AMESN - Slashdot User

Submission + - Experiment possibly detected dark matter (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by AMESN on Friday December 18, 2009 @07:57AM

AMESN writes: An experiment in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota may have picked up the signature of WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, theorized to be the least massive type of dark matter. While the physicists involved note a one in four chance that ordinary subatomic particles caused the characteristic events in the experiment’s germanium detectors, the physicists are also saying that it’s not possible to reject the events as being from dark matter particles. Dark matter is thought to make up 80 percent of the mass of the universe, but dark matter particles have not yet been detected.

Submission + - How to see past an invisibility cloak

Submitted by AMESN on Saturday December 05, 2009 @04:21PM

AMESN writes: Ways to bend light around objects and render them invisible are becoming a major field of scientific study and gaining ground. While no actual invisibility cloak exists yet, researchers are also theorizing on how to beat the perfect cloak.

Submission + - Loneliness is contagious (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by AMESN on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @11:20AM

AMESN writes: Studies have shown that feelings can spread through social networks. Looking at 10 years of data from a long-term health study, researchers found that feelings of mistrust can spread too, causing more and more people in a network to cut ties with others. Loneliness is contagious, the researchers say, and one expert says loneliness is a public health issue.

Submission + - Antimatter in lightning (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by AMESN on Friday November 06, 2009 @05:52PM

AMESN writes: The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope launched last year detects gamma rays from light years away, but recently it detected gamma rays from lightning on Earth. And the energy of the gamma rays is specific to the decay of positrons, which are the antimatter flavor of electrons. Finding antimatter in lightning surprised researchers and suggests the electric field of the lightning somehow got reversed.

Submission + - Solar system's largest planetary ring (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by AMESN on Wednesday October 07, 2009 @01:06PM

AMESN writes: The largest ring around Saturn is also the biggest in the solar system. Researchers reported yesterday during the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences that they identified a ring around Saturn that could hold a billion Earths. The team used the NASA infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to sleuth out dust particles that make up the massive ring. The work also appears in the journal Nature.

Comment Kristina from Science News (Score 1) 269

by AMESN on Thursday April 30, 2009 @11:58AM (#27773917) Attached to: Some Large Dinosaurs Survived the K-T Extinction

Had Meg Marquardt actually done some real research on the way paleontologists understand extinction events, she could have noted that the idea of a pocket of survivors is not a big deal and in no way completely overthrows the well-established evidence that the extinction was indeed massive.

Comment Headline is misleading, at best (Score 3, Informative) 625

by AMESN on Thursday September 11, 2008 @01:24PM (#24962921) Attached to: Research Finds Carbon Dating Flawed

"Miscalculation" is the wrong word. Geologists are nuanced (unlike this headline) in how they interpret C-13 vs. C-12, especially for early Earth history. The PNAS paper is not about the ratio being flawed, it's about another way to interpret the activity of the shallow ocean versus the deep, open ocean. The paper is simply another line of scientific discussion, itself part of the scientific method.

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