The science behind RHCs liver thread

That's nice but what if the police take their asthma inhalers off them or worse consider pocket protectors as concealment of weapons.

 

Collider data hint at unexpected new subatomic particles
Shortage of muons in B meson decay looks suspicious, but needs confirmation
BY
EMILY CONOVER
3:47PM, APRIL 20, 2017

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WEIRD DECAYS Something funny may be going on in certain particle decays measured in the LHCb experiment in Geneva (above). A new measurement has now added to scientists’ suspicions.

MAXIMILIEN BRICE/CERN

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A handful of measurements of decaying particles has seemed slightly off-kilter for years, intriguing physicists. Now a new decay measurement at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva has amplified that interest into tentative enthusiasm, with theoretical physicists proposing that weird new particles could explain the results. Scientists with the LHCb experiment reported the new result on April 18 in a seminar at the European particle physics lab CERN, which hosts the LHC.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” says theoretical physicist Benjamin Grinstein of the University of California, San Diego. The new measurement is “a further hint that there’s something new and unexpected happening in very fundamental interactions.”

Other physicists, however, are more cautious, betting that the series of hints will not lead to a new discovery. “One should always remain suspicious of an effect that does not show up in a clear way” in any individual measurement, Carlos Wagner of the University of Chicago wrote in an e-mail.

Taken in isolation, none of the measurements rise beyond the level that can be explained by a statistical fluctuation, meaning that the discrepancies could easily disappear with more data. But, says theoretical physicist David London of the University of Montreal, there are multiple independent hints, “and they all seem to be pointing at something.”

The measurements all involve a class of particle called a B meson, which can be produced when protons are smashed together in the LHC. When a B meson decays, it can produce a type of particle called a kaon that is accompanied either by an electron and a positron (an antimatter version of an electron) or by a muon — the electron’s heavier cousin — and an antimuon.

According to physicists’ accepted theories, muons and electrons should behave essentially identically aside from the effects of their differing masses. That means the two kinds of particles should have an even chance of being produced in such B meson decays. But in the new result, the scientists found only about seven decays with muons for every 10 with electrons.

There are several varieties of B mesons. All are made up of one quark — a type of fundamental particle that also makes up protons and neutrons — and one antiquark. One of the two particles is a type called a “bottom” quark (or antiquark), hence the B meson’s name.

Earlier measurements of another variety of B meson decay also found a muon shortage. What’s more, measurements of the angles at which particles are emitted in some types of B meson decay also appear slightly out of whack, adding to the sense that something funny may be going on in such decays.

“We are excited by how [the measurements] all seem to fit together,” says LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson, an experimental physicist at the University of Oxford in England. If more data confirm that B mesons misbehave, a likely explanation would be a new particle that interacts differently with muons than it does with electrons. One such particle could be a leptoquark — a particle that acts as a bridge between quarks and leptons, the class of particle that includes electrons and muons. Or it could be a heavy, electrically neutral particle called a Z-prime boson.

Physicists spawned a similar hubbub in 2016, when the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC saw hints of a potential new particle that decayed to two photons (SN: 5/28/16, p. 11). Those hints evaporated with more data, and the current anomalies could do likewise. Although the two sets of measurements are very different, says Wolfgang Altmannshofer of the University of Cincinnati, “from the point of the overall excitement, I would say the two things are roughly comparable.”

Luckily, LHCb scientists still have a lot more data to dig into. The researchers used particle collisions only from before 2013, when the LHC was running at lower energy than it is now. “We have to get back to the grindstone and try and analyze more of the data we have,” says Wilkinson. Updated results could be ready in about half a year, he says, and should allow for a more definitive conclusion.

 

Key Einstein principle survives quantum test
Equivalence of gravity, acceleration applies even for atoms in superposition of energy states
BY
EMILY CONOVER
7:28AM, APRIL 28, 2017

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EINSTEIN ENDURES According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, massive objects warp space (illustrated above), producing gravitational attraction. Scientists don’t understand how general relativity interfaces with quantum mechanics, but a pillar of general relativity, the equivalence principle, has withstood a new quantum test.

