Dark matter provided a lively topic of discussion at the recent AAAS Meeting in Boston. Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, explained it this way at a press conference: “It’s something new. No particle in the standard model can account for it.” And he believes the discovery of the culprit particle is right around the corner; hence the decade of the WIMPs.

As Ryan Wyatt mentioned in his post last month from the AAS Meeting (such similar names, I know), both the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Large Underground Xenon Experiment (LUX) are looking for these particles. In addition, a detector onboard the International Space Station, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), has joined the hunt. (Okay, I promise no more acronyms.)

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the brainchild of Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, who also presented at the press conference. It took Ting 16 years to get AMS into space; it’s now been collecting data for 18 months. And it sounds like they may already have results. Ting was vague, no matter how hard reporters tried to press him, but it sounds like his team plans to publish something in the next few weeks. With the length of time it took to make AMS a reality, Ting says, the results will certainly be worthwhile.

Here’s what he did clarify. AMS has seen 25 billion events—not many for a particle detector like the LHC, but quite a few for a space detector. Almost 8 billion of those are electrons and positrons, and scientists are working around the clock to understand how these interact with one another. Does the ratio between the two change over time? Turner explained that if scientists see a rise followed by dramatic fall, that will indicate a unique source—perhaps dark matter.

So now we must wait for the publication.  And remember, according to Turner’s timeline, we have a whole decade to make discoveries. Ting’s paper could take just a small step toward the description of dark matter. Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, reminded us that a lot of stuff can mimic dark matter. So it could be a step in the wrong direction. But for her, how models of dark matter fit into these experiments of dark matter is all part of the process. “We’re learning more along the way.”

AMS particle detector: NASA

This summer, it looked dismal for the so-called God particle. But this week, brighter news appeared on the horizon. The Higgs field gives particles their mass and discovery of the Higgs particle (which The New York Times describes as “the quantum personification of this field”) would confirm a critical part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions.

The Large Hadron Collider was essentially built to discover the Higgs—to prove its existence. But after two years and 600 million collisions per second, the Higgs particle has remained elusive.

A data release yesterday presented the current state of the search, with tantalizing results. Two detectors—the ATLAS and the CMS—seem to have detected something although it may or may not be the Higgs boson.

After the near light-speed collisions, the detectors record the (sometimes new) particles and their decay. Scientific American explains:

The experiments… cannot directly detect the Higgs, because the boson would decay within a fraction of a nanosecond into other particles. Instead, physicists must search through the debris of many different types of particle decay to find precise combinations of by-products that the Higgs would produce.

Both ATLAS and CMS have analyzed their separate results, suggesting the existence of a particle with just the right amount of mass. In fact, there are multiple independent measurements pointing to the region of 124 to 126 GeV (the rather odd units in which physicists measure the mass of such particles). It’s too early to say whether ATLAS and CMS have discovered the Higgs boson, but these updated results are generating a lot of interest in the particle physics community.

The Bad Astronomer puts it this way in Discover:

Scientists at CERN cannot claim with enough confidence they have found the Higgs particle, but neither can they rule it out. There’s a good chance they have found something, and it very well may be real, but they cannot say with complete confidence that it’s the Higgs.

Ah, the ambiguities of subatomic physics! Only more collisions and time will tell. In the coming months, both the CMS and ATLAS experiments will focus on refining their analyses in time for the winter particle physics conferences in March. After the current winter break, the experiments will resume collisions in spring 2012.

Higgs-hunting scientists conducting  experiments using the U.S. particle accelerator the Tevatron will also present results in March.

More Higgs news then!

Image courtesy of DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia

Publishing this week in the journal Nature, 40 scientists from around the world (and as nearby as UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), announced that they have now trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms, each for more than one-tenth of a second.

This is exciting news, because although the first artificially produced low energy antihydrogen atoms were created at CERN in 2002, until now these atoms have struck normal matter and annihilated in a flash of gamma-rays within microseconds of creation, keeping scientists in the dark about their properties.

From Universe Today:

Not only is this a science fiction dream come true, but in a very real way this could help us figure out what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang, one of the biggest mysteries of the Universe.

The new experiments are happening at CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under the name of ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus). In fact, ALPHA relies on the LHC. In order to make antihydrogen, the accelerators that feed protons to the LHC at CERN divert some of these to make antiprotons by slamming them into a metal target; the antiprotons that result are held in CERN’s Antimatter Decelerator ring, which delivers bunches of antiprotons to ALPHA and another antimatter experiment.

ALPHA then takes the antiprotons and cools them and compresses them into a matchstick-size cloud (20 millimeters long and 1.4 millimeters in diameter). Then, the cloud of cold, compressed antiprotons is nudged to overlap a like-size positron cloud, where the two particles mate to form antihydrogen. All this happens inside a magnetic bottle, cooled to 9 Kelvin (or -443.47˚ Fahrenheit), that traps the antihydrogen atoms for that magical 172 milliseconds, or a sixth of a second.

The sixth of a second is just long enough to let the scientists know they have actually trapped it. The ALPHA team spokesman, Jeffrey Hangst, a Danish physicist, describes it this way in a great video on YouTube:

The way you know that you’ve done it, is you capture some antihydrogen and then release it intentionally. You let it go, at a given time and you look for an annihilation. That’s how we detect this has actually happened and that’s what this article in Nature is about.

(He also has a great description of antimatter in the video.)

What if physicists were able to hold on to these antihydrogen atoms a little longer? “We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen,” said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics and ALPHA team member. From 80beats in Discover:

If the scientists can extend that time… Fajans says, they can begin to play around with antimatter and figure out how its personality differs from ordinary matter’s, and why we live in a universe dominated by matter rather than its opposite.

Image: CERN