Weird Science News
Mar. 21st, 2009 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knox"alevy writes to mention that scientists at Fermilab have detected a new, completely untheorized particle. Seems like Fermi has been a hotbed of activity lately with the discovery of a new single top quark and narrowing the gap twice on the Higgs Boson particle. "The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab's Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. 'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'""
snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS." Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.
Al writes "In an attempt to better understand how the reward system in the brain functions in people suffering from addiction, scientists at Stanford have created mice that are addicted to light. They engineered light-sensitive proteins to trigger signaling pathways in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain that responds to pleasurable stimuli. They then connected a fiber-optic cable to this part of the brain and delivered a blast of light whenever the mice wandered into a 'reward chamber.' In previous experiments the mice have been given drugs like cocaine or amphetamine when they enter these rooms. The light treatment works in exactly the same way but lets the researchers very precisely control timing and dose of reward administered to the brain. The approach could also provide a way to probe receptors that cannot be accessed using existing drugs."
