One of the big questions in science is not just “why are we here?’ It’s, “why is anything here?” Scientists at CERN have been looking into this one over the last several years, and there’s still no good answer.
This year we pushed the boundaries of science to new extremes. We saw new levels of supercomputer performance, peeled the plastic off the biggest telescope and solar plant on earth, and processed information via DNA and liquid light.
Using recent data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope, scientists have now found evidence for the left-handed galactic-scale magnetic fields that are predicted to exist by current theories for the scarcity of antimatter.
Physicists in England claim they have discovered how to create matter from light, by smashing together individual massless photons — a feat that was first theorized back in 1934, and has been considered practically impossible until now. If this new discovery pans out, the final piece of the physics jigsaw puzzle that describes how light and matter interact would be complete. No one’s quite sure of the repercussions if matter can indeed be produced from photon-photon collision, but I’m sure something awesomely scientific will emerge before long.
Russian search giant Yandex recently became an official CERN Openlab partner. As part of the deal, Yandex will share its MatrixNet search engine technology with researchers working on the LHCb experiment to assist them in their search for antimatter.
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