Emily Conover

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

If imitation is a form of flattery, then scientists are enamored with the axion. The hypothetical subatomic particle has long eluded scientists. But it’s now been conjured up in imitation form within a thin sheet of material, researchers report April 16 in Nature. If axions exist, they could explain dark matter, an invisible form of matter inferred from observations of the cosmos. But efforts to spot the particles have been unsuccessful. The newfound axion imitators are the next best thing.

2 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

Neutrinos are known to have tiny masses. A new result proclaims the subatomic particles to be even tinier still. The electrically neutral particles, produced in radioactive decays and in reactions in the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos, have a mass of less than 0.45 electron volts, physicists report in the April 11 Science. The result, from the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino, or KATRIN, experiment slashes the experiment’s previous upper limit for neutrino mass by nearly half.

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

There’s a newfound mismatch between matter and antimatter. And that could bring physicists one step closer to understanding how everything in the universe came to be. For the most part, particles and their oppositely charged antiparticles are like perfect mirror images of one another. But some particles disobey this symmetry, a phenomenon known as charge-parity, or CP, violation.

3 weeks ago | nuclear-news.net | Emily Conover |Christina MacPherson

Calls to restart nuclear weapons tests stir dismay and debate among scientists Testing “has tremendous symbolic importance,” says Frank von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton University. “During the Cold War, when we were shooting these things off all the time, it was like war drums: ‘We have nuclear weapons and they work.

4 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Emily Conover

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit.