Close to the Edge
"The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening that is far more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. This is one of those rare moments when our entire outlook, our framework for thinking, and the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology are suddenly undergoing real upheaval.”
That’s physicist and string theorist Leonard Susskind, commenting on the shifting scientific landscape in a recent edition of Edge. According to Susskind, the narrow 20th-century view of a unique universe, about ten billion years old and ten billion light years across with a unique set of physical laws, is giving way to something far bigger and pregnant with new possibilities.
Gradually, says Susskind, physicists and cosmologists are coming to see our ten billion light years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse. At the same time theoretical physicists are proposing theories that demote our ordinary laws of nature to a tiny corner of a gigantic landscape of mathematical possibilities.
This landscape of possibilities, Susskind notes, is a mathematical space representing all of the possible environments that theory allows. Each possible environment has its own laws of physics, elementary particles and constants of nature. Some environments are similar to our own corner of the landscape but slightly different. They may have electrons, quarks and all the usual particles, but gravity might be a billion times stronger.
Others, says Susskind, have gravity like ours but electrons that are heavier than atomic nuclei. Others may resemble our world except for a violent repulsive force (called the cosmological constant) that tears apart atoms, molecules and even galaxies. Not even the dimensionality of space is sacred. Regions of the landscape describe worlds of 5,6…11 dimensions. The old 20th century question, 'What can you find in the universe?' is giving way to 'What can you not find?'
The newest astronomical data about the size and shape of the universe convincingly confirm that inflation is the right theory of the early universe. There is very little doubt that our universe is embedded in a vastly bigger megaverse.
But the biggest news is that the notorious cosmological constant is not quite zero, as it was thought to be. This is a cataclysm and the only way that we know how to make any sense of it is through the reviled and despised anthropic principle.
Susskind doesn’t know what strange and unimaginable twists our view of the universe will undergo while exploring the vastness of the landscape. But he would bet that at the turn of the 22nd century, philosophers and physicists will look back nostalgically at the present and recall a golden age in which the narrow provincial 20th century concept of the universe gave way to a bigger, better megaverse, populating a landscape of mind-boggling proportions.
Steve Waite
The Hubble has detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a planet 150 light years away.
Unlike Earth, the planet is a hot, gassy orb very close to its sun-like star, and the oxygen and carbon are not signs of any sort of life, Hubble scientists said in a statement on Monday.
Still, astronomers said Hubble's findings show that the chemical composition of atmospheres of planets many light-years away can be measured.
The planet -- known as HD 209458b or Osiris -- is orbiting a star 150 light-years from Earth. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.
Osiris is only 4.3 million miles (6.92 million km) from its star -- compared with Earth's 93 million miles (150 million km) from the sun -- and whips around in an orbit of less than four days.
It belongs to a class of planets called "hot Jupiters," whose upper atmosphere is so hot it boils hydrogen off into space.
Osiris seems an odd name for a hot, gassy orb when there are so many members of Congress it could've been named after.
This could be a major boost toward supporting future energy needs. Scientists have demonstrated that they can produce natural gas from an existing gas hydrate deposit.
Hydrate forms when gas, usually methane, mixes with water under just the right temperature and pressure conditions. A lattice-work of frozen water molecules encases each molecule of the gas, creating a flammable, ice-like substance. When it was first discovered in the 1950s, hydrate was considered a nuisance, often clogging pipelines at drill sites. Hydrates were a ?gold-plated pain in the rear,? says gas industry veteran Robert Maddox, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering at Oklahoma State University.
In the past few decades, however, interest in hydrate has soared. The biggest reason for hydrate's appeal is the sheer volume of deposits buried beneath marine sediment and permafrost regions of the globe. Keith Kvenvolden, senior scientist (emeritus) at the U.S Geological Survey, estimates that the world's total supply of hydrate is more than double the amount of all other known fossil fuel deposits combined. If we could produce gas from only 1 percent of all the hydrates in the world, says USGS researcher Tim Collett, we would have enough natural gas to last more than 170,000 years at the present U.S. consumption rate of 23 trillion cubic feet annually.