POSTERIORI/SHUTTERSTOCK

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Particles with mind-bending quantum properties still follow a standard gravitational rule, at least as far as scientists can tell.

The equivalence principle — one of the central tenets of Einstein’s theory of gravity — survived a quantum test, scientists report online April 7 at arXiv.org.

In Einstein’s gravity theory — the general theory of relativity — gravity and acceleration are two sides of the same coin. According to the equivalence principle, the gravitational mass of an object, which determines the strength of gravity’s pull, is the same as its inertial mass, which determines how much an object accelerates when given a push (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). As a result, two objects dropped on Earth’s surface should accelerate at the same rate (neglecting air resistance), even if they have different masses or are made of different materials.

One of the first reported tests of the equivalence principle — well before it was understood in the framework of general relativity — was Galileo’s apocryphal experiment in which he is said to have dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Scientists have since adapted that test to smaller scales, swapping out the weights for atoms. In the new study, physicists went a step further, putting atoms into a quantum superposition, a kind of limbo in which an atom does not have a definite energy but occupies a combination of two energy levels.

Manipulating rubidium atoms with lasers, scientists led by researchers from Italy gave the atoms an upward kick and observed how gravity tugged them down. To compare the acceleration of normal atoms with those in a superposition, the scientists split the atoms into two clouds, put atoms in one cloud into a superposition, and measured how the clouds interacted. These clouds of atoms behave like waves, interfering similarly to merging water waves. The resulting ripples depend on the gravitational acceleration felt by the atoms.

The scientists then compared the result of this test to one where both clouds were in a normal energy state. Gravity, the researchers concluded, pulled on atoms in a superposition at the same rate as the others — at least to the level of sensitivity the scientists were able to probe, within 5 parts in 100 million.

Quantum tests of the equivalence principle explore the murky realm where quantum mechanics and general relativity meet. The two theories don’t play well with one another. Scientists are currently struggling to unify the pair into one theory of quantum gravity, and some candidate theories predict that the equivalence principle breaks down at the quantum level.

The test “is a new way of confronting gravity with quantum physics,” says theoretical physicist Robert Mann of the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Any way that we can do that tells us something about how to put together gravity with quantum physics,” even if the test finds no violation, he says.

Guglielmo Tino, a study coauthor and physicist at the University of Florence, declined to comment on the work due to the policies of the journal where the paper has been accepted.

Scientists have previously tested the equivalence principle in atoms, comparing gravity’s effects on different types of atoms, for example. Because such tests deal with tiny particles, they also explore the nebulous territory between quantum physics and general relativity. But the new test is the first to study superposition, one of the weirdest properties of quantum mechanics.

“It’s a beautiful demonstration of the versatility of these quantum tests,” says physicist Ernst Rasel of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany.

 

Here’s how an asteroid impact would kill you
Winds and shock waves are most deadly, computer simulations of 1.2 million hits suggest
BY
THOMAS SUMNER
7:00AM, MAY 2, 2017

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DEATH FROM THE SKIES Computer simulations reveal that most of the lethality of an earthbound asteroid (illustrated) comes from gusting winds and shock waves.

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It won’t be a tsunami. Nor an earthquake. Not even the crushing impact of the space rock. No, if an asteroid kills you, gusting winds and shock waves from falling and exploding space rocks will most likely be to blame. That’s one of the conclusions of a recent computer simulation effort that investigated the fatality risks of more than a million possible asteroid impacts.

