<h2>Secret Domination</h2>
The ocean is crowded. As many as 10 million viruses can be found squirming in a single millilitre of its water, and it turns out they have friends we never even knew about.
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can&#8217;t be detected by standard lab tests. Researchers suspect this viral multitude may already exist outside the water — maybe even inside us.
&#8220;We don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s ocean-specific at all,&#8221; <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2018/new-type-virus-found-ocean-0124">says</a> environmental microbiologist Martin Polz from MIT.
Polz and his MIT team, together with researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, analysed three months&#8217; worth of ocean water samples collected off the Massachusetts coast.
<figure id="attachment_120550" style="width: 700px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img class="size-full wp-image-120550" src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2018/01/ocean-virus-unknown-family-1.jpg" alt="" width="700" height="467" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Electron microscope&#8217;s view of the non-tailed viruses. Image Credit: Kauffman et al.</figcaption></figure>
What they found floating in the water isn&#8217;t just remarkable for what it possesses, but for what it doesn&#8217;t.
<h2>Tailless Wonders</h2>
According to the researchers, the most abundant viruses on the entire planet are double-stranded DNA (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_virus">dsDNA</a>) viruses, of which the &#8216;tailed&#8217; variety (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudovirales">Caudovirales</a>) are the most well-known to science.
Their mysterious tail-less counterparts are far less understood, chiefly because their biological characteristics aren&#8217;t easily picked up by common tests.
But that doesn&#8217;t mean they can&#8217;t be found. In their <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25474">new study</a>, the researchers were able to incubate tail-less viruses extracted from the waves lapping Massachusetts&#8217; shores, and sequenced their DNA.
Of 200 viruses infecting a culture of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrionaceae">Vibrionaceae</a> (a family of common marine bacteria), 18 turned out to belong to a new family of small, non-tailed dsDNA viruses.
The team calls their discovery Autolykiviridae, after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autolycus">Autolykos</a> (&#8220;the wolf itself&#8221;): a character from Greek mythology, who as a trickster and thief proved similarly tricky to catch.
But Autolykiviridae has been caught, and now that we know about it, the discovery is helping scientists to fill in a large missing link in virus evolution.
The tail-less viruses look to be representatives of an ancient viral lineage defined by specific types of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsid">capsids</a>, the protein shell that encases viral DNA — which we knew commonly infects animals and single-celled organisms, but not bacteria.
The genomes of this new family are very short compared to tailed viruses, composed of about 10,000 bases, instead of the typical 40,000–50,000 for tailed viruses.
<h2>Ruthless Killers</h2>
In addition, while most viruses prey on just one or two types of bacteria, the tail-less kind looks to be able to infect dozens of different types in a variety of species, suggesting it plays an outsized role in terms of regulating (or killing) bacterial life within the ocean.
And then some. In experiments with over 300 strains of Vibrionaceae, the Autolykiviridae punched well above their weight compared to tailed bacteriophages.
<figure style="width: 360px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="https://futurism.com/images/in-the-footsteps-of-zika-the-next-critter-borne-viruses-infographic/"><img src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2016/12/In-the-Footsteps-of-Zika_home_-v1.jpg" alt="In the Footsteps of Zika: The Next Critter-Borne Viruses [INFOGRAPHIC]" ></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text center"><a href="https://futurism.com/images/in-the-footsteps-of-zika-the-next-critter-borne-viruses-infographic/" target="_blank">Click to View Full Infographic</a></figcaption></figure>
&#8220;They caused about 40 percent of the bacterial killing observed, despite comprising just 10 percent of the viruses that we isolated,&#8221; <a href="http://www.einstein.yu.edu/news/releases/1286/previously-unknown-ocean-virus-family-may-also-populate-the-human-gut/">explains</a> one of the team, microbiologist Libusha Kelly.
That ruthless efficiency might not be restricted to the deep blue sea.
With the genome in hand, the researchers searched DNA databases to see if evidence of similar, Autolykiviridae-like viruses had already been studied by scientists. Your stomach came up in the results.
&#8220;We&#8217;ve found related viral sequences in the [human] gut microbiome,&#8221; <a href="http://www.einstein.yu.edu/news/releases/1286/previously-unknown-ocean-virus-family-may-also-populate-the-human-gut/">Kelly says</a>, &#8220;but we don&#8217;t yet know how they influence microbial communities in the gut or how important they are for health.&#8221;
There&#8217;s a lot more research to be done to understand what the implications of these viruses are – in the ocean, and in ecosystems like the human body too – but it&#8217;s already clear the discovery of these elusive parasites is a big catch in itself.
&#8220;[This] opens new avenues for furthering our understanding of the roles of viruses in the ocean,&#8221; <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2018/new-type-virus-found-ocean-0124">says</a> marine biologist Jed Fuhrman from the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the research.
&#8220;In a practical sense, it also shows how we need to alter some commonly used methods in order to capture these kinds of viruses for various studies. I&#8217;d say it is an important advance in the field.&#8221;
The findings are reported in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25474">Nature</a>.

These tailless viruses aren't easily picked up by common tests.

Never-before-seen viruses with weird DNA were just discovered in the ocean

Hard Science

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can't be detected by standard lab tests.

Never-Before-Seen Viruses With Weird DNA Were Just Discovered in The Ocean

"This opens new avenues for furthering our understanding of the roles of viruses in the ocean."

