A proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN laboratory in Geneva that produced more than 100 charged particles. CREDIT: CERN

In a development physicists are calling “huge,” “tantalizing” and “unexpected,” researchers have measured a signal that could herald a new kind of particle or force of nature.

Yet the finding is not yet conclusive, and leaves many researchers skeptical.

The discovery comes from an atom smasher called the Tevatron at the Fermilab physics laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Inside the accelerator there, particles are ramped up to near the speed of light as they race around a 4 mile (6.3 km) ring. When two particles collide, they disintegrate into other exotic particles in a powerful outpouring of energy.

Scientists analyzed thousands of these collisions, and found a suspicious pattern in about 250 more cases than predicted. In these instances, the products of the collision between a proton and its antimatter partner, the antiproton, were different than expected.

Read complete article here. {via livescience.com}

Einstein

If time and space are similar and space is fractalled then time fractals are not far away.

Challenging Einstein might be blasphemy, but there are a host of papers and published scientific features asking the same question. Was Einstein wrong? Even if he was wrong, what’s that got to do with markets and economics? We already talked about self similarity of research in ‘The Time Fractal’. Physicists and economists have more in common than what is being published or talked about.

If the ongoing research proves that the thinker (Einstein) was wrong, it would bring old schools down and erect new institutions. Though this is not a very comfortable truth, there is nothing wrong in challenging an idea. Moreover, how much truth do we know anyway? And don’t new ideas come from old ideas? Is this not what research is about, learning from the past and unearthing the future?

Read complete article here. {via Business Standard}

The Dark Matter Lab

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world’s deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings — a place uniquely suited to scientists’ quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.

Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.

The site is ideal for experiments because its location is largely shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.

Read complete article here. {via Associated Press}