In one extreme scenario, a simulated 200-meter-wide space rock whizzing 20 kilometers per second whacked London, killing more than 8.7 million people. Nearly three-quarters of that doomsday scenario’s lethality came from winds and shock waves, planetary scientist Clemens Rumpf and colleagues report online March 27 in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

In a separate report, the researchers looked at 1.2 million potential impactors up to 400 meters across striking around the globe. Winds and shock waves caused about 60 percent of the total deaths from all the asteroids, the team’s simulations showed. Impact-generated tsunamis, which many previous studies suggested would be the top killer, accounted for only around one-fifth of the deaths, Rumpf and colleagues report online April 19 in Geophysical Research Letters.

4,126
Average number of predicted deaths from a 50-meter-wide asteroid strike
18,424
Average number of deaths from a 100-meter-wide asteroid
276,311
Average number of deaths from a 400-meter-wide asteroid
“These asteroids aren’t an everyday concern, but the consequences can be severe,” says Rumpf, of the University of Southampton in England. Even asteroids that explode before reaching Earth’s surface can generate high-speed wind gusts, shock waves of pressure in the atmosphere and intense heat. Those rocks big enough to survive the descent pose even more hazards, spawning earthquakes, tsunamis, flying debris and, of course, gaping craters.

While previous studies typically considered each of these mechanisms individually, Rumpf and colleagues assembled the first assessment of the relative deadliness of the various effects of such impacts. The estimated hazard posed by each effect could one day help leaders make one of the hardest calls imaginable: whether to deflect an asteroid or let it hit, says Steve Chesley, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved with either study.

The 1.2 million simulated impactors each fell into one of 50,000 scenarios, which varied in location, speed and angle of strike. Each scenario was run with 24 different asteroid sizes, ranging from 15 to 400 meters across. Asteroids in nearly 36,000 of the scenarios, or around 72 percent, descended over water.

The deadliness assessment began with a map of human populations and numerical simulations of the energies unleashed by falling asteroids. Those energies were then used alongside existing casualty data from studies of extreme weather and nuclear blasts to calculate the deadliness of the asteroids’ effects at different distances. Rumpf and his team focused on short-term impact effects, rather than long-term consequences such as climate change triggered by dust blown into the atmosphere.

(The kill count of each effect was calculated independently of the other effects, meaning people who could have died of multiple causes were counted multiple times. This double counting allows for a better comparison across effects, Rumpf says, but it does give deaths near the impact site more weight in calculations.)

Story continues after interactive graphic

Death from the skies
A new project simulating 1.2 million asteroid strikes estimates how many deaths could result from each effect of a falling space rock (averages for three classes of asteroid simulated are shown in the interactive below). People who could have died from two or more effects are included in multiple columns.

Click the graphic to explore the asteroid simulation data.


H. THOMPSON AND T. TIBBITTS
While the most deadly impact killed around 117 million people, many asteroids posed no threat at all, the simulations revealed. More than half of asteroids smaller than 60 meters across — and all asteroids smaller than 18 meters across — caused zero deaths. Rocks smaller than 56 meters wide didn’t even make it to Earth’s surface before exploding in an airburst. Those explosions could still be deadly, though, generating intense heat that burns skin, high-speed winds that hurl debris and pressure waves that rupture internal organs, the team found.

Tsunamis became the dominant killer for water impacts, accounting for around 70 to 80 percent of the total deaths from each impact. Even with the tsunamis, though, water impacts were only a fraction as deadly on average as land-hitting counterparts. That’s because impact-generated tsunamis are relatively small and quickly lose steam as they traverse the ocean, the researchers found.

Land impacts, on the other hand, cause considerable fatalities through heat, wind and shock waves and are more likely to hit near large population centers. For all asteroids big enough to hit the land or water surface, heat, wind and shock waves continued to cause the most casualties overall. Land-based effects, such as earthquakes and blast debris, resulted in less than 2 percent of total deaths.

Deadly asteroid impacts are rare, though, Rumpf says. Most space rocks bombarding Earth are tiny and harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere. Bigger meteors such as the 20-meter-wide rock that lit up the sky and shattered windows around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 only frequent Earth about once a century (SN Online: 2/15/13). Impacts capable of inducing extinctions, like the at least 10-kilometer-wide impactor blamed for the end of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago (SN: 2/4/17, p. 16), are even rarer, striking Earth roughly every 100 million years.