A study using epilepsy patients undergoing surgery has given neuroscientists an opportunity to track in unprecedented detail the movement of a thought through the human brain, all the way from inspiration to response.
The findings confirm the role of the prefrontal cortex as the coordinator of complex interactions between different regions, linking our perception with action and serving as what can be considered the &#8220;glue of cognition&#8221;.
<a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/electroencephelography">Previous efforts</a> to measure the passing of information from one area to the other have relied on processes such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography">electroencephalography</a> (EEG) or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging">functional magnetic resonance imaging</a> (fMRI), which, whilenon-invasive, offer less than perfect resolution.
The study led by researchers from the University of California, Berkley, recorded the electrical activity of neurons using a precise technique called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocorticography">electrocorticograhy</a> (ECoG).
This required hundreds of tiny electrodes to be placed right up against the cortex, providing more spatial detail than EEG and improving the resolution in time of fMRI.
While this poses an unethical level of risk for your average volunteer, patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy have their brain activity monitored in this very way, giving the researchers a perfect chance to conduct a few tests.
Each of the 16 test subjects performed a number of tasks varied to suit their individual arrangement of electrodes, all while having their neural activity monitored and tracked.
Participants were required to listen to a stimulus and respond, or watch images of faces or animals on a screen and asked to perform an action.
Some tasks were more complex than others; for example, a simple action involved simply repeating a word, while a more complex version was to think of its antonym.
Researchers monitored the split-second movement of electrical activity from one area – such as areas associated with interpreting auditory stimuli – to the prefrontal cortex, to areas required to shape an action, such as the motor cortex.
<iframe width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PgU4s_U2Lb4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
While none of this threw up any surprises, the results clearly emphasised the role of the prefrontal cortex in directing activity.
For some tasks its input was fairly limited. In others the area was required to work hard, managing signals from multiple parts of the brain to coordinate the recognition of words, possibly dredging up memories before setting to work a bunch of muscles to provide a novel answer.
&#8220;These very selective studies have found that the frontal cortex is the orchestrator, linking things together for a final output,&#8221; <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/01/17/recording-a-thoughts-fleeting-trip-through-the-brain/">says neuroscientist Robert Knight</a> from UC Berkeley.
&#8220;It&#8217;s the glue of cognition.&#8221;
The prefrontal cortex was seen to remain active throughout most of the thought process, as would be expected for a multitasking region of the brain.
The quicker the handoff from one area to the other, the faster people responded to a stimulus.
&#8220;fMRI studies often find that when a task gets progressively harder, we see more activity in the brain, and the prefrontal cortex in particular,&#8221; says the study&#8217;s lead author <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/01/17/recording-a-thoughts-fleeting-trip-through-the-brain/">Avgusta Shestyuk</a>.
&#8220;Here, we are able to see that this is not because the neurons are working really, really hard and firing all the time, but rather, more areas of the cortex are getting recruited.&#8221;
What did come as something of a surprise were details on the precise timing of each area.
Some of the responding areas lit up remarkably early, often during the stimulus, suggesting that even before we have a complete response handy, our brain is already getting those parts of the cortex ready for action.
&#8220;This might explain why people sometimes say things before they think,&#8221; <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/01/17/recording-a-thoughts-fleeting-trip-through-the-brain/">suggests Shestyuk</a>.
This research was published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0267-2">Nature Human Behaviour</a>.

Neuroscientists have just gotten an unprecedented look at how thoughts move through our brains.

Neuroscientists have followed a thought as it moves through the brain

Neuroscientists were able to track a thought, from its formation to its response. The researchers used unique access given by patients undergoing surgery.

Neuroscientists Have Followed a Thought as it Moves Through the Brain

We didn't think it was possible.

While we all take for granted the fact that time&#8217;s arrow forever points towards the future, physicists have always had trouble showing <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-propose-a-mirror-universe-where-time-moves-backwards">why this is necessarily the case</a>.
A mix of chloroform and acetone might seem like an odd place to hunt for clues, but researchers have used just such a combination to create conditions where for some purposes time actually appears to move backwards.
This research won&#8217;t take us on a journey to see dinosaurs, but it just might tell us why our Universe is stuck on a one way street.
The recent experiment conducted by an international team of physicists focused on a principal feature we often use to define time — the movement of energy.
Intuitively, time is pretty simple. We can remember the past and not the future, for example.
But when breaking things down into simple rules, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-time-and-why-does-it-move-forward">we discover there&#8217;s no clear reason</a> why a cause has to come before its effect. On the smallest levels, we can flip the formula describing the movements and interactions of particles and still get a useful picture.
So why doesn&#8217;t time wobble back and forth?
A clue lies in something called entropy. In a system cut off from gaining energy — such as our Universe — things tend to go from ordered to disordered, giving large scale systems a bias in how energy is distributed.
In terms of the laws of thermodynamics, that means you can&#8217;t put a hot object in a cold room and expect the room to get colder and the object to get hotter. Hot things tend to cool down.
Even if this doesn&#8217;t tell us exactly why time exists, thermodynamics gives us a sloping direction to investigate.
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1829">Various experiments</a> have shown that, even on a quantum level, particles will generally behave in a way that&#8217;s dependent on initial starting conditions. In other words, they&#8217;re moving forward.
Are there limits to this generalization? Apparently so, at least according to the results of this experiment.
The team looked at chloroform, a molecule made up of a carbon atom connected to one hydrogen and three chlorine atoms.
The researchers used a strong magnetic field to line up the nuclei of the carbon and hydrogen atoms when the molecules were suspended in acetone, and manipulated a property of their particles called spin.
This allowed them to &#8216;listen in&#8217; on their behavior as they slowly heated the nuclei using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance">nuclear magnetic resonance</a>.
Playing by the rulebook of time, as one nucleus warms up it should transfer its random movements to colder particles until they&#8217;re both the same temperature, a change that would be recognisable in their respective energy states.
In normal conditions, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. But the researchers found a rather intriguing exception when the particles were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_correlation">correlated</a>.
This means certain probabilities became locked together over a distance thanks to previous interactions, a little like a softer version of quantum <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/">entanglement</a>.
The particle correlation made a significant difference to how energy was shared between the bodies — the heated hydrogen particles got even hotter, while their colder entangled carbon partner got colder.
In other words, the study revealed the thermodynamic equivalent of reversing time in a very tiny pocket of the Universe.
&#8220;We observe a spontaneous heat flow from the cold to the hot system,&#8221; the team <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323">writes in the study.</a>
The research was published on the pre-review website <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323">arXiv.org</a>, which means we do need to be cautious in how we interpret the results.
And, to be clear, the work is limited to a very small scale — it won&#8217;t give us a flux capacitor we can use to swing back to the &#8217;60s. But it does show the arrow of time isn&#8217;t absolute.
The demonstration also provides promising details on where quantum mechanics and thermodynamics overlap, which is itself an exciting brave new world physicists are <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/the-new-thermodynamics-how-quantum-physics-is-bending-the-rules-1.22937">still teasing apart</a>.
On a practical level it shows how heat can be channeled in strange ways using the rules of quantum physics, which could have some interesting technical applications.
Exactly how these observations scale up from tiny to macroscopic systems the size of a Universe is something for future experiments to investigate.
In any case, it could help fill in some of the gaps in understanding why the dimension of time leans so heavily in one direction.
You can read the study on the pre-print server <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323">arXiv.org</a>.

