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SCIENCE UPDATE
Scientists create new form of matter
Scientists have created a new form of matter and predicted it could help lead to the next generation of superconductors for use in electricity generation, more efficient trains and countless other applications.
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 behaviour,” added Jin.
Jin and her colleagues’ cloud of supercooled potassium atoms is one step closer to an everyday, usable superconductor — a material that conducts electricity without losing any of its energy.
“It is related to a Bose-Einstein condensate,” Jin said. “It’s not a superconductor but it is really something in between these two that may help us in science link these two interesting behaviours.”
Jin said. “Right now something like 10 percent of all electricity we produce in the United States is lost. It heats up wires. It doesn’t do anybody any good.”
Or superconductors could allow for the invention of magnetically levitated trains, she added. Free of friction they could glide along at high speeds using a fraction of the energy trains now use.
Jin, a recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” was building on the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate by her colleagues
Bose-Einstein condensates are collections of thousands of ultracold particles that occupy a single quantum state — they all essentially behave like a single, huge superatom.
But Jin says these Bose-Einstein condensates are made with bosons, which like to act in unison.
“Bosons are copycats. They basically want to do what everyone else is doing,” she said.
Her team’s new form of matter uses fermions — the everyday building blocks of matter that include protons, electrons and neutrons.
“They are not copycats,” Jin said. “Fermions are your independent thinkers — they don’t copy their neighbors.”
But Jin’s team coaxed them into doing just that. They cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree C above absolute zero or minus 459 degrees F — which is the point at which matter stops moving.
They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up.
“This is very similar to what happens to electrons in a superconductor,” Jin said.
This is more likely to provide applications in the practical world than a Bose-Einstein condensate, she said, because fermions are what make up solid matter.
Bosons, in contrast, are seen in photons, and subatomic particles called W and Z particles.
Jin stressed her team worked with a supercooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application. But the way the potassium atoms acted suggested there should be a way to translate the behavior into a room-temperature solid.
“Our atoms are more strongly attracted to one another than in normal superconductors,” she said.
Fossil find ‘oldest land animal’
Scientists have decided that a fossil found near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire is the remains of the oldest creature known to have lived on land.
It is thought that the one-centimetre millipede which was prised out of a siltstone bed is 428 million years old.
Experts at the National Museums of Scotland and Yale University, US, have studied the fossil for months.
They say the specimen is the earliest evidence of a creature living on dry land, rather than in the sea.
The discovery on the foreshore of Cowie Harbour was made by an amateur fossil hunter, Mike Newman. To recognize his role in the significant find, the new species — Pneumodesmus newmani — has been named after him. The Aberdeen bus driver, who lives in Kemnay, told the Sunday Herald newspaper: “I knew that the site had been re-aged, that it was older than originally thought, so I went down there.
“I knew that any terrestrial-type things with legs found there could be early and important.
“I had found millipedes there before, but this one had evidence of the holes that showed it actually breathed.
“I’m interested in particular in fossil fish; I describe the fish in scientific journals, but things like this creature I pass on.”
He added: “Scotland has the best Palaeozoic — pre-Triassic, pre-dinosaur — sites in the world.
Spidery animals
“There are more sites in the small country of Scotland than the whole of the US and Russia put together.
“It’s a fantastic place for these very old invertebrates. Just think, the first air-breathing creature crawled out of the swamp at Stonehaven.”
The fossil is believed to be some 20 million years older than what had previously been thought of as the oldest breathing animal — a peculiar spider-like creature chiselled out of the chert — a hard quartz rock — at Rhynie, also in Aberdeenshire.
The millipede had spiracles, or primitive breathing structures on the outside of its body, making it the oldest air-breathing creature to have been discovered.
The site near Stonehaven is well known in fossil collecting circles for its arthropods — animals with segmented bodies and jointed limbs — such as sea scorpions.
Sleep ‘can increase brain power’
Scientists say that they have shown how the brain can crack complex mental puzzles while its owner is sleeping.
Research at Luebeck University, in Germany, says tests on 106 volunteers back up anecdotal evidence that a good night’s sleep can help solve problems.
The volunteers were shown a number puzzle in which was embedded a “hidden code” revealing the answer, the journal Nature reports.
Those kept awake overnight reportedly had far less chance of solving it.
The scientists believe that because the brain appears to restructure information from the previous day during sleep hours, a period of sleep may produce insight into problems such as these.
Other experts say it is the first hard evidence that creativity and problem-solving may be assisted by the activity of the brain during sleep.
Dr Jan Born, who led the study, said: “This restructuring might be occurring in such a way that the problem is easier to solve.”
He highlighted a period of sleep called slow-wave sleep — a deep sleep not thought to be punctuated by dreams. — Sci-tech World Report
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