Story continues after image

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Large asteroid impacts are rare. Space rocks as big as the 20-meter-wide meteor that left behind a smoky trail across the sky above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, for instance, strike about once every 100 years. But to best prepare for such events when they do occur, a research group is assessing the relative deadliness of various effects.
OLEG KARGOPOLOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES


But asteroid impacts are scary enough that today’s astronomers scan the sky with automated telescopes scouting for potential impactors. So far, they’ve cataloged 27 percent of space rocks 140 meters or larger estimated to be whizzing through the solar system. Other scientists are crunching the numbers on ways to divert an earthbound asteroid. Proposals include whacking the asteroid like a billiard ball with a high-speed spacecraft or frying part of the asteroid’s surface with a nearby nuclear blast so that the vaporized material propels the asteroid away like a jet engine.

The recent research could offer guidance on how people should react to an oncoming impactor: whether to evacuate or shelter in place, or to scramble to divert the asteroid. “If the asteroid’s in a size range where the damage will be from shock waves or wind, you can easily shelter in place a large population,” Chesley says. But if the heat generated as the asteroid falls, impacts or explodes “becomes a bigger threat, and you run the risk of fires, then that changes the response of emergency planners,” he says.

These asteroids aren’t an everyday concern, but the consequences can be severe.

— Clemens Rumpf

Making those tough decisions will require more information about compositions and structures of the asteroids themselves, says Lindley Johnson, who serves as the planetary defense officer for NASA in Washington, D.C. Those properties in part determine an asteroid’s potential devastation, and the team didn’t consider how those characteristics might vary, Johnson says. Several asteroid-bound missions are planned to answer such questions, though the recent White House budget proposal would defund a NASA project to reroute an asteroid into the moon’s orbit and send astronauts to study it (SN Online: 3/16/17).

In the case of a potential impact, making decisions based on the average deaths presented in the new study could be misleading, warns Gareth Collins, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London. A 60-meter-wide impactor, for instance, caused on average about 6,300 deaths in the simulations. Just a handful of high-fatality events inflated that average, though, including one scenario that resulted in more than 12 million casualties. In fact, most impactors of that size struck away from population centers and killed no one. “You have to put it in perspective,” Collins says.



PS The LHC is circulating beams again

 

Is LHC at the CERN Really Capable of Uncovering Possible Parallel Universes?
By
Linda Johnson
-
May 4, 2017

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We have a lot to thank the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for. This amazing piece of technology is located at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland and has produced some spectacular results already. One of its main achievements was proving the existence of the Higgs boson particle, and now it looks as though scientists are on their way to solving the dark matter issue also with thanks to the LHC. However, this new experiment that’s due to take place soon will outdo them all.


When fired up to the highest energy level, scientists suspect it could even possibly create miniature black holes. If a parallel universe were to then pop into existence, it could even be filled with some of our own gravity. One of the three scientists behind the upcoming experiment is Mir Faizal, and he states, “Just as many parallel sheets of paper, which are two-dimensional objects [breadth and length] can exist in a third dimension [height], parallel universes can also exist in higher dimensions. We predict that gravity can leak into extra dimensions, and if it does, then miniature black holes can be produced at the LHC.”

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The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator (Image: CERN)

He continued, “Normally when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized. This cannot be tested and so it is philosophy and not science. This is not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions. As gravity can flow out of our universe into the extra dimensions, such a model can be tested by the detection of mini black holes at the LHC. We have calculated the energy at which we expect to detect these mini black holes in ‘gravity’s rainbow’ [a new scientific theory]. If we do detect mini black holes at this energy, then we will know that both gravity’s rainbow and extra dimensions are correct.”

 

Bull (the article that is). That's sensationalism. At least with the headlines.

There's no evidence the multiverse is real, that's an tested theory, and nothing to suggest black holes lead to other universes. (That's more a 1980's sci-fi b-movie plotline)

 

Well they're investigating it at the LHC, so there must be some significant substance to it.

 

Scientists have eliminated HIV in mice using CRISPR
Posted yesterday by Sarah Buhr (@sarahbuhr)
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An important breakthrough has been made in the eradication of AIDs. Scientists have found they can successfully snip out the HIV virus from mouse cells using CRISPR/Cas9 technology.

Right now patients with the deadly virus must use a toxic concoction of anti-retroviral medications to suppress the virus from replicating. However, CRISPR/Cas9 can be programmed to chop out any genetic code in the body with scissor-like precision, including, possibly, all HIV-1 DNA within the body. And if you cut out the DNA, you stop the virus from being able to make copies of itself.

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First published in the journal Molecular Therapy, the team is the first to show HIV can be completely annihilated from the body using CRISPR. And with impressive effect. After just one treatment, scientists were able to show the technique had successfully removed all traces of the infection within mouse organs and tissue.


However, it’s not a permanent solution and it’s still early days for the crew — the study merely builds on a previous proof-of-concept study they conducted last year and the technique has only been used on mice so far. But, should the scientists be able to replicate their findings, the technique could move to human trials in the future.

“The next stage would be to repeat the study in primates, a more suitable animal model where HIV infection induces disease, in order to further demonstrate elimination of HIV-1 DNA in latently infected T cells and other sanctuary sites for HIV-1, including brain cells,” said co-author of the study Dr. Khalili in a statement. “Our eventual goal is a clinical trial in human patients.”

 

Yeah! It's safe to have unprotected sex with mice again.

 

whats mice aids got to do with the large hadron collider

 

**** all

 

phew.. you've put my mind at rest there.

 

Nothing to do with the LARGE hadron collider. A different Hadron Collider gave the mice AIDS.

 

5 impossible things the laws of physics might actually allow

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By Gilead Amit



Einstein’s general theory of relativity is famous for its prediction of wormholes – shortcuts that might allow time travel by connecting different areas of space and time. Nobody’s ever seen one, though, and debate rages over whether you could travel down one even if they did exist. While we wait for a visitor from the future to let us know, here are some other physical impossibilities that might already have been proved possible.

Perpetual motion machines
The idea of devices that can move and do other sorts of useful work with no external power has seduced some famous names over the centuries. Leonardo da Vinci worked on several designs involving spinning weights. Robert Boyle imagined a funnel that feeds itself. Blaise Pascal wisely abandoned the search and invented the roulette wheel instead.

Large-scale perpetual motion machines offend against all sorts of physical laws, not least the cast-iron laws of thermodynamics. But Nobel-prize winning theoretician Frank Wilczek’s “time crystals” – materials that eternally repeat in time with no external power source – seem to come close. Examples recently made in the lab don’t do any useful work, however, and so the quest continues.

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Time crystals: A new state of matter that outlasts the universe
A bizarre oscillating material that seems to run on a never-ending loop has apparently been made in the lab, bending the cast-iron laws of thermodynamics
Teleporters
Ever wish the ground would swallow you up and spit you back out somewhere far away? Strangely enough, there is nothing in the laws of physics to stop that happening. In his 2008 book Physics of the Impossible, physicist Michio Kaku calls teleportation a “Class I Impossibility”, meaning that the technology is theoretically feasible, and could even exist within our lifetimes.

In fact, teleporters already exist: not for whole human beings, but for subatomic particles. Quantum entanglement, the phenomenon that Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”, allows information and quantum states to be transmitted apparently instantaneously across space. The first quantum teleportation experiments, carried out in 1997, involved one photon’s quantum state being reconstructed in another photon tens of centimetres away. Today, the world quantum teleportation record stands at over 100 kilometres.

Invisibility cloaks
Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak is just one fictional example of magical garb that makes you disappear. But so-called metamaterials suggest a similar possibility in real life too.