Physicists have created a set of conditions in which time seems to run in reverse

Earth & Energy

Researchers have used thermodynamics to experiment with the flow of time. The study will allow us to better understand the flow of time.

Physicists Have Created a Set of Conditions in Which Time Seems to Run in Reverse

The research attempts to prove that the arrow of time isn't absolute.

It&#8217;s well established that <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/new-composite-material-reduces-helium-damage-fusion-reactors">nuclear fusion</a> — the reaction that powers our Sun — could be the key to unlocking clean, limitless energy here on Earth.
But one of the biggest challenges of modern science is how to harness the fusion reaction so that it produces more energy than it consumes. And a new paper claims to have found a way to do just that.
Instead of looking at how to optimize common fusion reactor designs, such as <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-just-produced-its-first-hydrogen-plasma">tokamaks</a> or <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works">stellerators</a>, a group of physicists experimentally tested some novel reactor types.
They found that a strange-looking sphere design could be the key to achieving net-positive nuclear fusion because, surprisingly, it has the potential to generate more energy than it uses.
The key difference, aside from its shape, is that this nuclear sphere would fuse <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen">hydrogen</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron">boron</a>, rather than hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium. And it uses lasers to heat the core up to 200 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
If the team&#8217;s calculations are correct, the hydrogen-boron reactor device could be built and producing net-positive energy way before any of the reactors currently being tested reach completion.
Even better, the hydrogen-boron reaction produces no neutrons, and therefore doesn&#8217;t create any radioactive waste as a byproduct.
&#8220;It is a most exciting thing to see these reactions confirmed in recent experiments and simulations,&#8221; <a href="https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/laser-boron-fusion-now-%E2%80%98leading-contender%E2%80%99-energy">says lead researcher Heinrich Hora</a>, from the University of New South Wales in Australia.
&#8220;I think this puts our approach ahead of all other fusion energy technologies.&#8221;
Fusion reactions take the opposite approach to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission">nuclear fission</a> reactions we rely on for our nuclear power today: instead of atoms being split, they&#8217;re combined, or fused, together.
It&#8217;s similar to the reactions that power the Sun, as lighter nuclei are fused to build heavier ones with the help of incredible temperatures and pressures.
As great as it sounds in theory, it&#8217;s proving very difficult to harness in practice. The past two years have been record-breaking for fusion reactors around the world, with Germany switching on their <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works">much-hyped Wendelstein 7-X stellerator reactor.</a>
But despite all our advances, we&#8217;re not a whole lot closer to creating net-positive nuclear fusion. Put simply, that&#8217;s because these machines just take so much energy to generate plasma.
In fact, Wendelstein 7-X isn&#8217;t even intended to <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-just-produced-its-first-hydrogen-plasma">generate usable amounts of energy, ever</a>. It&#8217;s just a proof of concept.
But for years, Hora and her team have been working on alternative designs. And in this study, they tested them out experimentally as well as through simulations.
Their hydrogen-boron reactor works by triggering an &#8220;avalanche&#8221; fusion reaction from a laser beam packing a quadrillion watts of power in just a trillionth of a second.
You can see what it would look like below.
<figure style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="" src="http://www.sciencealert.com/images/2017-12/hb-fus-02.jpg" alt="hb fus 02" width="600" height="531" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Diagram showing a hydrogen-boron reaction. Image Credit: UNSW</figcaption></figure>
The latest tests put the hydrogen-boron approach ahead of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion">other similar technologies</a>, including deuterium-tritium fusion, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129562-400-laser-sparked-fusion-power-passes-key-milestone/">which is being explored</a> at the National Ignition Facility in the US (and also has the drawback of producing radioactive waste).
The team also put together a roadmap for further development of hydrogen-boron fusion.
The best news? If future research doesn&#8217;t reveal any major engineering hurdles to this approach, the scientists reckon that a prototype reactor could be built within a decade.
While plenty of challenges remain in optimizing the necessary reactions and keeping them stable enough to generate electricity, if this new fusion technique can be made to work, the benefits could be huge.
&#8220;The fuels and waste are safe, the reactor won&#8217;t need a heat exchanger and steam turbine generator, and the lasers we need can be bought off the shelf,&#8221; <a href="https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/laser-boron-fusion-now-%E2%80%98leading-contender%E2%80%99-energy">says Warren McKenzie</a>, managing director of HB 11, which owns the patents to the new technology.
The research has been published in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/laser-and-particle-beams/article/road-map-to-clean-energy-using-laser-beam-ignition-of-boronhydrogen-fusion/8BE057DC1BC9E0A588FB3ABAA993078C">Laser and Particle Beams</a>.

The laser beam it uses produces a quadrillion watts of power.