Scientists have created a new form of matter known as fermionic condensate which may be useful in creating the next generation of superconductors.
The new matter form is called a fermionic condensate and it is the sixth known form of matter -- after gases, solids, liquids, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995.
"What we've done is create this new exotic form of matter," Deborah Jin, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's joint lab with the University of Colorado, who led the study, told a news conference.
"It is a scientific breakthrough in providing a new type of quantum mechanical behavior," added Jin.
I would've loved to have seen the grant proposal for this study.
BIG-BOOBED gals have a new reason to stick out their chests with pride. A surprising study proves they're more intelligent than their small-breasted sisters!
The study of 1,200 women conducted by Chicago sociologists comes in the wake of a recently released report stating that blonde rocket scientists outnumber brunettes.
"Although I hate to admit it, we found that women with big busts average 10 IQ points higher than less well-endowed women," reveals lead researcher Dr. Yvonne Rossdale, herself a meager 32A.
"The myth that women with voluptuous figures are not smart should now be shelved, along with the misconception that all blondes are dumb."
Which brings to mind the following lines from one of my all-time favorite films:
Chris McConnell: Your breasts, they're like melons. No, no, they're like pillows. Can I fluff your pillows?
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Chris McConnell: What am I afraid of her for? She's no rocket scientist.
C.D. Bales: Well, actually, she is a rocket scientist.
- Roxanne (1987)
Here is an excellent article on the European Brain Drain (via Outside the Beltway):
In the spring of 2002, after three productive years of research at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in the U.S. state of Indiana, Matthias Tschöp went home. Leaving the country he calls "a paradise" for scientists was hard, says Tschöp, who studies hunger-related hormones. "I thought about staying, but I'm German. That's where I belong and where I should contribute."
He landed at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) in Potsdam, and the shock set in. As at many German institutions, his colleagues were top-notch, but there was little money, and bureaucracy had a stranglehold on what resources were available. Though he quickly helped to win an €11.7 million E.U. grant for obesity research in collaboration with more than two dozen other institutions, it wasn't enough to overcome his disillusionment. "You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342," he says. "I could not deal with all that." He kept a visiting professorship at the DIfE and a role in the obesity project, but headed back to America, where he's now an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's psychiatry department. He still laughs when he thinks of the $750,000 he got for his new lab, staff and travel at Cincinnati. In Germany, he says, "I couldn't even get a start-up grant."
Paul Davies, author of several excellent popular science books, has an op-ed in the NYT on the building of a Mars base.
President Bush's announcement yesterday that the United States will soon be pointing its rockets toward Mars will doubtless be greeted with delight by space scientists.
After all, there are plenty of good reasons to mount such a trip. For a start, Mars is one of the few accessible places beyond Earth that could have sustained life. Though a freeze-dried desert today, it was once warm and wet, with lakes, rivers, active volcanoes and a thick atmosphere — all conditions conducive to life. Microbes might even remain alive there, lurking in liquid aquifers deep beneath the permafrost.
If life began from scratch on both Mars and Earth separately, then evidence for a second genesis would await us, providing a heaven-sent opportunity to compare two bio-systems and learn how life emerges from non-life. And if life were found to have started twice within the solar system, it would signal that the laws of nature are inherently bio-friendly, implying a universe teeming with life.
An alternative possibility is that life started on Mars and spread to Earth inside material blasted into space by the impact of comets crashing into the Martian surface. Mars and Earth trade rocks, and hardy bacteria could have hitched a ride to seed our planet with microbial Martians. Just possibly the journey was reversed, with life starting on Earth and hopping to Mars. Though such cross-contamination would compromise hopes of identifying a genuine second sample of life, it would still represent a biological bonanza, enabling scientists to study two versions of evolution. The economic and practical benefits would be incalculable.
