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Gamma-ray spike in Fermi telescope data hikes anticipation.The jury is still out on whether Fermi has spied dark matter.NASA/DOE/International LAT Team The murky hunt for dark matter has just got a little bit brighter. New gamma-ray results from the FERMI telescope fit with previous tantalizing hints of a detection of the mysterious stuff.Last year, a series of independent experiments caused a stir because they seemed to have detected signals of dark matter, which is believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter."There's been tremendous excitement about cosmic ray signals that have dark matter as one possible explanation," says Neal...

Hideo Hosono's research group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology was not looking for a superconductor in 2006. Rather the team was trying to create new kinds of transparent semiconductors for flat-panel displays. But when the researchers characterized the electronic properties of their new substance -- a combination of lanthanum, oxygen, iron and phosphorus -- they found that below four kelvins, or -269 degrees Celsius, it lost all resistance to carrying an electric current; that is, it superconducted. Although 4 K is far below the current laboratory record of 138 K (let alone the holy grail of "room temperature," or...

Baroque field gets fresh lease of life in condensed-matter physics. String theory - more than just a 'theory of everything'?Alamy Until recently, string theory — long heralded as a 'theory of everything' — hadn't been particularly good at explaining anything.But at a workshop this month at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, scientists have been using the theory to make progress in tackling one of the biggest puzzles in condensed-matter physics: the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. String theory suggests that vibrating strings that exist in 10 dimensions underpin the observable Universe. Although that basic premise is still...

To a physicist, life seems little short of miraculous — all those stupid atoms getting together to perform such clever tricks! For centuries, living organisms were regarded as some sort of magic matter. Today, we know that no special “life force” is at work in biology; there is just ordinary matter doing extraordinary things, all the while obeying the familiar laws of physics. What, then, is the secret of life’s remarkable properties? In the late 1940s and 1950s it was fashionable to suppose that quantum mechanics — or perhaps some soon-to-be-formulated “post-quantum mechanics” — held the key to the mystery...

Today we present a very special installment of the Codex Futurius, Science Not Fiction’s look at the big scientific ideas in sci-fi: Kevin Grazier—JPL physicist and friend of SNF—gives an insider’s peek at the workings of and discussion around the Orion antimatter drive used to propel the Phaeton starship in Ron D. Moore’s recent TV movie, Virtuality. Grazier was a science adviser for the movie (which was intended to be the pilot for an ongoing show), so he was right in the middle of these discussions. The screenshot further down in this post shows the actual spreadsheet used in the...

As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists. Even if it does exist, dark matter would be unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between actual measurements and predictions based on theoretical models. Hence the number of physicists questioning the existence of dark matter has been increasing for some time now. Competing theories of gravitation have already been developed which are independent of this...

Three educators give their views on exams Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution "Back when I went to Oxford, the entrance exams for women were different. The one for Oxford I found most challenging was the general classics paper. It was a 3.5 hour paper – you had half an hour to think ,then one hour for each question. I still remember one of the questions – 'compare the ideas of empire in Greece and Rome'. That was a real high jump intellectually. Exams are good things. They prepare you...

Astronomers have turned up the oldest and most distant supernova ever found: the star that created it detonated just 3 billion years after the big bang. The technique used to find it could reveal tens of thousands of other ancient supernovae, tracing out how the universe became seeded over time with heavy elements. Because light travels at a finite speed, more distant supernovae also occur further back in time. The calculated distance of the newly discovered blast suggests it occurred 10.7 billion years ago – about 1.5 billion years earlier than the previous record holder. The new blast was a...

The orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury, departs from what it should be under Newton's laws. A century ago, when Einstein explained this anomaly, it confirmed his theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity. Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds...

Did dark matter destroy the universe? You might be looking around at the way things "exist" and thinking "No", but we're talking about ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why? Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have...

If the universe obeyed Newton's laws of gravity, there would be about a 60% chance that Mercury would head toward the Sun or Venus during the Sun’s lifetime. But according to a new study, corrections to Newton's laws using Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) lower these chances to about 1%. That’s good news, because if Mercury had a near miss with Venus or the Sun, it could wreak havoc on Earth.