New calculations may finally make fusion energy a reality

A sphere-shaped nuclear fusion reactor that uses hydrogen and boron could create more energy than it burns. It uses lasers to heat the core.

New Calculations May Finally Make Fusion Energy a Reality

Like nothing we've seen.

<blockquote>Down here on Earth, scientists around the globe are constantly watching, observing, measuring and trying to figure out just what the heck is going on in the vast Universe beyond our reach.</blockquote>
And 2017 has been an incredibly exciting year for space science &#8211; so here are some of the stories that really had us wowed.
We saw colliding neutron stars
We just gotta call it &#8211; this is absolutely jaw-droppingly good and probably won&#8217;t be topped by anything short of the first photographs of a black hole&#8217;s event horizon.
<a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-gravitational-waves-have-given-us-colliding-neutron-stars">Gravitational waves were able to help pinpoint the collision between two neutron stars</a>, allowing us to take optical observations as it was happening (and directly measure <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/speed-of-gravitational-waves-and-light-same">the speed of gravity</a>). This is HUGE &#8211; you can <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/what-the-new-gravitational-waves-discovery-means-for-the-future-of-astronomy">read up on the implications here</a>.
We had an interstellar visitor
Asteroids and comets in the Solar System are nothing new &#8211; astronomers observe them all the time. But this one was special &#8211; for the first time ever, scientists observed something, either an asteroid or a comet, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-spot-first-visiting-comet-from-outside-solar-system">inside our Solar System but originating from elsewhere</a>.
And it turned out to be <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/interstellar-extrasolar-asteroid-weirder-than-we-knew-oumuamua">even more amazing once we</a> started studying it &#8211; a strangely-shaped asteroid with an icy core that has probably been flying through space for hundreds of millions of years.
Astronomers measured the farthest distance yet across our own galaxy
It&#8217;s actually really hard to figure out what the Milky Way galaxy looks like from our vantage point on the inside &#8211; which meant it was pretty exciting news when astronomers were able to measure the <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-set-a-new-record-for-measuring-distances-across-the-milky-way">distance to a group of stars 66,000 light-years away</a> on the other side of the galaxy.
That nearly doubled the previous measurement record of 36,000 light-years!
<figure id="attachment_116764" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-116764" src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2017/12/galactic_distance_record_1024.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="415" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Robert Hurt, NASA</figcaption></figure>
Tabby&#8217;s Star got even weirder
KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby&#8217;s Star, has been confounding scientists since its discovery in 2015 &#8211; and continues to do so.
This year, researchers discovered that the star, which exhibits a dimming pattern never seen anywhere else before, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/tabby-s-star-is-apparently-weirder-than-we-knew-so-now-we-need-a-new-theory">has been doing so for longer than we thought</a> &#8211; which poses significant problems for all the current hypotheses. We got nothing, watch this space.
Humans are going back to the Moon!
The last human to set foot on the Moon was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Cernan">Eugene Cernan in 1972</a>. That&#8217;s 45 years ago.
But the Moon won&#8217;t be lonely for much longer, according to US Vice President Mike Pence, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/the-us-just-officially-said-they-are-sending-humans-back-to-the-moon">who announced this year</a> that the US government is sending people back up there. We&#8217;re packing our Moon boots already.
We got a lead on fast radio bursts
Fast radio bursts are one of the Universe&#8217;s most puzzling mysteries. They&#8217;re extremely powerful radio signals that last just milliseconds, and they can&#8217;t be predicted or, usually, pinpointed.
This year, we received <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-finally-pinpointed-the-source-of-one-of-those-mysterious-cosmic-radio-bursts">repeating bursts from one location</a> for the first time, and <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/we-just-picked-up-15-mysterious-radio-signals-from-a-distant-galaxy">then a second time</a>, allowing us to track where they came from. We still don&#8217;t know what they are, but we&#8217;re getting closer.
The Day Cassini Died
For 13 years, Cassini was the little Saturn probe that could, orbiting Saturn and sending back unprecedented amounts of data about the ringed planet and its wacky moons (and <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/the-cassini-files-our-favourite-photos-from-the-departing-saturn-probe">some breathtaking photographs</a>).
On 15 September, its mission came to an end, and it plunged down into the depths of Saturn &#8211; <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/cassini-is-getting-some-really-close-looks-at-saturn-s-amazing-rings">hard at work until its last moments</a>.
The Sun had a party
Our own local star has been having a blast up there &#8211; quite literally. It spat out <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/the-sun-just-spat-out-the-most-enormous-flare-in-12-years">the biggest solar flare we&#8217;ve seen in 12 years</a>, powerful enough to interfere with communication technology on Earth and cause gorgeous auroras.
And in August, the US saw its <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/everything-you-need-to-know-to-be-ready-for-monday-s-great-american-eclipse">first full solar eclipse across the entire country since 1918</a> (and NASA won eclipse photos with <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-just-recorded-the-international-space-station-flying-in-front-of-the-solar-eclipse">this shot of a photobombing ISS</a>).
Relativity got confirmed (again)
Over 100 years after Einstein published his theory of general relativity, scientists are still finding out he was right about many, many things.
This year, astrophysicists calculated that deviation in the orbit of a star around a black hole was not consistent with Newtonian theory &#8211; but it <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/stars-orbiting-a-supermassive-black-hole-may-have-finally-confirmed-general-relativity">totally fit with Einstein</a>. If he was still around, we would high-five him so hard.
Scientists observed binary supermassive black holes
Thanks to the <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/live-update-big-gravitational-wave-announcement-is-happening-right-now">discovery of gravitational waves</a>, we know that binary black holes exist, but the idea of a binary supermassive black hole was only theoretical &#8211; until this year.
Scientists <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/orbiting-supermassive-black-holes-have-been-observed-for-the-first-time">discovered and observed a binary supermassive black hole</a> created by a merger between two galaxies, each of which had a supermassive black hole at its centre.
Astronomers weighed a star using gravity
Einstein said this was impossible due to the scarcity of stars in the correct alignment.
But, thanks to the <a href="http://www.cfhtlens.org/public/what-gravitational-lensing">gravitational lensing</a> effect he predicted, and combined with the Hubble space telescope&#8217;s angular resolution, astronomers found the one-in-a-million alignment of stars that allowed them <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-weighed-a-star-with-gravity-for-the-first-time">to weigh a star using gravity</a> for the first time ever.
Hello TRAPPIST-1!
TRAPPIST-1 fever sort of came and went, but for a while there, it was the solar system on everyone&#8217;s lips: seven planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star, our &#8220;<a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/breaking-news-nasa-is-making-a-huge-exoplanet-announcement-right-now">sister solar system</a>&#8221; looked like a pretty good candidate for life.
Then it was discovered that <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/bad-news-humans-trappist-1-is-not-the-alien-paradise-we-were-hoping-for">maybe those planets aren&#8217;t so hospitable after all</a>. Then researchers discovered that, wait! <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-found-the-first-evidence-that-the-trappist-1-system-might-contain-water?perpetual=yes&amp;limitstart=1">They might be</a>! It&#8217;s been a real rollercoaster and we just don&#8217;t know what to believe any more, but it sure has been fun.
We&#8217;re still looking for extraterrestrial life elsewhere
TRAPPIST-1 isn&#8217;t the only basket for our alien-hunting eggs. There was also the <a href="https://sciencealert.com/newly-discovered-planet-could-be-the-best-hope-for-life-outside-our-solar-system">discovery of LHS 1140b</a>, a planet about 40 years away that shows promise as one of the best candidates yet.
And in November, astronomers announced the discovery of Ross 128 b, an Earth-like planet <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/exoplanet-11-light-years-away-ross-128-b-biomarkers-close-neighbour">just 11 light-years away</a>, from which <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-detected-strange-signals-coming-from-a-star-11-light-years-away">mysterious signals</a> were detected earlier this year (they could have been interference from Earth, so let&#8217;s not get too excited).
We&#8217;re going to have to wait a while to find out if either planet has biomarkers, but still! Exciting!
The Event Horizon Telescope took some pictures
We can&#8217;t see black holes, but maybe we can photograph them. This year, scientists around the world pointed a collective of telescopes &#8211; called the Event Horizon Telescope &#8211; at a black hole for five nights of observations.
Their goal was to see if they could finally, for the first time, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-might-have-just-captured-the-first-ever-photo-of-a-black-hole-s-event-horizon">get a picture of the event horizon of a black hole</a>.
We&#8217;re still waiting on the result, and we&#8217;re on the edges of our seats. Hopefully, we&#8217;ll get to see it sometime early next year.

