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Showing posts from April, 2016

This Year's Biggest Discoveries in Science

Science mattered more than ever in 2013. Climate science questions raged after Super Typhoon Haiyan pummeled the Philippines. And scientific expertise figured in disarmament debates in Syria and in Iran's proposed halt to its nuclear activities. Meanwhile, on the pure research front, investigators made plenty of intriguing discoveries in 2013. With plenty to choose from, and argue over, here's a top five list of some favorites from the year.  1. Space gets more crowded.  "Buy land, they're not making it anymore," Mark Twain famously advised investors. Twain never heard of exoplanets, of course. Caltech researchers suggested this year that at least 100 billion such worlds orbit stars in our Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of new real estate. (See " Smallest Exoplanets Found—Each Tinier Than Earth .") Of course, not all of them are places you would want to live. A November analysis from NASA's Keck Observatory team suggested

Dark Matter Particle Could be Size of Human Cell

Dark matter could be made of particles that each weigh almost as much as a human cell and are nearly dense enough to become miniature black holes, new research suggests.  PLAY VIDEO How Do We Know Dark Matter Is Out There? We hear a lot about dark matter, and how physicists are ever on the hunt for it. But how do you look for something you can't even see? While dark matter is thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe, scientists don't know what this strange stuff is made of. True to its name, dark matter is invisible — it does not emit, reflect or even block light. As a result, dark matter can currently be studied only through its gravitational effects on normal matter. The nature of dark matter is currently one of the greatest mysteries in science.                                If dark matter is made of such superheavy particles, astronomers could detect evidence of them in the afterglow of the Big Bang, the authors of a new research s