Mars is alluring in another respect. Alone among our sister planets, it is able to support a permanent human presence. As Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society has remarked, it is the second safest place in the solar system. Its thin atmosphere provides a measure of protection against meteorites and radiation. Crucially, there is probably the water, carbon dioxide and minerals needed to sustain a colony.
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Without some radical improvements in technology, the prospects for sending astronauts on a round-trip to Mars any time soon are slim, whatever the presidential rhetoric. What's more, the president's suggestion of using the Moon as a base — a place to assemble equipment and produce fuel for a Mars mission less expensively — has the potential to turn into a costly sideshow. There is, however, an obvious way to slash the costs and bring Mars within reach of early manned exploration. The answer lies with a one-way mission.
Most people react with instinctive horror at the suggestion. I recall my own sense of discomfort when I met an aging American scientist who claimed to have trained for a one-way mission to the Moon in the pre-Apollo days. And in the case of the barren Moon, that reaction is largely justified. There is little on the Moon to sustain human life. Mars, however, is a different story. Because of the planet's relatively benign environment, it is theoretically able to support a permanent human presence. If provided with the right equipment, astronauts would have a chance of living there for years. A one-way trip to Mars need not mean a quick demise.
Every two years the orbit of Mars creates a window of opportunity to send fresh supplies at a reasonable cost. An initial colony of four astronauts, equipped with a small nuclear reactor and a couple of rover vehicles, could make their own oxygen, grow some food and even initiate building projects using local raw materials. Supplemented by food shipments, medical supplies and replacement gadgets from home, the colony could be sustained indefinitely. To be sure, the living conditions would be uncomfortable, but the colonists would have the opportunity to do ground-breaking scientific work and blaze a trail that would ensure them a permanent place in the annals of discovery.
Obviously this strategy carries significant risks in addition to those faced by a conventional Mars mission. Major equipment failure could leave the colony without enough power, oxygen or food. An accident might kill or disable an astronaut who provided some vital expertise. A supply drop might fail, condemning the colonists to starve in a very public way.
It's an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt it would be politically feasible. Space exploration is inherently a dangerous business but considering the public reaction at past accidents that have cost lives I doubt the public would accept a mission where expendability was a primary consideration.
Andrew Sullivan on the space initiative:
I'm talking about this $170 billion foray into space. After all, the next generation will be paying for a collapsed social security system, a bankrupted Medicare program, soaring interest on the public debt, as well as coughing up far higher taxes to keep some semblance of a government in operation. But, hey, the president needed another major distraction the week before the Iowa caucuses, and since he won't be around to pick up the bill, why the hell not? Deficits don't matter, after all. And what's a few hundred billion dollars over the next few decades anyway? Chickenfeed for the big and bigger government now championed by the Republicans. This space initiative is, for me, the last fiscal straw. There comes a point at which the excuses for fiscal recklessness run out. The president campaigned in favor of the responsibility ethic. He has governed - in terms of guarding the nation's finances - according to the motto: "If it feels good, do it." I give up. Can't they even pretend to give a damn?
I totally disagree with him. I think it is totally lame that we had men walk on the moon 35 years ago and have done nothing of any interest since. We are orders of magnitude more technologically advanced than we were and all we do is send shuttles into space to learn the effect that solar radiation has on tomatoes and other such necessary yet boring experiments. I realize we need to study such things in order to increase the chances of successful long term space travel but come on, you can't tell me that is all we are capable of.
There is always a reason why not to explore, not to be bold. I'm sure there were people telling the various European exploreres not to sail across the Atlantic, but thank God they did. Imagine if the discovery of America was delayed a couple of hundred years? The world would be so completely different and I think also would be much worse off. After all there was a very good reason why so many people across the world have risked everything to come here. Just because we don't really see the immediate benefits of exploration doesn't mean that they won't be massive over time.