What we know about the universe is constantly evolving.

14 ways our perception of the universe changed forever in 2017

There have been a number of astronomical discoveries made regarding our universe over the past year. Here are a few of the most exciting.

Fourteen Ways Our Perception of the Universe Changed Forever in 2017

The universe will never be the same.

The human brain contains <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/are_there_really_as_many">a little over 80-odd billion neurons</a>, each joining with other cells to <a href="http://www.dana.org/News/Details.aspx?id=43512">create trillions</a> of connections called synapses.
The numbers are mind-boggling, but the way each individual nerve cell contributes to the brain&#8217;s functions is still an area of contention. A new study has overturned a hundred-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron &#8216;fire&#8217;, posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders.
A team of physicists from Bar-Ilan University in Israel conducted experiments on rat neurons grown in a culture to determine exactly how a neuron responds to the signals it receives from other cells.
To understand why this is important, we need to go back to 1907 when a French neuroscientist named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Lapicque">Louis Lapicque</a> proposed a model to describe how the voltage of a nerve cell&#8217;s membrane increases as a current is applied.
Once reaching a certain threshold, the neuron reacts with a spike of activity, after which the membrane&#8217;s voltage resets.
What this means is a neuron won&#8217;t send a message unless it collects a strong enough signal.
Lapique&#8217;s equations weren&#8217;t the last word on the matter, not by far. But the basic principle of his integrate-and-fire model has remained relatively unchallenged in subsequent descriptions, today forming the foundation of most neuronal computational schemes.
<figure id="attachment_116608" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-116608" src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2017/12/21086425615_b9d8c3caaa_b.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="819" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: NICHD/Flickr</figcaption></figure>
According to the researchers, the lengthy history of the idea has meant few have bothered to question whether it&#8217;s accurate.
&#8220;We reached this conclusion using a new experimental setup, but in principle these results could have been discovered using technology that has existed since the 1980s,&#8221; <a href="https://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php?id=33&amp;pt=20&amp;pid=4&amp;level=1&amp;cPath=4&amp;type=1&amp;news=3068">says lead researcher Ido Kanter</a>.
&#8220;The belief that has been rooted in the scientific world for 100 years resulted in this delay of several decades.&#8221;
The experiments approached the question from two angles – one exploring the nature of the activity spike based on exactly where the current was applied to a neuron, the other looking at the effect multiple inputs had on a nerve&#8217;s firing.
Their results suggest the direction of a received signal can make all the difference in how a neuron responds.
A weak signal from the left arriving with a weak signal from the right won&#8217;t combine to build a voltage that kicks off a spike of activity. But a single strong signal from a particular direction can result in a message.
This potentially new way of describing what&#8217;s known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summation_(neurophysiology)">spatial summation</a> could lead to a novel method of categorising neurons, one that sorts them based on how they compute incoming signals or how fine their resolution is, based on a particular direction.
Better yet, it could even lead to discoveries that explain certain neurological disorders.
It&#8217;s important not to throw out a century of wisdom on the topic on the back of a single study. The researchers also admit they&#8217;ve only looked at a type of nerve cell called pyramidal neurons, leaving plenty of room for future experiments.
But fine-tuning our understanding of how individual units combine to produce complex behaviours could spread into other areas of research. With neural networks inspiring future computational technology, identifying any new talents in brain cells could have some rather interesting applications.
This research was published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18363-1">Scientific Reports</a>.

