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Scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have calculated that the meson f0(1710) could be a very special particle -- the long-sought-after glueball, a particle composed of pure force. The prediction that glueballs exist is one of the most important of the Standard Model of particle physics that has not yet been confirmed experimentally. For decades, scientists have been looking for so-called "glueballs". Now it seems they have been found at last. A glueball is an exotic particle, made up entirely of gluons -- the "sticky" particles that keep nuclear particles together. Glueballs are unstable and can only be detected indirectly, by...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has offered free online courses for the last four years with one major downside: They didn't count toward a degree. That's about to change. In a pilot project announced Wednesday, students will be able to take a semester of free online courses in one of MIT's graduate programs and then, if they pay a "modest fee" of about $1,500 and pass an exam, they will earn a MicroMaster's credential, the school said. The new credential represents half of the university's one-year master's degree program in supply chain management....

White Hole. Credit: universe-review.ca =================================================================================================================== Black holes are created when stars die catastrophically in a supernova. So what in the universe is a white hole? It's imagination day, and we're going to talk about fantasy creatures. Like unicorns, but even rarer. Like leprechauns, but even more fantastical! Today, we're going to talk about white holes. Before we talk about white holes, let's talk about black holes. And before we talk about Black Holes, what's is this thing you have with holes exactly? Black holes are places in the universe where matter and energy are compacted so densely together that their...

Sometimes you have to think outside the box. Faced with some of the universe’s most stubborn mysteries, such as the identity of dark matter, physicists are turning to a technique that employs the weird laws of quantum mechanics: atom interferometry. Atom interferometers allow the study of various physical phenomena by splitting atom waves using a nanograting, such as this one. Composed of silicon nitride, this grating, imaged with a scanning electron microscope, has a period of 100 nm. Image courtesy of Alex Cronin (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ). This method, which takes advantage of the fact that quantum particles behave...

A Japanese scientist has won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Takaaki Kajita proved that neutrinos have mass. The neutrino is an elementary particle consisting of matter. Kajita observed neutrinos at a facility deep underground. He was part of a team that detected that some of the particles change to different types of neutrino. That proved neutrinos have mass. The discoveries were revealed at an international conference in 1998. His work surprised researchers all around the world because it disproved the established theory that neutrinos do not have mass. Kajita is the 24th Nobel Prize winner born in Japan. And...

Could the famed “Big Bang” theory need a revision? A group of theoretical physicists suppose the birth of the universe could have happened after a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole and ejected debris. Before getting into their findings, let’s just preface this by saying nobody knows anything for sure. Humans obviously weren’t around at the time the universe began. The standard theory is that the universe grew from an infinitely dense point or singularity, but who knows what was there before? “For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” stated Niayesh Afshordi, an...

The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics. But the idea that we live in a 'multiverse' made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility - although it is still a matter of vigorous debate among physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes. It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it...

If you visit the Paris Observatory on the left bank of the Seine, you'll see a plaque on its wall announcing that the speed of light was first measured there in 1676. The odd thing is, this result came about unintentionally. Ole Romer, a Dane who was working as an assistant to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, was trying to account for certain discrepancies in eclipses of one of the moons of Jupiter. Romer and Cassini discussed the possibility that light has a finite speed (it had typically been thought to move instantaneously). Eventually, following some rough calculations, Romer...

The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics. But the idea that we live in a “multiverse” made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility – although it is still a matter of vigorous debate among physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes. It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory,...

Are We Living In A Black Hole? // / Here’s an idea, what if the universe and everything we see around us is actually inside a black hole?Whenever I’m asked this question, what folks typically have in mind is that the universe began as an infinitely dense point, just like the singularity of a black hole, and because of cosmic expansion there’s a limit to how far we can observe, so maybe that’s like the event horizon. While it’s an interesting idea, things aren’t quite so simple.To begin with, the universe did not begin with an explosion from a...