Yes, I would rather private industry do all this since they would probably be able to do these things more efficiently. But barring a Bill Gates turning his sights away from Malaria and onto space, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything other than Hilton building a hotel in space. At this point, I will take any sort of research in space I can get. If it has to come from NASA, so be it.
Some scientists have come up with a new theory to explain the Ordovician extinction, the second most severe of the planet's five great periods of extinction.
The second-largest extinction in the Earth's history, the killing of two-thirds of all species, may have been caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun after gamma rays destroyed the Earth's ozone layer.
Astronomers are proposing that a supernova exploded within 10,000 light years of the Earth, destroying the chemistry of the atmosphere and allowing the sun's ultraviolet rays to cook fragile, unprotected life forms.
All this happened some 440 million years ago and led to what is known as the Ordovician extinction, the second most severe of the planet's five great periods of extinction.
"The prevailing theory for that extinction has been an ice age," said Adrian L. Melott, a University of Kansas astronomer. "We think there is very good circumstantial evidence for a gamma ray burst."
Explanations of how this was Bush's fault, to follow soon from the folks at DU and MoveOn.
I wonder if this will burst the bubble of all those who see race as a major classifier of group identity? Probably not. To those of us who prefer to treat all people as individuals rather than as members of a group, these results are not surprising. There is far more variation within groups than there is between them.
Race is less valuable than using genetic variants to infer ancestry when it comes to biomedical research.
That's because the use of genetic polymorphisms, as the variants are called, sorts people into categories that are much more precise than classifying them by race, said Dr. Michael J. Bamshad, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Although race can provide some useful information, it can be inadequate and even misleading when it comes to finding genetic links to disease.
Bamshad and science writer Steve E. Olson review the body of research available on the topic for the cover story of the December issue of Scientific American, titled "Does Race Exist?"
"Race is not as useful as other ways we have to sort people," said Bamshad. "There is information in race, but there is information in many other labels used to define populations. And we have better ways to sort people into groups."
Researchers would learn more by sorting people using genetic polymorphisms, he said, identifying both traits in common in groups and traits that are different.
"One of the ultimate goals is to be able to make inferences or predictions about health-related susceptibilities in individuals. To do that, we need to understand how genetic variation is distributed among different human groups," Bamshad said.
For example, people from Africa, Australian aborigines and folks from southern India bear a superficial resemblance because of skin pigmentation, but they are genetically quite different. The skin color is a trait that developed to protect them from the sun blazing overhead. And racial definitions vary worldwide. Someone "black" in the United States might be "white" in Brazil and "colored" in South Africa, where there are others classified as "black" and "white."
On the other hand, two groups who are similar genetically might have been exposed to different selective forces, so they appear to be more different than they are.
"Common notions of race do not always reflect a person's genetic background," they wrote.
A group of French chemists has found that red wine contains a chemical compound called acutissimin A which has shown promise as a anti-cancer agent. (I think this applies only to red wine made from grapes, not the stuff made from rats described below)
Gina Kolata has a fascinating article in the NYT about the discovery of an ancient manuscript by Archimedes, usually ranked with Gauss and Euler as one of greatest mathematicians of all time. The manuscript had been overwritten by monks in the 13th century.
Twenty-two hundred years ago, the great Greek mathematician Archimedes wrote a treatise called the Stomachion. Unlike his other writings, it soon fell into obscurity. Little of it survived, and no one knew what to make of it.
But now a historian of mathematics at Stanford, sifting through ancient parchment overwritten by monks and nearly ruined by mold, appears to have solved the mystery of what the treatise was about. In the process, he has opened a surprising new window on the work of the genius best remembered (perhaps apocryphally) for his cry of "Eureka!" when he discovered a clever way to determine whether a king's crown was pure gold.
The Stomachion, concludes the historian, Dr. Reviel Netz, was far ahead of its time: a treatise on combinatorics, a field that did not come into its own until the rise of computer science.