This discovery leaves plenty of room for future experiments.

Physicists overturn a 100-year-old assumption on how brains work

Researchers have begun to re-examine an old assumption regarding how the more than 80 billion neurons in our brains are stimulated.

Physicists Overturn a 100-Year-Old Assumption on How Brains Work

This is how neurons actually fire.

In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physics <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/odd-states-of-matter-how-three-british-theorists-scooped-the-2016-nobel-prize-for-physics?perpetual=yes&amp;limitstart=1">went to three British scientists</a> for their work on superconductors and superfluids, which included the explanation of a rather odd phase of matter.
Now, for the first time, their discovery has a practical application – shrinking an electrical component to a size that will help quantum computers reach a scale that just might make them useful.
In a collaboration with Stanford University in the US, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney and Microsoft have used the newly found phase of matter &#8211; <a href="https://iop.fnwi.uva.nl/cmp/TI.html">topological insulator</a> &#8211; in shrinking an electrical component called a circulator 1,000 times smaller.
That&#8217;s super good news when it comes to squeezing more qubits into a small enough space.
If you missed the fuss last year, a trio of physicists received the Nobel Prize for discovering that under certain conditions some materials could easily conduct electrons along their surface, but remain an insulator within.
Most importantly, they discovered cases where matter transitioned between states without breaking something called symmetry, as happens when water atoms rearrange into ice or vapour.
As we shrink electrical components down to virtually atomic scales, the way electrons move in different dimensions becomes increasingly important.
Enter the qubit – a chunky piece of electronics that uses the probabilities of an unmeasured bit of matter to perform calculations classical computers can&#8217;t hope to match.
<iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JhHMJCUmq28?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" gesture="media" allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
We can make qubits <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/breaking-a-brand-new-type-of-qubit-has-been-unveiled-and-it-finally-makes-quantum-computers-scalable">in a variety of ways</a>, and are getting pretty good at stringing them together <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-quantum-announcement-overshadowed-by-something-even-bigger">in ever larger numbers</a>.
But shrinking qubits to sizes small enough that we can shove hundreds of thousands into a small-enough space is a challenge.
&#8220;Even if we had millions of qubits today, it is not clear that we have the classical technology to control them,&#8221; <a href="https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/11/28/key-component-for-quantum-computing-invented.html">says David Reilly</a>, a physicist at the University of Sydney and Director of Microsoft Station Q.
&#8220;Realising a scaled-up quantum computer will require the invention of new devices and techniques at the quantum-classical interface.&#8221;
One such device is called a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulator">circulator</a>, which is kind-of like a roundabout for electrical signals, ensuring information heads in one direction only.
Until now, the smallest versions of this hardware could be held in the palm of your hand.
This is now set to change as scientists have shown a magnetised wafer made of a particular topological insulator could do the job, and be made 1,000 times smaller than existing components.
&#8220;Such compact circulators could be implemented in a variety of quantum hardware platforms, irrespective of the particular quantum system used,&#8221; <a href="https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/11/28/key-component-for-quantum-computing-invented.html">says the study&#8217;s lead author</a>, Alice Mahoney.
In many respects, we&#8217;re still at the pre-vacuum-tube and magnetic tape phase of quantum computers – <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-you-need-to-know-about-quantum-computing">they&#8217;re more promise</a> than practical.
But if we keep seeing advances like this, it won&#8217;t be long before we&#8217;ll be bringing you news of quantum computers cracking problems which leave our best supercomputers gasping.
This research was published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01984-5">Nature Communications</a>.
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The quantum computing revolution is upon us.

Physicists just invented an essential component needed for quantum computers

3D rendering Central Computer Processors CPU concept. Electronic engineer of computer technology. Computer board chip circuit cpu core. Hardware concept electronic device motherboard semiconductor

Robots & Machines

Researchers have found a use for a new state of matter that allows for an essential component of quantum computers to be shrunk.

Physicists Just Invented an Essential Component Needed for Quantum Computers

We're one step closer to a new age in computing.

