy laboratory operated by Stanford University, announced exciting new results demonstrating a dramatic difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter. They submitted their results to the journal Physical Review Letters for online publication.SLAC’s PEP-II accelerator collides electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, to produce an abundance of exotic...

As the 21st century unfolds, radically different forms of air and space vehicles will replace the clunky machines of today, whisking passengers at ultra-high speed around the Earth and outward into space. Laboratories scattered around the world are delving into novel and exotic forms of propulsion. Breakthrough physics could well make possible ambitious human treks across interstellar distances. Work is underway to harness antimatter as a way to shave travel time to the Moon down to minutes, or between Earth and Mars to a day. Meanwhile, laser and microwave technology is rapidly advancing the idea of beaming people and payloads...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. European scientists say they have created enough antihydrogen — a type of the mirror-image, antimatter stuff that fictionally powers spaceships on Star Trek — to test a widely held basic model of the universe. While antihydrogen has been made before, the more than 50,000 atoms created at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva are "by far, the most produced," said Jeffrey Hangst, a leader of the ATHENA collaboration, one of two groups of physicists working on antihydrogen at CERN. The quest to understand and manipulate antimatter is one of the most...