The goal of combinatorics is to determine how many ways a given problem can be solved. And finding the number of ways that the problem posed in the Stomachion (pronounced sto-MOCK-yon) can be solved is so difficult that when Dr. Netz asked a team of four combinatorics experts to do it, it took them six weeks.
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Among all of Archimedes' works, the Stomachion has attracted the least attention, ignored or dismissed as unimportant or unintelligible. Only a tiny fragment of the introduction survived, and as far as anyone could tell, it seemed to be about an ancient children's puzzle — also known as the Stomachion — that involved putting strips of paper together in different ways to make different shapes. It made no sense for a man of Archimedes' stature to care about such a game. As a result, Dr. Netz said, "people said, `We don't know what it is about.' "
In fact, he has concluded, the prevailing wisdom was based on a misinterpretation. Archimedes was not trying to piece together strips of paper into different shapes; he was trying to see how many ways the 14 irregular strips could be put together to make a square.
The answer — 17,152 — required a careful and systematic counting of all possibilities. "It was hard," said Dr. Persi Diaconis, a Stanford statistician who worked on it along with a colleague, Dr. Susan Holmes, who is also his wife, and a second husband-and-wife team of combinatorial mathematicians, Dr. Ronald Graham and Dr. Fan Chung from the University of California, San Diego.
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In the 13th century, Dr. Netz explained, Christian monks, needing vellum for a prayer book, ripped the manuscript apart, washed it, folded its pages in half and covered it with religious text. After centuries of use, the prayer book — known as a palimpsest, because it contains text that is written over — ended up in a monastery in Constantinople.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a Danish scholar, found it in 1906, in the library of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Istanbul. He noticed faint tracings of mathematics under the prayers. Using a magnifying glass, he transcribed what he could and photographed about two-thirds of the pages. Then the document disappeared, lost along with other precious manuscripts in the strife between the Greeks and the Turks.
It reappeared in the 1970's, in the hands of a French family that had bought it in Istanbul in the early 20's and held it for five decades before trying to sell it. They had trouble finding a buyer, however, in part because there was some question of whether they legally owned it. But also, the manuscript looked terrible. It had been ravaged by mold in the years the family kept it, and it was ragged and ugly.
In 1998, an anonymous billionaire bought it for $2 million and lent it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where it still resides.
"It is certainly the oldest penis in the world, that's for certain."
-- David Siveter of the University of Leicester reporting on a 425 million year old crustacean, ancestor of modern water fleas, found in rocks in Britain, that is unusually well-preserved and apparently has a clearly identifiable penis (that is, I assume, if you have expertise in identifying crustacean genitalia).
According to researchers, humor activates the same brain region as cocaine. Can we soon expect DEA agents breaking down doors looking for rubber chickens and whoopee cushions?
Some astronomers believe that the universe is in the shape of a dodecahedron.
This new study suggests that people are born gay.
This new study, however, suggests that people are not born gay.
Psychologists from University of Toronto and Harvard have identified one of the biological bases of creativity and its linked to mental illness.
The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
Popular Science has a list of the worst jobs in science.
We solicited nominations from more than a thousand working scientists and culled the list for the most noxious. Then we voted. Which is to say, there is absolutely nothing scientific about the ranking of the worst jobs in science that appears on these pages; it is simply the collective opinion of a group of alternately awestruck and disturbed editors who rarely suffer anything worse on the job than keyboard- induced repetitive-motion syndrome.
As happens in science, fundamental assumptions are herein turned on their heads. If you assume, for example, that people employed to supervise fart-smelling research would dislike such work, think again. Ditto Robert Jones, who adores working with flesh-eating beetles to remove every last morsel of decay and make his skeletons truly gleam. Mosquito researcher Helge Zieler says the beauty of the Brazilian rainforest far outweighs the thousands of mosquito bites and the malaria he suffered there. Science is full of inquisitive people who take great pleasure in doing jobs that others would not touch with a 10-foot pole?and the world is indisputably a better place for their efforts. We're grateful that someone out there is doing these jobs. Even more grateful that it isn't us.