Chess isn&#8217;t an easy game, by human standards. But for an artificial intelligence powered by a formidable, almost alien mindset, the trivial diversion can be mastered in a few spare hours.
In a new paper, Google researchers detail how their latest AI evolution, AlphaZero, developed <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf">&#8220;superhuman performance&#8221;</a> in chess, taking just four hours to learn the rules before obliterating the world champion chess program, Stockfish.
In other words, all of humanity&#8217;s chess knowledge – and beyond – was absorbed and surpassed by an AI in about as long as it takes to drive from New York City to Washington, DC.
After being programmed with only the rules of chess (no strategies), in just four hours AlphaZero had mastered the game to the extent it was able to best the <a href="http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/">highest-rated</a> chess-playing program <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)">Stockfish</a>.
In a series of 100 games against Stockfish, AlphaZero won 25 games while playing as white (with first mover advantage), and picked up three games playing as black. The rest of the contests were draws, with Stockfish recording no wins and AlphaZero no losses.
&#8220;We now know who our new overlord is,&#8221; <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/12/06/entire-human-chess-knowledge-learned-surpassed-deepminds-alphazero/">said</a> chess researcher David Kramaley, the CEO of chess science website Chessable.
&#8220;It will no doubt revolutionise the game, but think about how this could be applied outside chess. This algorithm could run cities, continents, universes.&#8221;
<figure id="attachment_114363" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="size-full wp-image-114363" src="https://wp-assets.futurism.com/2017/12/chess-2855056_640.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="440" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Image source: Creative Commons/Pixabay</figcaption></figure>
Developed by Google&#8217;s DeepMind AI lab, AlphaZero is a tweaked, more generic version of <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/new-self-learning-ai-is-like-an-alien-civilisation-inventing-its-own-mathematics">AlphaGo Zero</a>, which specialises in playing the Chinese board game, Go.
DeepMind has been <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-artificial-intelligence-beats-human-go-champion-for-the-first-time">refining this AI for years</a>, in the process besting a <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-ai-makes-history-beating-world-class-go-grandmaster">series of human champions</a> who fell like dominoes before the indomitable, <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/artificial-intelligence-officially-just-beat-the-world-s-1-go-player">&#8220;Godlike&#8221; neural network</a>.
That victory streak culminated in a <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/new-self-learning-ai-is-like-an-alien-civilisation-inventing-its-own-mathematics">startling success</a> in October, in which a new fully autonomous version of the AI – which only learns by playing itself, never facing humans – bested all its former incarnations.
By contrast, AlphaGo Zero&#8217;s predecessors partly learned how to play the game by watching moves made by human players.
That effort was intended to assist the fledgling AI in learning strategy, but it seems it may have actually been a handicap, since AlphaGo Zero&#8217;s fully self-reliant learning proved <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/new-self-learning-ai-is-like-an-alien-civilisation-inventing-its-own-mathematics">devastatingly more effective</a> in one-on-one competition.
&#8220;It&#8217;s like an alien civilisation inventing its own mathematics,&#8221; computer scientist Nick Hynes from MIT told <a href="https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/stunning-ai-breakthrough-takes-us-one-step-closer-to-the-singularity/">Gizmodo</a> in October.
&#8220;What we&#8217;re seeing here is a model free from human bias and presuppositions. It can learn whatever it determines is optimal, which may indeed be more nuanced that our own conceptions of the same.&#8221;
But things are moving so fast in this field that already the October accomplishment may have been outmoded.
In their new <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf">paper</a>, the team outlines how the very latest AlphaZero AI takes the self-playing reliance – called reinforcement learning – and applies it with a much more generalised streak that gives it a broader focus to problem solving.
That broader focus means AlphaZero doesn&#8217;t just play chess. It also plays Shogi (aka Japanese chess) and Go too – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it only took two and eight hours respectively to master those games as well.
For now, Google and DeepMind&#8217;s computer scientists aren&#8217;t commenting publicly on the new research, which hasn&#8217;t as yet been peer-reviewed.
But from what we can tell so far, this algorithm&#8217;s dizzying ascent to the pinnacle of artificial intelligence is far from over, and even chess grandmasters are bewildered by the spectacle before them.
&#8220;I always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on Earth and showed us how they played chess,&#8221; grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42251535">told the BBC</a>.
&#8220;Now I know.&#8221;
The findings are available at preprint website <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf">arXiv</a>.

This system didn't even have to watch humans to learn how to play.

In just 4 hours, Google's AI mastered all the chess knowledge in history

Artificial Intelligence

Google's latest AI was able to master the entire history of chess knowledge in just four hours. The AI was able to teach itself after being given the rules.

In Just 4 Hours, Google's AI Mastered All The Chess Knowledge in History

"This algorithm could run cities, continents, universes."

In Just 4 Hours, Google’s AI Mastered All The Chess Knowledge in History

By all measures, graphene shouldn&#8217;t exist. The fact it does comes down to a neat loophole in physics that sees an impossible 2D sheet of atoms act like a solid 3D material.
New research has delved into graphene&#8217;s rippling, discovering a physical phenomenon on an atomic scale that could be exploited as a way to produce a virtually limitless supply of clean energy.
The team of physicists led by researchers from the University of Arkansas didn&#8217;t set out to discover a radical new way to power electronic devices.
Their aim was far more humble – to simply watch how graphene shakes.
We&#8217;re all familiar with the gritty black carbon-based material called <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-find-a-flaw-in-our-description-of-how-graphite-turns-into-diamonds">graphite</a>, which is commonly combined with a ceramic material to make the so-called &#8216;lead&#8217; in pencils.
What we see as smears left by the pencil are actually stacked sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a &#8216;chicken wire&#8217; pattern. Since these sheets aren&#8217;t bonded together, they slide easily over one another.
For years scientists wondered if it was possible to isolate single sheets of graphite, leaving a 2-dimensional plane of carbon &#8216;chicken wire&#8217; to stand on its own.
<a href="http://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/explore/the-story-of-graphene/">In 2004 a pair of physicists</a> from the University of Manchester achieved the impossible, isolating sheets from a lump of graphite that were just an atom thick.
To exist, the 2D material had to be cheating in some way, acting as a 3D material in order to provide some level of robustness.
It turns out the &#8216;loophole&#8217; was the random jiggling of atoms popping back and forth, giving the 2D sheet of graphene a handy third dimension.
In other words, graphene was possible because it wasn&#8217;t perfectly flat at all, but vibrated on an atomic level in such a way that its bonds didn&#8217;t spontaneously unravel.
To accurately measure the level of this jiggling, physicist Paul Thibado recently led a team of graduate students in a simple study.
They laid sheets of graphene across a supportive copper grid and observed the changes in the atoms&#8217; positions using a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope">scanning tunneling microscope</a>.
While they could record the bobbing of atoms in the graphene, the numbers didn&#8217;t really fit any expected model. They couldn&#8217;t reproduce the data they were collecting from one trial to the next.
&#8220;The students felt we weren&#8217;t going to learn anything useful,&#8221; <a href="https://researchfrontiers.uark.edu/good-vibrations/">says Thibado</a>, &#8220;but I wondered if we were asking too simple a question.&#8221;
Thibado pushed the experiment into a different direction, searching for a pattern by changing the way they looked at the data.
&#8220;We separated each image into sub-images,&#8221; <a href="https://researchfrontiers.uark.edu/good-vibrations/">says Thibado</a>.
&#8220;Looking at large-scale averages hid the different patterns. Each region of a single image, when viewed over time, produced a more meaningful pattern.&#8221;
The team quickly found the sheets of graphene were buckling in way not unlike the snapping back and forth of a bent piece of thin metal as it&#8217;s twisted from the sides.
Patterns of small, random fluctuations combining to form sudden, dramatic shifts are known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight">Lévy flights</a>. While they&#8217;ve been observed in complex systems of biology and climate, this was the first time they&#8217;d been seen on an atomic scale.
By measuring the rate and scale of these graphene waves, Thibado figured it might be possible to harness it as an ambient temperature power source.
So long as the graphene&#8217;s temperature allowed the atoms to shift around uncomfortably, it would continue to ripple and bend.
Place electrodes to either side of sections of this buckling graphene, and you&#8217;d have a tiny shifting voltage.
This video clip below explains the process in detail:
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<div></div>
</div>
By Thibado&#8217;s calculations, a single ten micron by ten micron piece of graphene could produce ten microwatts of power.
It mightn&#8217;t sound impressive, but given you could fit more than 20,000 of these squares on the head of a pin, a small amount of graphene at room temperature could feasibly power something small like a wrist watch indefinitely.
Better yet, it could power bioimplants that don&#8217;t need cumbersome batteries.
As exciting as they are, these applications still need to be investigated. Fortunately Thibado is already working with scientists at the US Naval Research Laboratory to see if the concept has legs.
For an impossible molecule, graphene has become <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/confirmed-electrons-just-smashed-a-fundamental-speed-limit">something of a wonder material</a> that has turned physics on its head.
It&#8217;s already being touted as <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/graphene-s-more-incredible-than-we-thought-can-handle-1-000-times-more-current-than-regular-material">a building block for future conductors</a>. Perhaps we&#8217;ll also be seeing it power the future of a new field of electronic devices as well.
This research was published in <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.126801">Physical Review Letters</a>.