For years nuclear scientists have talked about a revival of molten salt reactors, which are powered by a liquid fuel rather than solid fuel rods, that will help spark the long-awaited “nuclear renaissance.” Recent developments indicate that this alternative nuclear power technology is finally making progress toward commercialization. A consortium of research institutes and universities working under the aegis of the European Commission, including the Technology University of Delft (TU Delft), in the Netherlands, France’s National Center for Scientific Research, and the Commission’s Joint Research Center, in Brussels, in August embarked on a four-year research program designed to demonstrate the...

The matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (or QGP), is predicted to exist when temperatures and densities are so extreme that regular matter cannot exist. Instead, a “perfect liquid” exists for a short time before it cools and condenses into the regular stuff that forms the building blocks of matter. Although physicists have announced the detection of this exotic state of matter before, new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York, appear to show the tiniest droplets of quark-gluon plasma appear, in a specific pattern,...

ATLAS and CMS experiments shed light on Higgs properties 01 Sep 2015 Results of the analyses by individual experiments (coloured) and both experiments together (black), showing the improvement in precision resulting from the combination of results. Geneva/Saint Petersburg, 1st September 2015. Three years after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS...

(Phys.org)—Due to quantum effects, it's possible to build a quantum computer that computes without running—or as the scientists explain, "the result of a computation may be learned without actually running the computer." So far, however, the efficiency of this process, which is called counterfactual computation (CFC), has had an upper limit of 50%, limiting its practical applications. Now in a new paper, scientists have experimentally demonstrated a slightly different version called a "generalized CFC" that has an efficiency of 85% with the potential to reach 100%. This improvement opens the doors to realizing a much greater variety of applications, such...

A team of Antarctic scientists has just verified the existence of cosmic neutrinos — tiny, energetic particles that might hail from far reaches of the Milky Way and beyond. And these ghostly little flecks of matter could hold the key to some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. High-energy cosmic neutrinos are thought to be produced by some of the universe’s most violent agents, including black holes, supernovae, and the energetic cores of galaxies. Unchanged as they zip across space and time, these particles may represent something of an intergalactic breadcrumb trail, pointing us in the direction of any...

Device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an “extra special dimension”Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. "This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."...

The Case for Complex Dark Matter The physicist James Bullock explains how a complicated “dark sector” of interacting particles may illuminate some puzzling observations of the centers of galaxies. Jonathan Alcorn for Quanta MagazineJames Bullock, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, imagines what the universe would look like if dark matter interacted with itself. By: Liz KruesiAugust 20, 2015 Dark matter — the unseen 80 percent of the universe’s mass — doesn’t emit, absorb or reflect light. Astronomers know it exists only because it interacts with our slice of the ordinary universe through gravity. Hence the hunt for this...

Is the world we live in a computer simulation in the minds of Robotic Overlords who are using humanity as playthings? This is the "scientific" theory put forward by a number of physicists and Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom.(1) Bostrom is one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanism is a blend of revitalized Gnostic pagan and Eastern occult pantheist elements and magic science undergirded by a strong Darwinian impulse. Thus it subscribes to the modern myth of a coming Superman that is actually a counterfeit of the Christian vision of a new and perfected human race spiritually...

Matter and antimatter appear to be perfect mirror images of each other as far as anyone can see, scientists have discovered with unprecedented precision, foiling hope of solving the mystery as to why there is far more matter than antimatter in the universe. Everyday matter is made up of protons, neutrons or electrons. These particles have counterparts known as antiparticles — antiprotons, antineutrons and positrons, respectively — that have the same mass but the opposite electric charge. (Although neutrons and antineutrons are both neutrally charged, they are each made of particles known as quarks that possess fractional electrical charges, and...

The Los Angeles Times (8/10, Khan) reports that an international study led by Simon Driver of the University of Western Australia and presented at the International Astronomical Union meeting on Monday found that the amount of light the 200,000 galaxies are outputting is half of what they did two billion years ago, meaning “the universe is dying.” The article notes that seven telescopes were used in the study, including NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft. Driver said that the conclusion is consistent with each of the three indicators measured. However, the universe should continue to exist “far into the foreseeable...