The top worst jobs...
1. FLATUS ODOR JUDGE (or Fart-Sniffer for the uninitiated)
Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level?or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people's farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each "episode of flatulence," Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and?eureka!?Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.
Levitt defends his work against the reflexively dismissive by noting that doctors have never studied flatulence and that smell is a potentially critical medical symptom: "The odors of feces and intestinal gas and breath could all be important markers of gastrointestinal health," he says. Hydrogen sulfide, for instance, is an extremely toxic gas to mammals, potentially playing a role in ulcerative colitis, among other diseases. And so Levitt has dedicated his career to the study of the myriad fragrances produced by the human gut and imprudently ignored by the medical establishment.
2. DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER
3. BARNYARD MASTURBATOR
4. BRAZIL MOSQUITO RESEARCHER
Follow the link to the article for more details. (Hat Tip: Big Mouth)
A researcher claims to have found direct links between a person's sleeping position and their personality.
Prof Chris Idzikowski, one of Britain's leading sleep experts, has identified six different positions and each one says more about a person's character than they may care to reveal.
The most popular position, particularly among women, is the "foetus" position, with 41 per cent of people, and 51 per cent of women, saying that they usually slept curled up on their side, holding on to the pillow.
This position, the professor claims, means that they may appear tough but "are actually sensitive souls right to their core" and are usually shy.
Those who adopt the "starfish" - spreadeagled on their back - tend to be good listeners who make friends easily but do not like to be the centre of attention and prefer to let other people take the limelight.
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The research was conducted by comparing a person's preferred sleeping position to the most common personality traits identified in the subject.
Despite certain personality difficulties associated with the "freefall" position, they can comfort themselves with the fact that the position is good for digestion. "Starfish" and "soldiers" are more likely to have a bad night's sleep and to snore.
The research also revealed that changing your sleeping position was just as unlikely as couples' changing the side of the bed on which they usually sleep. Just five per cent fell asleep in a different position every night while the vast majority stuck to their favourite one.
The Guardian has an interesting article on the relationship of science and religion and why there are so many religious scientists.
Tomorrow, Mars will be closer to the Earth than any time in recorded history. So take a few minutes tomorrow evening and look into the southern sky for a brief view of an event which won't occur again for quite a long time. It is actually very bright already, after dark it was clearly and starkly visible during our entire trip back from Ohio. Even a pair of 75x binoculars should show some details.
There is an interesting piece from the Saturday NYT by Peter D. Kramer, author of "Listening to Prozac", on the "Woody Allen gene," i.e. 5-HTT, a gene which seems to be linked to the level of neuroticism as a personality trait.
The myriad ways science improves our life...yesterday I posted an entry about research that indicates masturbation helps protect against prostate cancer and today I read that other researchers have found a way to grow fart-free beans.
Now here is a study result I fully support.
Frequent masturbation, particularly in the 20s, helps prevent prostate cancer later in life, according to new research. Australian scientists have shown that the more men masturbate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop the disease that kills more than half a million men each year. They suspect that frequent ejaculation has a protective effect against the cancer because it prevents dangerous carcinogens from building up in the gland.
Me at 85: "Yeah, my glasses are the size of Coke bottles, but my prostate is fine".
I bet John Harvey Kellogg is turning in his grave. Heh.
Physicists have discovered a new class of subatomic particle, called a pentaquark.
The discovery involves quarks - particles that make up the protons and neutrons usually found in the nuclei of atoms.
The new particle is the so-called pentaquark - five quarks in formation. Until now, physicists had only seen quarks packed into two- or three-quark combinations.
They say the discovery of this new particle should have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of how the Universe is put together.