Fermilab, home of a mammoth atom smasher and rival to CERN, which will be fired up later this year, has discovered a new particle. One little problem though: It breaks all of the known rules on how to create matter. Ooops.

The new particle has been given the unhip name of Y(4140). Researchers do not even know what Y(4140) is made of, though they do know this: it couldn’t have been formed through either of the two known models for creating matter.

From National Geographic:

“The surprise about this new particle that we found is that it’s not predicted by any of these rules,” said Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida.

“From what we know, if you tried to put a set of quarks or antiquarks together you couldn’t build these particles.”

Yesterday, the Dark Matter collaboration made an announcement in Venice, Italy that claimed dark matter, the elusive particle that theoretically accounts for 90% of the universe, had been detected on Earth.

The DAMA experiment has looked more directly for dark matter particles hitting the Earth. The experiment takes place in an underground laboratorythat lies beneath 1.4 kilometers of rock, inside the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. The team looks for flashes of light in a sodium iodide detector.
The flashes mainly come from background “noise”, such as ordinary neutrons from radioactivity in the surrounding rock. But some might also come from dark matter particles, and, if so, the scientists expect to see seasonal variations in the signal because the Earth’s speed through our galaxy changes depending on its direction of motion.

All is not settled though, as the method used in Italy has not been successfully reproduced anywhere else.

But Halzen is wary. “The discussion about whether this is some unknown systematic effect remains,” he says.
Richard Gaitskell from Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, US, and a member of two dark matter experiments – the Cyrogenic Dark Matter Search(CDMS) and the Xenon project – also remains skeptical, because no other experiment has seen signs of dark matter.
“Right now, it is very difficult to reconcile theoretically what they are seeing and what we are seeing,” says Gaitskell.

Fight! Fight!

Mark April 6th on your calendars, as that’s the day the world will most likely come to an end.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will be allowing the general public to visit the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the largest particle accelerator ever created and is slated for activation later in the year, when it will attempt to peer into the earliest moments of the universe…or something.

Why am I so down on the public being allowed through the door? Don’t you watch movies?
Here’s what will go down: the general public, cameras draped around necks, will be allowed through the door like a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At that point, all hell will break loose. Someone in this gathering, most likely a rambunctious kid, will somehow ditch the gaggle of onlookers and venture off on his own. He’ll enter a restricted area and start pressing big red buttons. LED countdown timers will start going off, sirens will blare, people will panic, and voila! Instant armageddon!
An alternative to my theory follows the above example, but instead of global destruction, the LHC will unleash its power, mutating all those within the facility with superhero powers.