Enlarge ImageOutlier. Astronomers think they have found an intermediate-mass black hole (bright blue object) just outside a distant galaxy. Credit: Heidi Sagerud Heavyweight and lightweight black holes abound in the universe, but nobody has detected a middleweight--and some scientists argue they don't exist. Now, astronomers say they have found the first conclusive evidence for one of these elusive objects at the fringe of a distant galaxy. Estimated to be at least 500 times more massive than the sun, the discovery could plug a large gap in the cosmic menagerie, though it leaves unanswered questions about this type of black...

Borrowing from the physics of invisibility cloaks could make it possible to hide buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, say physicists in France and the UK. The "earthquake cloak" idea comes from the team led by Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France. They were the first to show that the physics of invisibility cloaks could have other applications – designing a cloak that could render objects "invisible" to destructive storm waves or tsunamis. The seismic waves of an earthquake fall into two main groups: body waves that propagate through the Earth, and surface waves that travel...

Fission and quarks figure into quirky caseIt's not every day that disputes over particle physics leads to assault charges. But that's what happened when Jason Everett Keller, 40, joined a conversation about quantum physics in South San Francisco in March. Keller was accused of attacking Stephan Fava while Fava and his friend were discussing physics in the Bay Area town. The charges didn't stick, however, as Keller has been acquitted by a San Mateo County jury. The verdict is still out string theory, however, so there's no indication that physics-related violence will abate any time soon. Related Stories Jackson West...

New data show that enrollment in U.S. science and engineering (S&E) graduate programs in 2007 grew 3.3 percent over comparable data for 2006--the highest year-over-year increase since 2002 and nearly double the 1.7 percent increase seen in 2006. Science programs added the most students in absolute numbers, but engineering's percentage growth over 2006, 5.9 percent, was substantially higher than that of science, which grew by 2.4 percent. Enrollment in computer sciences programs was up 2.7 percent, the first increase since 2002. The proportion of foreign students enrolled in S&E graduate programs in 2007 remained below its 2002 high, despite a...

"Star Trek" makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole. "Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel," said Stefano Finazzi of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies. This paper "makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives." ...Other physicists agree with the Italians' calculations, up to a point. "It's a good paper; their results are sound," said Gerald Cleaver,...

How our youthful universe explored the string-theory multiverse in search of home—with help from its anti-universe counterpart. Its journey could explain why our cosmos is so well suited for life.Saswat Sarangi owes his career in physics to a twist of fate. When he was a 13 year-old schoolboy in Orissa in eastern India, his uncle bought him a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as a birthday present. Unfortunately, the young Sarangi would have preferred a cricket bat, and the book remained unread for two years, until he found himself struggling to prepare for a physics test...

GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest atom smasher will likely be fired up again in October after scientists have carried out tests and put in place further safety measures to prevent a repeat of the faults that sidelined the $10 billion machine shortly after startup last year, the operator said Saturday. The Large Hadron Collider was meant to restart in late September, but that will probably be pushed back two to three weeks, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research said. "We're pretty confident about the dates," James Gillies told The Associated Press, adding that scientists believe they...

A dispatch from my colleague Dennis Overbye: As fans of the late, great “Seinfeld,” know, there is a lot to say about nothing. At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all? “Nothing is unstable,” Frank...

Nanoscience milestone opens up new possibilities in molecular electronics ZURICH, June 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists in collaboration with the University of Regensburg, Germany, and Utrecht University, Netherlands, for the first time demonstrated the ability to measure the charge state of individual atoms using noncontact atomic force microscopy. View video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plMkPtwEMRM (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO ) Measuring with the precision of a single electron charge and nanometer lateral resolution, researchers succeeded in distinguishing neutral atoms from positively or negatively charged ones. This represents a milestone in nanoscale science and opens up new possibilities in the exploration of nanoscale structures and...