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Tiny cosmic particles can have serious impacts on Earth, causing election votes to be miscounted, planes to free-fall and computers to reboot, scientists say.These cosmic particles can hit electronic devices on Earth, which can cause components to burn out and cause malfunctions. Cosmic particles come from cosmic rays from outside our solar system. They crash into the Earth's atmosphere creating a range of particles, including protons, electrons, X-rays and gamma-rays that can penetrate aircraft.These cosmic particles constantly hit Earth, and can cause bits of information in electronics to change.

A new measurement confirms the subatomic particle’s spherical shape to a record level of exactness, physicists report in the July 7 Science. That near-perfect roundness deepens the mystery behind how the universe came to be filled with matter as opposed to its counterpart, antimatter. Any asymmetry in the electron’s shape, namely the distribution of the particle’s electric charge, would point to a related asymmetry in the laws of nature, one that could explain this feature of the cosmos. The measurement — of a property known in physicist-speak as the electric dipole moment of the electron — is twice as precise...

It has long been known that there are two types of excitation for electrons, as in addition to their charge they have a property called spin. Spin and charge excitations travel at fixed, but different speeds...However, theorists are unable to calculate what precisely happens beyond only small perturbations, as the interactions are too complex. The Cambridge team has measured these speeds as their energies are varied, and find that a very simple picture emerges...Each type of excitation can have low or high kinetic energy... with the well-known formula E=1/2 mv2, which is a parabola. But for spin and charge the...

Kovacs: The Zitterbewegung Orbit of Electrons Andras Kovacs Email: andras.kovacs@broadbit.com At ICCF-21, I presented experimental data [1] pointing to the existence of a close-proximity electronnucleus configuration, which catalyzes nuclear reactions by effectively shielding the proton’s or deuteron’s electric charge. The experimental support for such electron state is strong, but its theory has been lacking. Several researchers put forward theories of a close-proximity electronnucleus configuration, referring to “deep electron orbit”, “Rydberg hydrogen”, etc. However, these preceding theories did not quantitatively account for all observed experimental data, and there was no specific guidance for experimental reactor designs. This presentation discusses the physics...

Central to both quantum chemistry and the Schrödinger equation is the wave function – a mathematical object that completely specifies the behavior of the electrons in a molecule. The wave function is a high-dimensional entity, and it is therefore extremely difficult to capture all the nuances that encode how the individual electrons affect each other. Many methods of quantum chemistry in fact give up on expressing the wave function altogether, instead attempting only to determine the energy of a given molecule. This however requires approximations to be made, limiting the prediction quality of such methods. Other methods represent the wave...

For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter - a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria - swallow up organic waste and 'exhale' electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process. Those waste electrons always need somewhere to go (usually into a plentiful underground mineral like iron oxide), and Geobacter have an unconventional tool to make sure they get there. "Geobacter breathe through what is essentially a giant snorkel, hundreds of times their size," Nikhil Malvankar, an assistant professor at Yale University's Microbial Science Institute...

Ever since scientists discovered that certain microbes can get their energy from electrical charges, researchers have wondered how they do it. Bacteria don't have mouths, so they need another way to bring their fuel into their bodies. New research from Washington University in St. Louis reveals how one such bacteria pulls in electrons straight from an electrode source. The work from the laboratory of Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, was published Nov. 5 in the scientific journal mBio. "The molecular underpinning of this process has been difficult to unravel until our work," Bose said. "This...

That's a big deal, because it could lead to much smaller and cheaper particle accelerators than the ones we currently rely on. Right now, if you want to install a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in your back garden, you need a concrete tunnel about 27 kilometres (nearly 17 miles) long and US$5 billion in spare change. But this new experiment uses something known as plasma wakefield acceleration – and it takes up just 10 metres or 33 feet of space. The team behind the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) at CERN in Geneva has been...

Neutrinos are unimaginably numerous, but their infrequent interaction with matter make the particles a challenge to study. Neutrinos exist in three “flavors:” muon, electron and tau. The NOvA experiment aims to investigate one of the peculiar properties of neutrinos — their tendency to change flavors, or oscillate. NOvA is what the physicists call a long-baseline experiment, as the neutrinos travel more than 500 miles underground. “We make a beam of muon-type neutrinos at Fermilab, and then we detect those at Ash River, Minnesota,” Vahle explained. “We are looking for muon-type neutrinos to change into electron-type neutrinos. We also look for...

A fresh take on a classic experiment makes no progress in unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. If you ever want to get your head around the riddle that is quantum mechanics, look no further than the double-slit experiment. This shows, with perfect simplicity, how just watching a wave or a particle can change its behaviour. The idea is so unpalatable to physicists that they have spent decades trying to find new ways to test it. The latest such attempt, by physicists in Europe and Canada, used a three-slit version — but quantum mechanics won out again. In the standard double-slit...

Scientists have filmed an electron in motion for the first time, using a new technique that will allow researchers to study the tiny particle's movements directly. Previously it was impossible to photograph electrons because of their extreme speediness, so scientists had to rely on more indirect methods. These methods could only measure the effect of an electron's movement, whereas the new technique can capture the entire event. Extremely short flashes of light are necessary to capture an electron in motion. A technology developed within the last few years can generate short pulses of intense laser light, called attosecond pulses, to...

Killer Electrons From Outer Space By Saswato R. Das Accurate space-weather forecasts could come from knowing the cause of superfast electrons in the Van Allen belts Image: NASA Glenn Research Center 31 August 2007—Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, say they have solved the mystery of satellite-zapping “killer electrons” that are sometimes produced in Earth’s outer atmosphere. These highly energetic electrons—strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue—pose a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. For many years, the mechanism by which they are produced has remained little understood, in spite of physicists’ attempts at solving this...

A team of scientists led by University of Maryland physics professor James Drake appear to have solved a key remaining mystery about how the interaction of magnetic fields produce the explosive releases of energy seen in solar flares, storms in the Earth’s magnetosphere and many other powerful cosmic events. In recent years, researchers have answered many questions about this process, but one thing they have been unable to explain is data from solar observing satellites indicating that up to half of the energy released during solar flares is in the form of energetic electrons. Large numbers of these low-mass particles...