The principle behind metamaterial cloaks is simple: waves of light bend around an object in your field of vision, much like water folds itself around a boulder in a stream. In practice, though, whole new nanostructured materials must be developed that can bend light in unfamiliar ways.

The first metamaterials were made in the lab in 2000, and basic cloaking devices soon followed. Cloaking has recently been ruled impossible for human-sized objects, but that’s no great loss – even if it were possible, you would only be able to reroute specific wavelengths of light, making the cloaked object weirdly coloured and more conspicuous. Instead, similar cloaking principles might be used to divert seismic waves and shield entire cities from earthquakes.

Negative temperatures
If you want to live in this universe, you had better conform to its rules. No travelling faster than the speed of light, no dividing by zero and no cooling anything below absolute zero.

Absolute zero – about -273°C – represents the temperature at which atoms stop moving. So it seems logical you can’t go below it. In fact, as physicists finally proved earlier this year, you can’t even reach it at all.

But you can jump beneath it. According to the strict thermodynamic definition, temperature is a measure of order: the quieter and more ordered something is, the lower its temperature. So, in 2013, physicists at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany took the logical leap: they tidied up a collection of atoms cooled to almost absolute zero just a bit more, creating a temperature technically well below absolute zero.

Such states aren’t practically very useful. But they might help us study dark energy, the mysterious stuff ripping the cosmos apart, as some have proposed it has negative temperature.

Matter married with antimatter
Normally, when matter comes into contact with its opposite, antimatter, both “annihilate” in a sudden burst of energy. It’s just lucky we live in a universe with a lot of matter and mysteriously little antimatter.

But then again, bizarrely, some matter might also be antimatter. So-called Majorana fermions would be their own antiparticles, capable of self-annihilating under the right conditions. Physicists have long suspected that neutrinos could fall in this category, although proving that means spotting some of the rarest process in the universe in action, that happen perhaps once in 100 trillion trillion years.

Meanwhile there are persistent reports we’ve made something similar in the lab. When an electron is torn out of a superconductor, a hole is left behind that acts like a positively-charged particle with exactly the same mass. If the two are manipulated in just the right way, they can be made to act like Majorana particles.

 

Naked singularity might evade cosmic censor
Spacetime singularities might exist unhidden in strangely curved universes
BY
EMILY CONOVER
9:00AM, MAY 15, 2017

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LAID BARE Inside a black hole, the extreme curvature of space (shown) means that the standard rules of physics don’t apply. Such regions, called singularities, are thought to be shrouded by event horizons, but scientists showed that a singularity could be observable under certain conditions in a hypothetical curved spacetime.

HENNING DALHOFF/SCIENCE SOURCE

Certain stealthy spacetime curiosities might be less hidden than thought, potentially exposing themselves to observers in some curved universes.

These oddities, known as singularities, are points in space where the standard laws of physics break down. Found at the centers of black holes, singularities are generally expected to be hidden from view, shielding the universe from their problematic properties. Now, scientists report in the May 5 Physical Review Letters that a singularity could be revealed in a hypothetical, saddle-shaped universe.

Previously, scientists found that singularities might not be concealed in hypothetical universes with more than three spatial dimensions. The new result marks the first time the possibility of such a “naked” singularity has been demonstrated in a three-dimensional universe. “That’s extremely important,” says physicist Gary Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Horowitz, who was not involved with the new study, has conducted previous research that implied that a naked singularity could probably appear in such saddle-shaped universes.

In Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, spacetime itself can be curved (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). Massive objects such as stars bend the fabric of space, causing planets to orbit around them. A singularity occurs when the warping is so extreme that the equations of general relativity become nonsensical — as occurs in the center of a black hole. But black holes’ singularities are hidden by an event horizon, which encompasses a region around the singularity from which light can’t escape. The cosmic censorship conjecture, put forth in 1969 by mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, proposes that all singularities will be similarly cloaked.