Graphene could possibly power small devices like wristwatches indefinitely.

Physicists just found a loophole in graphene that could unlock clean, limitless energy

Researchers discovered that tiny fluctuations in the material could possibly be harnessed to deliver small but unlimited amounts of clean power.

Physicists Just Found a Loophole in Graphene That Could Unlock Clean, Limitless Energy

The property could be exploited to produce a virtually limitless supply of clean energy.

Amid the high speed cosmic rays raining down on us from the depths of space are a handful of antimatter particles called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron">positrons</a>.
Astronomers think that Earth is showered by these &#8216;anti-electrons&#8217; because of pulsars, but there&#8217;s a weird catch &#8211; there are more of these particles coming at us than there should be. And now, thanks to a new study, we might finally get some answers.
<a href="http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/C/Cosmic+Rays">Cosmic rays</a> are incredibly fast particles, since they&#8217;re being shot down from space at high energies. Positrons make up a small percent of these super speedy particles, but nobody is entirely sure where or how they&#8217;re made.
To make matters more confusing, in 2008 a probe in Earth&#8217;s orbit called PAMELA <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5344">detected more high energy positrons</a> reaching our corner of the cosmos than we&#8217;d expect.
A large team of international researchers analysed recent measurements from the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory in Mexico to test the hypothesis that the excess antimatter might have been whipped up by powerful objects known as <a href="http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/p/pulsar">pulsars</a>.
These are neutron stars that channel charged particles into a beam with their super-strong magnetic fields. They get the pulsar name from the beam describing a circle as the star rotates, seen from Earth as a steady, rapidly pulsing light.
As that beam smacks into surrounding dust and gasses, it acts like a giant particle accelerator, smashing particles together and producing new matter from the energy.
Amid the carnage particles like electrons and their mirror &#8216;anti-matter&#8217; twins can emerge, which are promptly whisked away on the shock waves produced by the collisions.
That&#8217;s <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/case-weakens-antimatter-sign-dark-matter">according to theory</a>, anyway.
So when the HAWC observatory recently detected a couple of perfect candidate pulsars a few hundred light years away to study for signs of these energetic positrons, it seemed like a good opportunity to put the hypothesis to the test.
&#8220;Detectors at the HAWC observatory record gamma radiation emitted, among others, by a certain population of electrons produced by pulsars and accelerated by them to huge energies,&#8221; <a href="https://press.ifj.edu.pl/en/news/2017/11/16/">says physicist Francisco Salesa Greus</a> from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow.
&#8220;The basic question was: are there enough of these electrons for interactions with them to then produce the right number of positrons?&#8221;
The answer was no. Not quite, anyway.
After 17 months spent collecting data and then thoroughly analysing it, the researchers found the pulsars were responsible for some of the extra-high energy positrons, but the figure was still several times too small to explain all of them.
&#8220;Since the involvement of close-by pulsars in the generation of high-energy positrons reaching us is so modest, other explanations become more and more likely,&#8221; <a href="https://press.ifj.edu.pl/en/news/2017/11/16/">says Sabrina Casanova</a>, who is also a researcher from the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences.
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6568">One of these explanations</a> involves the decay of massive dark matter particles.
It&#8217;s a tempting idea, especially as it would provide us with a way to shine a light on the shadowy material <a href="http://www.sciencealert.com/data-analysis-reduces-limits-on-dark-matter-photon-energies">making up a quarter of the Universe&#8217;s mass</a>, and finally start to gain an understanding of its other properties.
But it&#8217;s important to keep in mind the death of one hypothesis isn&#8217;t direct evidence of the strength of another.
The mystery of both dark matter and the extra speedy positrons remains. For now, we can only wait and see.
This research was published in <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6365/911">Science</a>.

Another possible explanation involves dark matter.

Earth is getting hit by too much antimatter, and nobody knows why

A type of antimatter particles called positrons are hitting the earth at a higher rate than they should be. More research is needed to discover why.

/Author

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