According to general relativity, hypothetical universes can take on various shapes. The known universe is nearly flat on large scales, meaning that the rules of standard textbook geometry apply and light travels in a straight line. But in universes that are curved, those rules go out the window. To demonstrate the violation of cosmic censorship, the researchers started with a curved geometry known as anti-de Sitter space, which is warped such that a light beam sent out into space will eventually return to the spot it came from. The researchers deformed the boundaries of this curved spacetime and observed that a region formed in which the curvature increased over time to arbitrarily large values, producing a naked singularity.

“I was very surprised,” says physicist Jorge Santos of the University of Cambridge, a coauthor of the study. “I always thought that gravity would somehow find a way” to maintain cosmic censorship.

Scientists have previously shown that cosmic censorship could be violated if a universe’s conditions were precisely arranged to conspire to produce a naked singularity. But the researchers’ new result is more general. “There's nothing finely tuned or unnatural about their starting point,” says physicist Ruth Gregory of Durham University in England. That, she says, is “really interesting.”

But, Horowitz notes, there is a caveat. Because the violation occurs in a curved universe, not a flat one, the result “is not yet a completely convincing counterexample to the original idea.”

Despite the reliance on a curved universe, the result does have broader implications. That’s because gravity in anti-de Sitter space is thought to have connections to other theories. The physics of gravity in anti-de Sitter space seems to parallel that of some types of particle physics theories, set in fewer dimensions. So cosmic censorship violation in this realm could have consequences for seemingly unrelated ideas.

 

So apparently humanity may have unintentionally created a space shield. Not to protect us from asteroids or space aliens but from charged particles.

VLF radio transmissions ( Very Low Frequency waves used in part to communicate with submarines) appear to have created a cocoon around the earth and pushed the Van Allen belt further out.

Small charged particles are being blocked by this layer.

 

Quantum tractor beam could tug atoms, molecules
Electron beams could enable ‘matter wave’ treknology, theoretical study suggests
BY
EMILY CONOVER
7:00AM, MAY 19, 2017

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DO THE WAVE Quantum matter acts like both a particle and a wave, as demonstrated by the famous double-slit experiment (illustrated above). Electrons sent through a pair of slits interfere like waves, creating peaks and troughs. This wave nature of matter could be used to create a tractor beam that could reel in atoms or molecules, a new study proposes.

• The wavelike properties of quantum matter could lead to a scaled-down version of Star Trek technology. A new kind of tractor beam could use a beam of particles to reel in atoms or molecules, physicists propose in the May 5 Physical Review Letters.

Scientists have previously created tractor beams using light or sound waves, which can pull small particles a few millimeters or centimeters (SN: 11/15/14, p. 16). But “the idea of doing this with matter waves is really groovy,” says physicist David Grier of New York University, who was not involved with the research.

Sound or light waves can pull small particles under carefully controlled conditions. For certain types of beams, waves can scatter forward off of a particle, pushing the particle back toward the source of the beam due to the law of conservation of momentum.

“We have used a very similar reasoning here,” says study coauthor Andrey Novitsky, a physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. But rather than light or sound, “we have something more elusive” — namely, matter waves.

In quantum mechanics, particles behave like waves, spread out so that they have no definite position. Quantum waves represent the probability that a particle will be found in a particular spot if its location is measured. Novitsky and colleagues performed theoretical calculations to show that such matter waves could produce a pulling effect similar to light or sound waves.

Matter wave tractor beams could be made with beams of electrons, Novitsky says. Such beams could provide new ways of manipulating matter on small scales. Scientists might use these tractor beams to separate mixtures of atoms or ions, for example, reeling in one type but not another.

“The idea is very reasonable,” says Philip Marston of Washington State University in Pullman. Although the results are still theoretical, “I think somebody will probably find some way to demonstrate this in the lab,” Marston says.

Can they do it with combine harvesters as well as tractors?

 

Do atoms ever "tug"

 

If you slip them a fiver and noone is looking.